Alternatives:
Urabi in Egypt, Mahdism in the Sudan and the Sanusiyya in Libya The Urabi Revolt in Egypt, 1881
Ahmad ‘Urabi’s
Revolt in Egypt in 1881 and British Occupation in 1882
As
the use of empire to create world markets for raw goods included the prominence
of Egyptian cotton and sugar plantations, there was greater pressure to develop
resources for shipping of agricultural products. Both cotton and sugar are essentially cash
crops, they are not used for local consumption as a food source. Rather they are developed to earn cash
primarily by export. As part of this
strategy, the emphasis on larger landholding became paramount as well as
pressure to facilitate trade and shipping.
The modernization and expansion of trade routes, included the project
for the construction of the Suez Canal to allow direct shipping from the
Mediterranean and European ports to the Red Sea and to India. The costs of the Suez Canal project that
became formalized required massive investment of capital to finance the French
engineered construction project.
Following a period of financial indebtedness and bankruptcy of the
Egyptian State, a rebellion by a group of Egyptian military led to a
nationalist revolt and attempt to seize power and curtail British
intervention. The Nationalist officers
were making demands for reform that were rejected by Tewfiq the Khedive of
Egypt, who instead sought British help (Lutsky, 1969). The reason the Khedive
sought British help was not a single Egyptian military unit turned out to
support him. Once the Khedive realized this he was forced to return to his palace. In an arrogant show of
force, the British forced the Khedive to confront his troops in the open and to
order their surrender or arrest. This
resulted in a prolonged engagement and acceleration of British occupation of
Egypt and the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882.
This
led to a long occupation of Egypt that was only partly relaxed in the granting
of a constitutional monarchy in 1922, but with continued British presence until
1952. The career and autobiographical
administrative memoir of the lead British administrator the Earl of Cromer is
revealing for its insight and its intellectual and Orientalist arrogance that
is full of stereotypes about Egyptians or Arab society. It is toward the end of this period that we
find romanticized Orientalists like T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) serving
the British army in the campaigns
The Najd, Hijaz and Iraq from the End of World War I
Few
historians have tried to integrate developments in Post-War Arabia with the
wider Arab Middle East as the late Iraqi sociologist and historian, Ali
al-Wardi, who devoted a separate volume at the end of his history of modern
Iraq to struggle between the Hashemites and Ibn Saud after World War I (al-Wardi,
2007).
In
1914, the central Arabian Peninsula and the Hijaz were divided between two
different ruling factions. The Hijaz,
with the major cities of Mecca, Medina and the port town of Jeddah, were ruled
by the al-Ashraf, the Hashemite dynasty, who served as the local elites who
shared rule and power with the Ottoman Empire.
The al-Ashraf dynasty had actually been appointed by the Ottomans in the
19th century and was centered around the title of Sherif of Mecca,
the protector of the city under the Ottoman dynasty. In the interior was a second powerful and emerging faction, the Saud dynasty that
had been allied with the Wahhabi followers, since the late 18th
century. The Saudi-Wahhabi confederation
had been suppressed for a period during and after the 1811-1818 Ottoman and
Egyptian Army invasion of the interior, in the so-called Ottoman-Hijazi wars
that were led by the Egyptian Ottoman ruler Muhammad Ali (Rogan, 2012,
p. 219). However by the end of the 19th
century they had revived and were a local force again in the central Nejd
region of Arabia where Ottoman administrative rule was weak or effectively non-existent.
Between
1902 and 1913 Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Faysal Al Sa’ud (1880-1953), also known as Ibn Saud, led a
rise to power in confederation with followers and descendants of Muhammad ibn
Abd al-Wahhab. In doing so he relied on
the mobile fighting prowess of the Ikhwan and displaced the Rashidi tribes that
had dominated the interior. After
seizing power, Ibn Saud declared Riyadh as his capital from which he moved into
Eastern Arabia and claimed this region from Ottoman rule, and now the Saud
dynasty and state held a presence along the shores and towns of the Upper
Gulf. What we find is a great deal of
rivalry and uncertainty in the period 1913-1924 between Sherif Husayn in Mecca
and Ibn Sa`ud’s followers, the Ikhwan.
Sherif Hussein blundered when he refused permission for Ibn Sa`uds
followers, the Ikhwan to make pilgrimage to Mecca or Medina or to negotiate on
other key points (al-Wardi, 2007). Thereafter, the decade was a period strife
between the two factions until Ibn Sa`ud’s forces overwhelmed the dynasty of
Sherif Hussayn and his sons in the two holy cities and took control of the
entire Hejaz. By 1924 the Hejaz and the Najd were united and the new Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia was created.
In
the midst of World War I, the British signed a treaty with Ibn Saud to include
his dynasty and young state within the sphere of British control regarding its
foreign relations. These agreements were
similar to the series of treaties that the Gulf Sheikdoms here in the Emirates
had signed in the 19th century that led to Trucial States.
When
the Young Turks seized power in Istanbul after 1908, this opened the
possibility for British influence, and just before the outbreak of World War I,
the British administrator, Ronald Storrs had discussions at the Abidin Palace
in Cairo with Prince Abdullah of the Hashemite dynasty (Storrs, 1937). Abdullah was the
second son of Hussain, the Grand Sherif of Mecca. At this meeting Storrs recalled that Abdullah
asked for machine guns to arm themselves against the possibility of an attack
by the Turks. According to Storrs, the
British turned this offer down, claiming they were not in conflict with the
Turks (Storrs, 1937, p. 135). But events changed and World War I broke out
when the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28,
1914. The alliance of the Turks with the
Germans allowed the British to seek extended influence and alliances against German
and Turkish positions. The arming of the
Hashemite dynasty with limited arms became a part of this strategy. Storrs recalls the change:
I could not forget how the Sharif Abdallah had
unlocked his heart during his visit to Cairo that same spring. I therefore
submitted a short note, suggesting that by timely consultation with Mecca we
might secure not only the neutrality but the alliance of Arabia in the event of
Ottoman aggression (Storrs, 1937, p. 162).
On
September 14, 1914 Storrs received a reply authorizing him to seek support from
Abdallah and Sherif Hussein in Mecca.
Turkish control of the lower Hejaz and Jeddah was gradually surrendered
and by the end of 1916, the British were able to dispatch military agents, like
T.E. Lawrence, (Lawrenc e of Arabia) to coordinate attacks against the Turkish
railroad leading up from Medina to Damascus, as well as to seize the port of
Aqaba.
During
the course of the war from 1916 until the end of 1918, the Hashemite Dynasty based
in Mecca, followed the aspirations of its leader Sharif Husayn who in an
overreach of his actual power declared himself as King of the Arab Countries in
1916. As he sent his sons to fight with
the British and T.E. Lawrence, Ibn Saud mobilized his own troops to move to
consolidate and take back the Hejaz and other parts of Arabia. A series of battles over the town of
al-Khurma in 1918 resulted in successive defeats for the Hashemites by the
Saudi forces. After the conclusion of
World War I in November 1918, fighting expanded as the Saudi forces
resoundingly defeated the Hashemites in May of 1919 at Turaba. Only British diplomatic pressure stopped the
expansion of fighting but by 1924 Ibn Saud mounted an attack on Taif to the
South of Mecca. By October, the Ikhwan
had captured Mecca and soon after laid siege on Jedda and Medina, until the new
King Ali was forced to surrender the Hejaz kingdom to Ibn Saud and go into
exile with British protection. Over the
next eight years Ibn Saud consolidated his power in the region and declared the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, the same year that oil was being explored in
the region by American oil companies.
Meanwhile
the creation of the Mandates that divided the Mashreq between British and
French control did not go as smoothly as hoped for the Hashemite dynasty that
had gone into exile under British protection and direction. In 1920 the French, with local Syrian
pressure, had forced King Faysal out of a proposed kingdom in Syria, and he
would later be installed by the British as a reward as the new King of Iraq in
August of 1921. Yet King Ali had been
forced from the Hejaz in 1925. The
British consented by installing Prince Abdullah as the King of Trans-Jordan,
which at the time had a population of only 350,000.
