The role of Egypt in the Gallipoli campaign was as a vast military camp and hospital for the Allies. The Egyptian people responded with their customary stoical friendliness to the invasion of tens of thousands of uninhibited Allied troops, even though the troops provoked a crippling rise in prices. An auxiliary labour corps of some three thousand Egyptians was sent to the Dardanelles, where they proved an outstanding success at digging trenches.
In the summer of 1916, von Kressenstein launched his final offensive against the Suez Canal. He was beaten back, and the British forces under General Murray were then in a position to sweep the Turks out of Sinai. By December 1916 they had reached El Arish before Gaza.
The Egyptian people were forced into political quiescence by the vast weight of British military power. The fellahin could show only passive resistance to increasingly insistent demands by the military government that they should surrender their firearms and volunteer for camel transport or the auxiliary labour corps. Several thousand did eventually serve in Palestine and France and suffered casualties.
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:
The districts of Mersin and Alexandretta, and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, cannot be said to be purely Arab, and must on that account be excepted from the proposed delimitation.
Subject to that modification, and without prejudice to the treaties concluded between us and certain Arab Chiefs, we accept that delimitation.
As for the regions lying within the proposed frontiers, in which Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interests of her ally France, I am authorized to give you the following pledges on behalf of the Government of Great Britain, and to reply as follows
to your note:
That subject to the modifications stated above, Great Britain is prepared to recognize and uphold the independence of the Arabs in all the regions lying within the frontiers proposed by the Sharif of Mecca.
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
as regards to the two Vilayets of Baghdad and Basra the Arabs recognize that the fact of Great Britain’s established position and interests there will call for the setting up of special administrative arrangements to protect those regions from foreign aggression, to promote the welfare of their inhabitants and to safeguard our mutual interest.
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.)
For understandable reasons, Britain and France chose to keep the details of their agreement secret. Sharif Hussein had some suspicions of the Allies’ intentions, and in early 1917 Sir Mark Sykes was sent to Jedda by the British Foreign Office to allay his fears. But although they discussed the question of French arms in Lebanon and the Syrian coastal regions, with Hussein maintaining the principle that these regions were as much Arab in character as the interior, Sykes did not inform him of the broader aspects of the Sykes–Picot agreement.
Meanwhile, although the Arab Revolt launched by the sharif aroused little response in Mesopotamia and Syria, which were still firmly under Turkish control, it made an important contribution to the war in the Middle East. It immobilized some 30,000 Turkish troops along the Hejaz railway from Amman to Medina and prevented the Turco-German forces in Syria from linking up with the Turkish garrison in Yemen. There could have been the most serious consequences for the Allies if the enemy forces had made contact with the Germans in East Africa and succeeded in closing the Red Sea to Allied shipping. The Arab forces, who were mainly armed tribesmen with only a small core of regular troops, were under the command of Emir Feisal, the sharif’s third son. Feisal lacked the subtle intelligence of his elder brother, Emir Abdullah, but with his imposing appearance and restrained dignity he seemed t
o Colonel T. E. Lawrence, one of the British officers sent by the Arab Bureau in Cairo to help the revolt, to possess the right qualities for leadership.
In the spring of 1917 the British offensive against Turkey in Syria/Palestine was going badly. In April, General Murray’s expeditionary force was heavily repulsed in Gaza and held up for three months. Then, at the end of June, Murray was replaced by General Allenby, a brilliant and forceful commander (nicknamed ‘the Bull’), who at once moved GHQ from Cairo to Palestine and speedily raised morale. At the end of October he launched his offensive and drove on towards Jerusalem.
Morale was also high in Emir Feisal’s camp. In July his forces captured the port of Aqaba with a daring stroke. The Arabs were making an important contribution to Turkey’s defeat. However, as Allenby was advancing, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, discovered documents referring to the Sykes–Picot agreement among the imperial archives, and informed the Turks about these. Jemal Pasha lost no time in passing the details on to the Arabs, as proof of treachery against the Muslim peoples of the Ottoman Empire by the Christian powers. Sharif Hussein at once asked for an explanation from Sir Reginald Wingate (who had succeeded McMahon in Cairo). Wingate represented the Petrograd documents as referring to provisional exchanges between the British, French and Russian governments, rather than to any hard agreement, and suggested that the success of the Arab Revolt and the withdrawal of Russia from the war had created an entirely new situation.
A History of the Middle East Page 20