AlicetheKurious wrote:
In the early 18th century, the religious scholars of the Najd and Hijaz (territories which the British would later merge by force to create the new country of "Saudi" Arabia) wrote to Mohamed Ali, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, to beg him to send his army to rescue their people from attacks by the violent and armed proponents of this "strange new cult, which claims to be of Islam, but which is not the Islam we know." In response, Mohamed Ali sent his own son, Ibrahim Pasha, at the head of a formidable army. As a result, two separate attempts to impose Wahhabist rule, in 1818 and a much smaller one in 1824, were put down. However, the Wahhabists' ambitions were given new impetus through another alliance that would prove fateful: in 1865, Faisal, the grandfather of the founder of Saudi Arabia (Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud), openly pledged his allegiance to the British and once again began to wage war against the Ottoman Empire, with British covert financial, logistical and weapons support. By the early 1900s, it was no longer overt.
There are approximately 200 years between the early 18th century and the early 1900s. So a lot of stuff happened that eventually led to the British Empire's decision to back Faisal, including its loss of the American colonies and the Napoleonic Wars. But their reasons for arming and/or investing in anybody (and everybody) available in and around then-Arabia in the 1860s weren't obscure and didn't have anything to do with the subjects presently being canvassed:
They wanted to have the Suez Canal themselves and/or prevent anybody else from having it.
And that's about it.
But I doubt very much that Wahhabism meant anything at all to them at that point, if they even knew what it was.
And it definitely didn't mean "eventually Saudi Arabia and a British alliance with the House of Saud." If it had, they wouldn't have still been backing Hussein in 1919 when -- as far as I'm aware -- they were unpleasantly surprised to find out that Ibn Saud and a bunch of other Arabs had somehow taken over the whole not-yet-defined-as-such show.
Because Britain’s colonial strategy in the Arabian Peninsula at the beginning of the 20th century was quickly gearing towards the final and complete destruction of the Muslim Ottoman Empire and its allies in Najd, [the] al-Rasheed clan, the British decided to swiftly support the new Wahhabi Imam Abdulaziz. Fortified with British support, money, and weapons, the new Wahhabi Imam was able in 1902 to capture Riyadh.
That's just wrong. The Ottoman Empire couldn't hold on to the Arabian Peninsula, where the British had an interest in connection with the Suez Canal. So they protected those interests by investing in Hussein and (to a lesser extent) Ibn Saud. But pre-WWI, their colonial strategy in the Arabian Peninsula was fundamentally unrelated to their colonial strategy regarding the Ottoman Empire, which was governed exclusively by the perceived urgency of keeping either France, Russia or the German Empire from getting anywhere near it (ie, Afghanistan). Mostly Russia, by 1902. But the Ottoman Empire wasn't a whole lot more than a buffer state protecting India that hadn't fully outlived its usefulness, in the overall early-20th-century British Imperial scheme of things.
One of his first savage acts after capturing Riyadh was to terrorize its inhabitants by spiking the heads of the falling al-Rasheeds at the gates of the city. He and his fanatical Wahhabi followers also burned over (1,200) people to death.10
Known in the West as “Ibn Saud”, the Wahhabi Imam Abdulaziz was well loved by his British masters. Many British officials and emissaries in the Arab Gulf area frequently met or interacted with him, and generously supported him with money, weapons, and advisors. Sir Percy Cox, Captain Prideaux, Captain Shakespeare, Gertrude Bell, and Harry Saint John Philby (the so-called “Abdullah”) were among the many British officials and advisors who constantly surrounded Abdulaziz to help him with everything he needed. With British weapons, money, and advisors, Imam Abdulaziz was able to gradually conquer most of the Arabian Peninsula in a ruthless manner under the banner of Wahhabism to create the Third Saudi-Wahhabi State, known today as Saudi Arabia.
That was in 1919.
Prior to which: Hussein, T.E Lawrence, the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence. In a nutshell. Plus a very prolonged and futile attempt by Lloyd-George to keep France out of Syria. But I can never remember exactly what that was all about. I just know that it didn't help.
British policy regarding Palestine was, as you know, subject to fits and starts and sudden, tempestuous changes during that general time frame. But that was mostly because they only cared about it on a situational basis. (Why?
INDIA.) But in 1919, they didn't actually want it at all, IIRC.
As long as we're jumping around anyway, though, please forgive this snip-for-author's-convenience-just-because-it's-late:
Yet it is the opponents of Wahhabism who are accused of collaborating with the enemies of the Muslim people, of being traitors and zionist agents, of being apostates and infidels who hate Islam.
Though perhaps not obvious, the parallels with zionism are staggering.
No, they really aren't. You pretty much breathe the only interest they have into them. In fact.
Like the history of what has come to represent establishment Islam, the actual origins of zionism and how it came to dominate establishment Judaism are not widely known. Like Wahhabism, zionism has ideological roots in the 17th century and even earlier, but its practical origins in the 1830s, when the wealthy financier and President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Moses Montefiore, began to commission a series of censuses of Jews in Palestine starting in 1839, followed by purchases of land there from the Ottoman sultan and the offer of financial incentives to poor European Jews to emigrate to Palestine. He also financed the transport of builders from England to Palestine, and provided health, education and employment for Jewish immigrants. They also received paramilitary training and weapons, as well as being taught self-sufficiency. This activity coincided with the British decision to send a British consul to Jerusalem, and to establish the first European Consular Office in 1939.
Alice, there are
100 very eventful years between the 1830s and 1939.
Have you ever looked into whether there were any non-Jewish-wealthy-financiers who were buying up land and otherwise investing in Palestine at the time? Because Imperial Russia definitely was. And (as I hope goes without saying), that had nothing whatsoever to do with Jews or zionism. Most things don't. Many people neither think nor care about them at all, ever.
Believe it or not.
Given the fact that the two major financiers of Jewish settlement in Palestine, Moses Montefiore and Lord [Nathan] Rothschild, were both very prominent and powerful British Jews, it is perhaps not entirely a coincidence that the aggressive British efforts to recruit, arm and train Ibn Saud and his Wahhabist army to defeat the Ottoman Sultan begin during the early 1860s, when the Sultan suddenly refused to sell any more land in Palestine for Jewish settlement. Perhaps.
Insofar as all British investment in and around the constuction of the Suez Canal in the 1860s was related to British interest in the Suez Canal, the purchase of land there by wealthy Jewish financiers and British efforst to recruit, arm and train Ibn Saud (and a Wahhabist army that I've always thought didn't really exist as such until approximately fifty years later, though I could be wrong) were related. Which is not to say that they and the other players on the field mightn't have had other interests, too. By any means.
If anybody's still reading this, more later.
Mel Gibson. He was hawt, once.
) and disagree in part ( 
).
