The Struggle for Independence 161

the conditions of the inhabitants., . , We have never excluded
from our considerations those great, desolate, and uncultivated
stretches of land across the river which are capable of settlement
and development.'1

During the war Britain had sought to protect her pre-eminent
position in the Arabian Peninsula by agreements with France and
Italy by which these powers undertook not to acquire, nor to con-
sent to a third power acquiring, territory in Arabia or a naval base
in the Red Sea. Britain had also from the beginning been on
friendly terms with the young Wahhabi Amir Abdul Aziz ibn
Sa'ud. Early in the War she, like the Arab nationalists, had sent
emissaries to him to enlist his support for an Arab rising against
the Turks; but the pro-Turkish Amir of the Jebel Shammar to the
north, his ancestral enemy, was too nearly a match for him to give
more than moral support. It was psychologically difficult for him
to make common cause with the Sharif Husain, the ruler of Mecca
and Madina, those centres of what the strict Wahhabis regarded as
idolatrous and corrupt saint-worship unauthorized by the Qur'an
and Sunna; and the Sharif made matters worse by his assumption
in 1916 of the title of King of the Arabs. With his Ottoman culture
and his overweening personal ambition he evidently regarded Ibn
Sa'ud as a barbarian upstart, and behaved to him with *a show of
studied condescension and even discourtesy* combined with
'somewhat highhanded methods*.2
Turkish support for the Shammar having ceased with the col-
lapse of the Ottoman Empire, Ibn Sa'ud was able to annex their
territory in 1921, and was now in a position to settle scores with
King Husain. He had already for some years been making Wah-
habi propaganda among the tribes on the Hijaz border to win them
away from Husain, and when Abdullah had led a force against him
in 1919 had severely defeated him. He was at that time deterred
from invading the Hijaz by the British government, which was
still supporting Husain. But the old King, with greater consistency
than worldly wisdom, broke with Britain, mainly over the poli-
tical disability imposed on the Arabs of Palestine by the Balfour
1 24 January, 1946.
2 Antonius/op. citt, 329,