“The Bedou remain, what they always have been, independent tribes, each community having its own country, rulers, laws, and customs,” Wavell observed in his memoirs . “For many years past the Turks have found it less trouble to pay a certain sum of money to the sheikhs of the Bedou tribes through whose country the pilgrim caravans have to pass, in return for immunity from attack.” Ali bin Muhammed—a model pilgrim who was in fact the English spy AJB Wavell—arrived in Medina in 1912, at the end of a long covert journey through Beirut, Damascus, and Jeddah. The reconnaissance established…