9. The Anglo-French Interregnum, 1918–1939
Partition of the Arab East
The end of four centuries of Turkish rule in the Middle East was sudden and complete. Since Turkish rule had been accepted as the natural order for so long, it is hardly surprising that its removal left the vast majority of the population feeling confused and disorientated. The Ottoman ruling class had provided the leaders of Arab society – even in Egypt, which had been under British control for nearly forty years.
As we have seen, Ottoman governments and their representatives in the Arab provinces sometimes gave reason for them to be detested, but this did not mean that Turkish political leadership of the heart of the Islamic world had come to seem unnatural. Despite some later rewriting of history, the concept of a separate Arab nation – still less the doctrine of secular Arab nationalism – had scarcely begun to develop. The Hashemite claim to Arab leadership had been born almost haphazardly in the circumstances of war. It was far from being accepted by all the Arabs and would always suffer from its sponsorship by Britain. But the total Ottoman collapse did give Britain and France a brief period in which they felt that they could act largely as they pleased. This was something that would otherwise have been unimaginable for two invading Christian powers.
The Turkish heartland of the Ottoman Empire only narrowly avoided its own dismemberment – largely through the indomitable leadership of one man, Mustafa Kemal. After the signing of the Mudros armistice agreement, the new sultan, Mohammed VI (Mohammed V had died in July 1918), dissolved the Turkish parliament and formed a new government of men who were ready to accept the terms of the Allies. Apart from an Allied administration of Istanbul, the French were occupying Cilicia and Adana, British forces had taken over the Dardanelles strait and the Italians, the fourth of the western Allies, had landed at Antalya. Only the Russians had no claim. Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (9 March 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution), Turkey had regained all the territories lost to Russia in the war, as well as those ceded in 1877. But this would mean little if Turkey ceased to exist.
The Committee of Union and Progress had collapsed and its leaders had fled. The sultan then decided to crush the remnants of the Young Turks. Mustafa Kemal, who already enjoyed high prestige in Turkey, was causing the sultan and his government trouble by organizing resistance to the Allies in Istanbul, so Mohammed VI appointed him inspector-general of the Ninth Army, based on Samsun, with orders to disband the remainder of the Ottoman forces.
Mustafa Kemal landed at Samsun on 9 May 1919, but instead of disbanding the army he gathered supporters for the declaration of a Turkish state free from foreign control. The Allies, determined to fight resurgent Turkish nationalism, allowed a large Greek force to land at Izmir and occupy the surrounding district. Greek ambitions extended to the whole of western Anatolia, in which there were large Greek minorities – the former Christian Empire of Constantinople might be restored.
While the sultan ordered the Turkish troops not to resist the Greeks, Kemal was rapidly gathering support for the cause of Turkish independence. Although exhausted by eight years of almost continuous warfare, the Turkish people were roused to pursue the struggle by the Greek advance into the Anatolian heartland. They rejected the harsh terms of the Treaty of Sèvres of August 1920, which would have left Turkey helpless and deprived of some of its richest provinces, and the sultan, now little more than a puppet, was increasingly discredited.
The Graeco-Turkish war lasted two years, from 1920 to 1922. At first the Turks were unable to halt the Greek advance, but in 1921 the tide turned with a great Turkish victory on the River Sakayra. In 1922 the Greeks, weakened by dissension at home, were in headlong retreat, and in September 1922 Mustafa Kemal occupied Izmir. When his forces crossed the Dardanelles to drive the Greeks out of European Turkey too, a direct clash with Britain was only narrowly averted. The Allies gave way and by the terms of the armistice, to which Greece also adhered, they recognized Turkish sovereignty over Istanbul, the straits and eastern Thrace.
The peace conference which followed culminated with the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923. This recognized full Turkish sovereignty in nearly all the territories which are now those of the Turkish Republic. The long-suffering Armenians lost their hopes of independence in the process. After the Bolshevik Revolution, eastern or Russian Armenia declared its independence. Hopes of the western or Turkish Armenians of joining the new republic were destroyed by the advance of Mustafa Kemal’s forces, and in December 1920 the government in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, handed over power peacefully to the Bolsheviks. The remnants of the Turkish Armenians fled mainly to Lebanon and Syria, where after a few years they were offered citizenship.
The Kurds suffered a similar bitter disappointment. The Treaty of Sèvres recognized an independent Kurdish state of Kurdistan, but this was cancelled by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. The Kurdish problem remained to destabilize the politics of the three countries in which Kurds form important minorities – Turkey, Iran and Iraq.
Although a considerable body of Turkish opinion favoured the retention of a constitutional monarchy, Mustafa Kemal was determined to get rid of the sultan, and his prestige and authority were such that he had his way. On 1 November 1922 the National Assembly passed a law abolishing the sultanate, and Mohammed VI fled into exile. On 29 October 1923 Turkey was proclaimed a republic, with Kemal as president.
The Islamic caliphate attracted as much loyalty as the sultanate and, although Mustafa Kemal would have liked to abolish the offices of sultan and caliph together, he bowed to the popular will in this matter. He agreed that Mohammed VI’s nephew Abdul Mejid should become the spiritual head of Islam. But, although the caliph was shorn of all political power, his court became the centre of monarchist intrigue, and when two prominent Indian Muslims, Emir Ali and the Agha Khan, published a declaration calling upon the Turkish people to preserve the caliphate, Mustafa Kemal took advantage of the unfavourable Turkish reaction to this foreign interference and abolished it. A bill to this effect was passed by the National Assembly on 3 March 1924.
The title of caliph has not since been revived. In May 1926 a caliphate congress, held in Cairo, was attended by delegates from thirteen Muslim countries (not including Turkey), but its deliberations were inconclusive. Since then, the caliphate has not been an issue in the politics of the Muslim world.
Mustafa Kemal was a secular nationalist who believed that all the inheritance of the Ottoman Empire should be abandoned and Turkey should be transformed into a modern European state. This involved less of a sudden break with the past than might appear. The Tanzimat reforms had laid the foundations of a secular state, and the Young Turks, even while attempting to preserve the empire, had given a powerful impetus to the cause of Turkish nationalism. During the war years, the secularization of education had proceeded and the universities and public positions had been opened to women. Certain of the law courts under the control of the religious authorities had been placed under the Ministry of Justice. A law in 1916 had reformed marriage and divorce.
Mustafa Kemal carried the process much further. A new legal code, based on a variety of European systems, was substituted for the Islamic sharia. In 1928 the constitution became officially secular with the deletion of the clause reading that ‘the religion of the Turkish state is Islam’ and ‘laicism’ was established as one of the six cardinal principles of the state. A Latin-based alphabet replaced the Arabic script of Ottoman Turkish and finally, in 1935, surnames on the European model were introduced. Mustafa Kemal took the name of Atatürk or ‘Father of the Turks’.
Because of Kemal’s extraordinary ascendancy over his people, these reforms were profound and far-reaching; however, they did not mean that the Turkish people as a whole renounced Islam. Though the authority of the ulama was destroyed, the Turkish masses, who remained peasant farmers, preserved their Islamic faith. Even the intelligentsia would have ridiculed the idea that they had ceased to be Muslims – in their view there ha
d only been a Turkish reformation of Islam.
What the creation of the Turkish Republic and the abandonment of the empire did mean was that Turkey abruptly ceased to be a factor in the political development of the Middle East (only territorial disputes involving the vilayets of Mosul and Aleppo remained, and these were settled in the 1920s and 1930s – with Britain and France). Atatürk’s success in developing a strong national state capable of dealing with the European powers on equal terms influenced both Arab and Persian nationalists – especially the latter – but their differing circumstances meant that Turkey was more of an inspiration than an example. They neither wished nor could hope for their countries to become part of Europe, although Turkey could nurse this aspiration, even if to some it appeared unrealistic.
After the abolition of the sultanate and caliphate, Atatürk organized the new republic as a secular parliamentary democracy. The 1924 constitution guaranteed equality before the law and freedom of thought, speech, publication and association. In theory sovereignty lay with the people and was exercised in their name by the single-chamber parliament – the Grand National Assembly – which elected the president of the republic, who chose the prime minister. Ministers were supposed to be responsible to parliament.
Democracy remained severely restricted, however. Atatürk used his immense prestige to override the constitution whenever he chose. In 1924 he organized his supporters as the Republican People’s Party (RPP). This dominated political life, as all members of the Assembly belonged to it, and the RPP ruled Turkey for twenty-seven years. Yet, despite his authoritarianism and arbitrary methods, Atatürk planted the seeds of liberal constitutional government. The Assembly had real powers, and Atatürk tried to have his way by persuasion rather than by force.
In the economic field, Atatürk concentrated on developing Turkey’s rich mineral resources, industry and communications. With a lively memory of Ottoman Turkey’s subservience to European financial and economic control through the Capitulations, he instituted an étatist policy of large-scale state enterprises to exercise close control over planning and development. Although increasingly bureaucratic and inefficient, these enterprises made considerable progress towards industrializing Turkey between the two world wars and, because they had no Marxist ideological basis, their eventual liberalization did not present insuperable difficulties.
After Atatürk’s death in 1938, opposition to the elected dictatorship gained ground and his successor, Ismet Inönü, partly under the influence of the democratic ideals of the Western Allies in the Second World War, allowed the establishment of a multi-party system. The Democratic Party emerged as the chief rival to the RPP, advocating free enterprise and a multi-party system, and it steadily gained popularity until it won a resounding victory in the 1950 elections. The genuineness of Turkey’s secular democracy was demonstrated when Inönü allowed a peaceful transfer of power.
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The experience of Turkey’s former Arab subjects was wholly different.
At the end of the First World War the principal concern of the four Western Allies, as they prepared for the peace conference to be held in Paris, was the post-war settlement in Europe following the defeat of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The future of the Middle East was not high on the conference agenda. As a consequence of its defeat of Turkey, Britain had acquired supreme power in the region, subject only to its obligations to its French ally. The war in the desert had caught the imagination of the British public, as the well-publicized romantic exploits of T. E. Lawrence provided relief from the squalid horrors of the trench warfare on the western front.
The possibility of annexing the former Ottoman Arab provinces as colonies was not seriously entertained except by a few Arabist officials – the age of European imperial expansion was already at an end. But the Arabs, who for so long had been ruled by Turks, were regarded as one of the ‘subject races’ rather than a ‘governing race’, to employ Cromer of Egypt’s categorization of humanity. (The ‘noble and independent’ Arab beduin were different, but they did not occupy territory of political or economic significance.) The conflict between the undertakings to Sharif Hussein and to France concerned only a small minority of specialists, such as T. E. Lawrence himself, who were almost unanimously Francophobe. In general it was felt that the Arabs should be grateful for their liberation from the Turks – as indeed most of them were. Although in theory the new doctrine of self-determination, based on President Wilson’s ideals, was the guiding principle of the post-war settlement, its effect was quite underestimated.
It was Egypt – the country which had already been under British control for nearly forty years – which provided the first shock. Compared with the Syrians, the Egyptians had suffered little from the war. With the huge rise in cotton prices, Egypt’s natural wealth had actually increased. Large profits were made from the supply of goods to the Allied troops. But the prosperity concealed powerful social grievances. Although supposedly voluntary, recruitment of the fellahin and their camels and donkeys to the labour and transport corps was in effect compulsory under martial law, and was deeply resented. The new wealth accrued to the big and medium-sized landowners, who possessed 75 per cent of the cultivated area, and to a small new capitalist class in the cities. The reality for the rest of the population was a steep rise in the cost of living. The government’s lack of any social and economic policy allowed the large landowners to abandon food-growing for cotton-growing, thus creating a near-famine and a sharp rise in the death rate, which actually exceeded the birth rate during the war.
The fermenting nationalism which had merely been submerged by martial law came to the surface. The British high commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, had allowed the formation of a commission headed by the British judicial adviser to consider legislative reform and Egypt’s political status after the war. This reached the conclusion that Egypt should have a legislature of two chambers, of which the Upper House would be the more important. This would include Egyptian ministers, British advisers and representatives of the foreign communities elected by special electorates. The judicial adviser’s view was that, since Egypt’s financial interests were largely in foreign hands, the Egyptians had no right to a dominant voice in legislation affecting them.
These proposals, when leaked in November 1918, were a provocation to Egypt’s nationalist leadership. They were fully aware that the Wilsonian doctrine of self-determination for the people freed from Turkish rule had been endorsed by the Allies. Already the Arabs of Arabia, whom the Egyptians regarded (with some justice) as being more backward than themselves, were preparing to send a delegate to the Paris peace conference. Two days after the Armistice, Zaghloul Pasha presented himself at the British Residency at the head of a delegation (wafd in Arabic – the name that was to become attached to Zaghloul’s supporters) to say that the Egyptian people wanted their complete independence and to request proceeding to London to present their case. Zaghloul had been kept out of the government by Wingate, but he was the undoubted leader of the nationalist movement. Balfour, Britain’s foreign secretary, who was already looking forward to the Paris peace conference, brusquely rejected the visit and when Rushdi Pasha, the prime minister, proposed that he should come to London instead he repeated the refusal, saying in a dispatch to Wingate that while the British government ‘desire to act on the principle which they had always followed of giving the Egyptians an ever-increasing share in the government of the country…as you are well aware, the stage has not yet been reached at which self-government is possible.’ Britain had no intention of abandoning its responsibilities for order and good government in Egypt ‘and for protecting the rights and interests both of the native and the foreign populations of the country’.
Zaghloul seized his chance. Pointing out that even Egypt’s prime minister had been spurned, he organized a nation-wide campaign of protest to back his claim to be Egypt’s true representative. Balfour relented to the extent of inviting Rushdi to London, but he rejected Rushdi
’s insistence that Zaghloul should accompany him. Rushdi and his cabinet then resigned on 1 March 1919, with the full approval of Sultan Fuad.
Although Zaghloul stepped up his agitation, the high commission believed the trouble would die down and recommended that Zaghloul be deported. Balfour agreed, and Zaghloul and three of his colleagues were bundled on a train to Port Said and taken on a British destroyer to Malta.
The public reaction was immediate and severe. Rioting students in Cairo were supported by strikes among government officials, doctors and lawyers and the capital came to a standstill. To British astonishment, the trouble spread to the provincial towns and the countryside, to take the form of a national uprising which Egyptian nationalists later called their 1919 Revolution.
Stern military action, with the use of flying columns into the countryside and bombing raids on suspect gatherings, brought the uprising to an end in a few weeks. But the British government understood that repression would not suffice. News of the uprising had been as unwelcome as it was unexpected at a time when the government was concerned with the Irish troubles nearer home as well as involved in the affairs of the Paris conference. The prime minister, Lloyd George, with one of his rare intuitive flashes, decided that General Allenby, who had arrived in Paris to give his views on Syria, was the right man to restore the situation in Egypt, and in March 1919 Allenby was instantly dispatched to replace Wingate.
Allenby’s brief was to restore law and order and do anything required ‘by the necessity of maintaining the King’s protectorate over Egypt on a secure and equitable basis’. However, behind the bluff and sometimes brusque military exterior of Allenby ‘the Bull’ lay an acute political mind with liberal tendencies. He had already, in Paris, argued against the imposition of French rule in Syria against the clearly expressed wishes of the inhabitants, and he at least half-believed in the principle of self-determination – which was 50 percent more than the British and French politicians who had publicly adopted it.
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