Why did King ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz do jihād against the British agent Sharīf Ḥusayn and remove his rule from Makkah and Madīnah? • Sh Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā said: ❝The first reason is what is known by definitive mass transmission and by official documents: the alliance of the Sharīf of Makkah, Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī, and his sons with the British state and its allies in the recent war, and their support of them against the Ottoman state in opening the Arab lands. He used to congratulate the British state whenever it captured a region from among the lands of Islām and the capitals of Islāmic civilization, such as al-Quds al-Sharīf, Baghdād, and Damascus. Then they divided these lands, granting him the governorship of the Ḥijāz, while they took the governorships of al-ʿIrāq, Syria, and al-Quds al-Sharīf. They even divided the Ḥijāz Railway, which is an Islāmic endowment established to facilitate the performance of an Islāmic pillar. As for a Muslim taking the side of non-Muslims in fighting and opening the lands of the Muslims, its religious ruling is well known by the explicit text of the Noble Qurʾān and the books of the Sharīʿah. It suffices us in this regard His saying: {Whoever takes them as allies among you—then he is one of them}. [5:51] As for its consequence for the Arab nation, it is the foreigners’ seizure of the cradle of its civilization and development, its most fertile regions, and its greatest sources of wealth; and making what remains for it of its sacred peninsula surrounded by them on land as if by sea, and threatened with the loss of its independence at every moment. The threat includes the two noble sanctuaries by implication of the third of them, which is al-Masjid al-Aqṣā, until no independence remains for it in religion or state.❞ 📚 (Al-Wahhābīyyūn wal-Ḥijāz p. 20-21)