In the course of the winter I made with my wife our intended visit to Jeddah, where I gathered much information of the kind I sought as to the opinions of the various sects of Islam. No place accessible to Europeans could have been better chosen for the purpose, and I made the acquaintance of a number of interesting Moslems through the help of one Yusuf Effendi Kudsi, who had a connection with the English Consulate. Among them the most remarkable were Sheykh Hassan Johar, a learned and very intelligent Somali, Sheykh Abd-el-Rahman Mahmud from Hyderabad in India, Sheykh Meshaat of Mecca, several members of the Bassam family from Aneyzah in Nejd, and a certain Bedouin Sheykh, a highly educated man, from Southern Morocco. My stay in Jeddah, however, was but a short one, as I fell ill of a malarious fever very prevalent there, and this prevented any idea I may still have had of penetrating into the interior. The moment, too, I found was a most unfavourable one for any plan of this kind, through the new hostility of the Meccan authorities to England. Already the Sultan Abdul Hamid had begun to assert himself, a thing for many generations unknown to his Ottoman predecessors, as spiritual Head of Islam, and in Arabia especially he had become jealous of his authority, while his quarrel with our Government made him suspicious, more than of any other, of English influences. Only a few months before my visit to Jeddah he had made a vigorous assertion of his authority at Mecca by the appointment of a new Grand Sherif of strong reactionary and anti-European views. The former Grand Sherif Huseyn Ibn Aoun had been a man of liberal ideas and known for his friendly relations with the English Consulate, and had so incurred his displeasure and met a violent death. Whether this was in reality contrived by the Sultan, or perhaps his Valy, it is not possible precisely to say, but it was certainly believed to have been so when I was at Jeddah.
I learned the particulars of the Sherif Huseyn's death from his agent at Jeddah, Omar Nassif, who most certainly laid it to the Sultan's charge.