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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.
What followed is well known. After the peace of Paris Sultan Mahmud commissioned Mehemet Ali to deliver Mecca and Medina from the Wahhabite heretics, and this he in time effected. The war was carried into Nejd; Deriyeh, their capital, was sacked, and Ibn Saoud himself taken prisoner and decapitated in front of St. Sophia's at Constantinople.
An excellent example of their system has recently been given in the episode of the late Grand Sherif's death, and the story of it will serve also to show the fear entertained by the present Sultan of this his great spiritual rival. To tell it properly I must go back to the epoch of the Wahhabite invasion of Hejaz in 1808.
It can therefore be well imagined that the awakening of religious feeling, which I also described as having been produced by the Wahhabite movement, especially menaced the Sultan in his Caliphal pretensions.
In Tripoli there is indeed a saint of very high pretensions, one known as the Sheykh Es Snusi, who has a large religious following, and who has promised to come forward shortly as the Móhdy or guide expected by a large section of the Sunite as well as the Shiite Mussulmans. But as yet we know nothing of him but his name and the fact of his sanctity, which is of Wahhabite type.
Mehemet Ali's name and that of his successor Ibrahim Pasha, if not precisely popular, are at least respected at Mecca; and the latter possesses a great title to Sunite gratitude in having destroyed the Wahhabite empire in 1818. I have mentioned Mehemet Ali's ambition; and a similar ambition would seem to have occurred to Ismaïl, the late Khedive.
The Ibn Saoud dynasty no longer holds the first position in Nejd, and Ibn Rashid who has taken their place, though nominally a Wahhabite, has little of the Wahhabite fanaticism. He is in fact a popular and national rather than a religious leader, and though still designated at Constantinople as a pestilent heretic, is counted as their ally by the more liberal Sunites.
It would be a repetition, but on a grander scale, of the Wahhabite movement of the eighteenth century, and, having a wider base of operations in the vast fanatical masses of North Africa, might achieve far more important results.
Nor, as may be supposed, was this lessened by the subsequent changes rung by the Turkish and Egyptian Governments in their appointments to the office, for, in 1827, we find Abd el Mutalleb, the son of the deposed Wahhabite Ghaleb, reappointed, and in the following year again, Mohammed, the son of Yahia ibn Aoun, an intrigue which brought on a civil war.
Before the close of the eighteenth century the chiefs of the Ibn Saouds, champions of Unitarian Islam, had established their authority over all Northern Arabia as far as the Euphrates, and in 1808 they took Mecca and Medina. In the meanwhile the Wahhabite doctrines were gaining ground still further afield.
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