Failure is, of course, always defined in relation to expectations. Had the expectations been more modest, the story of the twentieth century would have been different. But nationalism and modernity embodied utopian dreams of a world without physical or spiritual want. They held out the promise that nations would be able to satisfy both the material needs of their citizens and the intangible ones as well. The nation would provide not just security but meaning and purpose. That was a tall order, and even if it was not bound to fail, it did.
A millennium of success, punctuated by challenges such as the Crusades and the Mongol invasions, had conditioned much of the Muslim world to believe that those who embraced Islam would in return be
given power relative to those who rejected it. The tolerance that Muslim communities exhibited toward the People of the Book went hand in hand with that power, and it stood in sharp contrast to the intolerance that Christian societies displayed toward Jews and Muslims during the same centuries. Given that Christian societies were rarely secure in their power until a few hundred years ago, it’s hard not to conclude that security is a precondition for tolerance. There are exceptions, including the early Muslims in Medina in relation to their non-Muslim neighbors. Theirs was tolerance born of expediency and weakness. But in general, tolerance is often a by-product of strength and an expression of confidence.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslim societies were anything but secure in the face of Western encroachments and expansion. Yet with the exception of Damascus in 1860, that didn’t lead to intolerance. In fact, the reform movements trumpeted coexistence and protected religious diversity. Not only the
Tanzimat
reforms of the Ottoman Empire but the various constitutions written throughout the Muslim world all enshrined religious toleration as a cornerstone of the modern state.
This nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century spirit of tolerance is another overlooked chapter of history. In the West, the prevailing image of Muslim societies is that, at best, they discriminated against non-Muslims and at worst they treated other religions with outright hatred.
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The forgetting of the past is just as acute within Muslim countries. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the principle of tolerance for Christians and Jews has been denounced by extremists, and Muslim defenders of coexistence have had a difficult time being heard. That is in contrast to centuries of Islamic history, when respect had been so woven into the moral framework that no one thought to challenge it.
But however much the ideologies of intolerance have come to dominate the public realm, that does not mean that most people are intolerant. Societies have public faces that do not necessarily reflect what the people who inhabit them think and feel. Even in the contentious modern age, the quiet norm in the Muslim world has been a tacit acceptance of religious minorities and a continued willingness to work with the West when that is perceived as beneficial. That reality, less dramatic than angry sermons meant to stoke passions, has been almost completely
obscured by fundamentalists who see the reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth century as a long march away from Islam and away from everything that had once made Muslims powerful.
There was nothing inevitable about public abandonment of tolerance and coexistence. Even as the West invaded and occupied parts of the Muslim world, the initial response was to find ways to accommodate and cooperate. There was no widespread call for jihad against the West in the early twentieth century. There were calls for a restored caliphate and for reforms that would generate an Arab or Muslim renaissance, but not for war against the West. And as long as the promise of independence and revival stayed alive, most Muslim societies distinguished between illegitimate Western domination, which was to be resisted, and continued coexistence between Muslims, Christians and Jews, which was to be preserved.
the arab revolt and
the balfour declaration
TWO EVENTS
profoundly shaped how Muslims, Christians, and Jews interacted in the twentieth century. One was the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans, which was supported and encouraged by the British. The other was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, also supported and encouraged (at least initially) by the British. Both had their origins in World War I.
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In many ways, World War I was the direct result of the erosion of the Ottoman Empire and the outbreak of more virulent strains of nationalism. In the decades leading up to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, the Balkans were a cauldron of nationalist zeal. The balance between the new Balkan states was continually disrupted by the powers of Europe, which treated them as pawns to be used and sacrificed. The Ottoman Empire was roiled by a struggle between Turkish nationalists who wanted to retrench and redefine the empire as a Turkish state and Ottoman nationalists who wanted to regroup and recapture lost territories. In the Balkans, the Russians aggressively asserted their claim to be the protector of Slavic states such as Bulgaria and Serbia, and thereby came into direct conflict with the Habsburg-ruled Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was itself wrestling
to maintain its control in the face of nationalist movements. When Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, was killed by a Serbian nationalist, a chain reaction led to war between the major European states. Soon after, the Ottoman Empire joined the fray on the side of Germany against the French, Russians, and English.
In the Near East, the war became a contest between England and the Ottomans. The British Empire depended on the Suez Canal to link Britain to its colonies in India and Asia. With the outbreak of hostilities, the British treated Egypt as a strategic center that could serve as a launching point for attacks on the Ottomans. They also viewed Egypt as potentially vulnerable, and redoubled their military presence in the canal zone. The other source of British concern was the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra (which would eventually form the modern state of Iraq).
Within the Ottoman Empire, the war provided the government with a rationale for suppressing dissent. Given that most dissent came from ethnic and religious minorities who wanted independence, the result was predictable. Turkish governors dispatched by the cabal then ruling in the sultan’s name showed no mercy in the Armenian provinces in eastern Anatolia and in the Arab provinces of Syria and Lebanon. The Ottoman Turks were so concerned about Armenian nationalism that they engineered the forced removal of millions of Armenians, many of whom died or were killed in the process. In the Near East, anyone who had spoken for Arab nationalism or for an independent Arab state faced imprisonment or execution. The empire, which had for centuries epitomized tolerance, became a police state.
In Cairo, a group of British officials set up an Arab Bureau in order to coordinate efforts to support Arabs who wanted to work with the Allies against the Ottomans. One of the junior officers assigned to the bureau was T. E. Lawrence, a young but preternaturally old and already eccentric student of classical Islamic castle architecture who had fallen for the desert. He idolized the bedouins as warriors pure of heart, humble in their faith, and still connected to the natural world. But though he celebrated their culture, his attitudes toward the Arabs he actually encountered were paternalistic and condescending. He saw them as lost souls, who had forgotten what had made them great centuries ago. Condescension aside, his interpretation was not much different than that of Muhammad Abduh or the Arab reformers, but unlike them, he was an
Englishman who didn’t believe that the Arabs were capable of claiming their own destiny. Instead, he was convinced that they could move forward to a better future only if the more civilized and advanced England assisted them.
The Arab Revolt of 1916 had several triggers. One was the British struggle against the Ottomans. By sponsoring a revolt of the Arab provinces, the British High Command hoped to distract the Ottoman military and force the empire to direct precious resources to fight in what was otherwise the strategic backwater of Syria and the Arabian Peninsula. Another spark was the dream of national awakening that had been fostered in equal measure by sympathetic Europeans like Wilfrid Blunt and by hardheaded reformers like Afghani, Abduh, and their successors. Though Lawrence was at the outset only a staff officer responsible for implementing policy rather than making it, he fused the contradictory aspirations of the British Empire. As his influence grew, he then embodied the inevitable disillusionment that ensued once those visions ran up against great-power politics. Sent by the Arab Bureau to support Sharif Husayn of Mecca, Lawrence set in motion events that would remake the Near East.
“All men dream,” he wrote in later years,
but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream palace of the national thoughts, and made them play a generous part in events: but when we won, it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined the Levant.
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Lawrence, with his florid prose and profound sense of destiny, became a key player in the Arab Revolt as the liaison between the Arabs and the British. He was also a capable military commander, who favored the hit-and-run tactics that had been perfected over the course of centuries by bedouin raiders. In the eyes of the West, he was the public face
of the Arab Revolt. Lionized as Lawrence of Arabia, he was pictured in bedouin garb and credited with organizing the tribal Arabs, mounted on camels and on horseback, against the stolid and better armed Turkish occupiers.
Yet the Arabs that Lawrence worked with were hardly passive pawns. They had their own plans and their own vision. They treated him as a partner, and in the end they used him just as he used them. By the time he wrote his memoirs, he had become an international celebrity, and the dreams of the Arab Revolt had collided with the postwar realities of the Paris peace conference and the refusal of the European powers to honor their wartime pledges. But in 1916 Lawrence still believed, with a naive, compelling fervor, that he was fighting for the restoration of Arab glory.
The movement was led, at least initially, by Sharif Husayn ibn Ali, who was the head of the Hashemite clan that traced its lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad. Though his family had governed the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for generations, he answered to the Ottomans and paid tribute to the sultan, and he had begun to chafe under the control of Istanbul. He was also facing a challenge from Ibn Saud, who controlled the central part of the Arabian Peninsula and could call on the formidable support of the puritanical Wahhabis. Even before the war, Husayn entered into a dialogue with the British authorities in Cairo, and the letters between him and the British high commissioner, Sir Henry McMahon, set forth the conditions under which he would agree to declare independence.
Husayn wanted more than to rule Arabia. He intended to create an Arab state stretching from Syria to Yemen that would potentially include parts of Iraq as well. Though he needed British military and economic aid in order to mount a credible campaign against the Ottomans, he was a proud, stubborn man with several ambitious sons, and he correctly perceived that he was in a position to make demands. As a result, the British guaranteed that his family would have the right to rule the lands “lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo.” The terms would come back to haunt not just the British and Husayn, but the Hashemite clan, the Arab world, and the future state of Israel. The text of the letters excluded Lebanon but did not address who would control Palestine. Jerusalem and its environs were symbolically important both to the Ottomans and the British, and
it isn’t surprising that their status was left out of discussions between Husayn and McMahon. Yet the omission proved costly to the future of coexistence between the Arab world and the West.
With the parameters established, Husayn announced the Arab Revolt in June 1916. Soon after, he proclaimed himself king of the Arabs. Lawrence later claimed that he designed the military and political strategy adopted by Husayn and his sons, and while he almost certainly overstated his role, he did act as a trusted adviser. Husayn’s sons Abdullah, later the first king of Jordan, and Faysal, soon to be the first king of Iraq, both relied on Lawrence’s counsel, Faysal most of all. They knew he wanted the same thing for them that they wanted for themselves: an independent Arab nation allied with Great Britain. They saw themselves as walking in the footsteps of the first Arab conquerors, destined to inherit the legacy of Muhammad and the caliphs, their great-grandfathers many times removed. And in their most optimistic moments, preparing for an ambush on a Turkish outpost or readying an assault on the port city of Aqaba, they saw their dreams coming true and believed that the English, represented by Lawrence, were on their side, working for a common goal.
What Lawrence didn’t know, or chose not to acknowledge, was that the British had no intention of honoring their promises to Husayn and his family. All may be fair in love and war, but that does not mean that there are no hurt feelings. Husayn, Faysal, and Abdullah led a revolt against the Ottomans at great personal peril, and they expected the British to keep their word. But the British were trying to win a war, and they were willing to make empty promises to gain allies. As important as the Arab Revolt was, it was a minor affair in the greater scheme of things, and less important than the Anglo-French alliance.