The
position of the Sherif of Mecca had long been anomalous. The title of
'Sherif' implied descent from the prophet Mohammed through his daughter
Fatima, and Hassan, her elder son. Authentic Sherifs were inscribed on
the family tree - an immense roll preserved at Mecca, in custody of the
Emir of Mecca, the elected Sherif of Sherifs, supposed to be the senior
and noblest of all. The prophet's family had held temporal rule in Mecca
for the last nine hundred years, and counted some two thousand persons.
The old Ottoman Governments regarded this clan of
manticratic peers with a mixture of reverence and distrust. Since they
were too strong to be destroyed, the Sultan salved his dignity by
solemnly confirming their Emir in place. This empty approval acquired
dignity by lapse of time, until the new holder began to feel that it
added a final seal to his election. At last the Turks found that they
needed the Hejaz under their unquestioned sway as part of the stage
furniture for their new pan-Islamic notion. The fortuitous opening of
the Suez Canal enabled them to garrison the Holy Cities. They projected
the Hejaz Railway, and increased Turkish influence among the tribes by
money, intrigue, and armed expeditions.
As the Sultan grew stronger there he ventured to
assert himself more and more alongside the Sherif, even in Mecca itself,
and upon occasion ventured to depose a Sherif too magnificent for his
views, and to appoint a successor from a rival family of the clan in
hopes of winning the usual advantages from dissension. Finally, Abdul
Hamid took away some of the family to Constantinople into honourable
captivity. Amongst these was Hussein ibn Ali, the future ruler, who was
held a prisoner for nearly eighteen years. He took the opportunity to
provide his sons - Ali, Abdulla, Feisal, and Zeid - with the modern
education and experience which afterwards enabled them to lead the Arab
armies to success.
When Abdul Hamid fell, the less wily Young Turks
reversed his policy and sent back Sherif Hussein to Mecca as Emir. He at
once set to work unobtrusively to restore the power of the Emirate, and
strengthened himself on the old basis, keeping the while close and
friendly touch with Constantinople through his sons Abdulla,
vice-chairman of the Turkish
House, and Feisal, member for Jidda. They kept him informed of political
opinion in the capital until war broke out, when they returned in haste
to Mecca.
The outbreak of war made trouble in the Hejaz. The
pilgrimage ceased, and with it the revenues and business of the Holy
Cities. There was reason to fear that the Indian food-ships would cease
to come (since the Sherif became technically an enemy subject); and as
the province produced almost no food of its own, it would be
precariously dependent on the goodwill of the Turks, who might starve it
by closing the Hejaz Railway. Hussein had never been entirely at the
Turks' mercy before; and at this unhappy moment they particularly needed
his adherence to their 'Jehad', the Holy War of all Moslems against
Christianity.
To become popularly effective this must be endorsed
by Mecca; and if endorsed it might plunge the East in blood. Hussein was
honourable, shrewd, obstinate and deeply pious. He felt that the Holy
War was doctrinally incompatible with an aggressive war, and absurd with
a Christian ally: Germany. So he refused the Turkish demand, and made at
the same time a dignified appeal to the Allies not to starve his
province for what was in no way his people's fault. The Turks in reply
at once instituted a partial blockade of the Hejaz by controlling the
traffic on the pilgrim railway. The British left his coast open to
specially-regulated food vessels.
The Turkish demand was, however, not the only one
which the Sherif received. In January 1915, Yisin, head of the
Mesopotamian officers, Ali Riza, head of the Damascus officers, and Abd
el Ghani el Areisi, for the Syrian civilians, sent down to him a
concrete proposal for a military mutiny in Syria against the Turks. The
oppressed people of Mesopotamia and Syria, the committees of the Ahad
and the Fetah, were calling out to him as the Father of the Arabs, the
Moslem of Moslems, their greatest prince, their oldest notable, to save
them from the sinister designs of Talaat and Jemal.
Hussein, as politician, as prince, as moslem, as
modernist, and as nationalist, was forced to listen to their appeal. He
sent Feysul, his third son, to Damascus, to discuss their projects as
his representative, and to make a report. He sent Ali, his eldest son,
to Medina, with orders to raise quietly, on any excuse he pleased,
troops from villagers and tribesmen of the Hejaz, and to hold them ready
for action if Feisal called. Abdulla, his politic second son, was to
sound the British by letter, to
learn what would be their attitude towards a possible Arab revolt
against Turkey.
Feisal reported in January 1915, that local
conditions were good, but that the general war was not going well for
their hopes. In Damascus were three divisions of Arab troops ready for
rebellion. In Aleppo two other divisions, riddled with Arab nationalism,
were sure to join in if the others began. There was only one Turkish
division this side of the Taurus, so that it was certain that the rebels
would get possession of Syria at the first effort. On the other hand,
public opinion was less ready for extreme measures, and the military
class quite sure that Germany would win the war and win it soon. If,
however, the Allies landed their Australian Expedition (preparing in
Egypt) at Alexandretta, and so covered the Syrian flank, then it would
be wise and safe to risk a final German victory and the need to make a
previous separate peace with the Turks.
Delay followed, as the Allies went to the
Dardanelles, and not to Alexandretta. Feisal went after them to get
first-hand knowledge of Gallipoli conditions, since a breakdown of
Turkey would be the Arab signal. Then followed stagnation through the
months of the Dardanelles campaign. In that slaughter-house the
remaining Ottoman first-line army was destroyed. The disaster to Turkey
of the accumulated losses was so great that Feisal came back to Syria,
judging it a possible moment in which to strike, but found that
meanwhile the local situation had become unfavourable.
His Syrian supporters were under arrest or in
hiding, and their friends being hanged in scores on political charges.
He found the well-disposed Arab divisions either exiled to distant
fronts, or broken up in drafts and distributed among Turkish units. The
Arab peasantry were in the grip of Turkish military service, and Syria
prostrate before the merciless Jemal Pasha. His assets had disappeared.
He wrote to his father counselling further delay,
till England should be ready and Turkey in extremities. Unfortunately,
England was in a deplorable condition. Her forces were falling back
shattered from the Dardanelles. The slow-drawn agony of Kut was in its
last stage; and the Senussi rising, coincident with the entry of
Bulgaria, threatened her on new flanks.
Feysul's position was hazardous in the extreme. He
was at the mercy of the members of the secret society, whose president
he had been before the
war. He had to live as the guest of Jemal Pasha, in Damascus, rubbing up
his military knowledge; for his brother Ali was raising the troops in
Hejaz on the pretext that he and Feisal would lead them against the Suez
Canal to help the Turks. So Feisal, as a good Ottoman and officer in the
Turkish service, had to live at headquarters, and endure acquiescingly
the insults and indignities heaped upon his race by the bully Jemal in
his cups.
Jemal would send for Feisal and take him to the
hanging of his Syrian friends. These victims of justice dared not show
that they knew Feisal's real hopes, any more than he dared show his mind
by word or look, since disclosure would have condemned his family and
perhaps their race to the same fate. Only once did he burst out that
these executions would cost Jemal all that he was trying to avoid; and
it took the intercessions of his Constantinople friends, chief men in
Turkey, to save him from the price of these rash words.
Feisal's correspondence with his father was an
adventure in itself. They communicated by means of old retainers of the
family, men above suspicion, who went up and down the Hejaz Railway,
carrying letters in sword-hilts, in cakes, sewn between the soles of
sandals, or in invisible writings on the wrappers of harmless packages.
In all of them Feisal reported unfavourable things, and begged his
father to postpone action till a wiser time.
Hussein, however, was not a whit cast down by Emir
Feisal's discouragements. The Young Turks in his eyes were so many
godless transgressors of their creed and their human duty - traitors to
the spirit of the time, and to the higher interests of Islam. Though an
old man of sixty-five, he was cheerfully determined to wage war against
them, relying upon justice to cover the cost. Hussein trusted so much in
God that he let his military sense lie fallow, and thought Hejaz able to
fight it out with Turkey on a fair field. So he sent Abd el Kader el
Abdu to Feisal with a letter that all was now ready for inspection by
him in Medina before the troops started for the front. Feisal informed
Jemal, and asked leave to go down, but, to his dismay, Jemal replied
that Enver Pasha, the Generalissimo, was on his way to the province, and
that they would visit Medina together and inspect them. Feisal had
planned to raise his father's crimson banner as soon as he arrived in
Medina, and so to take the Turks unawares; and here he was going to be
saddled with two uninvited guests to whom, by the Arab law of
hospitality, he could do no harm,
and who would probably delay his action so long that the whole secret of
the revolt would be in jeopardy!
In the end matters passed off well, though the
irony of the review was terrible. Enver, Jemal and Feisal watched the
troops wheeling and turning in the dusty plain outside the city gate,
rushing up and down in mimic camel-battle, or spurring their horses in
the javelin game after immemorial Arab fashion. 'And are all these
volunteers for the Holy War?' asked Enver at last, turning to Feisal.
'Yes,' said Feisal. 'Willing to fight to the death against the enemies
of the faithful?' 'Yes,' said Feisal again; and then the Arab chiefs
came up to be presented, and Sherif Ali ibn el Hussein, of Modhig, drew
him aside whispering, 'My Lord, shall we kill them now?' and Feisal
said, 'No, they are our guests.'
The sheikhs protested further; for they believed
that so they could finish off the war in two blows. They were determined
to force Feisal's hand; and he had to go among them, just out of earshot
but in full view, and plead for the lives of the Turkish dictators, who
had murdered his best friends on the scaffold. In the end he had to make
excuses, take the party back quickly to Medina, picket the banqueting
hall with his own slaves, and escort Enver and Jemal back to Damascus to
save them from death on the way. He explained this laboured courtesy by
the plea that it was the Arab manner to devote everything to guests; but
Enver and Jemal being deeply suspicious of what they had seen, imposed a
strict blockade of the Hejaz, and ordered large Turkish reinforcements
thither. They wanted to detain Feisal in Damascus; but telegrams came
from Medina claiming his immediate return to prevent disorder, and,
reluctantly, Jemal let him go on condition that his suite remained
behind as hostages.
Feisal found Medina full of Turkish troops, with
the staff and headquarters of the Twelfth Army Corps under Fakhri Pasha,
the courageous old butcher who had bloodily 'purified' Zeitun and Urfa
of Armenians. Clearly the Turks had taken warning, and Feisal's hope of
a surprise rush, winning success almost without a shot, had become
impossible. However, it was too late for prudence. From Damascus four
days later his suite took horse and rode out east into the desert to
take refuge with Nuri Shaalan, the Beduin chieftain; and the same day
Feisal showed his hand. When he raised the Arab flag, the pan-Islamic
supra-national State, for which Abdul Hamid had massacred and worked and died, and the
German hope of the co-operation of Islam in the world-plans of the
Kaiser, passed into the realm of dreams. By the mere fact of his
rebellion the Sherif had closed these two fantastic chapters of history.
Rebellion was the gravest step which political men
could take, and the success or failure of the Arab revolt was a gamble
too hazardous for prophecy. Yet, for once, fortune favoured the bold
player, and the Arab epic tossed up its stormy road from birth through
weakness, pain and doubt, to red victory. It was the just end to an
adventure which had dared so much, but after the victory there came a
slow time of disillusion and then a night in which the fighting men
found that all their hopes had failed them. Now, at last, may there have
come to them the white peace of the end, in the knowledge that they
achieved a deathless thing, a lucent inspiration to the children of
their race.
