The French had their own designs on Lebanon and Syria, having worked tirelessly for much of the nineteenth century to secure their influence in those regions. Just as McMahon was promising Syria and more to Husayn, a British diplomat named Mark Sykes concluded a secret compact with a French diplomat named Charles François Georges-Picot. The Sykes-Picot agreement established a template for the postwar division of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire: France would get Syria, Lebanon, and parts of oil-rich northern Iraq; Britain would get Palestine and southern and central Iraq.
To complicate matters further still, the British government made another wartime promise. This one had little to do with the war and did
nothing to advance the campaign against the Ottomans. It was, instead, the culmination of years of effort by a nationalist group that had blossomed in the late nineteenth century. Like so many others, this group traced its origins to a distant point in the past and claimed the right of self-determination. But unlike so many others—unlike the Serbs or the Turks or the Arabs—this movement looked to a land that its people had not occupied in any great numbers in nearly two thousand years. That was what made Zionism different, and what made the declaration of the British foreign secretary in 1917 all that more unusual.
The idea that Jews were an ethnic group that had the right to self-determination and their own state was no more or less unusual than any other nationalist movement of the time. But the homeland claimed by the Jews was Palestine, and the ones claiming it were European Jews. Graced with well-connected and extremely disciplined leaders, the Zionists found a sympathetic audience in the inner circles of the British government. Just as there is a long and complicated history between Muslims and the People of the Book, there is also another history, of relations between Jews and Christians. Rarely had Jews fared well in Christian states. They had been barely tolerated, but with a lingering threat of violence that compared poorly to the climate of benign neglect in the Muslim world. In the nineteenth century, as most Western European states distanced themselves from organized religion, the position of Jews improved, especially in countries such as England, France, and Germany. But leading families like the Rothschilds were aware that the security of the present was not something to rely on. Only if the Jews had their own country could their survival be assured.
In England, support for Zionism stemmed from the same source as support for Arab independence. Most of the men who governed the British Empire had gone to schools whose curriculum was heavily influenced by both the Bible and the classics of Rome and Greece. The result was a deep affinity for the Holy Land, which in turn led to an ambivalent and troubled relationship to Judaism. There was shame and guilt over the ill treatment that Jews had suffered throughout most of the medieval and early modern period—and there was also anti-Semitism, which led members of the British ruling class to prefer the idea of Jews living somewhere else. Leaders of the Zionist movement toiled for years to gain the support of the British government (and the American government of Woodrow Wilson as well) for a homeland in Palestine, but as
long as the Ottoman Empire was still intact, there was little the British were willing or able to do. With the war, however, the aspirations of the Zionists received an unexpected boost, and in 1917, the British foreign secretary, Sir Arthur Balfour, issued a stunning declaration.
“His Majesty’s Government,” Balfour wrote in a letter to the Lord Rothschild,
view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national homeland for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
The British government later claimed that it had informed Husayn before issuing the statement, as well as at least one of his sons, Faysal. Husayn, according to British accounts, had no objections, as he did not see Palestine as essential to the national aspirations of the Arabs. He also did not believe that the declaration precluded an Arab state governing the territory, as long as the rights of local Jews and any Jewish immigrants from Europe were protected. In Britain, a number of prominent Jewish leaders, including a member of the cabinet, Sir Edwin Montagu, were less warm to the idea of the British endorsing Zionism. They were concerned that doing so would undermine the hard-won status of the Jews in England and in other countries in Europe. Hence the final words of the declaration, and hence, as well, why Balfour spoke only of a “national homeland” rather than a state, which left open a variety of possibilities short of actually nationhood.
4
This triad of documents—the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, the Sykes-Picot agreement, and the Balfour Declaration—determined the shape of the modern Middle East. Even more, the hopes and expectations raised by these promises were the source of many of the conflicts both within the Arab world and between the Arab world and the West for the remainder of the twentieth century. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks, in order to embarrass and undermine the Allied war effort, made public a variety of secret documents, one of which was the Sykes-Picot agreement. Its revelation had the desired effect. British duplicity was exposed. The British had told Husayn that Syria would be
his and then secretly assured the French that it would be theirs. Had Britain known how much bitterness these conflicting promises would generate, it may have thought twice, but in the heat of war, lies seemed a small price to pay for victory.
Few were more disillusioned by what happened in the aftermath of the war than Lawrence himself. He had been used and misled by his government no less than Husayn and his sons. After the war, he went to Paris, as did Faysal, to plead the case for Arab independence. Woodrow Wilson had opened the floodgates of nationalism when he announced before the peace conference that the postwar world would honor the self-determination of all peoples. Faysal was one of many supplicants who asked the victorious powers to grant his people a state, and he was one of many whose requests were politely, but firmly and perhaps cynically, rejected.
Faysal appeared at the conference not just as the representative of his father, but as the ruler of Damascus. In the final days of the war, the forces of the Arab Revolt occupied the city and Faysal was proclaimed king. Lawrence both reveled in the success and dreaded what he knew, or at least feared, would come after. The French coveted Syria, and they had no intention of ceding it to Faysal or the Arabs. In a similar fashion, the British wanted Iraq. In fact, with the exception of the unclear status of oil-rich Mosul, the map of the Near East had been drawn long before Faysal or Lawrence arrived in Paris.
But with American president Woodrow Wilson having unleashed the genie of self-determination, the powers of Europe could not simply brush aside Faysal’s claims and those of others who were in a similar position. The result was a compromise between imperialism, nationalism, and Wilson’s idealism: the Mandate System. Under its terms, various European nations were given control of specified territory under the condition that they established a timeline for eventual independence. Syria and Lebanon were declared French mandates; Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine were awarded to the British. Faysal returned to Damascus, only to be forcibly removed by the French. The British, who needed someone to govern the new state of Iraq, decided to install the now-stateless Faysal as its new king in 1921. His brother Abdullah became the first ruler of the new state of Transjordan, and their father, Husayn, was left in control of the western part of Arabia.
5
The subsequent fate of the Hashemites was mixed. Sharif Husayn,
having been a hero to the Allied war effort, alienated the British because of his refusal to kowtow after the war. He soon found himself without sufficient aid and unable to resist the onslaught of Ibn Saud, who evicted Husayn from Arabia in 1924. Faysal remained king when Iraq became independent in 1932, and ruled until his death the following year. His heirs controlled the country, under the watchful eye of the British, until his grandson Faysal II was overthrown and assassinated in a coup in 1958. Only Abdullah’s family survived much past midcentury as rulers of Jordan, though Abdullah himself was gunned down for the unforgivable sin of allowing an independent state of Israel to come into existence in 1948 and planning to make a separate peace with the Israelis. His legacy was continued by his grandson Hussein, who in turn was succeeded by his son Abdullah II, the current ruler of Jordan.
Outside of Jordan, it is rare today for those who remember these events to portray Husayn, Faysal, and their family as anything but puppets in an imperial game.
6
The regimes that replaced them in both Saudi Arabia and Iraq reviled their legacy and labeled them collaborators. They were viewed, at best, as benighted fools who had legitimate goals but who failed utterly in implementing them, and, at worst, as corrupt and venal manipulators who sold out the Arabs to the West. As for the British, the French, and the West in general, they were indicted for cloaking their greed for oil and for land in the noble language of the League of Nations and self-determination.
Without question, Western motives were ambiguous. Many genuinely respected the Arabs, admired the bedouin, and supported the right to self-determination. The contradictory promises that the British made were largely the product of incompatible goals. Men like Balfour and Prime Minister Lloyd George were both idealistic romantics and hardheaded practitioners of realpolitik. They genuinely supported a homeland for the Jews and a new Arab nation, and also wanted to make sure that the balance of power in the postwar Near East did not favor the French. They did not believe that either the Arabs or the Jews were ready for self-government without a period of tutelage, and they were willing and eager to be the tutors.
On the other side, men like Faysal and Husayn made their compromises knowingly. They were prepared to do what was necessary to achieve their ultimate goal. For Faysal, that meant accepting the loss of Syria in order to get Iraq. His aim was an independent Arab nation, and
he was pragmatic enough to change tactics as the situation demanded. After the war, the British in Iraq were desperate for a credible ruler who could unite a country on the verge of revolt. In 1920, Iraq had been racked by a bloody insurgency, and though the British army and air force quelled the uprising, there was still no viable Arab ruler. Faysal was offered the throne of Iraq, provided he was willing to work under the terms of the British Mandate until the League of Nations determined that Iraq was ready for full independence. Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, wired the British high commissioner in Iraq about British expectations: “You should explain to Faysal that… we must expect to be consulted so long as we are meeting heavy financial charges in Mesopotamia [Iraq]. He must show that he is capable of maintaining peace and order unaided… then he can become sovereign…. This will certainly take some time.”
7
Faysal, who was almost as much a stranger to Iraq as the British were, agreed, and in 1921 he arrived in Basra. He soon won a rigged election that the British made sure he could not lose, and was acclaimed king by 96 percent of the population. Eleven years later, Iraq gained full independence.
Here as well, what is most remarkable in light of subsequent history is the almost complete absence of religion from the debates. In Iraq, the same divisions that define the country in the early twenty-first century defined the political landscape under Britain and Faysal. The Shi’ites were predominant in the south, the Sunnis in the central regions, and the Kurds in the north. But while the British played on regional and religious rivalries as part of their tactics of divide-and-rule, no one demanded a Muslim state or called for a government controlled by the
ulama.
Religious differences were secondary to tribal, ethnic, and regional divisions, and Iraqi elites argued not over the role of religion in public life but over the merits of the British, the virtues or faults of Faysal, and the shape of the nascent “Arab nation” emerging from the shadow of the Ottomans in the Near East.
Although the Hashemites became synonymous with collaboration with the West, they were architects of their own destiny and made strategic choices that involved collaboration with the British in order to achieve independence. As Faysal said in 1921, “The British and I are in the same boat and must sink or swim. Having, so to speak, chosen me, the British must treat me as one of themselves and I must be trusted.” Stripped of the baleful context of later interpretations, the relationship
between Britain and Faysal in Iraq was a marriage of convenience, but a marriage it was. It was an example of cooperation and coexistence, and it created a new state.
Similar relationships existed between the British and Abdullah in Jordan, between the French and nascent political parties in Syria and Lebanon, and between the British and nationalist leaders in Egypt. Throughout the Near East, and in Turkey under the charismatic leadership of Kemal Atatürk, elites made common cause with Western powers, who in turn looked to them as partners who would facilitate their access to oil. It was not a union of equals, as the West retained military and economic dominance. But neither was it a black-and-white case of an oppressive, rapacious West and passive Muslim states with puppet leaders. The West was ascendent, and presented a still unsolvable puzzle to Muslim societies, but within that framework there was a wide scope of cooperation, coexistence, and common ground.
Nationalism was the most fertile common ground. It was understood that Muslim societies would achieve full independence from the West only when they became modern nations. Politicians and intellectuals throughout the Muslim world ingested the history and ideas that had led to the emergence of the Western nation-state, and they then applied those to their own societies. That process had begun in the late nineteenth century, but truly blossomed after World War I, especially in the Arab world. While Arab nationalism aimed to remove the onerous presence of the Western powers, Arab states in the first half of the twentieth century was still dependent on and subservient to the West. The relationship was laced with tension, competition, and animosity, but there was also respect, shared goals, and similar world views.