The United Kingdom (UK) and Saudi Arabia are close allies. They maintain and have continued to develop extensive economic and military ties. Do not take my word for it; please feel free to read the UK government’s own description of its ties to Riyadh as a strategic partnership.

By 2030, the governments of both nations expect bilateral trade to increase to $39.6 billion.

Why is there such a close and mutually financially beneficial relationship between London and Riyadh? Surely the British government realises that it is laying itself open to charges of hypocrisy – a liberal parliamentary democracy maintaining trade and military links with a theocratic, hereditary monarchy like Riyadh. Why does the UK, where women enjoy the liberal freedoms of a capitalist state, intimately cooperate with a regime that maintains strict gender segregation?

The answer to that question lies in understanding Britain’s role in shaping the modern Saudi state in the 1910s and 20s. Indeed, the UK has a long history of colluding with and supporting fundamentalist groups, arming and training them, as a bulwark against Arab nationalist and anticolonial movements in the Middle East region.

Britain, eager to defeat the Ottoman Turkish empire, encouraged the Arab revolt, an uprising by Arabic-speaking peoples in the Arabian peninsula. The leader of this nationalist uprising was Sharif Hussein, a notable leader in western Arabia which was then known as the Kingdom of Hejaz. This was significant because his territory contained the holy sites of Mecca and Medina.

Guardian of the holy sites and Arab leader. Hussein received numerous assurances from Britain (the 1915 Hussein-McMahon correspondence) that London would respect the creation of an independent Arabia after the defeat of the Ottoman Turks. We all know through the romanticised and somewhat fictionalised movie Lawrence of Arabia that London’s policymakers were secretly plotting, along with France, a division of the spoils once the Ottoman Empire was defeated.

The secret Sykes-Picot agreement, signed in 1916, involved carving up the Middle East into spheres of influence shared between Britain and France. What is not publicised in that film, nor to students of the British empire, is that London was worried. Sharif Hussein was an anticolonial and nationalist leader. What happens if he is successful – would his example inspire similar anticolonial uprisings in Egypt and India?

Here is where the UK made a fateful decision; to financially and militarily back the fundamentalist and ultraconservative Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, the king of the central Arabian state of Nejd. His brand of theocracy is known as Wahhabism, named after the 18th century theologian Muhammad ibn Abd Al-Wahhab (1703 – 1792).

Believing Islam to be corrupted by foreign elements, Wahhab wanted to purge Islam of those he considered apostates. A highly strict, orthodox interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism is today the official ideology of Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud was no fool, realising that British arms and training would give him a decisive edge over his rival, Sharif Hussain.

The supply of armaments and money flowed into the coffers of the house of Saud. With British backing, the Wahhabi leader was able to impose his brand of Salafi revivalism on the entire territory of the Arabian peninsula after the defeat of the Ottoman Turkish empire. The subsequent political and economic character of the unified Saudi state was heavily influenced by this covert development.

Sharif Hussein’s forces were defeated, not by arms alone, but by imperial British treachery. Throughout the 1920s, the UK improved its relations with the emergent Saudi state. It is interesting to note here that Hussein repeatedly refused London’s proposal to start a Jewish state in Palestine.

Hostile to Zionism, Hussein desired the unification of Arab lands, including Syria and Palestine, into one entity. Ibn Saud on the other hand, accepted (however reluctantly) the Zionist project in Palestine. The 1917 Balfour declaration, committing Britain to a Jewish state in Palestine, was the price Ibn Saud was willing to pay for British finance and military backing.

By 1925, Hussein had been forced out of the port city of Aqaba, a city his forces liberated from Turkish control during the First World War.

Let us be clear – Britain actively colluded with a fundamentalist ultraconservative movement to achieve its geopolitical objectives. It is quite hypocritical for the UK to publicly denounce the Saudis for culturally regressive practices, but then actively support those political forces which advocate religiously fanatical culturally regressive policies.

London’s collusion with fundamentalist groups is not just a matter of history. There are important lessons for us today.

The current government in Damascus, headed by the fundamentalist and ultraconservative organisation Hayat Tahrir al-Shams (HTS), a Sunni supremacist group, received copious funding and military support from the UK, in their effort to topple the previous Ba’athist regime in Syria.

While every uprising undoubtedly has domestic origins and legitimate grievances, the military support and political backing provided to HTS by Britain is of an order of magnitude similar to the UK’s regime change policies of the past. Only now, months after the ousting of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, is the full extent of London’s covert support for the Syrian Sunni rebel group emerging.

While it is easy to view the success of HTS as a purely indigenously based, rapid advance against a tottering regime, the HTS militia was steadily groomed and cultivated over the years from its enclave in northwestern Syria.

Emerging as an Al Qaeda offshoot, the HTS has ruled Syria with lethal force, engaging in ethnic cleansing against minority communities. London’s role in orchestrating a regime change in Syria, accompanied by a media campaign to whitewash HTS’ image as a ‘moderate’ force, is only now just becoming clear. The HTS leadership is media savvy, and able to appeal to a Western audience – something no doubt their British paymasters trained them to do.

No amount of slick public relations can obscure the violent and extremist nature of the HTS militia. The new regime in Damascus recently announced their intention to privatise public assets, cut corporate taxes, and make Syria a business-friendly economy – a failed prescription that we have witnessed many times before.

The success of the HTS Salafi uprising has more in common with the Sudeten German ethnic uprising in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. An uprising, sponsored by a foreign power, intended to break apart a multiethnic and multi-confessional state, thus making it easier to monopolise. This is a playbook we have witnessed in the past.