The two pashas set out for Mecca to see off any potential Arab rebellion. But Enver’s haj could not save Arabia for the Ottomans.9
ARAB REVOLT, BALFOUR DECLARATION
1916–17
LAWRENCE AND THE SHERIF OF MECCA
Just before the Great War began, a young princeling from Mecca, Abdullah ibn Hussein, on his way back from Istanbul, visited Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the reigning British Agent in Cairo, to ask for military aid for his father.
Abdullah’s father was Hussein, the Sherif of Sherifs and the Amir of Mecca, the grandest potentate in Arabia, a Hashemite in direct descent from the Prophet. The family were traditionally amirs of Mecca but the Ottoman sultan Abdul-Hamid had kept him in luxurious limbo in Istanbul for over fifteen years while appointing other members of the family. Then in 1908, the Young Turks, faced with a lack of other candidates, despatched him to Mecca (where his telephone number was Mecca 1). Faced with Enver Pasha’s aggressive Turkish nationalism and the rivalry of the Saudis and other Arabian chieftains, Hussein wished to prepare for either war in Arabia or revolt against Istanbul.
Abdullah proudly showed Kitchener a flesh wound gained fighting a southern Arabian sheikh, and Kitchener revealed his scars from the Sudan. ‘Your Lordship’, the squat Arabian told the towering Kitchener, ‘is a target that cannot be missed but, short as I am, a Bedouin hit me.’ Despite Abdullah’s charm, Kitchener refused to arm the Sherifians.
A few months later, the start of the Great War changed everything. Kitchener returned to London to serve as secretary of state for war – and to launch the steely-eyed recruiting poster that read ‘Your Country Needs You’ – but he remained Britain’s pre-eminent Eastern expert. When the Ottoman sultan-caliph declared jihad against the Allies, he remembered Hussein and proposed appointing him as Britain’s own caliph to launch an Arab revolt. He ordered Cairo to contact the Sherif.
At first there was no reply. Then suddenly, in August 1915, Sherif Hussein offered to lead an Arab revolt – in return for certain promises. The British, confronting the failure of their Gallipoli expedition, designed to break the Western Front stalemate by knocking the Ottomans out of the war, and the disastrous encirclement of an army at Kut in Iraq, were afraid that Jemal Pasha would conquer Egypt unless he was restrained by Arab unrest. London therefore ordered Sir Henry McMahon, high commissioner in Egypt, to agree whatever necessary to keep the Arabs on side without promising anything that clashed with French and of course British ambitions.
Sherif Hussein, now over sixty, was described by no less an observer than Lawrence of Arabia as ‘conceited to a degree, greedy and stupid’ and ‘pitifully unfit’ to rule a state, but nonetheless ‘such an old dear’ and at this point the British badly needed his help. Guided by his canny second son Abdullah, he now demanded a Hashemite* empire of all of Arabia, Syria, Palestine and Iraq, an outrageously exorbitant gambit and an imperium on a scale that had not existed since the Abbasids. In return he would lead a revolt against the Ottomans not only in his native Arabia but also in Syria through the network of secret Arab nationalist societies such as al-Fatat and al-Ahd. None of this was quite true: he commanded only a few thousand warriors and did not even rule all of the Hejaz. Much of Arabia was controlled by rival chieftains like the Saudis and his position was precarious. The secret societies were tiny, with just a few hundred active members between them, and would soon be decimated by Jemal.
McMahon was unsure how much to concede to these ‘tragi-comic pretensions’, but, while he agonized, Hussein simultaneously offered the Three Pashas the chance to outbid the British, asking for hereditary possession of the Hejaz and an end to Jemal’s terror. The sherif sent his third son Faisal to negotiate with Jemal, but the tyrant forced him to attend the hangings of Arab nationalists.
The sherif had much more success with the British. London’s Eastern experts based in Cairo knew the contours of Palestine intimately through the espionage archaeology of the last century and Kitchener himself had photographed Jerusalem and mapped the country, sometimes in full Arab disguise. But many understood the clubs of Cairo better than the souks of Damascus: they were patronizing about the Arabs and prejudiced against the Jews whom they saw as behind every enemy conspiracy. While London ran one policy, negotiating with the sherif, the British viceroy of India ran his own quite different policy, backing the sherif’s enemy, the Saudis. Britain’s often amateurish experts found themselves living the real version of John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle, adrift on the subtle, treacherous currents of Arab politics in the vast Ottoman sea.
Fortunately, McMahon had one officer who really did know Syria. The twenty-eight-year-old T. E. Lawrence, described by his fellow Arabist Gertrude Bell as ‘exceedingly intelligent’, was an eccentric outsider who hailed from the ambiguous heart of the British establishment and never quite reconciled his tormented allegiances to his two flawed masters – the empire and the Arabs. He was illegitimate: his father was Thomas Chapman, heir to a baronetcy who had left his wife to raise a new family with his mistress Sarah Lawrence and adopted her surname.
‘As a boy, TE always thought he was going to do great things, both active and reflective and determined to achieve both.’ He trained himself to improve his powers of physical endurance while writing his Oxford thesis on Crusader fortresses. Afterwards, he perfected his Arabic by travelling throughout Syria, and worked as an archaeologist at Hittite sites in Iraq, where his young Arab assistant Dahoum became his companion and perhaps the guiding passion of his life. His sexuality, like so much else about him, remains mysterious, but he mocked ‘our comic reproductive processes’ and his friend Ronald Storrs said, ‘He was not a misogynist though he’d have kept his composure if he’d suddenly been informed he’d never see a woman again.’ While in Iraq, he planned a book of ‘adventures’ on Jerusalem and six other Arab cities which he would call The Seven Pillars of Wisdom after a verse in Proverbs. He never published this, but he later used the title for another book.
‘A rather short, strongly built man with sandy complexion, a typical English face bronzed by the desert, remarkable blue eyes,’ as an American later described him, Lawrence stood 5 foot 5 inches – Gertrude Bell called him the Imp. ‘My brain’, he wrote, ‘was quick and silent as a wild cat.’ Super-sensitive to every human nuance, superb writer and keen observer, and abruptly rude to those he disliked, he suffered from ‘a craving to be famous’, he admitted, ‘and a horror of being known to like being known’. He did it all for ‘egotistical curiosity’. This believer in chivalry and justice was also a serpentine intriguer and self-mythologizer with what the journalist Lowell Thomas called ‘a genius for backing into the limelight’. Vanity competed with masochism: ‘I like the things underneath me and took my pleasures and adventures downwards. There seemed a certainty in degradation.’
Now in Cairo, McMahon turned to this junior officer who became ‘a moving spirit in the negotiations with the sherif’. As Lawrence wrote his reports, he always found himself ‘thinking of Saladin and Abu Ubayda’, but he shared the view of many British Arabists that the desert Arabs were pure and noble – unlike those of Palestine. While he defined Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Hama as the Arab heartland of Syria, he did not recognize Jerusalem as really Arab – she was a ‘squalid town’, whose people, he wrote, ‘were characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through. Questions of Arabs and their nationality are as far from them as bimetallism from the life of Texas.’ Such places as Jerusalem or Beirut were ‘shop-soiled – as representative of Syria as Soho of the Home Counties’.