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Updated: September 14, 2025
I have good reason to believe that, were the people of Yemen to effect their deliverance from Constantinople, the same humane feeling would be found to exist among them; and I know that it exists in Nejd; while even in Hejaz, which is commonly looked upon as the hot-bed of religious intolerance, I found all that was truly Arabian in the population as truly liberal.
Its physical power enabled it to do this, and though it could not abolish the office of the Grand Sherifate, it could interfere in the order of succession. Family feuds have, therefore, been at all times fostered by the Turks in Hejaz, and will be, as long as their presence there is tolerated.
In Abyssinia all artisans are Budah, sorcerers, especially the blacksmith, and he is a social outcast as among the Somal; even in El Hejaz, a land, unlike Yemen, opposed to distinctions amongst Moslems, the Khalawiyah, who work in metal, are considered vile. Throughout the rest of El Islam the blacksmith is respected as treading in the path of David, the father of the craft.
These put up a small fight, but had all surrendered by the middle of July. The force at Taif were blockaded, and, on the 23rd September, this force also surrendered. By this time, all the outlying garrisons had been disposed of, and the Hejaz generally cleared of Turks. Meanwhile, Medina had not only held out, but had been reinforced, and the fighting strength brought up to some 14,000.
Like every district of Arabia proper, Hejaz has a town and a nomad population, but almost no intermediate agricultural class. The townsmen I have already described a multitude of mixed origin, descended from such pilgrims as from every quarter of the globe have visited the Holy Places, and have remained to marry and die in them.
The kingdom of Yemen displays the limits, or at least the situation, of Arabia Felix: the name of Neged is extended over the inland space; and the birth of Mahomet has illustrated the province of Hejaz along the coast of the Red Sea.
El Husseyn's successor, the man for whom room was made, and who knew beforehand that it was to be made, was none other than the aged and twice deposed Abd el Mutalleb, the son of the Wahhabite Ghaleb, the fiercest fanatic of the Dewy Zeyd. I have not room here to describe in detail the effect of this coup de Jarnac on the political aspect of Hejaz.
The Turkish Government in Hejaz holds a comparatively insignificant position, and the Sultan's representative at Jeddah is hardly more than servant to the Prince of Mecca. It is he who is the descendant of their prophet, not the other, and though the learned may make distinctions in favour of the Caliph the Haj only hears of the Sherif.
He showed up Enver and his Unionist party as an atheist among atheists who had deprived the Sultan of his rightful power and Islam of its religious head, and contrasted their conduct with that of the British, who exempted the Hejaz from the blockade enforced against the rest of the Ottoman Empire until it became quite clear that the Turks were benefiting chiefly by that exemption, and who, out of respect for the holy places of Islam, refrained from making that country a theatre of war.
Nor must we overlook that reverend pastor and Koranic scholar who distributed anti-Christian and more especially anti-British propaganda by means of native emissaries. Last but not least, the Herr Direktor of the Hejaz Railway, who was collecting railway material for Sinai before war broke out.
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