DUBAI: In April 1818, Ottoman forces under the leadership of Ibrahim Pasha — the eldest son of the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha — began to lay siege to Diriyah. The culmination of a seven-year campaign against the Saudis, the siege would result in the defeat of the First Saudi State.   

Saudi forces resisted for six months before Abdullah bin Saud Al-Saud, the fourth and final ruler of the First Saudi State, sued for peace. In exchange for his surrender, he requested that Diriyah be spared. Instead the city was razed to the ground, and he was sent to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), where he was executed. 

En route, he passed through Cairo, where he met his triumphant foe, Muhammad Ali Pasha, for the first and only time. Their meeting was witnessed by an Englishman called John Bowes Wright, a well-connected, politically attuned traveler. It is Wright’s previously unpublished account of their meeting that the historian Michael Crawford has drawn on for his book “The Imam, the Pasha and the Englishman,” which was released by Arabian Publishing earlier this month.  

“I’ve always been interested in the fate of Imam Abdullah because he seemed to have been written out of a lot of the history, despite having been a champion of his people, his religion, and his country,” says Crawford.  

Bowes Wright’s account of the meeting takes the form of a letter to his oldest friend and regular correspondent, Joseph Lamb, a Newcastle coal merchant. “There was a slight melancholy in his countenance but mixed with a firmness and dignity suited to his situation beyond anything I had ever witnessed,” wrote Bowes Wright of Abdullah bin Saud. “His dark visage was rather long and careworn; he wore a red shawl wrapped round his head, and a loose brown and white camlet robe, and in every respect appeared, as he was, a perfect Chief of the Desert.” 

Not only does the letter provide a first-hand account of Abdullah bin Saud’s courage and composure, it enables a comparison with the narrative provided by Abd Al-Rahman Al-Jabarti, a renowned Egyptian historian who also recorded the meeting between the two rivals. While Bowes Wright’s letter reveals an acceptance of the reasoning of his Ottoman hosts, Al-Jabarti was more sympathetic to Abdullah bin Saud. 

Why was Bowes Wright present at the meeting? Arguably as a publicity stunt, Crawford suggests.  

“I think Muhammad Ali thought, ‘Well, this is my big moment. The enemy I’ve been fighting for seven years has been defeated. I’m going to have my meeting with him. I want this publicized in Europe.’ There weren’t any journalists in those days, so I think he just said to the British representative (in Cairo), ‘Bring anybody along — any senior travelers who you might have staying — and they can witness the meeting.” 

Central to the meeting was the question of treasures taken from the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb in Madinah in 1807, prior to Abdullah bin Saud’s reign. The Ottomans, particularly Sultan Mahmud II, wanted to know where the missing treasure was. Some of it, including emeralds, other jewels, and volumes of the Holy Qur’an, were returned by Abdullah bin Saud. The location of the rest remains a mystery. 

“Of course, ‘theft’ depends on who you believe owned them,” says Crawford. “The Ottomans obviously felt that they owned most of them, and the Saudis believed that they were there to serve religion and, if jihad needed funding, or the people needed money to just survive, then they could draw on those. And the interesting thing is that Al-Jabarti actually agreed with them — which is pretty remarkable really.” 

Crawford, who was partly brought up in the Middle East and served for the UK government in Saudi Arabia between 1986 and 1990, wrote the book to shed light on a lesser-known period of the Kingdom’s history. He also wanted to draw attention to Abdullah bin Saud himself, whose execution has always troubled him.  

“He was basically a soldier,” says Crawford. “His father (Saud bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud) was much more of a politician — one of those great men of the Middle East renowned for their generosity and extravagance. Everybody loved him and admired him and so on, but he was an extremely tough and authoritarian figure. I think Abdullah was perhaps less well-rounded; more of a soldier, much less of a politician. He perhaps didn’t understand how to keep the tribes on side and I think his strategy was probably wrong. He withdrew too quickly back into Najd and I don’t think he had the same kind of hold over people that his father had. But he was brave and he absolutely did his best.” 

Could the outcome have been different? Could the First Saudi State have survived?  

“Given how extended Ottoman supply lines and logistics were, if he’d managed to keep the major tribes on side then I think he could have stalled the Ottomans at Qasim, or even before Qasim,” Crawford suggests. “But he didn’t manage to keep them on side and, of course, many of the tribes were rather flattered by Muhammad Ali’s attentions. They were given shawls and cloaks and swords and all the gifts that he needed to give. It’s all recorded in Egyptian documents. If (Abdullah bin Saud) had been a bigger personality, or more generous, or had a greater grip on people’s imaginations, as his father did, maybe the state would have survived for longer. But ultimately, the Egyptian machine had much bigger resources and Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim, as a combination, were fairly brutal.” 

Crawford’s interest in the Kingdom’s history began when studying at Oxford under the British-Lebanese historian Albert Hourani. “Nobody wrote about it,” he says. “Everybody wrote about the Levant. It was all about Cairo and Damascus and Baghdad and the great metropolises, and no one wrote about Saudi Arabia. Indeed, there was a rather sniffy attitude to the history of the Arabian Peninsula: ‘There’s not much there, there’s no material.’ And actually, that’s not true. There is a phenomenal amount of material, just no one had really focused on it apart from George Rentz and (Harry St John Bridger) Philby, whose books were completely unreadable.” 

If nothing else, Crawford hopes his book will encourage a deeper understanding of the Kingdom’s history.  

“I do think it’s important that people should have some sort of grasp of where the country has come from. I’ve been writing Saudi history since 1982 — somewhat specialized, I admit — but this was a chance to try and bring some of it alive.”