Faisal al-Duwaish

Faisal al-Duwaish led the Mutayr tribe and the Ikhwan revolt against the man he had helped make king, and died in an Iraqi prison. He was paramount shaikh of the Mutayr and took his people into the Ikhwan settlements early, founding Artawiya, the first and largest of them. As a commander he was central to almost every Saudi conquest of the 1910s and 1920s: he took Hail from the Rashidis, he fought in the Hijaz campaign, and it was his men who stormed Taif in 1924, where the killing of civilians did lasting damage to Ibn Saud's reputation in the Muslim world. His quarrel with the king was about what the conquest had been for. The Ikhwan understood jihad as unbounded and the frontiers with British Iraq and Transjordan as illegitimate lines drawn by unbelievers; Ibn Saud understood that a state has borders and that raiding across them would bring the Royal Air Force. Al-Duwaish raided anyway, from 1927, and was denounced at a conference of religious scholars who found for the king. At Sabilla on 30 March 1929 he was badly wounded and his force destroyed, and he was left for dead. He recovered, fought on, and eventually surrendered to the British in Kuwait, who handed him back to Ibn Saud on a promise that his life would be spared. He was imprisoned in Riyadh and died there in 1931 of a heart condition, or so it was announced. His sons were released and the Mutayr were absorbed into the kingdom without further revolt. Sabilla was among the last battles fought by camel-mounted tribal levies anywhere, and the Ikhwan settlements he had founded became ordinary towns.

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