Meanwhile Lawrence, finding his attacks on the Turkish Hijaz railway not enough to damage his opponents, used explosives to wreck a railway hub at Derah, south of Damascus. It was an excellent tactic, but Derah was well north of the Sykes–Picot line and the attack was seen by the French as a breach of faith. Allenby went on after capturing Jerusalem to win the last cavalry battle in British history and defeated the Turks at Megiddo. It stimulated Lloyd George, who had succeeded Asquith in 1916, to think, irrespective of Sykes–Picot, that the British had done so much to defeat the Turks that they should have a major share of Near Eastern spoils to add to their empire. Lloyd George also played a major part in persuading his foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, to write a formal letter to the British Zionist Lord Rothschild, giving Cabinet support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ with the caveat, ‘it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. This became known as the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. Lloyd George believed this high-minded statement would keep out the French and influence Jews in the United States in favour of Britain and the allies. The USA entered the war, and Germany was defeated.
Promises over future colonising to the French, promises to the Arabs of independence, promises of a home for the Jews had all been given by the British in the hope of reducing the loss of life and achieving victory. They could not all be kept. It was a witches’ brew. Faisal, sidelined in peace negotiations, commented ruefully, ‘Who did win the crusades?’
The Peace of Versailles rearranged most of the northern hemisphere. In the West the peacemakers used Wilson’s ideas of national self-determination as far as they were able. In the East there were mandates dividing the Ottoman Empire intended to prepare indigenous peoples for freedom and self-determination. Lloyd George took a British mandate under the League of Nations for Iraq and Palestine, and Clemenceau took a mandate for Syria and Lebanon. The mandate for Iraq gave the opportunity for the British to provide some sort of reward for Faisal. At first Clemenceau was happy, but he became furious as he realised that Sykes–Picot had not been observed. He appointed as ruler of Damascus an obdurate French general who expelled Lawrence’s Arab rebels, exclaiming ‘Saladin, we have returned’. French imperialism merely created a corrupt regime which favoured Christians over Muslims but was unable to displace the Druze, the supporters of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, who had ensconced themselves on a high plateau in the interior. The terrain, their sniping expertise, their faith and their belief in reincarnation gave them victory over French regular troops.
The British convinced themselves that the energy of incoming Zionists would make the desert bloom. This it did. But they also believed that the enhanced economic life which followed would benefit the Arabs and be welcomed by them. This was nonsense. Lord Dowding, of Battle of Britain fame, sent to Palestine to oversee peace, saw how Zionism was working in practice. Absentee Turkish landowners in Beirut demanded huge sums before they would sell their land to Jewish immigrants. Many Zionists, who had paid much in consequence, claimed all the lands for themselves and evicted Arab tenants who had worked the land over generations, offering no other employment. They grew angry with the British and the mandate. Dowding believed promises were not being honoured, and his sympathies lay with the Arabs. He was right, but oil was discovered in Iraq and the British were the more determined to hold Palestine because it provided an outlet to the sea for its exportation. The French became convinced that the British had been behind their troubles in Syria and Lebanon and, in their anger, supplied arms to Zionist terrorists. The mandate became impossible, as Zionist terrorists kidnapped British sergeants, hanged them and left their bodies on display, as well as killing civilians and soldiers by dynamiting British headquarters in the King David Hotel. The post-Second World War Labour government gave it up.
Arabs fled and the state of Israel was born in 1948. Swift recognition by President Truman was a major advantage but was inevitable. The impetus to immigrate after the Holocaust and world sympathy for the fate of the Jews created a great influx. Terror had had its effect. In wars that followed and that still follow, jihad has repeatedly been declared, using the term intifada, with great loss of life. In much hatred, one generous and states-manlike action stands out and is too readily forgotten. Moshe Dayan, the Israeli general in the Six-Day War of 1967, the third Arab–Israeli war, achieved the triumph of his life with his troops when he took the Old City of Jerusalem from the Jordanians and captured the Temple Mount. The Rabbi who was chief chaplain to the Israeli army proposed blowing up the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque; Dayan rejected this, ordered the removal of the Israeli flag from the Dome and decreed that the Jews should not be allowed to pray on the site; it was to be allocated solely for worship by the Muslims. He was the one man who could have made this decision and it has, albeit narrowly, held force to this day.
Military problems have dominated the situation since Israel’s founding days. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 came close to success, only being stymied by incompetence in Syria, and inevitably the very real pressure on security militarises both Jewish and Muslim sides. Christians within Israel are excluded from military service and so from a regular rite of passage for their age group: they appear as second-class citizens. Any mistake made in an apparently endless cycle of raids, bombings and attacks creates anti-Semitism in the outside world, especially as social media and television news bulletins capture devastation for all to see. The state is indeed a refuge for people persecuted by the Nazis, but its existence has tended to damage the position of Jews elsewhere in the world. A Muslim sense of failure over Israel has contributed to a more widespread malaise in modern Islam.
The Challenge of the West and the Islamic Response
Napoleon’s dash to Egypt in 1798, his triumph and failure opened a new era in relations between Islam and the West. Napoleon’s attack was pure opportunism, designed to conquer Egypt, put pressure on the British navy and open the way to successful invasion of England. He beat the Mamluks at the battle of the Pyramids but was in turn beaten by Nelson in his coup at Aboukir Bay, wrecking his fleet. The two battles made it plain that the West had established an overriding superiority in war. In science and industry Western powers also had the lead.
Egypt was the richest country in the Islamic world, yet it had been completely outpaced by the West; there followed an epoch of colonialism, in which Western powers took territory from the Muslims. Although there were resistance movements – jihad was preached, the British were troubled in India, the Kaiser seized opportunities in Turkey and General Gordon was overwhelmed by the inspired leader, the Mahdi, and his followers – all had no lasting effect. Mehmet Ali’s reforms in Egypt and his army improvements were not enough. The Mahdi’s forces were shattered at Omdurman; the British took a Protectorate over Egypt and advanced to the Sudan. It was all in grievous contrast to the early conquests under Muhammad and the great caliphs which had transformed the Near East and destroyed Byzantine power. The battles, Badr, the battle of the Trench, the great victory at Yarmuk and the dash of Khalid with his camels across the desert, the capture of Jerusalem and Abu Bakr’s miles of conquest were part of the inheritance of Islam, well known to practising Muslims. The Ghaznavids, for example, were treacherous Arabs who fought with the Byzantines against the Muslim army; a reference to them is an insult in exchanges in the twenty-first century which is instantly understood. This has reinforced the loss of confidence among leaders, politicians, generals, religious leaders which is so striking a feature of Islam in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Awareness of Muslim weakness in contrast to the conquests of the past has produced and continues to produce a variety of responses and proposed reforms.
Responses to new challenges have been varied, even contradictory. Atatürk’s focusing on one state, his own, Turkey – casting aside the Ottoman capital Istanbul and replacing it with Ankara in
the Anatolian heartland – deliberately secularised his country and abandoned any attempt at an Islamic unity; yet from 1945 his decision to substitute Turkish for Arabic in the call to prayer was overturned and the use of the veil for women has reappeared. The view has also been put forward that the divisions within Islam are too great to establish an effective umma and what is needed is a drive to Arab unity.
Pakistan, founded as a Muslim state in 1947 by Ali Jinnah, rejected the inter-religious ecumenical vision of Gandhi. The Sandhurst-trained general Ayyub Khan, after he seized power from the politicians in 1958, set about modifying the traditional status and treatment of women in his ordinance of 1961. He required a man to demonstrate before a court that he could treat his wives equally, as laid down in the Quran, and put obstacles in the way of unilateral divorce. It was a serious blow against traditional polygamy. But Ayyub Khan was forced out of office. In 1977 another soldier, Zia ul-Haq, led a coup and took Pakistan in a different direction, seeking to restore Islamic law, with amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, flogging for convictions for slander and made gradual moves to rid Pakistan of banking interest as un-Islamic – since interest payments were forbidden by Muhammad, aware of the wickedness of village moneylenders. The position of women deteriorated. The two soldiers, despite their differences, were both wrestling with the problem of Islamic law. How was it to be restored in Muslim societies, where the effects of colonial rule had been to remove Sharia altogether and replace it with codes of Western conquerors?
The Quranic ruling on inheritance laid down that a male child should receive double the portion of the females on the grounds that the male had greater financial responsibility. But what if society had changed and females (as is the case sometimes in Britain) had greater financial responsibility? The argument then was sometimes put forward that the Quranic ruling could be honourably modified in changed economic and social circumstances. This was, in effect, Mutazilism reborn and it struck against the belief that the Quran, uncreated, timeless and eternal, could never be subject to modification.
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded by an Egyptian schoolteacher, sought to revive the notion of an Islamic state and was progressively radicalised by the effects of British rule in Palestine and resentment at the displacement of Arabs by Jewish immigrants. Jihad, it was felt, had fallen into neglect and should be preached against the Christian British oppressors and adherents of the Brotherhood should be willing to face personal martyrdom in the jihad. This comes close to recognition of the rightfulness of suicide bombers. In tradition, jihad had to be preached by a legitimate authority and for specified reasons. Yet the grievous circumstances of the Islamic world, it was alleged, called for jihad to be revived; in effect, Islam had fallen back to jahiliyya, the state of ignorance before the coming of the Prophet and so jihad could and should be carried through by devout individuals without further authority. These were potent ideas and the Brotherhood showed its power when members assassinated Anwar Sadat for recognising the state of Israel. In our own day extremist Islamic movements have seized the ‘sword-text’, sura 9 verse 5: ‘But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans.’ This was tempered only by the injunction to forgive them if they repent. It was seized on to abrogate all the other much more moderate and peaceful suras, just as extremist Christian groups reject broadly based interpretation of Scripture in favour of arbitrary selection of key verses convenient to them.
In Bosnia, where the Muslim community, before the internecine war which broke up Yugoslavia, had benefited from Ottoman tolerance and was noted for its relaxed attitude to Islamic custom and Sharia law, the hijab has returned and travellers visiting Sarajevo have been startled to see its prevalence. In Egypt the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood has made the veil more and more customary. In northern Nigeria, a part of the country dominated by Islam, Boko Haram represents a radical Muslim alternative rejecting all Western influences, including voting in elections, secular education and the wearing of shirts and trousers. In Iran, Twelver Shiism, backed by the state, has hitherto retained its position, imposing harsh punishments on dissidents. In Britain a reaction against teenage binge-drinking has led some women, repelled by the abuse of alcohol and by promiscuity, to convert to Islam, finding protection in the headscarf and the known rejection of casual sex by Muslim women.
A Radical Survival in the East: Wahhabism
Wahhabism survived because of one man, Abd al-Aziz (1880–1953), known as Ibn Saud (an ancestral name taken up out of family respect), a master of traditional Bedouin desert warfare. As a child he survived the long civil war which came close to eliminating his dynasty; he then broke out of exile in Kuwait after his father’s death and at the age of twenty-one led a tiny force to overwhelm the garrison placed in Riyadh by pro-Ottoman rivals. Then step by step he combined war with minimal bloodshed and generous hospitality to defeated enemies and created a coalition with tribal notables; in 1932 he became King of Saudi Arabia, an immense territory, with a Shiite regional minority, that came to embrace some agricultural land as well as desert, its wealth giving massive irrigation opportunities. The isolation of central Arabia in his formative years can hardly be exaggerated. Western powers were only interested in the coasts and currency hardly existed: Maria Theresa silver thalers were carried in camel saddlebags. Ibn Saud prevailed because he was imposing, especially in stature, on camel-back could outpace others and was a master of the sword and rifle. As a devout Wahhabi, he ruled an illiterate population with wives fully veiled and in seclusion, basing all on the Quran, hearing allcomers personally and making instant decisions to reward rightful appellants with gifts or to administer traditional punishments on the disobedient. With Wahhabi tradition came the maintaining of four wives and instant divorces, albeit with generous personal provision for the divorced and permission to remarry. Ibn Saud created an immense royal family, siring forty-five sons and over 200 daughters. A British connection was established early in his career due to individual British representatives, unmistakably alien in sun helmet and officer’s uniform but with fluent Arabic and deep knowledge of Islam, commanding his respect. When he took Mecca and Medina, his discipline brought relief to pilgrims, long subject to robberies on their journey.
The discovery of oil in 1938 and the granting of concessions to the US oil company Aramco brought wealth and inevitable transformation, saddening him in old age. He could not adapt but his successors have and have avoided succession disputes of the kind which destroyed Ibn Saud’s father, understanding that pious, observant Wahhabi rulers can manage quiet change and modernisation where Westernised, self-indulgent rulers cannot. The Saudi Arabian ulama are committed Wahhabis and impose traditional punishments of public beheadings, amputation and floggings; no ruler can afford to defy them. Yet vast changes have occurred, bringing prosperity, health provision and opportunities to a backward land and will in time go much further. True to Wahhabi principles, Ibn Saud has no known grave and the power of Wahhabism continued to be displayed when the king who died early in 2015, one of the richest men in the world, was given no tomb. Western observers have argued that the contradictions within Saudi Arabia will destroy the kingdom: they may well have misunderstood the shrewdness of the Saudis.
No clear-cut answer can be given on links between Saudi Arabia and modern jihadis. An illiterate stonemason built up a fortune through the building boom based on oil revenues and his funds went to support al-Qaeda. Individuals have given resources to anti-Western movements while the official policy of the government is to maintain correct, peaceful relations with the West and welcome Western expertise. Christian services are permitted in the embassy premises and, as across the world, there remains a passive force of families desiring peace and reconciliation and looking to commerce to heal wounds. Wahhabis are an extreme wing of Sunnism and remain most hostile of all to the Shiites of Iran. This deep division is the hardest to heal within the modern world.
An Eccentric Survival: The Hospitallers
In 1
798 Napoleon seized Malta. Under the Grand Master Ferdinand von Holpesch, a vapid diplomat, the Order succumbed easily and was forced to hand over a massive treasure in silver and gold which he took to Egypt. It now lies under the shallows of Aboukir Bay, together with the remains of Napoleon’s flagship, I’Orient, blown up by Nelson. Napoleon gave the islanders a republican constitution but they found the occupiers left behind by the emperor so rapacious that they rose in rebellion. Fifty of the Knights accepted Napoleon’s offer of a place in his army but 150 declined and left, facing penury in consequence. Some fled to Russia and, once there, voted to depose Holpesch and elect in his place the deranged Tsar Paul I – who was in any case ineligible both as a married man and as a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Years of confusion thereafter, nationalist conflicts and decades without a recognised Grand Master made it most likely that the French Revolution and its bastard child Napoleon would succeed not only in forcing the Knights out of Malta but in ending their existence. Yet an improbable series of events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries enabled the order to survive and exercise a function in the twenty-first century.
Protestant Knights of St John, children of the Reformation in Germany, had remained in contact with the traditional Knights and a similar imitation Order supported by Anglicans, romantic enthusiasts and eccentrics emerged in Britain. French Knights encouraged them, wishing to enlist their support in an attack, with the backing of the Greeks, on the Ottomans in Rhodes (Turkish since 1523), which, it was thought, could become a substitute for Malta. These British Knights favoured the military action of the Hospitallers and were inclined to look down on their other activity of care of the sick. Some improbable leaders functioned at various times – a fraudster, a bogus aristocrat and a supplier of accoutrements to the British army.
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