Over the nineteenth century, Arab identity had been remoulded once again by contact with outside powers. When those powers went to war, they courted Arab potentates, just as Assyrians, Persians, Romans and others had done before them. This time round, however, the latter-day powers, Britain, France and Ottoman Turkey, had been joined by a fourth suitor – Germany, full of its own new-found nationalism and carried along by its own Drang nach Osten, or ‘Thrust to the East’. As part of the push, Kaiser Wilhelm II had already persuaded the Ottomans, in 1898, to agree to extending their existing Anatolian railway in the direction of the Gulf. The idea was to have a continuous Berlin–Baghdad line, Germany’s own short-cut to palm-fringed shores – and perhaps a palmy imperial future. In the event, work and funding were intermittent, and the first direct Istanbul–Baghdad train would not run until 1940. It was not followed by many more: post-Second World War events would chop the line into sections that eventually withered. The Ottomans were more immediately successful in building their own line, the Hijaz Railway, funded by donations from around the Muslim world and designed to carry pilgrims – and, of course, troops – from Damascus to Medina. Announced in 1900 and finished in 1908, it was the first improvement in Arabian overland travel since the Queen of Sheba; indeed, since the domestication of the camel.
From pack-camel to pilgrim express had taken three millennia; the Hijaz Railway would run for less than nine years. As the Great War ground into action, Britain decided both to derail the Turks’ thrust to the south by destroying their shiny new Arabian train set and, more importantly, to sidetrack them from the conflict in the Fertile Crescent by provoking an Arabian tribal uprising that would be known as the Arab Revolt. To this end, they communicated with the local Arab potentate through whose Hijazi lands much of the line passed, Sharif Husayn ibn Ali, the Ottoman-groomed Amir of Mecca – already known from clandestine approaches to the British as the owner of a second, anti-Ottoman face. Displaying their own other face, the British now egged Husayn on in the very terms of the new nationalism they had recently tried to stamp out in Egypt – throwing off the Turkish yoke and gaining Arab independence. The rewards of rebellion would be the time-honoured ones of gold and arms, naturally, but also recognition of Husayn as King of the Hijaz, the north-western part of the peninsula. As in the days of Sasanian Persia and imperial Rome, an empire was buying an alliance with an Arab chief by the promise of client-kingship. Nor did the resonances from the past end there. That early client-king of the Persians (or the Romans, or both; as we have seen, he too seems to have had more than one face), Imru’ al-Qays ibn Amr, had aggrandized himself as ‘King of the Arabs’ in that first great monument inscribed in the Arabic language, the al-Namarah inscription of AD 328. Now, in AD 1916, Husayn, too, upgraded himself to ‘King of the Arabs’; although at times, as if to align himself with the new, territorial nationalism, he used the style, ‘King of the Arab Lands’. And there was yet another echo from another persistent past. As his courtesy title of al-sharif, ‘the noble’, showed, Husayn belonged to Muhammad’s Hashimi clan of Quraysh; moreover, as Amir of Mecca, the Qurashi ancestral city, he could with some justice claim to be head of the tribe that had provided the two great dynasties of Arab caliphs, the Umayyads and the Abbasids . . . and, sure enough, in time, he would claim the title ‘caliph’ too. For the moment, however, his dreams did not go beyond ruling a united Arab kingdom that took in all Arabic-speaking lands and populations east of Suez: merely the entire Mashriq.
The British High Commission in Cairo chewed their briars and reamed their dottle. Their responses to Husayn were mealy-mouthed and ambiguous. They had been looking for guerrilla back-up in the peninsula, that side-show to the Great War; they now found themselves contemplating Arabdom resurgent in the overweening person of Husayn. For the time being, they left his dreams intact. At its crucial moment, therefore – with the thousand-year preponderance of Turks over Arabs hanging in the balance – the Arab Awakening looked as if it was turning, in politics as in poetics, into a ‘retreat from modernity’: Husayn seemed like the past personified, a whole history of kings and caliphs, of Qurashis and Hashimis, boiled down into one man.
In the short term, Husayn’s hopes would be dashed. In the longer, the British would indeed collude in ‘returning the present to the past’, by handing out Arab thrones to his sons. To raise the scions of Quraysh even to client-kingship might have looked like stability, continuity. But it would all complicate the web of opposing forces – stasis and mobility, tradition and adaptation, then and now – in which the Arab future would be caught.
The web would be even more cruel and complex, for it was warped to duplicity. Even while they were wooing their Arabian kinglet, the British were cheating on him. By the beginning of 1916, Husayn believed his crown as King of the Arabs was in the bag; a few months later, Britain came to an arrangement with her old rival, France, to carve up the Ottoman empire between themselves, once they had defeated it. As the Arab Revolt, ably commanded by Husayn’s son Faysal, scored successes, in November 1917 there came an extra twist of the carving-knife – the Balfour Declaration, in which:
H.M. Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people . . . it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of other non-Jewish communities in Palestine . . .
As the fortunes of the Great War turned to the advantage of Britain and her allies, it seemed that Jews were on their way to achieving what Arabs were still wondering how to do: to take a diverse collection of humanity, encompassing in the Jewish case Rothschild barons in Mayfair and barefoot goatherds in Yemen, linked by little more than devotion for an ancient text (in the Arab case, devotion for the language of an ancient text), and to translate them into a ‘people’ who, in the terms of modern European nationalism, had a claim on a territorial nation-state. Many Jews, at least at the Mayfair end of the scale, agreed with Balfour’s (Jewish) cabinet colleague, Edwin Montagu, in branding Zionism ‘“a mischievous political creed” that would promote anti-Semitism’. His words may have been more prophetic than he could have known. But in any case, various elements of the European nationalist model were missing from Zionism, like shared language, customs, history (at least for the most recent couple of thousand years or so) . . . but all that could be dealt with in time; and for the moment, it could be finessed with that idea of a Promised Land. Rather, the problem was the second part of the declaration, ‘it being clearly understood . . . ’ The Balfour Declaration was an insoluble equation, a logical impossibility. It was like saying you would build a new reservoir without prejudicing the people of the villages that would be flooded.
Arabic calls the Balfour Declaration Wa’d Balfur, literally ‘the Balfour Promise’ (although wa’d has a hint of ‘threat’ as well). Whether the land was promised by God or by Balfour didn’t matter: ‘a promise’, an Arabic saying goes, ‘is the sound of thunder; its fulfilment is the fall of rain’. And in this case, the thunder was ominous, telling of the flood to come. The omens were correct: the deluge came. That second part of the declaration was doomed not to work, and a hundred years on it most patently hasn’t. It would have been impossible in any of the other places mooted as a Jewish national home, which included even the Yemeni island of Socotra. The only place it might have worked is Antarctica.
THE CHAFF OF DREAMS
In the aftermath of the Great War in the Near East, the winners got down to the real business of victors – dividing the spoils, in this case the lands of the Ottoman empire. Those non-committal mumblings to Sharif Husayn about Arab independence were quietly forgotten while Britannia and Marianne shaped not just Arab identity, but the map of the Arab world. Some commentators have argued that their pact, known after its negotiators as the Sykes–Picot Agreement, can be interpreted to demonstrate
Britain’s championing of Arab independence and unity over French opposition. In other words, the Sykes–Picot agreement was a tool of unifi
cation rather than the divisive instrument it is now commonly thought to have been.
That is sophistry. The agreement did, in fact, accept the principle of eventual Arab independence; but on condition of the two powers having permanent influence. A prisoner is not free just because he is under house-arrest, instead of in gaol.
By now it was clear that Sharif Husayn’s vision of himself as sole and unencumbered hegemon of Arab Asia was, like Pharaoh’s visions in the Qur’an, ‘the chaff of dreams’. Husayn’s son Faysal, however, who had spent most of his formative years in Istanbul and had led the Arab Revolt on the ground, had a greater grasp on realpolitik than his father. He also acknowledged the ever-growing importance of modern-style Arab nationalism, and wrote to the Paris peace conference that the aim of the movement was ‘to unite the Arabs eventually into one nation’. Because of the vast discrepancies across the region, he admitted that this would be impossible in the short term. But, he summed up, ‘If our independence be conceded, and our local competence be established, the natural influences of race, language, and interest will soon draw us into one people.’ It was a noble sentiment. And even if ‘race’ had always been a genealogists’ construct, and ‘interest’ had more often divided Arabs than drawn them together, there might yet be hope in that ever-powerful unifier, language. Faysal’s case did not fall on deaf ears; but it fell on ears whose hearing had been rendered selective by the tumult of victory. In 1922, the League of Nations granted provisional independence to the Arab lands – but subject to the mandates already given to Britain and France. Borders that had been pencilled in were now gone over in indelible ink; nebulous ‘spheres of influence’ solidified into hard-edged blocks of imperial tutelage.
Faysal’s comrade from the Arab Revolt, Colonel T.E. Lawrence – the boy from north Oxford who saw himself as a Byron in Arab costume, and had graduated from digging up Hittite ruins to blowing up the Hijaz Railway – was utterly disillusioned by British duplicity; or by some aspects of it. He had sketched out his own ideal map of the post-Ottoman region. In it, a vast area of the northern peninsula, inland Iraq and Transjordan is marked ‘ARABS: Feisal’. Small areas are shown on the Mediterranean seaboard as ‘SINAI’, ‘PALESTINE’ (unZionized, of course), ‘LEBANON’ and, interestingly, surrounding the Gulf of Alexandretta, ‘ARMENIANS’. But the Kurdish-majority regions of Anatolia and northern Iraq are labelled only with ‘??’, and a large chunk of upper Mesopotamia is given to Faysal’s younger brother under the designation ‘ARABS: Zeid (under British Influence)’. Faysal’s elder brother, meanwhile, got most of Iraq – ‘IRAK: Abdullah (under Direct British Administration)’. As for the vast rest of the peninsula south of Faysal’s patch, Lawrence wrote along its northern border, ‘No Foreign Power other than Great Britain to be allowed any share in the Government of the country south of this line’. Even the loyal Lawrence, then, like the duplicitous British desk-wallahs, believed that many of his Arab friends needed the strict regime of nanny Britannia. As for the French stake in Lawrence’s spin on the map . . . rien ne va plus.
Neither Husayn’s vision of a Mashriqi mega-monarchy nor Lawrence’s of a map sans French, sans Zionists stood a chance. But the younger sharifs did get their nursery thrones. Faysal was installed as king of Syria; in the gap between nannies, he assembled a General Congress and was declared king also of Lebanon and Palestine. Then the French arrived with a force of North African troops and promptly expelled him. The British therefore shifted him sideways in 1921 to the throne of Iraq, where their original attempts to rule on their own had been stymied by a widespread tribal revolt. Faysal’s brother Abd Allah, meanwhile, was made king of Transjordan in the same year. Their father, Sharif Husayn, stewed away in righteous bitterness on his Hijazi throne. The Hashimi (or ‘Hashimite’) family had not done badly, with three kingdoms; but the fact was that they were client-kings, just as the Lakhmids and Ghassanids had been clients of the Persians and the Romans 1,400 years and more before. Again, Arabs were caught on their rock between predatory powers – and the powers were now up on the rock too, in the person of British and French officials, dispensing ‘advice’ that was mandatory, deposing and enthroning as they saw fit.
The presence of Europeans hardened borders. It also widened them, in the sense that geographically adjacent territories might become strikingly different from one another. There had always been that hadar–badw disconnect between settled peoples and tribes; but dividing-lines had never been clear. Now, places that were ‘Westernizing’, however superficially, became even more alien than they had been to the tribal inhabitants of the surrounding, and often unchanging, country. An extreme case in every way, but one which points to other disunities created by imperial rule, was that of Aden, down at the far end of the peninsula. ‘British colonial rule,’ admitted one of its last dispensers there, High Commissioner Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, ‘had converted Aden into an island which might have been separated by a hundred miles of ocean from the South Arabian mainland.’ Aden, itself a miniature peninsula with ancient cosmopolitan connections, had never been more than loosely moored to Yemen and the peninsula as a whole. But by administering it from Bombay for a century, the British had floated it in the direction of India. (The resulting developmental – not to say mental – gulf between it and the rest of the country has contributed to the mess outside my window now. When the Adenis found themselves ruled from 1990 by a tribal-military clique from the inland mountains, ‘Vikings’ was one of the kinder epithets they gave them; it was not a propitious start to the union.) To a lesser degree, the same sort of dislocations would affect other semi-detached places, like Bahrain and Kuwait.
Borders have not only been a political and social impediment to integration. They have continually been the pretext for confrontations, sometimes bloodless, like that in which a British-officered force from Oman and Abu Dhabi threw the American-backed Saudis out of the oasis of al-Buraymi in 1955; but sometimes shockingly bloody, as when Saddam Husayn was bombed out of Kuwait in 1991 along the ‘Highway of Death’. All Arab borders are fractures, not sutures – all the way from the one between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, an open wound, to the frontier between Morocco and Algeria, shut tight since 1994 while the two countries trade accusations of terrorism and war-mongering like crazy neighbours yelling over a fence. ‘If a man hates at all,’ as Samuel Johnson realized, ‘he will hate his next neighbour.’ And sometimes, today, all the borders and the hatreds seem to radiate out from that mother of all divides, the Israeli Separation Wall.
Nor do borders only keep out, and apart. As the Syrian writer Khalil al-Nu’aymi knows, they also imprison and entomb: ‘Those who condemn us not to travel . . . condemn us to a slow death in a spacious grave.’
WEDGES AND SPLITS
It all begs the question: if borders were imposed by wicked scheming imperialists, why did Arabs not simply erase them when they did eventually gain real independence? Why did they not enter into that longed-for unity? After all, nothing reignited the rhetoric of that unity like the double dishonour of Balfour and Sykes–Picot, that dark alliance of perfidious Albion and fraudulent Gaul.
The answer, of course, should by now be clear. It was not lines on maps that prevented unity. They didn’t help; but there had always been enough forces pushing Arabs apart from the inside. Blame it as they might on other peoples’ empires, Arabs had never been a happy family: not since the division of the spoils of Islam; not since the pre-Islamic War of al-Basus, that forty-year super-squabble over grazing rights. They had never really been a family at all, except in tribal fictions of shared descent. If empires were to blame, it was as much as anything for inspiring, by reflex, the myths and mirages of unattainable union. Imperialists certainly divided and ruled, but more often than not they were driving their wedges into old splits. As the pro-independence activist Muhammad Ali Jawhar said to the British rulers of 1920s India, ‘We divide and you rule.’ And by the reverse of the same token – You divide and we rule – post-imperial, post-nationalist Arab rulers h
ave found it easier to try to keep control within the more manageable areas delineated by the old imperial borders.
We may now be getting enough distance on imperialism to look back at some of its features with greater clarity. One of those features is the wickedness of it all, and the legacy of hatred and division that it left. Imperialism undoubtedly had a wicked side. What could be more wicked, for example, than the Dinshaway Incident of 1906? A peaceful hamlet in the Nile Delta; the villagers’ pigeons cooing in their dove-cote, others twinkling on the wing over the nearby fields . . . suddenly a party of boorish twelve-bored British officers breeze in and start shooting the flying birds. Jolly good sport! The village men rush out – shouts – fists – blows with gun-butts and nabbuts . . . one too heavy, on a British skull; an effendi dies. There is a round-up, a trial, a lesson for the fractious fellaheen: four villagers are sentenced to hang, two others to life with hard labour, others to lesser imprisonments and lashings. It was an over-reaction, and undeniably wicked. But wickedness ought to be quantifiable by the amount of suffering it causes, and if the British in Palestine were measurably wickeder than the British in Egypt, and the French in Algeria wickeder than both, then so too are the Egyptians in Egypt today, where the current regime can imprison a young man for two years for wearing a ‘No Torture’ T-shirt, and can sentence islamist opponents to death by the hundred. Iraqi Saddam Husayn was wickeder still, gassing – for example – at least 3,000 Iraqi Kurds to death in the village of Halabjah in one fell swoop. So too is Syrian Bashshar al-Asad, in whose Syrian gaols alone 18,000 are said to have died over the first five years of civil war, while his armed forces and militia were allegedly responsible for the violent deaths of between 92,000 and 187,000 Syrian civilians alone during the same period.
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