A Peace to End all Peace (13 page)

A few weeks later the messenger returned from his undercover journey to Ottoman Arabia with a vague but encouraging reply. It invited the War Minister to spell out what he had in mind. Cairo cabled Kitchener that “Communication is guarded, but friendly and favourable.”
⁹

Meanwhile the Agency had again been in communication with Major al-Masri and also other Arabic émigrés in Cairo. These exiles from the Ottoman Empire continued to carry on the decades-old discussion of who the various and diverse Arabic-speaking peoples of the empire were, or ought to be. This question of national identity was one which had been raised in the coffee houses of Damascus and Beirut, and in the student quarters of Paris from the nineteenth century onward, and had given rise to a variety of literary clubs and secret societies within the Ottoman Empire.

In the context of Ottoman politics, the Arabic-speaking exiles in Cairo were responding to those policies of the Young Turk government which subjected the majority of the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire to the hegemony of the roughly 40 percent of the population who spoke Turkish. In one way or another, what the exiles advocated was a greater say in governmental matters, and more and higher official positions for those who spoke Arabic—about the same percentage as spoke Turkish.

Though often referred to as nationalists, these men are more accurately described as separatists.
¹⁰
They did not ask for independence; they asked for a greater measure of participation and local rule. They were willing to be ruled largely by Turks because the Turks were fellow-Moslems. Unlike European nationalists, they were people whose beliefs existed in a religious rather than secular framework. They lived within the walls of the city of Islam in a sense in which Europe had not lived within Christendom since the early Middle Ages; for, like the cities built in the Arab world in medieval times, the lives of Moslems circle around a central mosque. They did not represent an ethnic group, for historically, the only ethnic or “true” Arabs were the inhabitants of Arabia, while the Arabic-speaking populations of such provinces as Baghdad or Damascus, or of such cities as Algiers or Cairo, were of mixed ethnic stock and background, spanning the vast range of ancient peoples and cultures that extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf.

There were only a few dozen people who were active partisans of Arabic nationalism (separatism) in October 1914, as members of one or more of the secret societies, such as al-Fatat and al-’Ahd, of which the British Agency in Cairo was becoming increasingly aware.
¹¹
A great deal more is now known about these men and what they represented than was known to the British at the time. In large part they were members of the Arabic-speaking élites who had been well connected with the regime which had been overthrown by the Young Turks and who felt threatened by the pro-Turkish and centralizing trends in C.U.P. policy.
¹²
Milne Cheetham, the acting Agent and Consul-General in Cairo, cabled an intelligence memorandum about the secret societies to Kitchener on 26 October 1914, as the field marshal pondered the terms of his next message to Arabia.

IV

Kitchener’s telegram, which was cleared and sent by Grey at the Foreign Office, told the Agency that Storrs should reply to Abdullah that “If the Arab nation assist England in this war that has been forced upon us by Turkey, England will guarantee that no internal intervention take place in Arabia, and will give Arabs every assistance against foreign aggression.” (By “Arabs,” Kitchener here meant those who lived in Arabia.) In other words, if the Arabian leaders freed their peninsula from the Sultan and declared their independence, Britain would help to protect them against any invasion from abroad.

At the Agency, Cheetham and Storrs were responsible for supervising the translation of this message into Arabic. Apparently with the encouragement of Clayton, they broadened its language to pledge British support for “the emancipation of the Arabs.”
¹³
This went far in the direction pointed out by Reginald Wingate. Wingate believed in stirring up the tribes of Arabia on Britain’s behalf. Unlike Kitchener, who proposed to deal with Arabia at the end of the war, the impatient Wingate urged immediate action at the beginning of the war. His goal was to lure the Arabs away from the Ottoman Empire and as early as 14 January 1915 he wrote to Clayton that “I fear British action has been so long delayed that it is doubtful if we shall now succeed in detaching the Arabs…”
¹⁴
His familiar complaint was that his superiors had not heeded his advice in time.

As the Kitchener message was being sent out in Arabic translation, the émigré groups with which Clayton kept in contact in Cairo seem to have told him that Arabs in the Hejaz would be suspicious of British intentions, and that some sort of clarification of what was being promised would be in order. Kitchener, with Grey’s approval, immediately authorized the Agency to issue a further statement. Again the Agency went beyond its instructions, and issued proclamations directed not merely to Arabia, but to practically all of Arabic-speaking Asia (“Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia”), promising that if their inhabitants threw off the Turks, Britain would recognize and guarantee their independence.
¹⁵

Although the Agency exceeded its instructions in making this public offer, the pledge itself was a reasonable one. Britain had not yet made any conflicting commitment to the Allied Powers regarding the future of Arabic-speaking Asia. If the Arabic-speaking provinces, in defiance of all the probabilities, had struck a major blow for the Allied cause by seceding from the Ottoman Empire and by successfully winning their freedom by their own exertions, there was no reason why Britain should not have guaranteed help in protecting their future independence. It would have been in Britain’s national interest, with respect both to wartime and to postwar rivalries, to do so.

It was rather the message that Kitchener
had
authorized that was troubling, for—reflecting his belief that Arabia was important not for the role it could play in the war but for the role it could play after the war—he had closed his message to Mecca with his bombshell: “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.”
¹⁶
Restoring the caliphate to Arabia, where it and Mohammed were born thirteen centuries before, was Kitchener’s strategy for preparing for the rivalry with Russia which was bound to follow the conclusion of the war against Germany. But Arabians, living within the political confines of their own peninsula, were not likely to understand what he had in mind. They would not know that at the outset of one great conflict between European powers he was already thinking ahead to the next. They would be even less likely to recognize that Kitchener, Wingate, Clayton, and Storrs did not understand the nature of the caliphate.

Scholars have been kept busy ever since explaining to western students of the Middle East that the split between temporal and spiritual authority, that in medieval Europe pitted pope against emperor, did not occur in the world of Islam. Kitchener, Wingate, Clayton, and Storrs were mistaken in believing that the Caliph could be a spiritual leader only. In Islam, all of life, including government and politics, falls within the governance of the Holy Law; so that in the eyes of Sunni Moslems, such as the Ottoman Sultan and the Emir of Mecca, the dominion of the Caliph as upholder of the Holy Law is pervasive. What British Cairo did not see is that the Caliph is also a prince: a governor and a leader in battle as well as a leader in prayer.

Kitchener’s followers, for all their supposed knowledge of the Islamic world, missed the importance of another point: they ignored the extent of Islamic disunity and fragmentation. Thus the Kitchener plan called for Ibn Saud, leader of the fierce puritanical Wahhabi sect, to recognize the spiritual authority of the Sunni ruler of Mecca; but that was not a realistic possibility, for like so many of the dozens of contending sects into which Islam is divided, theirs were at daggers drawn.

The proposal which Kitchener and his followers sent off to Mecca misled its recipient, who read it as an offer to make him ruler of a vast kingdom; for that, of course, is what the new Caliph of Islam would have been. As will be seen, when the ruler of Mecca opened the discussion of what the boundaries of his new kingdom were to be, Storrs was appalled; for he and Kitchener had not intended that the area ruled by the Emir should be expanded. In the summer of 1915, Storrs wrote to FitzGerald/Kitchener that if the ruler of Mecca could conciliate the other ruling emirs and chieftains of the Arabian peninsula, and impress upon them that “he has no idea of pretending to any temporal rights within their territories, his chances of a general—though hardly yet of a universal—recognition as Caliph will be good.”
¹⁷

The British intended to support the candidacy of Hussein for the position of “Pope” of Islam—a position that (unbeknown to them) did not exist; while (unbeknown to them too) the language they used encouraged him to attempt to become ruler of the entire Arab world—though in fact Storrs believed that it was a mistake for Hussein to aim at extending his rule at all. Kitchener and his lieutenants would have been astonished to learn what their communication signified to Moslems in Arabia.

I

Arthur Hirtzel, Secretary to the Political Department of the India Office, was not shown the Kitchener messages to Hussein until 12 December 1914—
after
they had reached Mecca. He was aghast. Hirtzel quickly criticized “a very dangerous correspondence” which, in hinting at an Arab caliphate, “does the very thing which this Office has always understood that H.M.G. would
not
do.”
¹
The Secretary of State for India, Lord Crewe, privately told the Viceroy that Kitchener refused to see that the spiritual prestige of the existing Caliph—the Turkish Sultan—remained intact, and that Moslems in India, who held him in high regard, even if they accepted his being replaced would never accept his being replaced as a result of foreign meddling.
²

When he saw Kitchener’s pledge to protect Arabian independence, Hirtzel protested that it was “a startling document,” “a guarantee given…in writing without the authority of H.M.G.”
³
Hirtzel’s protest was buttressed by an earlier memorandum from the Foreign Department of the Government of India, forwarded to the India Office with support from the governors of Aden, Bombay, and elsewhere, which explained that, “What we want is not a United Arabia: but a weak and disunited Arabia, split up into little principalities so far as possible under our suzerainty—but incapable of coordinated action against us, forming a buffer against the Powers in the West.”
⁴
This misunderstood British Cairo’s intentions: as Clayton later wrote to Wingate, “India seems obsessed with the fear of a powerful and united Arab state, which can never exist unless we are fool enough to create it.”
⁵

Attempting to soothe feelings in the India Office and in the Government of India, Lord Crewe explained that there had been no prior consultation about the Kitchener pledge because “this was a private communication of Lord Kitchener’s” rather than an official communication from His Majesty’s Government.
⁶
But the jurisdictional dispute that had flared up was not extinguished by such assurances; it flamed on heatedly throughout the war and afterward.

II

India’s institutional outlook was that of a beleaguered garrison spread too thin along an overextended line. Her instinct was to avoid new involvements. Her strategy for the Middle East was to hold the bare minimum—the coastline of the Gulf, to keep open the sea road to and from Britain—and to refuse to be drawn inland.

Nonetheless the unwanted war against the Ottoman Empire opened up the possibility of annexing nearby Basra and Baghdad. Colonization and economic development of these provinces would bring great riches, it was believed; and the Government of India was tempted, even though in the past its officials had often warned against assuming further territorial responsibilities. Whatever she did, British India was determined to identify her interests with those of her subjects, many of whom were Moslem; and Lord Kitchener’s Islamic policy posed a threat to this vital interest.

Kitchener’s initiatives also intruded into a foreign policy sphere in which the Government of India jealously guarded its rights against competitors within the British government. The Foreign Department of the Government of India exercised responsibility for relations with such neighboring areas as Tibet, Afghanistan, Persia, and eastern Arabia; and the Government of India also administered Britain’s protectorate over Aden and the Gulf sheikhdoms through a network of governors and resident agents. Thus when Kitchener entered into discussions with the ruler of Mecca, he intervened in an area of Indian concern and activity.

Though the Government of India had long followed a policy of holding the coastal ports along the Persian Gulf sea route to Suez, it had avoided involvement in the politics of the interior. Even so, Captain William Henry Shakespear, an officer in the Indian Political Service, had, as Political Agent in Kuwait, entered into relations of political and personal friendship with Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, an emir and a rising power in central Arabia, in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war.
⁷
Like Abdullah in Cairo, Ibn Saud had expressed a willingness for his domain to become a British client state; and like Kitchener and Storrs, Shakespear was obliged to indicate that his government was unwilling to interfere in matters of purely domestic Ottoman concern. This was even more true at the time because the Foreign Office backed the pro-Turkish House of Rashid, the paramount rulers of central Arabia and the House of Saud’s hereditary enemy. But with the outbreak of war, India was free to back her protégé Ibn Saud, only to find Cairo backing a rival in Mecca.

Cairo, in turn, found its own projects thwarted by India. In November 1914, the month that the Ottoman Empire entered the war, Cairo proposed (with the approval of Sir Edward Grey) to send Major al-Masri on an expedition to organize agitation and perhaps revolution in Mesopotamia. Ever fearful of igniting a conflagration that could blaze out of control, India blocked the proposal.

India believed that if the Arabs ever were to turn against the Turkish government, Ibn Saud should lead this revolt; but as of December 1914, the Viceroy argued that action along these lines would be premature.
⁸
Taking a contrary view, Kitchener and his followers in Cairo and Khartoum looked to Sherif Hussein as Britain’s important Arabian ally, and issued proclamations urging Arabs to revolt. Apart from this difference in overall strategy, Simla,
^*
on the basis of prewar dealings, was aware of others in the Arabic-speaking world who might be alienated by British support for the Emir of Mecca’s pretensions. There was Sheikh Mubarak of Kuwait, long a friend of Britain; there was the friendly ruler of the Persian port of Muhammara; there was even Sayyid Talib, the magnate of Basra, “dangerous scoundrel” though Hirtzel believed him to be.
⁹
A Foreign Office official, in warning of repercussions in Arabia, noted that the Emir of Mecca’s two enemies there—Ibn Saud and Seyyid Mohammed al-Idrisi, the ruler of Asir—were, in his view, Britain’s friends.
¹⁰

Indian officials made the point that Cairo’s policies were reckless; worse, they would not work. Britain’s sponsorship of an Arab caliphate would not only adversely affect Moslem opinion in India (and Moslem opinion in India was, from the British point of view, what the caliphate issue was principally about); it would also do no good in the Arab world. Percy Cox, of the Indian Political Service, reported in December 1915 that he had held meetings with the Sheikh of Kuwait and Ibn Saud, and that he had found the caliphate question to be of no interest to them. Ibn Saud said that among the Arabian chiefs “no one cared in the least who called himself Caliph,” and claimed that his Wahhabi sect did not recognize any caliphs after the first four (the last of whom had died more than a thousand years before).
¹¹

III

Oddly, nobody in London or in Simla seems to have drawn the appropriate conclusion from an episode at the end of 1914 that showed the power of the Caliph had been put to the test and had been shown to be illusory.

In November 1914, upon entering the First World War, the Sultan/Caliph proclaimed a
jihad
, or Holy War, against Britain, amidst well-planned demonstrations in Constantinople. There were crowds, bands, and speeches. The Wilhemstrasse ordered copies of the proclamation to be forwarded immediately to Berlin for translation into “Arabic and Indian” (
sic
) for leaflet propaganda among Moslem troops in enemy armies.
¹²
The staff of the German Foreign Ministry predicted that the Sultan’s actions would “awaken the fanaticism of Islam” and might lead to a large-scale revolution in India.
¹³

The German military attaché in Constantinople believed that the proclamation would influence Moslem soldiers in the British and French armies not to fire on German troops. However, the skeptical German ambassador proved a better prophet: he wrote in a private letter that the proclamation would “coax only a few Moslems”
¹⁴
to come over to the side of the Central Powers. He was right. The
jihad
proved to be, in a coinage of the First World War, a “dud”: a shell that was fired, but failed to explode.
^*

Enthusiasm for a Holy War was low, even in Constantinople. The
jihad
was proclaimed, but nothing happened. The British, however, continued to be wary and feared that any jolt might cause the unexploded shell suddenly to go off. In October 1915 Gilbert Clayton wrote a memorandum arguing that although the
jihad
until then had been a failure, it still might come alive.
¹⁵
According to Lord Crewe, Secretary of State for India, the only reason it had not worked was because the Porte did not control the Holy Places of the Hejaz: “If the Committee of Union and Progress get control of Mecca, they might be able to declare a regular Jehad [
sic
], probably affecting Afghanistan, and giving serious trouble in India.”
¹⁶

Meanwhile Wingate, Clayton, and Storrs were actively pursuing the Kitchener plan that called for an association in the postwar world with Arabia and with an Arabian religious primate. The cautious Clayton warned that the Arab caliphate was a delicate matter and should be proposed by Arabs themselves;
¹⁷
but Wingate, as always impatient to move forward, assured FitzGerald/Kitchener that “We shall do what we can to push the Arab movement & I have got various irons in the fire in this connection.”
¹⁸

But the India Office continued to fear that, as a result of these activities, Mecca would be drawn into the vortex of world politics—an eventuality that might disturb opinion in India at a time when any disturbance could prove fatal. During the course of the war, Simla was going to send many of its European soldiers to Europe, and large numbers of Indian troops as well. For the duration of the war it was in a weak position to quell whatever uprisings might occur. Cairo and Constantinople both seemed to Simla to be pursuing policies that threatened to inflame Moslem passions in India and thus to imperil the Indian Empire.

As the war progressed, British officials who ruled India increasingly came to believe that their most dangerous adversaries were neither the Turks nor the Germans, but the British officials governing Egypt; for despite India’s protests, British Cairo went ahead with its intrigues in Mecca.