Arabs (35 page)

The Iraqi resistance movement was both well-organized and disciplined. The leadership drew up guidelines for common action, which they had printed and distributed through local printing presses. One leaflet printed in Najaf in July 1920 decreed the rules of engagement: “Each head of tribe must make all their members understand that the goal of this uprising is the demand for complete independence.”
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The insurgent tribesmen were instructed to make “independence” their battle cry. They were to ensure the smooth administration of all towns and villages that fell under their control, they were to take good care of all English and Indian prisoners, and most of all they were to preserve all weapons, ammunition, equipment, and medicines captured from the British, as such supplies were “among the greatest means to achieve victory.”

Initially, the uprising spread across all three provinces, though the principal area of conflict lay in the Middle Euphrates region, between Baghdad and Basra, with Najaf and Karbala at the center of the movement. Here, the British were forced to withdraw their troops as the insurgents took control of towns and villages, established local government, and managed to collect taxes and preserve order. Although the British managed to prevent any major outbreaks in the capital city, the areas surrounding Baghdad were soon overrun by insurgents. The tribes to the northeast of Baghdad raised a major revolt in August 1920 and, for one month, held Baquba and the other towns to the north of the Diyala River. Another major uprising took place to the west of Baghdad, in Faluja.
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The British hastily withdrew their troops to consolidate their forces before striking back—with a vengeance.

Faced with a nationwide insurgency, the British had no choice but to reinforce their overstretched military in Iraq to regain authority over their new mandate. Fresh troops from India raised the number of British forces in Iraq from 60,000 in July 1920 to over 100,000 that October. In the course of September and October, the British completed their reconquest of Iraq with overwhelming force, using heavy artillery and aerial bombardment. They regained Faluja in early September, inflicting a heavy punishment on the local tribes. Later that month they proceeded against the tribes of the Diyala River. They then moved on to the Middle Euphrates. A journalist in Najaf described the British onslaught: “They attacked the houses of tribal shaykhs and burned them down, contents and all. They killed many men, horses and livestock.” The British were relentless in pursuing the insurgents and refused all negotiations. “The officers had no other interest than our extermination, or putting
us on trial,” he continued. “We agree to their request for a truce and they violate it. We allow them to withdraw with their arms when we have secured [territory] from them and they respond treacherously with attacks on us. In recent days there has been bloodshed and the destruction of populous towns and the violation of the sanctity of places of worship to make humanity weep.”
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With the surrender of Najaf and Karbala at the end of October, the uprising came to an end. The costs—human and material—were high. According to British estimates, over 2,200 British and Indian soldiers and some 8,450 Iraqis were killed or wounded.
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There are no estimates for the material losses of the Iraqi people.

The Uprising of 1920, referred to in Iraq as the “Revolution of 1920,” has a special place in the nationalist mythology of the modern Iraqi state comparable to the American Revolution of 1776 in the United States. These were not social revolutions so much as popular uprisings against foreign occupiers, and they marked the starting point of nationalist movements in both countries. Whereas most westerners have no knowledge of the 1920 uprising, generations of Iraqi schoolchildren have grown up learning how nationalist heroes stood up against foreign armies and imperialism in towns like Faluja, Baquba, and Najaf—the Iraqi equivalents of Lexington and Concord.

The First World War and the postwar settlement together constituted one of the most momentous periods in modern Arab history. Four centuries of Ottoman rule came to a decisive end across the Arab world in October 1918. Few Arab contemporaries could have imagined a world without the Ottomans. The nineteenth-century reforms had extended Istanbul’s hold on the Arab provinces by a more elaborate bureaucracy, communications infrastructure like railways and telegraphs, and by making an Ottoman education available to a growing number of Arab subjects through expansions in the school system. The Arabs probably felt more connected to the Ottoman world by the start of the twentieth century than they ever had before.

The links between the Arabs and the Ottomans only intensified after 1908, under the Young Turks. By that time, the Ottomans had lost nearly all their European provinces in the Balkans. The Young Turks had inherited a Turco-Arab empire and did all they could to intensify Istanbul’s grip over the Arab provinces. Young Turk polices might have alienated Arab nationalists, but they succeeded in making Arab independence seem an unattainable goal.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists entered a period of intense activity, driven by aspirations to independent rule. For a brief, heady moment
between 1918 and 1920, political leaders in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Hijaz believed themselves on the threshold of a new age of independence. They looked to the Paris Peace Conference, and to the new world order promised by Woodrow Wilson, to confirm their ambitions. They were, without exception, to be disappointed.

The new age the Arabs faced would in fact be shaped by European imperialism rather than Arab independence. The European powers established their strategic imperatives and resolved all points of disagreement between themselves through the postwar peace process. France added Syria and Lebanon to its Arab possessions in North Africa. Britain was now master of Egypt, Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. Though there would be some tinkering with specific frontiers, the European powers drew up the boundaries of the modern states of the Middle East as we now know them (with the significant exception of Palestine). The Arabs were never reconciled to this fundamental injustice, and they spent the remainder of the interwar years in conflict with their colonial masters in pursuit of their long-standing aspiration for independence.

CHAPTER 7

By the time of the postwar settlement conferring the mandates of Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine on Great Britain, the British Empire in the Arab world was already a century old. The British East India Company had been drawn into the treacherous waters of the Persian Gulf in the early nineteenth century to combat the growing threat to merchant shipping posed by the seaborne tribes of Sharja and Ras al-Khaima, now part of the United Arab Emirates. The Persian Gulf was a vital land-and-sea link between the Eastern Mediterranean and India, and the British were determined to put a stop to Gulf piracy. In the process of subduing what they called the “pirate coast,” the British transformed the Persian Gulf into a British lake.

The record of British grievances against the Qasimi confederation of tribes in Sharja and Ras al-Khaima dated back to 1797. The East India Company attributed a string of attacks on British, Ottoman, and Arab shipping to the Qawasim (plural of Qasimi). In September 1809, the East India Company dispatched a sixteen-ship punitive expedition to the pirate coast. The fleet was under instructions to attack the town of Ras al-Khaima and burn the ships and stores of the Qasimi raiders. Between November 1809 and January 1810, the British fleet inflicted significant damage on Ras al-Khaima and a string of four other Qasimi ports. The British burned sixty large and forty-three small vessels and seized some £20,000 in allegedly stolen property before returning home. Yet for failing to secure a formal agreement with the Qawasim, the British would continue to face attacks on their shipping in the Gulf.
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Within five years of the first British expedition, the Qasimis had rebuilt their fleet and resumed their seaborne raiding. In 1819 a second British expedition was dispatched from Bombay to subdue the Qasimis. With twice the forces, and a focus
on Ras al-Khaima, the expedition not only succeeded in seizing and burning most of the Qasimi shipping but also achieved the political settlement that had eluded the first campaign. On January 8, 1820, the shaykhs of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman, Umm al-Qaiwain, and Bahrain, as well as the Qasimi family who ruled over Sharjah and Ras al-Khaima, signed a general treaty pledging a complete and permanent cessation to all attacks on British shipping. They also accepted a common set of maritime rules in return for trade access to all British ports in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. By granting the seafaring shaykhdoms access to ports under British control, the agreement gave all parties an economic incentive to preserve the peace on the high seas and in-shore waters. These terms were confirmed in the Perpetual Treaty of 1853, which outlawed maritime hostilities between all of the states in the Gulf. The mini-states of the “pirate coast” now came to be known as the Trucial States, so called for the formal truce struck with Britain and among themselves.

It was the beginning of a nineteenth century
Pax Britannicus
during which the Persian Gulf developed into an out-and-out British protectorate. The British deepened their control over the Gulf through a series of bilateral agreements concluded with the rulers of individual shaykhdoms. In 1880 the shaykh of Bahrain signed an agreement that effectively placed his foreign relations under British control, promising “to abstain from entering into negotiations or making treaties of any sort with any State or Government other than the British without the consent of the said British Government.” The British concluded similar agreements with the other Persian Gulf shaykhdoms.
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In the 1890s the British went even further, obtaining from the Gulf rulers “nonalien-ation bonds,” in which they pledged not to “cede, sell, mortgage or otherwise give for occupation any part of [their] territory save to the British Government.”
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Britain took these measures to ensure that neither the Ottoman Empire, which since the 1870s had sought to extend its sovereignty over the Persian Gulf, nor any of its European rivals might threaten Britain’s paramount control over this strategic sea route to its empire in India. Kuwait and Qatar both sought British protection against Ottoman expansionism and joined the Gulf “protectorate” in 1899 and 1916, respectively.

Britain’s growing reliance on oil gave the Persian Gulf added significance in the twentieth century. With the conversion of the Royal Navy from coal to oil in 1907, the Arab shaykhdoms of the Persian Gulf took on a new strategic role in British imperial thinking. In 1913 Winston Churchill, then first lord of the admiralty, confronted the House of Commons with Britain’s new dependence on oil. “In the year 1907,” he revealed, “the first flotilla of ocean-going destroyers wholly dependent upon oil was created, and since then, in each successive year, another flotilla of ‘oil only’ destroyers has been built.” By 1913, he claimed, there were some 100 new oil-powered ships in the Royal Navy.
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As a result, Britain’s priorities in the Persian Gulf expanded from trade and communications with India to reflect this new strategic interest in oil.

The first major oil reserve in the Persian Gulf region was struck in May 1908 in central Iran. Geologists had every reason to believe that exportable quantities of oil remained to be discovered in the Arab states of the Gulf. The British began to conclude agreements with the gulf shaykhdoms for exclusive rights to explore for oil. The ruler of Kuwait gave the British a concession in October 1913, pledging to allow only persons or firms approved by His Majesty’s government to prospect for oil in his territory. A similar agreement was concluded with the ruler of Bahrain on May 14, 1914. The prospect of oil, combined with commerce and imperial communications, made the Persian Gulf an area of particular strategic importance to Great Britain by the First World War. In 1915 a British government report defined “our special and supreme position in the Persian Gulf” as “one of the cardinal principles of our policy in the East.”
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In 1913 a new Arab state burst upon the
Pax Britannicus
in the Persian Gulf. The Al Sa‘ud (whose eighteenth-century confederation challenged Ottoman rule from Iraq to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina until defeated by Muhammad ’Ali’s forces in 1818) had reestablished their partnership with the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab to launch a new Saudi-Wahhabi confederation. At their head was a charismatic young leader named Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Faysal Al Sa’ud (1880–1953), better known in the West as Ibn Saud.

Ibn Saud began his rise to power in 1902 when he led his followers to victory over their long-standing rivals, the Rashidi clan, to seize the Central Arabian oasis town of Riyadh. His fighters, known as the Ikhwan (“the brothers”), were zealots who sought to impose their austere Wahhabi interpretation of Islam across the Arabian Peninsula. They also reaped the rewards of religiously sanctioned plunder whenever they conquered a town that rejected their message. These incentives of faith and gain combined to make the Ikhwan the strongest fighting force on the peninsula. Ibn Saud declared Riyadh his capital, and over the next eleven years he deployed the Ikhwan to expand the territory under his rule from the Arabian interior to the Persian Gulf.