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The actual holder of the title was Ghaleb ibn Mesaad, and he, finding himself unable to contend against the Wahhabis, became himself a Wahhabi. Consequently, when Mehemet Ali appeared at Mecca in 1812, his first act was to depose this Ghaleb, in spite of his protest that he had returned to orthodoxy, and to appoint another member of the Sherifal House in his place.
He and his government consequently soon drifted back into the groove of his predecessors' material policy, which relied for its strength on the physical force of arms, foreign loans, and the intrigues of officials. The only practical action taken by Ottoman ministers in the line indicated were the twin crusades proclaimed against the Wahhabis of Hasa and the heretical Imams of Sana.
In the tenth century it was held by the Karmathian heretics, in the thirteenth by the Imams of Sana, and for seven years in the present century by the Wahhabis. Still the de facto sovereignty of the Harameyn, or two shrines, was one of Selim's pleas; and it is one which has reappeared in modern arguments respecting the Caliphal rights of his descendants. Possession of the Amanat or sacred relics.
He established himself at Taïf, the summer residence of the Meccans; deposed the Grand Sherif Ghaleb, and appointed in his stead another member of the Sherifal family; declaring the Sultan sovereign of the country acts which the Meccans acquiesced in through dread of the Wahhabis, from whom Mehemet Ali promised to deliver them.
These, already alarmed by Sultan Murad's administrative reforms, would hardly have espoused the Sultan's defence with any vigour; and though Mehemet Ali himself was open to a charge of latitudinarianism, he had the one great claim upon orthodox Islam of having delivered the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina from the Wahhabis.
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