by Alan Palmer
Although in some respects it seems astonishing, the Young Turks sought to maintain the momentum of their revolution throughout the first three years of war. In April 1913 decrees permitting judgements of the religious courts to be referred to the Mahkrme-i Temyiz (lay Court of Appeal) had asserted the primacy of the secular judiciary over the ulema; and this gradual toning down of the Muslim hierarchy’s authority reached a climax towards the end of Said Halim’s vizierate. From April 1916 the şeyhülislâm was no longer automatically a member of the cabinet, and in the next few months he was deprived of all his executive functions in what were now regarded as lay affairs, such as the administration of religious foundations and education. By the time of Mehmed VI Vahideddin’s accession the şeyhülislâm was accepted as a solely religious dignitary, someone to be consulted and respected as an interpreter of Islamic teaching. There was also a series of measures which cautiously advanced the general emancipation of women: thus, in 1917 revision of the code of family law established that marriage was a secular contract, and recognized that a wife was entitled to divorce a husband who was a proven adulterer. Nevertheless, many social taboos remained rigidly enforced, especially in the countryside: and in the towns and cities all theatres, restaurants and lecture halls were still required to have a curtained-off area set aside for women.
Conservative disapproval of secularization lessened with the removal of the restraints on Muslim fanaticism which the Young Turks had imposed so long as they courted favour abroad. There was no longer any prospect of foreign inspectors-general operating in the provinces where Christian minorities complained of persecution. Renewed Dashnak activity in the city of Van, with the Russians now openly backing some form of Armenian autonomy on both sides of the old frontier, led to Ottoman fears that the Sultan’s Armenian subjects would regard the Tsarist invaders as liberators and therefore assist their advance into Anatolia. Accordingly, in May 1915 the Ottoman authorities organized a mass deportation of Armenians from the eastern provinces to guarded settlements in northern Mesopotamia. As many as half a million Armenians may have died at this time from starvation, or from the sufferings of long marches through mainly Kurdish territory, or from massacres committed by the Kurds themselves, with the connivance of local officials. Soon afterwards Armenian communities living in the countryside of northern Syria and Cilicia were similarly uprooted, and concentrated in central Syria. No one knows how many Armenians perished during the war. Official Turkish estimates put the total figure at about 300,000; maximum Armenian claims suggest a figure of some two million, killed during what is regarded as a systematic campaign of genocide.32 Sadly, at least 1.3 million Armenian deaths seem probable. This estimate, if correct, means that in the war and its aftermath as many Armenians were slain as were soldiers serving the French Republic.
Inevitably, as the conflict began to drag out far longer than had been anticipated, individual CUP leaders began to assert an increasing independence of the Porte. Mustafa Rahmi, one of the three members of that first Young Turk deputation received by Sultan Abdulhamid in July 1908, was appointed vali of Izmir in 1915 and became such a powerful warlord in his province that he was able to protect both Armenians and Greeks from Muslim fury, occasionally putting out peace feelers to allied agents in Athens. Later in the war the Ottoman military commander in Syria, Ahmed Cemal Pasha, also showed an inclination to arrange separate terms with the Entente allies, but in the summer of 1915 he was still a pillar of the ruling triumvirate, convinced that the enemy would soon make a seaborne invasion in support of an Arab rebellion at some point between Iskenderun and Haifa. Cemal therefore resorted to drastic repressive measures, intent on liquidating the Arab secret societies and other dissident groups. Eleven Arabs were hanged in Beirut on 28 August 1915 and arrests, executions and deportations continued in the Lebanon for eighteen months. The whole community suffered. Cemal saw no reason to distinguish too precisely between the likely treason of Arabs, Jews and Christians. As Lawrence wrote a few years later, Cemal ‘united all classes, conditions and creeds in Syria, under pressure of a common misery and peril, and so made a concerted revolt possible.’33
Cemal was correct in assuming that an Arab rebellion was imminent. It had long been brewing. Shortly before the outbreak of war Emir Abdullah, the second son of the Sherif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali el-Aun, twice sounded out the British authorities in Egypt to see if he could win London’s backing for a rising against Ottoman rule. Abdullah was familiar with political life in Constantinople as both he and his brother, Emir Feisal, sat in the Ottoman Parliament. Lord Kitchener, British Agent and Consul General in Egypt from 1911 until the coming of the war, met Abdullah in Cairo and was impressed by evidence of the mounting Arab hostility towards the Young Turk regime. The Emir’s father was not a natural rebel. He was an elderly conservative, alarmed by the coming of a westernized Ottoman governor to the Hejaz. As head of the Hashemite dynasty and thirty-seventh in direct descent from the Prophet, the Sherif of Mecca deserved the high respect with which Kitchener treated him and his emissaries. But the British may have exaggerated the status of the Sherif within Islam; they may, too, have attributed to him a desire to see the Ottoman Empire swept away, which he never possessed. After Kitchener became War Secretary in August 1914 he kept in touch with the Hashemite princes. ‘It may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Khalifate at Mecca or Medina and so good may come by the help of God out of all the evil that is now occurring,’ Kitchener wrote to Abdullah six days before Britain declared war on the Sultan.34
The jihad proclamation prompted the British to revive the idea of a Hashemite Caliphate. But by now Hussein was thinking of a crown. During the summer of 1915 Hussein exchanged letters with Sir Henry McMahon, Britain’s High Commissioner in Egypt, seeking Cairo’s support for the Caliphate, and for a Hashemite kingdom of Arabia, too. It would extend southwards from Cilicia (roughly the modern frontier of Turkey and Syria) down to the Yemen, and from the Mediterranean to the eastern limits of Mesopotamia. Ultimately, in a letter to Hussein dated 24 October 1915, Sir Henry McMahon agreed that Britain would ‘recognise and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories included in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca’, but with important reservations, notably the exclusion of regions considered not entirely Arab in composition or character. In the north both Mersin and Iskenderun fell into this category. So too did ‘portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo’ (in effect the eastern Mediterranean littoral). Other reservations included insistence on the acceptance of ‘special measures of administrative control’ throughout the vilayet of Baghdad and Basra to protect British interests, observance of British pledges to protect other Arab rulers, and a reminder that these promises concerned only ‘those portions of the territories wherein Great Britain is free to act without detriment to her Ally, France’.35
McMahon’s letter remains one of the most disputed documents in twentieth-century diplomacy. The weakness of his message lay not so much in its stated terms, imprecise though wartime conditions required them to be, as in its discreet omissions, and in particular its lack of any reference to Palestine, Jerusalem or the Jews. For several months Sherif Hussein continued his correspondence with McMahon, hoping to clarify the British offer and the meaning of that emotive word ‘independence’. He had no success. But in December he received one more pat of encouragement: the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, favoured ‘Arab independence of Turkish domination’, Hussein was told—provided, of course, that the Arabs themselves achieved it in revolt.36
There was good reason for this Foreign Office evasiveness. Doubts had arisen over what the ‘French ally’ would and would not regard as detrimental to her interests. In November 1915 François Georges-Picot, a former French consul-general in Beirut, arrived in London. Throughout December and well into the following year Georges-Picot held discussions with the much respected Arabist, Colonel Sir Mark Sykes. Together the two experts on the Mid
dle East thrashed out proposals for the partition of the Ottoman Empire in the Levant, which in May 1916 were accepted as the ‘Sykes-Picot Agreement’.37 It envisaged the creation of two Arab states, one under French protection around Damascus, and another under British protection from Baghdad to Aqaba. The French would administer the Lebanon from north of Beirut to south of Tyre; the British would control Acre and Haifa; and Palestine would become the joint responsibility of France, Britain and (Tsarist) Russia. The Agreement has frequently been criticized as incompatible with the pledges already given to the Sherif of Mecca. It could, however, be argued that the Sykes-Picot Agreement amplified, clarified and complemented McMahon’s proposals rather than invalidated them, and that later disputes arose rather more from the obligations assumed by the British in 1917 to the Zionist movement. Yet, whatever their importance for subsequent decades, within the context of the First World War the historical significance of the McMahon letters and the Sykes-Picot discussions is clear and unequivocal: they show that by 1915 the Entente allies were agreed on the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, with help from a controlled explosion of Arab nationalism.
On 5 June 1916 Sherif Hussein began the Arab Revolt with a symbolic rifle shot fired at the Ottoman barracks in Mecca and a proclamation which was to serve as an Arab manifesto in the Islamic world. He denounced, in particular, the impiety of the Young Turks who had curbed the religious prerogatives of the Sultan-Caliph, having ‘taken the religion of God as an amusement and a sport’.38 At first the rhetoric was matched by deeds of arms, at least in the Hejaz. Mecca was soon cleared of Turks; the port of Jeddah was attacked on 9 June and, with offshore support from the Royal Navy, passed into Arab hands a week later; the town of Taif, an oasis forty miles south-east of Mecca, swiftly fell to Emir Abdullah, although Turkish troops continued to resist from behind the solid walls of the adjoining fort. Medina, however, could not be taken. The city housed not only the Prophet’s sacred tomb, but the headquarters of the Twelfth Army Corps, commanded by the formidable and devout Fakhri en-din Pasha. Rather than see rebel Arabs in infidel pay enter Medina, Fakhri committed his garrison to a thirty-month siege. He was still defiant in January 1919, ten weeks after every other Ottoman army commander had accepted an Armistice.
Kitchener, who was drowned on his way to Russia on the day the Arab Revolt began, had always insisted on the need to prepare for a general insurrection, not simply an uprising in a particular vilayet. But other Arabs were slow to respond to the Hashemite call, and for several months it was questionable whether the fighting in the Hejaz posed a real military challenge to the Ottoman Empire. Not until the end of the year did Hussein’s British sponsors, the ‘Arab Bureau’ in Cairo, begin seriously to co-ordinate the Revolt: Captain T. E. Lawrence, as head of the British mission to the Hejaz, secured the acceptance of Emir Feisal as effective leader of the Bedouin guerrillas, while the Ottoman veteran Major Aziz al-Masri trained regular Arab troops at Rabegh, where he was assisted by his fellow-Iraqi officer and conspirator, Nuri as-Said, allowed back from India.39 Even during these essentially preparatory months, Enver, Talaat and Cemal could not ignore the threat to the Empire’s southern flank, to the uncomprehending chagrin of their German advisers. For as long as the Hashemite rebel army was in the field—or, more accurately, in the desert—at least 30,000 Turkish troops were retained along the route of the Hejaz Railway and in Medina and the Yemen.
In the summer of 1917 the Hashemites went over to the offensive. On 6 July the Arabs captured the important port of Aqaba which, with British assistance, became the Emir Feisal’s base for raids on the railway, seventy miles inland, and for an advance into Syria. Even before Aqaba fell, Ottoman complacency was shattered by a Bedouin raid on Baalbek, fifty miles north of Damascus, where on 11 June a bridge was damaged on the strategically important railway linking Syria with the heart of the empire. A British Intelligence assessment, reaching London from Switzerland some five weeks later, quotes a Turkish source as reporting that this revelation of unrest among the northern tribes caused the immediate transfer of six front-line battalions to Baalbek in order to stamp out the embers of revolt in so sensitive a region.40
The Turkish concern was understandable, for the character of the war in the Middle East was changing rapidly. By carefully developing Basra as a military base and modernizing the port, General Maude had by January 1917 been able to concentrate an army four times as large as the forces of his Ottoman enemy; and on 11 March Baghdad was captured, for at least the thirtieth time in the city’s long history. Enver, however, was unwilling to write off Mesopotamia as yet. With German backing, a new and powerful army group—code-named Yildirim (Lightning)—was concentrated in southern Anatolia during the summer months. General Erich von Falkenhayn, former Chief of the German General Staff and more recently the conqueror of Roumania, came to Constantinople and planned an offensive which would recover Baghdad and carry the Germano-Turkish Army through Persia and beyond, thus reviving the simplistic strategic goal of depriving ‘England’ of India. But ‘Lightning’ was soon forced to strike elsewhere. While Falkenhayn and Enver were planning Yildirim in Constantinople, General Allenby (newly arrived from the Western Front) was completing preparations for an offensive in Sinai, where in March and April the first two battles of Gaza had failed to breach the main Ottoman–German defensive system. By the autumn of 1917 Falkenhayn acknowledged that Palestine, rather than Mesopotamia and Persia, was the natural theatre of operations for Yildirim.41
Falkenhayn could oppose Allenby with fourteen Ottoman divisions and the nucleus of the German Asia Corps, some 6,500 specialist troops and staff officers. But Falkenhayn’s army group was far less powerful than it appeared on paper. Mustafa Kemal—appointed to command the Seventh Army in Syria on 7 July—reported in September that in one of his divisions half the troops were so physically weak that they could not even stand on parade, let alone march against the enemy. Moreover, the Asia Corps’ arrival in Syria was delayed by sabotage at Haydarpaša where, on 6 September, a huge explosion in the railway sidings destroyed rolling-stock, stores and munitions. There was, too, a fundamental flaw in the command structure: Falkenhayn himself despised and mistrusted all Turks. ‘He had a stubborn, selfish streak in his character,’ his best-known staff officer, Franz von Papen, was to recall.42 So arrogant was the General’s manner that Enver had to travel down to Damascus and seek to mediate between Falkenhayn and the two experienced Ottoman army commanders, Cemal and Kemal. Enver failed. Rather than attempt to carry out the German’s battle plans, Mustafa Kemal obtained permission to go on long sick-leave early in October. Ahmed Cemal retained his command in Syria, but he remained incensed against Falkenhayn.
Allenby, with twice as much infantry as his opponents and ten times their cavalry, opened his Sinai offensive on the last day of October 1917, and gained all his immediate objectives.43 The Ottoman advanced base at Beersheba fell to a surprise attack on the first day. Jaffa was entered a fortnight later, and on 3 December Jerusalem was captured, Allenby’s victory ending nearly 700 years of Ottoman rule over the one city in the world sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. The coming of winter ruled out any further advance, but by the end of the year it seemed, both in Constantinople and in London, as if the Sultan’s Arab lands would soon be lost to the Ottomans for all time. Unless, of course, a new wave of Panislamic sentiment could turn the Arab Revolt against its infidel sponsors.
That possibility, discounted by the British, raised Ahmed Cemal’s hopes in Damascus. The Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 was followed by the publication of wartime secret treaties found in the Russian Foreign Ministry archives: the Sultan’s subjects thus learned for the first time of the Constantinople Agreement of March 1915, by which the Ottoman capital and the Straits were to be incorporated in the Russian Empire while Britain and France ‘achieved their aims in the Near East and elsewhere’; and they were told, too, of the Allied pledge confirming Italy’s sovereignty over the Dodecanese and promising the Italians a
foothold in Asia Minor by extensive territorial gains in the vilayet of Adana. But the Ottoman authorities made most capital out of the Bolsheviks’ publication of the Sykes-Picot agreement, seeing in it a means of winning over the Arabs. The deposed Khedive Abbas II was sent to Damascus, where the Germans set up an ‘Arab Bureau’ to rival the institution of the same name created by the British in Cairo some twelve months before. When secret overtures to Hussein produced no response, Cemal Pasha delivered a speech at Beirut on 6 December 1917 in which he cited the Bolshevik revelations as proof to all Islam that the Sherif of Mecca was conspiring with the Christian imperialists of the West.44 One month previously—on 2 November, before the Bolsheviks leaked details of the Sykes-Picot agreement—the famous Balfour Declaration gave notice that the British Government viewed ‘with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. Cemal had already successfully opposed German Foreign Ministry proposals to win Zionist support by a joint German–Ottoman declaration; he maintained that any championship of the Jews would force the Arabs into a closer dependency on the Entente. Now Cemal could cite the Sykes-Picot exchanges and the Balfour Declaration as ‘proof’ to the Islamic world that Arabs in British pay were handing over their Muslim heritage to the Zionist imperialists.45
During that last winter of war Cemal was the only member of the basically secularist Talaat government to affect what might today be described as a ‘born-again’ Muslim enthusiasm. But other colleagues were willing to accept extensive devolution so long as some form of Ottoman authority was preserved in the Arab lands: thus the Foreign Minister, a kinsman of Enver, let the Americans know in February 1918 that the Porte did not reject the Twelfth of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which recommended autonomous development for the Ottoman non-Turkish nationalities; and the influential publicist Ziya Gökalp argued in favour of a federalized empire which would link virtually independent Turkish and Arab states.46 Inevitably the Hashemites were tempted by this apparent change of mood on the Golden Horn, and there were further (almost-) secret exchanges between Emir Feisal and Cemal, and indeed even more confidential contacts between Feisal and Mustafa Kemal, when in the summer the latter returned to the Palestine Front.47 Lawrence may have encouraged Feisal, in the double hope of spreading dissension among the Young Turk factions and of finding out more about Ottoman intentions. But, if so, it was a risky game to play. In June 1918 the British Foreign Office discovered that Feisal had gone so far as to set down on paper the basic concessions to be met by the Porte before Arab and Turkish armies might again fight ‘side by side’. As Lawrence discreetly writes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ‘Events in the end made abortive these complicated negotiations.’48