by Jan Morris
Before the war the British had dealt warily with the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula, theoretically subjects of Turkey, in practice largely autonomous. The sheikhs of the Persian Gulf, as we have seen, they made more or less their vassals, but the chieftains of the interior they generally left well alone. ‘The cardinal factor of British policy’, said a Foreign Office minute in 1913, ‘is to uphold the integrity of the Turkish dominions in Asia,’ and even when the redoubtable Ibn Saud of Nejd openly revolted against the Turks that year, he was told that there was no chance of concluding a treaty with the British Empire instead. Still, they kept in touch with him, from their bases on the Persian Gulf: and at the same time, on the other side of the peninsula, they cautiously contacted the Grand Sharif Hussein of Mecca, head of the Hashemite clan, descended directly from the Prophet Mohammed, which held the hereditary guardianship of the Holy Places.
They liked the desert Arabs. The Bedouin struck a responsive chord in them. With his patrician style and his picturesque appearance, his great flocks of goats and camels, his taste for coffee and beautiful boys, his blend of arrogance and hospitality, his love of pedigree, his fighting ability and what would later be called his machismo, the Bedouin was every Englishman’s idea of nature’s gentleman. He seemed almost a kind of Englishman himself, translated into another idiom. It was upon this romantic fixation, this idealization of a type or a legend, that the British were precariously to build their new positions in the Middle East.
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Their chosen vessels were the Hashemites, the most high-flown and ornate of the Bedouin clans, whose desert rawness had been smoothed by long acquaintance with Turkish habits, and who had pretensions to some kind of primacy, religious and temporal, over all the Arabs. Hussein was a picaresque but highly ambitious figure, coveting the position of Caliph, spiritual leader of all the Muslims, which was held ex officio by the Sultan of Turkey. He had no love for the Turks, having spent some years as a political prisoner in Constantinople, and after the outbreak of war he had conspired with the British to rise against the Ottoman Empire, in return for British arms, money and expertise, and promises of favours to come.
The Empire’s compact with the Hashemites was deliberately vague and opportunist. It was wartime, and the British were concerned first to win the war. The Arab Revolution, to be led by Hussein and his sons, was thus seen differently by its several participants. The Hashemites represented it as a national movement, to unite all the Arabs in an independent united kingdom. Their rivals in the peninsula, notably Ibn Saud, saw it as an unprincipled attempt by one Arab clan to impose its hegemony on the others. Their tribal levies saw it as a kind of prolonged ghazu, a war raid in pursuit of booty. The sophisticated Arabs of Syria and Lebanon, who had their own revolutionary movements, saw it as an archaic threat to the Arab future, mounted by bucolics out of the wilderness.
And the British saw it as a tool of their own intent. The conspiracy with Hussein was hatched from Cairo and Khartoum, and fostered by an intelligence agency called the Arab Bureau, working under the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon. The men in Cairo did not really know much about the desert Arabs: they had none of the long tradition of expertise which gave the Indian Political Service its insight into Arabian affairs. McMahon himself was a cautious freemason who spoke neither Arabic nor French, and was ignorant of Arabian matters. His advisers were mostly men of extreme intelligence but somewhat amateur enthusiasm, fired by the exigency of war and intrigued by the allure of Arabness from across the Arabian Sea. Everything about the liaison was at once vague and disingenuous. McMahon’s promises to Hussein were deliberately vague; Hussein’s claims to universal Arab leadership were necessarily vague; the geographical terms employed were unavoidably vague, for nobody had really defined, for example, the limits of Syria or the extent of Palestine. All was veiled in a courteous opacity, and the messages which McMahon exchanged with Hussein, encouraging him to rebellion, were to become, as ‘The McMahon Letters’, synonymous with diplomatic ambivalence.
They were not a treaty, had no legal force, and carefully left all British options open, but their implication seemed to be that in return for his help Hussein would be recognized after the war as the titular head of an independent Arab kingdom, embracing much of the old Turkish Empire. The British treated Hussein with a skimble-skamble deference, couching their letters in sickly honorifics, and addressing Hussein as ‘The excellent and well-born Sayid, the descendant of Sharifs, the Crown of the Proud, Scion of Mohammed’s Tree and Branch of the Koreishite Trunk, him of the Exalted Presence and of the Lofty Rank, Sayid son of Sayid, Sherif son of Sherif, the Venerable, Honoured Sayid, His Excellency the Sherif Hussein, Lord of the Many, Emir of Mecca the Blessed, the Lodestar of the Faithful, and the cynosure of all devout Believers, may his Blessing descend upon the people in their multitudes!’ They designed a flag for his new kingdom, symbolizing Arab unity—black for the Abbasids of Baghdad, white for the Ommayads of Damascus, green for the Alids of Karbala, red for the Mudhars. Careful though they were to avoid commitments, still their assurances to Hussein came to be regarded, at least by the Grand Sharif himself, as a pledge: if he rebelled against the Turks, they would make him King of the Arabs.
In fact they did not take him very seriously, or perhaps the Arabs either. ‘What we have to arrive at now’, McMahon wrote, ‘is to tempt the Arab people into the right path, detach them from the enemy, and bring them on to our side. This, on our part, is at present largely a matter of words, and to succeed we must use persuasive terms and abstain from haggling over conditions.’ Hussein they regarded generally as a tiresome and faintly comic old rogue, knowing very well that there were moments when he seriously considered joining the other side after all, and the idea of a true Arab State, taking its place in the comity of the nations, probably seemed so remote to them that their assurances of Arab independence were given lightly and heedlessly.
Far from frivolous, however, were the assurances they gave elsewhere about the future of the Middle East, for in fact the British were working to contradictory plans. With the Grand Sharif they had apparently agreed that the Hashemites should rule over the whole of Syria, Transjordan and Palestine, the northern provinces of Iraq, and most of the Arabian peninsula, though they had ambivalently excluded from this promise ‘portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Horns, Hama and Aleppo’, whatever that might mean. With their French allies they had concluded a quite separate pact, ‘greatly confusing’, as Winston Churchill observed, ‘the issue of principles’. Under this, the Sykes-Picot agreement, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq would be divided into British and French spheres of influence or exploitation, with Palestine under some kind of international control, and the Arabs only truly independent within the Arabian peninsula. Finally, in another quid pro quo, they made a fateful pledge to the leaders of the Zionist Movement, the powerful international organization dedicated to the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Jewish money, talent and sympathy were very important to a Britain at war, and the British Government promised the Zionist leaders that they would encourage the development of a Jewish National Home in Palestine—a country whose population was, in 1916, 93 per cent Arab. The British saw advantages to themselves in a Jewish State there, British-sponsored and perhaps British-protected: ‘A Jewish Commonwealth’, Lloyd George envisaged, while Chaim Weizmann, the most eminent of the Zionists, said that they aimed to make Palestine ‘as Jewish as England is English’.
All these cross-purposes, equivocations and contradictions entramelled imperial policy towards the Arabs. The British in the field never lost their affection for the desert Arab, but they never lost either a nagging feeling of dishonesty or betrayal, a guilt-sensation that would never have troubled their forebears in the robuster imperial adventures of old.1
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For it was to prove a febrile relationship, and the man who set the tone of it, the showiest figure in the acquisition of these new prov
inces, was perhaps the most introspective of all the varied activists of Empire. We have glimpsed him once already, when we followed Allenby through the Jaffa Gate to accept the submission of Jerusalem in 1917: he was the untidy young staff officer in what appeared to be borrowed uniform, with a long sensitive face, a slight but sinewy body, and a donnishly distracted air.1 This was T. E. Lawrence, archaeologist, scholar of Jesus College, Oxford, the confused and enigmatic exhibitionist who was to be known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia.
He entered the arena modestly enough. He had worked as an archaeologist in northern Syria, spoke Arabic and had taken part in a clandestine intelligence survey in Sinai. When the war came he was recruited into the Geographical Section of the General Staff and posted to Cairo; and from there he was sent to the Hejaz as one of the British officers lent to Hussein to stiffen his revolt. Lawrence was an amateur soldier of a kind more familiar in the Empire’s later campaigns, an Oxford intellectual who remained obdurately and often infuriatingly civilian beneath his uniforms. His pose was shy but superior, in the maddening Oxford way, but for every man he antagonized with his self-conscious theatricals, he entranced another with the riddle of his style and sexuality.1
His was a strange genius. Confused in his own spirit by doubts and anxieties of the profoundest kind, sexually ambivalent and perhaps despairing, he exerted an astonishing power over the most unlikely subjects—statesmen, common soldiers, society women, Arab tribesmen, even regular soldiers of the British Army. He was a very good man, kind, generous, and perhaps this, the deepest trait of his nature, was apparent to people of perception beneath the flummery and the deceit (for he was a gifted and enthusiastic liar). Nobody remotely like Lawrence had ever played a part in the extension of the British Empire, but though it was only the chance of war that made him an Empire-builder, and though he later persuaded himself that he was doing it all for the Arabs, still he was one of those who saw the Arab countries as a potential Dominion of the British Empire—‘our first brown dominion, not our last brown colony.’
Lawrence was an inspired guerilla leader, and soon became the effective commander of Hussein’s revolt. He himself led its first foray out of the Peninsula, into the country at the head of the Red Sea, and he presently came to see himself as a King-maker, escorting the Hashemite family to the thrones of the Arabs. He became not simply a colleague of the Arab leaders, but actually a friend, so restoring to imperial affairs a relationship between imperialist and client that had scarcely existed since eighteenth-century India.2
It might have come to nothing, though, and the Hashemites might have faded from the imperial scene, if Lawrence had not persuaded Allenby, then organizing his invasion of Syria, of the potential importance of the Arab revolt. We have a picture, from Lawrence’s own writings, of the first meeting between the two men, when Lawrence implanted in Allenby’s mind the idea that the Arabs might have great meaning for the British future. It took place at the general headquarters in Cairo. Lawrence had ridden overland from Aqaba, at the head of the Red Sea, and was dressed self-indulgently à l’Arabe, flowing white robes, gilded dagger at the waist, sandals flip-flopping incongruously along the military corridors. He was the local equivalent in fact of the Anglo-Indian irregulars who, in turban and sashed tunics, had ridden with their cavalrymen through so many Victorian adventures, but in the ramrod world of Allenby’s command, he was a rarity indeed. He looked faintly absurd, suggestively feminine, highly unmilitary.
Across the table sat The Bull, tremendous with command. One can almost feel the tension, even now, as the temperaments faced each other. They looked at one another with suspicion. Allenby thought Lawrence rather a fraud, with too high an opinion of himself as a soldier, and an altogether disproportionate view of the importance of his Arabs. Lawrence feared Allenby to be just another brass-hat. But even as Lawrence offered his plans, we may feel the atmosphere changing. Lawrence recognized the hidden spark in Allenby. Allenby dimly saw in Lawrence some hint of greatness. The idea of the Arabs as allies, not merely mercenaries, gained a new meaning when Lawrence talked of it, so fresh from the peninsula. He wanted to spread the Arab revolt northwards, into Syria, and he wanted more weapons and ammunition for the Arabs, more gold, more air support.
The general, so Lawrence himself thought, could not make out how much was genuine performer and how much charlatan—‘the problem was working behind his eyes’. But he was convinced. ‘At the end he put up his chin and said quite directly, “Well, I will do for you what I can”’—an improbable cadence, but then Lawrence preferred a mannered prose.
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When Allenby resumed his campaign through Syria, his right flank consisted of the Hashemite army, commanded by the Emir Feisal, third son of the Grand Sharif, and directed by Lawrence; and when Damascus fell Arabs and British rode into the city together, something new in imperial victories. Feisal set up an Arab administration in Syria; Abdullah, his brother, was promised by his father the throne of Iraq. Everywhere the flag of the Hashemites flew, and the wide kingdom of the Arabs seemed to be at hand. Lawrence had given McMahon’s promises meaning, it seemed, and Allenby had sealed them.
From Cairo and London, though, the prospects looked different, for the British were already preparing to divide the Arab lands with their European allies in a muffled version of the African Scramble. They had admitted to nobody that their instinctive purpose had been to gain an imperial supremacy over the Middle East, but it was so. Their Allies assumed it, and sometimes one could read it between the lines even of their own most Wilsonian announcements. At the end of the war the British published a declaration, jointly with the French, assuring the Arabs they would be absolutely free to choose what Government they wished, but there was a sting to the rider. The only concern of the Allies, it said, was ‘to offer such support and efficacious help as will ensure the smooth working of the governments and administrations’.
Cynics knew what ‘efficacious help’ meant, in the imperial vocabulary, and so it was to prove. At the peace conference Feisal represented his father, actually as King of the Hejaz, in his own eyes as King of the Arabs: the only other Asians present were the Indians and the Chinese. He argued for the complete independence of the Arabs—‘as representing my father, who, by request of Britain and France, led the Arab rebellion against the Turks, I have come to ask that the Arabic-speaking peoples of Asia … be recognized as independent sovereign peoples, under the guarantee of the League of Nations.’ But he had no chance. Nobody bore himself with more dignity at Versailles than this descendant of the Prophet, immaculate in his Sharifian robes, guarded at the Hotel Metropole by two huge Nubians with drawn swords, and attended often by the now celebrated Lawrence. But dignity availed him nothing in the end. The United Arab Kingdom collapsed in disillusionment (‘a madman’s notion’, Lawrence himself called it, ‘for this century or the next probably’), and Feisal was presently ejected by the French from his throne in Damascus. When the final arrangements for the Middle East were agreed by the Supreme Council of the Peace Conference, the Hashemites were not represented at all.
This is what was decreed. In the Arabian peninsula the status quo would be maintained, with King Hussein confirmed in his sovereignty of the Hejaz. France was given a mandate over Syria and Lebanon, traditionally French spheres of activity since the days of the Crusades. The Zionists got their National Home. The rest would be British, embodied in mandatory Governments in Palestine (including Transjordan) and Iraq. From the half-truths and evasions of their wartime policies, from the rivalries and intrigues of Versailles, from the discomfiture of the Arabs, from the pressure of the Zionists, from the power of Allenby and the complex imaginings of T. E. Lawrence there really had come into being a new province of the Empire.
Among many British Arabists a profound sense of shame set in, to dog their attitudes and even affect their policies until the end of the Empire. They felt they had betrayed their friends, and believed the imperial policies to have been dishonourable. This is how one
of them, Walter Smart of the Egyptian service, summed up the wartime exchanges in hindsight: ‘The Anglo-French bargaining about other peoples’ property, the deliberate bribing of international Jewry at the expense of the Arabs who were already our allies in the field, the immature political juggleries of amateur Oriental experts, the stultification of Arab independence and unity … all the immorality and incompetence inevitable in the stress of a great war.’ The Arabs were no less bitter in their disillusionment. Feisal retired sadly to the Hejaz; the Iraqis burst into rebellion against their British overlords; Transjordan subsided into squabbling groups of tribes and petty States, precariously held in check by a handful of Englishmen.
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Among those most deeply affected by this denouement was Lawrence, whose private mortifications were thus sublimated into a public emotion. Shame was to be the leitmotif of his epic memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and he was outspoken in his view that Britain had ill-treated the Hashemite family, now reduced once more to their guardianship of the Holy Places. Fortunately there presently came into office one of those public men improbably held in thrall by the Lawrentian enigma, Winston Churchill. Setting up a Middle East Department at the Colonial Office, and appointing Lawrence as his particular adviser, he set out to straighten accounts, if not with the Arabs in general, at least with the Hashemites. In 1921 he summoned a conference at Cairo to interpret in imperial terms the decisions of the Peace of Versailles.