the position of the sherif of mecca had long been anomalous. the title of ‘sherif implied descent from the prophet mohammed through his daughter fatima, and hassan, her elder son. authentic sherifs were inscribed on the family tree — an immense roll preserved at mecca, in custody of the emir of mecca, the elected sherif of sherifs, supposed to be the senior and noblest of all. the prophet’s family had held temporal rule in mecca for the last nine hundred years, and counted some two thousand persons.
the old ottoman governments regarded this clan of manticratic peers with a mixture of reverence and distrust. since they were too strong to be destroyed, the sultan salved his dignity by solemnly confirming their emir in place. this empty approval acquired dignity by lapse of time, until the new holder began to feel that it added a final seal to his election. at last the turks found that they needed the hejaz under their unquestioned sway as part of the stage furniture for their new pan-islamic notion. the fortuitous opening of the suez canal enabled them to garrison the holy cities. they projected the hejaz railway, and increased turkish influence among the tribes by money, intrigue, and armed expeditions.
as the sultan grew stronger there he ventured to assert himself more and more alongside the sherif, even in mecca itself, and upon occasion ventured to depose a sherif too magnificent for his views, and to appoint a successor from a rival family of the clan in hopes of winning the usual advantages from dissension. finally, abdul hamid took away some of the family to constantinople into honourable captivity. amongst these was hussein ibn ali, the future ruler, who was held a prisoner for nearly eighteen years. he took the opportunity to provide his sons — ali, abdulla, feisal, and zeid — with the modern education and experience which afterwards enabled them to lead the arab armies to success.
when abdul hamid fell, the less wily young turks reversed his policy and sent back sherif hussein to mecca as emir. he at once set to work unobtrusively to restore the power of the emirate, and strengthened himself on the old basis, keeping the while close and friendly touch with constantinople through his sons abdulla, vice-chairman of the turkish house, and feisal, member for jidda. they kept him informed of political opinion in the capital until war broke out, when they returned in haste to mecca.
the outbreak of war made trouble in the hejaz. the pilgrimage ceased, and with it the revenues and business of the holy cities. there was reason to fear that the indian food-ships would cease to come (since the sherif became technically an enemy subject); and as the province produced almost no food of its own, it would be precariously dependent on the goodwill of the turks, who might starve it by closing the hejaz railway. hussein had never been entirely at the turks’ mercy before; and at this unhappy moment they particularly needed his adherence to their ‘jehad’, the holy war of all moslems against christianity.
to become popularly effective this must be endorsed by mecca; and if endorsed it might plunge the east in blood. hussein was honourable, shrewd, obstinate and deeply pious. he felt that the holy war was doctrinally incompatible with an aggressive war, and absurd with a christian ally: germany. so he refused the turkish demand, and made at the same time a dignified appeal to the allies not to starve his province for what was in no way his people’s fault. the turks in reply at once instituted a partial blockade of the hejaz by controlling the traffic on the pilgrim railway. the british left his coast open to specially-regulated food vessels.
the turkish demand was, however, not the only one which the sherif received. in january 1915, yisin, head of the mesopotamian officers, ali riza, head of the damascus officers, and abd el ghani el areisi, for the syrian civilians, sent down to him a concrete proposal for a military mutiny in syria against the turks. the oppressed people of mesopotamia and syria, the committees of the ahad and the fetah, were calling out to him as the father of the arabs, the moslem of moslems, their greatest prince, their oldest notable, to save them from the sinister designs of talaat and jemal.
hussein, as politician, as prince, as moslem, as modernist, and as nationalist, was forced to listen to their appeal. he sent feisal, his third son, to damascus, to discuss their projects as his representative, and to make a report. he sent ali, his eldest son, to medina, with orders to raise quietly, on any excuse he pleased, troops from villagers and tribesmen of the hejaz, and to hold them ready for action if feisal called. abdulla, his politic second son, was to sound the british by letter, to learn what would be their attitude towards a possible arab revolt against turkey.
feisal reported in january 1915, that local conditions were good, but that the general war was not going well for their hopes. in damascus were three divisions of arab troops ready for rebellion. in aleppo two other divisions, riddled with arab nationalism, were sure to join in if the others began. there was only one turkish division this side of the taurus, so that it was certain that the rebels would get possession of syria at the first effort. on the other hand, public opinion was less ready for extreme measures, and the military class quite sure that germany would win the war and win it soon. if, however, the allies landed their australian expedition (preparing in egypt) at alexandretta, and so covered the syrian flank, then it would be wise and safe to risk a final german victory and the need to make a previous separate peace with the turks.
delay followed, as the allies went to the dardanelles, and not to alexandretta. feisal went after them to get first-hand knowledge of gallipoli conditions, since a breakdown of turkey would be the arab signal. then followed stagnation through the months of the dardanelles campaign. in that slaughter-house the remaining ottoman first-line army was destroyed. the disaster to turkey of the accumulated losses was so great that feisal came back to syria, judging it a possible moment in which to strike, but found that meanwhile the local situation had become unfavourable.
his syrian supporters were under arrest or in hiding, and their friends being hanged in scores on political charges. he found the well-disposed arab divisions either exiled to distant fronts, or broken up in drafts and distributed among turkish units. the arab peasantry were in the grip of turkish military service, and syria prostrate before the merciless jemal pasha. his assets had disappeared. he wrote to his father counselling further delay, till england should be ready and turkey in extremities. unfortunately, england was in a deplorable condition. her forces were falling back shattered from the dardanelles. the slow-drawn agony of kut was in its last stage; and the senussi rising, coincident with the entry of bulgaria, threatened her on new flanks.
feisal’s position was hazardous in the extreme. he was at the mercy of the members of the secret society, whose president he had been before the war. he had to live as the guest of jemal pasha, in damascus, rubbing up his military knowledge; for his brother ali was raising the troops in hejaz on the pretext that he and feisal would lead them against the suez canal to help the turks. so feisal, as a good ottoman and officer in the turkish service, had to live at headquarters, and endure acquiescingly the insults and indignities heaped upon his race by the bully jemal in his cups.
jemal would send for feisal and take him to the hanging of his syrian friends. these victims of justice dared not show that they knew feisal’s real hopes, any more than he dared show his mind by word or look, since disclosure would have condemned his family and perhaps their race to the same fate. only once did he burst out that these executions would cost jemal all that he was trying to avoid; and it took the intercessions of his constantinople friends, chief men in turkey, to save him from the price of these rash words.
feisal’s correspondence with his father was an adventure in itself. they communicated by means of old retainers of the family, men above suspicion, who went up and down the hejaz railway, carrying letters in sword-hilts, in cakes, sewn between the soles of sandals, or in invisible writings on the wrappers of harmless packages. in all of them feisal reported unfavourable things, and begged his father to postpone action till a wiser time.
hussein, however, was not a whit cast down by emir feisal’s discouragements. the young turks in his eyes were so many godless transgressors of their creed and their human duty — traitors to the spirit of the time, and to the higher interests of islam. though an old man of sixty-five, he was cheerfully determined to wage war against them, relying upon justice to cover the cost. hussein trusted so much in god that he let his military sense lie fallow, and thought hejaz able to fight it out with turkey on a fair field. so he sent abd el kader el abdu to feisal with a letter that all was now ready for inspection by him in medina before the troops started for the front feisal informed jemal, and asked leave to go down, but, to his dismay, jemal replied that enver pasha, the generalissimo, was on his way to the province, and that they would visit medina together and inspect them. feisal had planned to raise his father’s crimson banner as soon as he arrived in medina, and so to take the turks unawares; and here he was going to be saddled with two uninvited guests to whom, by the arab law of hospitality, he could do no harm, and who would probably delay his action so long that the whole secret of the revolt would be in jeopardy!
in the end matters passed off well, though the irony of the review was terrible. enver, jemal and feisal watched the troops wheeling and turning in the dusty plain outside the city gate, rushing up and down in mimic camel-battle, or spurring their horses in the javelin game after immemorial arab fashion. ‘and are all these volunteers for the holy war?’ asked enver at last, turning to feisal. ‘yes,’ said feisal. willing to fight to the death against the enemies of the faithful?’ yes,’ said feisal again; and then the arab chiefs came up to be presented, and sherif ali ibn el hussein, of modhig, drew him aside whispering, ‘my lord, shall we kill them now?’ and feisal said, ‘no, they are our guests.’
the sheikhs protested further; for they believed that so they could finish off the war in two blows. they were determined to force feisal’s hand; and he had to go among them, just out of earshot but in full view, and plead for the lives of the turkish dictators, who had murdered his best friends on the scaffold. in the end he had to make excuses, take the party back quickly to medina, picket the banqueting hall with his own slaves, and escort enver and jemal back to damascus to save them from death on the way. he explained this laboured courtesy by the plea that it was the arab manner to devote everything to guests; but enver and jemal being deeply suspicious of what they had seen, imposed a strict blockade of the hejaz, and ordered large turkish reinforcements thither. they wanted to detain feisal in damascus; but telegrams came from medina claiming his immediate return to prevent disorder, and, reluctantly, jemal let him go on condition that his suite remained behind as hostages.
feisal found medina full of turkish troops, with the staff and headquarters of the twelfth army corps under fakhri pasha, the courageous old butcher who had bloodily ‘purified’ zeitun and urfa of armenians. clearly the turks had taken warning, and feisal’s hope of a surprise rush, winning success almost without a shot, had become impossible. however, it was too late for prudence. from damascus four days later his suite took horse and rode out east into the desert to take refuge with nuri shaalan, the beduin chieftain; and the same day feisal showed his hand. when he raised the arab flag, the pan-islamic supra-national state, for which abdul hamid had massacred and worked and died, and the german hope of the co-operation of islam in the world-plans of the kaiser, passed into the realm of dreams. by the mere fact of his rebellion the sherif had closed these two fantastic chapters of history.
rebellion was the gravest step which political men could take, and the success or failure of the arab revolt was a gamble too hazardous for prophecy. yet, for once, fortune favoured the bold player, and the arab epic tossed up its stormy road from birth through weakness, pain and doubt, to red victory. it was the just end to an adventure which had dared so much, but after the victory there came a slow time of disillusion, and then a night in which the fighting men found that all their hopes had failed them. now, at last, may there have come to them the white peace of the end, in the knowledge that they achieved a deathless thing, a lucent inspiration to the children of their race.
