Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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Alan George points out that "with the twin aims of creating the basis of a centralized
political organization, and or reviving the ideals of the Wahhabism, King Abdul-Aziz
established the Ikhwan, or Brethren, a religious organization modeled on the Wahhabi
movement." 16 It was an organization whose ideology was based on a return to strict
fundamentalist ideas. King Abdul-Aziz's effort to tame the Ikhwan political power took the
form of settling the leading tribal factions in rudimentary-built colonies known as hijar
settlements (singular, hijrah). 17 The term hijrah invokes the concept of reliving the faith as
modeled after the Prophet Mohammed's flight from Makkah to Madinah at the dawn of
Islam. It connotes the move from the land of polytheism to the land of Islam.
The Ikhwan movement was the reification of Wahhabi religious reform in the
nomadic population of Arabia. In the physical sphere it was manifest in the Hijar program
which was started by Abdul-Aziz in 1912 to settle the recalcitrant bedouin tribes. 18 The
King sought to establish Hijar, first, for religious-militancy and control, but later for
agricultural production. Agriculture was encouraged "to be the basis of economic life and,
most important, the reformed religion the basis of social and spiritual life." 19 While the
professed goal was to encourage the bedouins to settled forms of life based on communal
religious organization, the hijar initiative was taken for political purposes as well. The
predetermined locations for sedentary living meant close supervision by the government
and quick mobilization of forces when needed. The sedentarization was meant to help
nomads abandon their roving life-style and to enlist them as reservists in the army for
Abdul-Aziz's expeditions. They carried the major burden of policing the tribal areas and
helping the King consolidate his authority at a time when no standing army was available to
him. In the course of King Abdul-Aziz's forty years sponsorship of the hijar's colonies
program, two hundred settlements {Hijar) were established in the central region (Najd)
alone.
One of these settlements, Al-Artawiyah, which belonged to the powerful Mutair tribe,
boasted a population of over 10,000. Although the hijar settlements owed their start to the
religio-political designs of Abdul-Aziz, their subsequent growth hinged on the agricultural
programs of the government. Once Abdul-Aziz amassed financial strength to establish his
own standing army, the military purpose behind the hijar program gave way to the
economic. For example, when some of the Ikhwan factions opposed Abdul-Aziz's
decision to suspend the long-practiced expansionist religious military raids, jihad, to
advance the Saudi-Wahhabi domain into nearby Arab territories of the new Arab nation-