Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 by Efraim Karsh

Author:Efraim Karsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-08-06T20:33:00+00:00

Till now we have defended and befriended Islam in the person of the Turks; henceforward it shall be in that of the noble Arab ... It may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Caliphate at Mecca or Medina and so good may come by the help of God out of all evil which is now occurring.12

This was no mean achievement for Hussein. Eight months earlier he had been refused a mere half-dozen machine guns from Britain; now all of a sudden he was being offered not only a defensive pact with the largest empire on earth but also the highest Islamic post worldwide: the caliphate. Yet the sharif preferred to chart his options carefully. The Ottoman Empire was now a full-fledged war ally of Germany, whose military prowess was held in great awe in the Near East, and Hussein, whose ambitions were aptly matched by his caution, would not take the plunge before ascertaining which way the current was flowing. He therefore reassured Kitchener of his benign neutrality and expressed regret for being unable to break with the Turks immediately owing to "his position in the world of Islam and the present political situation in the Hijaz," while promising to wait for "a reasonable pretext to do so."13

Not before the summer of 1915 would Hussein feel confident enough to make his move. Enver's catastrophic Transcaucasian setback, Djemal's abortive attack on the Suez Canal, and the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign all seem to have allowed Abdullah to convince his father that the moment was ripe for a serious exploration of the feasibility of an Anglo-sharifian alliance. He was aided in this by communications from the two Arab secret societies-al-Fatat and al-Ahd-which promised to stir a revolt by Arab officers and troops in Syria and urged Hussein to demand, in any negotiations with Britain, the establishment of a vast Arab empire stretching from Asia Minor to the Indian Ocean and from the Persian frontier to the Mediterranean Sea.

On July iz, 1915, shortly after a delegation of the secret societies had visited Arabia and sworn allegiance to the sharif, a personal envoy of Abdullah's arrived in the Sudan to explore the possibility of British military assistance to the sharif and his Arab supporters. Two days later Abdullah sent a letter on his father's behalf to Storrs, which was to inaugurate a long, drawn-out, and controversial correspondence between the sharif of Mecca and British High Commissioner McMahon, the echoes of which would reverberate in Middle Eastern politics and historiography for many years to come.14

The letter reflected the sea change in Hussein's worldview since the beginning of the Great War. The vast Arab empire envisioned by the secret societies coalesced with Kitchener's allusion to the caliphate to whet the sharif's appetite. He no longer spoke for himself and his family, or even for the whole of the Hijaz; styling himself as the champion of "the whole of the Arab nation without any exception," he presented a long list of conditions

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