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 20 at Mecca. From this rivalry the Shereefate profited, just as the suzerains of the Holy Land had reaped advantage from the family disputes of the Shereefs. In the eighteenth century, the Shereefs were not troubled by the pressure of a heavy hand from without, but they were forced to depend on themselves, and their inadequate equipment was a source of danger to them when an unexpected opponent threatened to destroy their power.

The Wahhabis of Central Arabia, roused by a puritanic zeal to protest against what they declared was the dishonour of Islam, launched out on a campaign of reform. This "holy war," directed, primarily, against the Turkish domination, succeeded in exciting a religious fervour throughout a great part of Arabia, similar to that awakened by Mohammed twelve centuries earlier, and, at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth