Coming on the heel of the Tanzimat-era, Sultan Abdülhamid II recognized the urgent need to modify the policies that instead of achieving cohesiveness by appealing to the loyalty of the non-Muslim population had ignited tensions among the Muslim population. With this impetus, AbdülhamidII targeted the Arab provinces and the Arab frontier regions, home to the highest proportion of Sunni Muslims in the empire and the two holy cities in Islam – Mecca and Medina. New forms of tying the Ottoman state to its distant and important frontiers were infrastructural projects which sought to tie Istanbul, physically and politically to the southern provinces were the Hijaz telegraph line (completed in 1901) and the Hijaz railroad (completed in 1908). To ensure the success of these projects – logistically difficult and heavily dependant on local resources and support – the Hamidian administration relied on the negotiation skills of loyal, multilingual, highly educated Ottoman officials. One such official was Sadiq al-Mu’ayyad al-‘Azm, a Damascene-Ottoman based in Istanbul who worked on both projects, most importantly, leading the extension of the telegraph line from Damascus to Medina. As part of a bigger project aimed at understanding the experience of the understudied role that Ottoman-Arab officials such as Al-Azm played in these crucial projects, in this paper I will reverse the angle of analysis in order to explore the role tribes from all over the Arabian Peninsula played in facilitating, hindering, guarding and destroying of the telegraph line during the process of construction and operation at the turn of the century. I will attempt to understand the socio-political dynamic of this negotiation from the perspective of the Ottoman state and the various local tribes. I will do this through an analysis of the records collected from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, contemporary Ottoman and Arabic newspapers, as well as a variety of travelogues and records found in Riyadh, Jeddah, and Damascus. My primary aim is to contribute to emerging literature that looks at tribal forces in the Arabian peninsula as agents of history, often determining the path that the Ottoman policies. This influence on Ottoman international and domestic policies took on a much wider dimension due to the geopolitical significance of the Southern Arabian Peninsula especially in relation to emerging European colonial interests in the region and the symbolic significance of this holy land for the Muslim world.