The Treaty of Jeddah

On 20 May 1927 in Jeddah, the Red Sea port through which pilgrims from all over the Muslim world travelled to Mecca, a treaty of friendship was signed between Great Britain and the King of the Hejaz and of Nejd and its Dependencies, Abdulaziz ibn Saud, known in the West as Ibn Saud. It was signed on London’s behalf by Brigadier General Sir Gilbert Clayton, a former head of British intelligence in Cairo, and on the King’s behalf by his son and viceroy of the Hejaz, Emir Faisal ibn Abdulaziz, the future king. In the first article Great Britain recognised the “complete and absolute independence” of his state. The treaty replaced the agreement of 1915, which had made Ibn Saud in practice a British protégé, and it was the first document in which the leading colonial power in the Middle East treated the ruler of central Arabia as an equal partner. It is often said that the treaty was signed by “Saudi Arabia and Great Britain”. This is a simplification: in 1927 the state was called the Kingdom of the Hejaz and of Nejd and its Dependencies, and it took the name Saudi Arabia only in September 1932.

From Riyadh to Mecca

The House of Saud had already twice ruled a large part of the Arabian Peninsula. In the 18th century its ancestor, Emir Muhammad ibn Saud, formed an alliance with the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of the austere current of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. The first Saudi state was destroyed in 1818 by an Egyptian army acting on behalf of the Ottoman sultan; the second fell at the end of the 19th century in a war with the rival Rashidi dynasty of Ha’il. The Saud family took refuge in Kuwait.

From there, in January 1902, the young Abdulaziz and a few dozen companions recaptured Riyadh in a night attack. Over the next quarter of a century he built a new state step by step. In 1913 he seized the Ottoman province of Al-Ahsa on the Persian Gulf, bringing him to the edge of the British sphere of influence. On 26 December 1915 he concluded the Treaty of Darin with the British, in which they recognised him as ruler of Nejd and its dependencies, while he undertook not to enter into relations with other powers, not to cede land or concessions to them and not to attack the sheikhdoms under London’s protection. In return he received weapons and, until March 1924, a regular subsidy. The instrument of his conquests was the Ikhwan, the “Brotherhood”: Wahhabi warriors from Bedouin tribes whom Ibn Saud settled in agricultural colonies. In 1921 he defeated the Rashidis and took Ha’il, and in 1922, in the Uqair Protocol, the British High Commissioner in Iraq drew the borders of his state with Iraq and Kuwait.

Ibn Saud’s greatest rival was the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, who in 1916 had launched the Arab Revolt against the Turks with British help and proclaimed himself King of the Hejaz. By London’s will his sons, Faisal and Abdullah, became rulers of Iraq and Transjordan. The Treaty of Sèvres recognised an independent Hejaz and made no mention of the Saudis. When in March 1924, after the abolition of the caliphate in Turkey, Hussein proclaimed himself caliph, he provoked outrage in the Muslim world and at the same time lost the British money with which he had been buying the loyalty of the tribes. Ibn Saud struck at the end of August 1924. His forces took Taif, where the Ikhwan massacred some of the inhabitants, and on 13 October entered Mecca without a fight. Hussein abdicated in favour of his son Ali and sailed into exile. Great Britain did not intervene, explaining that it did not interfere in religious disputes. In December 1925 Medina and Jeddah surrendered, and on 8 January 1926 the notables of the Hejaz proclaimed Ibn Saud their king. A year later, in January 1927, an assembly of notables in Riyadh raised the Sultanate of Nejd to the rank of a kingdom as well. From then on Ibn Saud ruled two kingdoms joined in a personal union.

An outdated treaty

The legal status of this state had not kept pace with its size. A ruler who reigned from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea and was guardian of the holy cities of Islam was still, in London’s eyes, bound by the Treaty of Darin, cut to the pattern of the agreements with the petty sheikhs of the Gulf. As the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee observed in 1929 in the Survey of International Affairs, within ten years that treaty had become an anachronism. Ibn Saud was in any case seeking recognition elsewhere. The first state to recognise his kingdom in the Hejaz was the Soviet Union, in February 1926, and in the autumn of 1926 his son Faisal visited London, The Hague and Paris. At the end of 1926 the British agent in Jeddah travelled to the King’s headquarters to discuss a new treaty.

The actual negotiations were conducted by Gilbert Clayton, who as early as November 1925 had negotiated with Ibn Saud the Bahra and Hadda agreements on Nejd’s relations with Iraq and Transjordan. In mid-May 1927 the Cairo press reported that talks had begun in Jeddah. They lasted only a few days. On Friday 20 May 1927 – in the Muslim calendar the 18th day of Dhu al-Qadah 1345 – Clayton and Emir Faisal signed. By 24 May Clayton was back in Cairo. Ratifications were exchanged in Jeddah on 17 September 1927.

Provisions

The treaty consisted of eleven short articles. The most important was the first: Great Britain recognised the complete and absolute independence of the dominions of the King of the Hejaz and of Nejd. In the Treaty of Darin this independence had been hedged with conditions that reduced it almost to a formula: Ibn Saud could not maintain relations with other powers, and his successor could not be hostile to the British. Now the two parties appeared as equals. Each undertook to maintain good relations with the other and not to allow its territory to be used as a base for hostile activity against the other (Article 2). Each recognised the nationality of the other party’s subjects on its soil, in accordance with the principles of international law in force between independent states (Article 5). Toynbee pointed out that this formula ruled out anything resembling capitulations – the judicial privileges for foreigners that the European powers had once imposed on the Ottoman Empire.

The remaining articles dealt with matters of particular concern to the British. The King undertook to facilitate the hajj for Muslim British subjects and protected persons – of whom there were tens of millions in India and the other colonies – and to guarantee their safety (Article 3). The property of pilgrims who died in the Hejaz was to pass to their heirs through the British agent in Jeddah (Article 4). Ibn Saud promised to maintain friendly and peaceful relations with Kuwait, Bahrain and the sheikhs of Qatar and the Trucial Coast (Trucial Oman), that is, with the small states bound to London by special treaties (Article 6). A novelty was Article 7, in which the King promised to cooperate with Great Britain in suppressing the slave trade. The treaty was to remain in force for seven years and be renewed automatically unless either party denounced it. On ratification the treaty of 1915 lapsed (Article 9), and in the event of any discrepancy the English text was to prevail.

Four exchanges of notes dated 19–21 May were attached to the treaty. In the first, Clayton set out the British position that the border between the Hejaz and Transjordan ran so that Ma’an and Aqaba, occupied by Transjordan in 1925, remained on its side. The King did not accept this, but promised to maintain the status quo and not to interfere in the administration of the district until the matter could be finally settled. In this way Transjordan kept its access to the sea, and the dispute formally remained open until the 1960s. In the second exchange the British stipulated that for the time being they were not giving up the right, long exercised by their consuls, to free slaves who sought refuge in their posts. According to the Foreign Office, between 1926 and 1938 the British legation in Jeddah freed 263 people in this way. Slavery remained legal in the kingdom until 1962. The third exchange confirmed the lifting of the British embargo on arms exports to Arabia: the kingdom could henceforth buy military equipment in Great Britain in accordance with the international convention on the arms trade of 1925. The fourth clarified the rules for returning the property of deceased pilgrims.

Not everyone liked the treaty. In November 1927 Persia protested against it, as it regarded Bahrain as its own territory and did not want it recognised as a sheikhdom under British protection.

The Ikhwan against the King

The treaty was concluded just in time. Ibn Saud, who was becoming a monarch recognised by the great powers, was increasingly at odds with the men who had helped him win his throne. The leaders of the Ikhwan, above all Faisal al-Dawish of the Mutair tribe and Sultan bin Bajad of the Utaiba, demanded a holy war against all non-Wahhabis and opposed innovations such as the telegraph, the telephone and motor cars. They regarded the recognition of borders with the British mandates and protectorates as betrayal. On the night of 5–6 November 1927, less than two months after the exchange of ratifications, a Mutair band led by al-Dawish attacked an Iraqi police post under construction at Busaiya and killed six policemen, a works foreman, twelve labourers and a woman. Ibn Saud warned the Iraqi authorities that the Ikhwan were marching north against his orders, but the raids continued. For several weeks at the turn of 1927 and 1928 British aircraft bombed the raiding parties, including on the far side of the border, which in turn angered the King. In the spring and summer of 1928 Clayton held new talks with him in Jeddah on the borders with Iraq and Transjordan, but they failed to reach agreement.

Ibn Saud settled the dispute by force. At the end of March 1929 he defeated the rebellious Ikhwan at the Battle of Sabilla, in which his soldiers fired on camel-mounted warriors with machine guns, including some mounted on motor cars. The last leaders of the rebellion surrendered to the British in Kuwait in January 1930 and were handed over to the King. So ended the era of Bedouin raids, and the borders of the British protectorates recognised in the Treaty of Jeddah ceased to be merely words on paper.

From the Hejaz and Nejd to Saudi Arabia

For five years after the treaty was signed Ibn Saud ruled his two kingdoms as separate entities with separate administrations. Only in September 1932 did he unite them by royal decree into a single state, proclaimed on 23 September as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The state was named after the ruling house, which in itself said whose property it was. The Treaty of Jeddah remained the basis of British–Saudi relations, and minor amendments were made to it by exchanges of notes in 1936 and 1943.

Significance

The Treaty of Jeddah closed the process by which Great Britain, after the First World War, had tried to build an order in the Middle East based on the Hashemite dynasty, its allies from the Arab Revolt. The Hashemites lost the Hejaz, and London recognised the victor without hesitation. The rivalry between the Saudis and the Hashemites ruling in Baghdad and Amman remained one of the main threads of Arab politics for decades to come and undermined every plan for Arab unity, from Faisal I’s pan-Arab dreams to the projects of the 1940s.

For the road to the Second World War, what happened to the lands whose independence was recognised in 1927 proved more important. In May 1933 Ibn Saud granted an oil concession to the American company Standard Oil of California, and in March 1938 oil was struck in commercial quantities at Dammam. A state that in 1927 had lived off the pilgrimage became an object of great-power rivalry. In the 1930s Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany also courted influence in Arabia. From the autumn of 1938 to September 1939 Berlin had a minister accredited to the Saudi court – its representative in Baghdad, Fritz Grobba – and in 1939 an envoy of the King held talks in Germany on arms deliveries. Ibn Saud did not, however, bind himself to the Axis. After the outbreak of war he broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and his country remained neutral, though sympathetic to the Allies. On 19 October 1940 Italian bombers attacked the American oil installations at Dhahran. On 14 February 1945, aboard an American cruiser on the Great Bitter Lake, Ibn Saud met President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and on 1 March 1945 Saudi Arabia declared war on Germany and Japan in order to become a founding member of the United Nations. Great Britain, which in 1927 had been the only power that counted in Arabia, then yielded first place to the United States. The Treaty of Jeddah was thus the last act of an era in which London alone dealt the cards on the peninsula, and the first step of a state that during and after the Second World War became one of the pillars of the world oil market.