ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1954 I was again drawn to that quickly changing Arabian Kingdom. Ibn Sa‘ud had died. Only a few years before Wahhabism had still held undisputed sway but I had seen it gradually retreat before the American advance. The struggle between the two parties, none the less decisive for being unavowed and, certainly from the American side undesired, had been an unequal one. On the Wahhabi side a spiritual force, a creed and on the American side open materialism. It was a ranged battle and the Americans had no inkling that they were fighting. Yet they were. Their very presence in Arabia meant attack on Wahhabism. Neither of the two parties is to be blamed for not having foreseen the far-reaching consequences of their encounter, certainly not the Americans who had had no earlier experience to guide them. The Arabs, particularly those with a knowledge of past Wahhabi history, might have remembered Ibrahim Pasha and had a foreboding of coming disaster. D. G. Hogarth once said ‘the fantastic spirit of Nejd has boiled up and over more than once, none of its past ebullitions has, for obvious reasons equally operative today, enjoyed any but very brief life. I see nothing in the circumstances or constituents of the present Wahhabi expansion to promise it longer life than has been enjoyed by earlier Nejdean ebullitions. These, to take only one test, have not prevailed in Mecca for ten years on the average. Just conceivably the masterful and sagacious personality of the Sultan, Abdul Aziz Ibn Sa‘ud, may prolong this last domination: but for myself I expect him to find, not less quickly than his forebears, that Mecca, Taif and Medina are so many Capuas sapping the fervour and 241fortitude of his fanatics, and that he has overreached the limits of one-man rule… I prophesy therefore that Arabia is not in for more than a decade at most of Wahhabi domination outside Nejd…’ Hogarth’s prophecy has not been fulfilled in the letter, but in the spirit …? Wahhabi domination has outlived the decade, and Hogarth too, but were there none among its stalwarts who with the advent of the Americans did not foresee the end of another ‘very brief life’?
