A History of the Middle East (26 page)

The pro-Turkish and pan-Islam feeling which Britain had feared was almost non-existent. The oriental secretary in Cairo, Sir Ronald
Storrs, wrote, ‘Pious Muslims shake their heads and say, “We wish the Turks all success – from afar.”’ In the Canal zone it was only some Muslims in two Indian battalions of the Canal Defence Force who deserted to the Turks. They were caught and shot and the trouble was prevented from spreading. A succession of Indian Muslim ruling princes was brought in to help stiffen the morale of the troops.

That pro-Turkish feeling was subdued did not mean that Egyptian nationalism was dead. Although leaderless and confused, the students were fervently nationalist and their clubs seethed with bitter opposition to the occupation. Secretly they applauded two unsuccessful assassination attempts on the life of Sultan Hussein Kamel. However, the British government handled the situation with some skill. When the sultan died in the summer of 1917, it resisted the demands that Britain should annex Egypt which came from some MPs and which were supported by Sir Reginald Wingate, the new high commissioner in Cairo; Britain was still concerned with the reaction of other Mediterranean powers. Instead the 49-year-old Prince Ahmed Fuad, a son of the khedive Ismail, was brought in to replace Hussein Kamel.

While pro-Turkish sentiment presented little problem for Britain in Egypt, there was a possibility that anti-Turkish feeling could be encouraged in the Ottoman Arab dominions. It was known that the Arabs had good cause for resentment against their rulers – especially in the aftermath of the brief Arab–Turkish honeymoon which followed the Young Turks revolution – but detailed intelligence was lacking.

Six weeks before Turkey entered the war, Lord Kitchener, at Ronald Storrs’ suggestion, approached Sharif Hussein in Mecca to find out which way the Arabs would turn if Turkey allied itself to Germany. The sharif was as cautious as Kitchener himself had been with the Emir Abdullah eight months earlier. He hinted that he might bring the Hejazis out in revolt against the Turks if he was ensured of enough British support. A further message from Kitchener (who by now was minister of war in the British cabinet)
promised Hussein that, if he would come out against Turkey, Britain would guarantee his retention of the title of Grand Sharif and defend him against external aggression. It hinted that if the sharif were declared caliph he would have Britain’s support, and it included a general promise to help the Arabs obtain their freedom.

The message was enough to cause Sharif Hussein to contemplate the much wider objective of a general revolt against the Turks, under his leadership. But for this he required much more specific assurances from the Allies, and the year 1915 was spent trying to elicit them from Cairo while he continued to sound out the other leading Arabs in the peninsula with whom he was in contact.

The British cabinet for its part had no clear policy towards the Arabs or for the future of the Ottoman provinces in Asia after Turkey’s defeat. It was obviously desirable that Turkey should be knocked out of the war as soon as possible, but this was primarily to give Britain and France access to Russia and Romania to encircle the Central Powers. This was the strategy behind the Gallipoli campaign. There was an assumption that the Turks would have to give up Constantinople/Istanbul and the Dardanelles strait and that ‘in the interests of Islam’ (according to the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey) there should be an independent Muslim political unit somewhere else. Its centre would naturally be the Muslim holy places and Arabia, but it remained to be settled what else it would include.

Britain’s Arab policy evolved in a way that the British considered pragmatic but which the Arabs came to regard as unprincipled. Sir Percy Cox, the chief political officer of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, which occupied Basra at the beginning of the war, was aware of the importance of winning Ibn Saud, the new power in central Arabia, to the British cause. He sent Captain W. H. I. Shakespear as British representative at the Saudi court. Shakespear had already made friends with Ibn Saud during his heroic journeys of exploration in Arabia, and he was the Englishman whom the Wahhabi ruler most admired. However, Shakespear was killed in a skirmish with the Saudis’ Rashidi enemies in January 1915. His death
eliminated the possibility that Britain might invest in the Saudis, who had long demonstrated their independence from the Turks, as the leaders of an Arab revolt.

To the Arab Bureau – the group of high-level British experts gathered in Cairo – there were sound political reasons for looking to the Hashemites from the Hejaz to lead the Arabs. Sharif Hussein’s position as keeper of the Islamic holy places made him the obvious person to counter the Ottoman call for a
jihad
against the infidel. But at that stage Britain had little knowledge of the state of opinion in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Syria, although it was in a position to sound the feelings of leading Arabs in Cairo. Moreover, Britain had to consider the interests of its principal allies, Russia and France. In 1915 there was already a fear that huge Russian losses were causing the Russian people to lose enthusiasm for the war. France, which was bearing the brunt of the war on the western front, had a claim to a special position in Syria, based on long-standing cultural and political ties that had been acknowledged by Britain before the war. During 1915, Britain began secret negotiations with its two allies on the future of all the Ottoman lands. Although British, the government of India also had its own interests and means of pressure on London, and it regarded Mesopotamia, the Gulf and the Arabian peninsula, as its special concern. It is hardly surprising that Britain lacked a coherent policy towards the Arabs.

The British government negotiated the agreement with Sharif Hussein to launch his revolt against the Turks by a correspondence which took place between July 1915 and February 1916, being conducted through Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt.

The sharif’s aim was to secure British support for Arab independence in all the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire from Mersin in the north, the Persian frontier in the east, the Mediterranean in the west, and the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean in the south. The only temporary exception he was prepared to make was Aden. Doubtless he knew that Britain would not accept all his demands, but he was setting out his maximum negotiating position.

McMahon’s crucial letter is his second, dated 24 October 1915, in which he pledged British support for Arab independence in the areas proposed by the sharif subject to certain reservations:

In other passages in the same letter, McMahon said it was understood ‘that the Arabs have already decided to seek the counsels and advice of Great Britain exclusively; and that such European advisers and officials as may be needed to establish a sound system of administration shall be British’. He added that he considered it was agreed that

The ambiguity in some of these phrases was no doubt deliberate, and the shrewd sharif was aware of the reasons. He protested vigorously about the exemption of the Syrian Mediterranean coast from the area of Arab independence, saying that the vilayets of Aleppo
and Beirut could not be regarded as anything but Arab provinces. He reluctantly agreed to shelve the problem for the duration of the war but declared his trust that Britain would subsequently persuade ‘her ally France’ to hand them over to the Arabs. He was more ready to compromise on the Iraqi provinces, recognizing the existing reality of the British military occupation, but he pointed out that, because they were part of the former Arab Empire, the seat of the caliphs and the first centre of Arab culture, it would be ‘impossible to persuade or compel the Arab nation to renounce the honourable association’. He agreed that the end of the occupation would be determined by negotiation, but ‘without prejudice to the rights of either party or the natural wealth and resources of these parts’.

The ambiguity which sowed most trouble for the future concerned Palestine. The name was not mentioned in the correspondence because Palestine was not an Ottoman administrative division, although it was a geographical expression employed throughout the Christian world. British cabinet ministers certainly referred to Palestine in their discussions. By no stretch of the imagination could McMahon’s exemption of ‘portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo’ – which was a vague attempt to accommodate French interests in Lebanon – have referred to the
sanjak
of Jerusalem, which covered two-thirds of Palestine and lay well to the south. It may be argued that the sharif either understood or should have been aware that Palestine was excluded, but there is no proof and he never accepted it. Britain could easily have clarified the situation by saying that Palestine must have a special status because it was sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but it chose not to do this. Clarity was not an objective.

The sharif’s weakness lay in the fact that his claim to leadership was far from being acknowledged by the Arabs outside the Hejaz. Apart from the imam of Yemen (who remained pro-Turkish), the Arab shaikhs on the fringes of the Arabian peninsula (who were in treaty relationship with Britain) and Ibn Saud in the interior (who was the sharif’s hostile rival), the Arabs of Mesopotamia looked
forward to their own independence, while the sharif had little contact with the Arabs of Syria, who were under iron Turkish rule. When Jemal Pasha first arrived in Syria to command the Fourth Army, he curbed his naturally despotic nature and declared a policy of ‘clemency and tolerance towards the Arabs’. ‘I am in a position to assure you that the Turkish and Arab ideals do not conflict,’ he said in Damascus in January 1915. ‘They are brothers in their strivings, and perhaps their efforts are complementary.’ However, after his failure to invade Egypt and his intelligence services reported the scale of Arab anti-Turkish activities, he resorted to a policy of repression. First he took every opportunity to send Arab units of the Ottoman army out of Syria and replace them with Turks, and then he put on trial a number of prominent Arab civilians who had been implicated in treasonable activities by documents seized in the French consulates. Eleven were publicly executed in August 1915 and twenty-one more the following May in the central squares of Damascus and Beirut.

However, if the Syrians were feeling increasingly anti-Turkish, they by no means saw their salvation in France. Hostility towards the possibility of French rule surprised even British intelligence, which attributed it to aspects of French colonial policy in north-west Africa. Only the Maronites of Mount Lebanon looked to France as a protector.

By the spring of 1916, Sharif Hussein knew that he had to act, as a large Turco-German force was about to arrive in the Hejaz on its way to Yemen. On 16 June he raised the flag of the Arab Revolt and seized Mecca from its small Turkish garrison. He had hoped for a simultaneous landing by Allied troops at Alexandretta (Iskenderun) to promote an uprising against the Turks in Syria, but this was rejected by the British war cabinet, despite strong support from the military, because of French opposition to any landing in Syria other than by French troops. For the time being the Arab Revolt remained confined to the Hejaz. On 2 November 1916 Sharif Hussein was proclaimed ‘King of the Arab Countries’ by his followers, but this was not acceptable to Britain and France. A compromise was
reached, and in January 1917 they both recognized him as King of the Hejaz.

Britain had never specifically promised to acknowledge Sharif Hussein’s claim to leadership of all the Arabs, although it had encouraged him to believe that it would. The truth was that Britain’s secret negotiations with France on the future of the Arab Ottoman dominions had already resulted in an agreement early in 1916. The two allies had previously accepted, with some misgivings, that Russia should have Constantinople and the Dardanelles. The task of negotiating had been delegated to Georges Picot of France and Sir Mark Sykes of Britain, and the Sykes–Picot agreement which they concluded partitioned the whole of Syria and Iraq and a large part of southern Turkey into spheres of direct or indirect French and British influence. France’s area corresponded to the future states of Syria and Lebanon, and Britain’s to Iraq and Transjordan. France’s area of direct control would be the Mediterranean coastal regions, and Britain’s the vilayets of Basra and Baghdad (in addition to the ports of Haifa and Acre). In the hinterland, which would be under the indirect control of the two powers, France and Britain were prepared ‘to recognize and uphold an independent Arab state or confederation of Arab states under the suzerainty of an Arab chief’. In addition there was an area including Jerusalem and most of Palestine which was to be under some form of international control. Only the area comprising the present-day Saudi Arabia and North Yemen was to be left independent. (Britain had Aden and retained its exclusive relationship with the Arab Gulf shaikhdoms.)