The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (44 page)

Even after these early efforts to end the war with Turkey by negotiation failed, Fitzmaurice kept his ear to the ground. “Those in touch with Young Turk circles state that the latter have been discussing advisability of a separate peace,” he cabled to Grey from Sofia on May 7. Sure enough, three weeks later the idea resurfaced in Paris.
⁴
It proved stillborn because the French could not promise to keep the Russians from Constantinople. It resurfaced in California
⁵
in August 1915, when an Ottoman commissioner to the San Francisco Exhibition contacted a British official there. He came up against the same stumbling block: Britain could not protect Constantinople either. At the end of the year, Russia tried to bribe
⁶
Djemal Pasha to end the war—but he would have to give up Constantinople. Arthur Balfour had it right when the Foreign Office informed the War Council of these various maneuvers. “No harm in trying,”
⁷
he scribbled on the F.O. minute, “but it is incredible that the Turks will agree.”

In Britain anti-Turkish sentiment ran high during the war. This was nothing new: It had been running high at least since the 1870s, when Britons learned to despise the murderous Sultan Abdul Hamid II along with the corruption of his court, the dead hand of his bureaucracy, and the brutality of his minions, in short everything that the great nineteenth-century Liberal, William Gladstone, summed up in his memorable epithet “the unspeakable Turk.” Conservatives did not dispute this judgment, only the foreign policy that flowed from it. From the floor of the House of Commons, Gladstone’s great Conservative antagonist, Benjamin Disraeli, said of the Ottomans, they “seldom resort to torture, but generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner.” Where opposition to the Ottoman regime constituted a bedrock of Liberal foreign policy, therefore, willingness to overlook Ottoman faults constituted the Conservative. Disraeli held that Britain must practice realpolitik in the real world. She must defend the far-flung interests of the British Empire; she must keep the Russians out of the Mediterranean Sea and far away from the Suez Canal; and if that meant allying with the brutal regime on the Bosporus, so be it.

The advent of the CUP in 1908 changed little. Gladstone was gone, but the Liberal government kept the Young Turk government at arm’s length;
it joined the Triple Entente with France and Russia, Turkey’s traditional enemy. Disraeli was long gone too, but many Conservatives still preferred a Turkish alliance to one with Russia. Nevertheless they, as much as the Liberals, generally viewed Young Turks as atheists and radicals who aped the West without truly understanding it, and who continued all the while to indulge the inbred Oriental vices: intrigue, treachery, and violence.

British anti-Ottoman sentiment had a religious component. Many Ottoman subjects practiced the Muslim religion, over which the Ottoman sultan presided as caliph. Ironically, Britain too ruled over a Muslim empire whose main outposts were in South Asia, Egypt, and Sudan. The British Muslim empire numbered nearly a hundred million people and was second in size only to the Ottoman Muslim empire. Inevitably British-governed Muslims flocked to the imperial center as students, business and professional men, and tourists. Muslim lascars (seamen) lived in British port cities when their ships docked. By 1914 Britain contained a small but distinct Muslim community.

That community did not receive a warm welcome. When William Quilliam, a prosperous solicitor from the Isle of Man, converted to Islam and established what appears to have been Britain’s first mosque, in Liverpool in 1891, the response was harsh. A crowd greeted the muezzin’s call to Friday services “with ‘discordant yells
⁸
and loud execrations,’ pelted him with mud, stones and filth; and also pelted worshippers leaving the mosque.” In 1895 “furious Christians threatened to burn Sheikh Quilliam alive.” Ten years later things had not much improved, even in cosmopolitan London. “Opposition was
⁹
very keen in those days and many obstacles were placed in our path,” recalled one who claimed to have been the sole British-born worshipper then taking part in London’s Muslim services. During the next decade passions abated, but general ill will did not. When the war was about four months old, that first Anglo-Muslim, who now called himself Sheikh Khalid Sheldrake, wrote to the king: “Your Majesty, May I venture
¹⁰
most humbly to bring to your notice the existence of a grave danger at the present crisis? The Press have issued Cartoons and articles in which the Muslim creed, and the Sultan (its Caliph) have been held up to ridicule.”

Old habits of thought died hard among the population as a whole, but in December 1914 the last thing the British government wanted was to alienate Muslims. When Turkey entered the war, the sultan/caliph immediately declared jihad against his Christian enemies. Various imams endorsed and repeated his call. The question for Britain was how her hundred million Muslim subjects would react. Starting the Arab hare, setting up the grand sharif as an opposite pole to the Ottoman sultan, suggesting that he might
become caliph himself—all this was part of Britain’s strategy for vitiating the sultan’s holy war and retaining the loyalty of her own Muslim subjects.

The strategy was not completely successful. Muslim agitators, some of them financed by the Ottoman and German governments, made difficulties in South Asia and throughout the Middle East. Their message reached as far as Europe, even Britain. On October 26, 1915, somebody walked into the East Central London post office and dropped a letter into the box. It was a warning to Prime Minister Asquith, the third he had received so far, against making war on “our brothers and the Caliph
¹¹
of Mohammedans … The responsibility falls on you alone and the chastisement for deceiving the nation will be your deprivation from life, and in the world to come you will undergo the worst of torture … Beware, beware.”

During the war British Intelligence kept
¹²
a weather eye on British Muslims great and small, whether politically moderate, liberal, or radical, and on those who sympathized with them and on the places where they gathered, not merely in South Asia and Egypt but in England too. It kept tabs, for example, on the chief Muslim cleric in Britain, Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, who appears from his writings to have been a gentle, tolerant soul; also on some of the more radical members of an Islamic Society, including its general secretary, the barrister, poet, author, and pan-Islamist Mushir Hussein Kidwai; and the pan-Africanist, anti-imperialist Dusé Mohamed Ali. It even opened the mail of a troublesome Liberal MP, Joseph King,
¹³
who although only tangentially concerned with British Muslims publicly attacked the government for permitting the Secret Service to employ agents provocateurs against these and other groups.

Men such as Dusé Mohamed Ali, Mushir Hussein Kidwai, and Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din figure in our story because their aims and aspirations are relevant to the movement for a separate peace with Turkey.

Dusé Mohamed Ali was an Egyptian-born, English-educated son of a Sudanese woman and an Egyptian army officer who had died in the failed nationalist uprising of 1881–82. An erstwhile actor who toured the United States and Canada as well as Britain, Mohamed turned to journalism in 1909 at the age of forty-five. In 1911 he published to critical acclaim
In the Land of the Pharos
, which was said to be the first short history of Egypt written in English by an Egyptian. A year later he founded the
African Times and Orient Review
. This sporadically published journal provided a forum for opponents of British imperialism. It opened its pages not merely to critics who wished to soften what they deemed to be a well-intentioned if occasionally unjust and harsh movement, but also to those like Kidwai who wished to tear up the imperialist movement root and branch. Dusé Mohamed
Ali also founded a League of Justice “to defend the rights of native peoples.” In a secret summation of his character, an agent of the India Office deemed him to be quite “capable of political mischief.”
¹⁴

The barrister Mushir Hussein Kidwai came from a well-connected and politically active South Asian family, against which he rebelled. The India Office thought little of him. “He is so peculiar
¹⁵
that occasionally he is spoken of as not quite right in his head. I think he is quite sane, but not sensible,” judged one of its agents. When Kidwai arrived in England shortly before the war he joined the League of Justice. He often contributed to the
African Times and Orient Review:
“long letters, almost always taking an extreme view of the matter, whatever it is.” The agent deemed Kidwai honest but extreme: “I don’t think he would
¹⁶
touch swindling in any form. But he is certainly a pro-Turk, and a friend of the advanced political party.”

As for Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din,
¹⁷
he was a South Asian who had abandoned his legal practice to become a Muslim missionary and to lead the sole mosque in England, at Woking, some thirty miles south of London. By 1914 this institution had become the center of Muslim activity in Britain. With its domes and minarets, set in the grounds of what once had been the Royal Dramatic College, it was (and remains to this day) an impressive albeit incongruous structure. Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din conducted services there; he started a monthly journal, the
Islamic Review;
and he helped to strengthen the London-based Islamic Society that Kidwai served as an officer and that boasted some three hundred members, many of whom made at least a weekly trek to the Woking mosque. Wherever he went and whenever he wrote, Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din emphasized the tolerant, progressive aspects of his religious creed. He and his followers stressed that Islam made no racial distinctions. As one of the followers wrote, when Muslims gathered annually in the early days of the last lunar month to worship in Mecca, “you would see a black
¹⁸
presiding over a meeting of white people. Men in Islam were estimated by their moral greatness, and neither color, [nor] rank, nor wealth was any criterion for preference.”

When Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din and Mushir Hussein Kidwai spoke at a meeting organized by the Islamic Society in June 1917, the British government took note. The purpose of the meeting was to protest the possibility of Palestine becoming a Jewish state under Britain’s protection. Kidwai argued in his opening address that Palestine was “holier to the Muslims than … to the Jews or the Christians … So if the Zionistic ambitions of our Jewish brothers must be realized; if they have suffered for the last two thousand years … suffered, mind, never at the hands of Muslims but always by the hands of Christians … then those ambitions can only be realized by the
cooperation and under the suzerainty of Muslims.” And Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din said in part: “The great Temple of Solomon
¹⁹
at present is below the surface of the ground with a large and splendid mosque over it … Does not restoration of the Temple of Solomon mean demolishing the mosque and its appurtenances?” Such statements seem mild enough, but on the cover of the Foreign Office file in which the report of this meeting rests, one of the mandarins scrawled, “Christianophobe C.U.P.-ophils.”

An ill wind of anti-Ottoman and anti-Muslim sentiment swept through Britain before and during the war, even among members of the government, who worried that British Muslim subjects might join in a holy war against their rulers. But the anxiety did not touch everyone. Those who resisted tended to be people who actually knew something about the Ottoman Empire and its inhabitants: journalists and academics, for example, but also people who had traveled there, or who had worked there either on business or for Britain. Among the latter category, Mark Sykes, Aubrey Herbert, and George Lloyd had overlapped in Constantinople in 1905 as honorary attachés. Of the three, Sykes reacted most publicly to the experience, extolling traditional Ottoman mores and practices, including religious ones, in books, articles, and speeches, presenting them always with flair and élan. He hated the Young Turks, however, whom he accused of diluting the admirable ancient Ottoman conventions with a half-baked and half-understood Western ideology based upon the principles of the French Revolution. Less voluble but equally impressed by what they had seen of the pre-CUP Ottoman Empire, George Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert advocated a renewed Anglo-Ottoman alliance. Unlike Sykes, they continued advocating it even after the Young Turks came to power.

Herbert went further. He took seriously the Young Turk promises of constitutional government, equality before the law of all Ottoman subjects including women, cultural rights of small nationalities within the Ottoman Empire, and so on. He favored an Anglo-Ottoman alliance not merely because he thought it made strategic sense for Britain but also because he thought the Ottoman government worthy of British support, worthier than brutal, reactionary tsarist Russia. Herbert got to know the leading Young Turks, Enver Pasha and, most particularly, Talaat Pasha. What was more, he liked them.

In late December 1913 Herbert, now Conservative MP for South Somerset, received an invitation to join “an Ottoman Association”
²⁰
whose aim would be to foster Anglo-Ottoman understanding. Among the names listed
²¹
as endorsing this fledgling body was that of his friend George Lloyd, who had also become a Conservative MP, for West Staffordshire. (Sykes too
had entered Parliament by this time, as Conservative MP for Kingston-upon-Hull, but as strongly opposed as he was to the CUP, he refused to endorse or join the society.) Unlike Sykes, Herbert did join it. But do not think the Anglo-Ottoman Society was dominated by Conservative politicians. Liberal, Labour, and Irish Nationalist MPs lent their names to it too, as did several members of the House of Lords, one of whom, Lord Lamington, became its president. Then there were the men of business, journalism, and academia. The name of at least one Jew, Jaakoff Prelooker, a Russian refugee and liberal rabbi, figures on the society’s early masthead. Startlingly, on the eve of war the names of Moses Gaster and Lucien Wolf
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are listed as members of the society’s executive committee. And at the body’s meetings
²³
we find Dusé Mohamed Ali, Mushir Hussein Kidwai, and Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din speaking in favor of various motions.