A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  II

  Toward the end of the summer of 1914, as the Ottoman war approached, Gilbert Clayton recalled that Abdullah, the favorite son of Hussein, the ruler of Mecca, had visited Cairo some months earlier and had suggested that Arabia might be ripe for revolt. At the time, Abdullah had been afraid that the Young Turks were about to move against his father; and Abdullah, whose indolent disposition hid a bold intelligence, looked about for possible support from abroad. But shortly afterward his father and the Porte composed their differences, so that British assistance was no longer needed.

  Even now, it is not certain what Abdullah said in Cairo and what was said to him. Abdullah apparently first met Lord Kitchener there in 1912 or 1913. He met Kitchener in Cairo again in February and April 1914, and also met with Ronald Storrs. Abdullah seems to have sought assurances of British help if the Porte were to seek to depose his father. At the time, Kitchener, who inquired in detail about the difficulties in Arabia, seems to have disclaimed any interest in interfering in internal Ottoman affairs. Abdullah may have been less impressed by the disclaimer of interest than by the expression of concern.3

  To Storrs, Abdullah apparently claimed—falsely—that the rival chiefs of the Arabian peninsula were prepared to follow his father in opposing the Porte’s designs. He suggested a future relationship between Arabia and Britain similar to that between Afghanistan and Britain, in which the former exercised internal self-rule and the latter administered all foreign relations. Though the idea was attractive to him, Storrs, like his chief, was unable to offer Abdullah the encouragement that he sought.4

  Several Arabian emirs had indeed been in conflict for years with the Young Turk leadership in Constantinople. But Gilbert Clayton failed to appreciate the extent to which religious, dynastic, and other differences divided them. Arabic-speaking émigrés in Cairo, with whom he met, may have misled him in this connection. In fact none of the Arabian emirs was willing to accept one of the others as a leader.

  Prominent among the Arabic-speaking exiles living in Cairo with whom Clayton spoke was a colorful former Ottoman army officer and C.U.P. politician named Aziz Ali al-Masri. Al-Masri, of Circassian ancestry,* was born and brought up in Egypt; he had attended military school in the Ottoman Empire. After military service in the field, he had emerged as a leader of the Young Turkey Party. Yet he was a mere major attached to the General Staff at a time when Enver, a classmate of whom he held a low opinion, had become Minister of War. Discontented, al-Masri responded by organizing al’Ahd, a small secret society of army officers who objected to the C.U.P.’s centralizing policies and its failure to give those who spoke Arabic their fair share of high office. The officers of al-’Ahd were united in their opposition to the Turkifying policies adopted by the C.U.P. They advocated either admitting the Arabic-speaking populations to a greater share of power in the central government, or else decentralizing and allowing them greater autonomy at the local level, or perhaps both.5

  Enver Pasha was responsible for having had Major al-Masri arrested and convicted on trumped-up charges in early 1914. Thus al-Masri unwillingly found himself cast in the role of an Arab revolutionary—unwillingly, because he aspired to leadership of the Ottoman Empire as a whole, not a mere section of it. Responding to opinion in Cairo, Lord Kitchener intervened on his behalf; and Djemal Pasha arranged to have him pardoned and exiled to his native Egypt. An opponent, since his childhood, of British rule in Egypt, anti-British, pro-German, a supporter of the Ottoman Empire who was opposed only to its government, a military politician who numbered a mere handful of colleagues among his supporters, al-Masri was misunderstood by the British intelligence officers who wrongly regarded him both as powerful and as a potential ally.

  In early September 1914, it appears that al-Masri visited the British Agency in Cairo, and met with Clayton.6 Al-Masri knew that Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud and other Arabian leaders had in the past considered rising against the Porte. Perhaps he told Clayton so. Perhaps Clayton was reminded of Abdullah’s visit and of what he had said to Storrs and Kitchener.

  After seeing al-Masri, Clayton met with Ronald Storrs and made arrangements for him to forward a secret memorandum to Lord Kitchener. The Clayton memorandum was enclosed in a letter that Storrs was to send to his old chief on the relatively innocuous subject of camels.

  III

  It was a common British concern in 1914 that the Ottoman Empire, if it entered the war, might launch an attack against the Suez Canal; and, like officials in the war ministries of Europe who analyzed the military potential of neighboring enemy countries in terms of railroad facilities, Ronald Storrs focused attention on the supply of camels available to the Ottoman forces. The Ottoman army, he wrote in his letter to Kitchener, would count on obtaining its animals from the camel-breeders of the western district of Arabia, the Hejaz, and what Storrs proposed was to encourage the local ruler—the Emir of Mecca—not to deliver them.

  The message about camels served as his cover: with it Storrs forwarded Clayton’s secret memorandum of 6 September 1914 to Kitchener which urged him to enter into conversations with the ruler of Mecca for other purposes. One of the issues raised in Clayton’s memorandum was whether the Ottoman Sultan could be replaced as Caliph of Islam by an Arabian leader friendly to Britain. If so, the Emir of Mecca, the guardian of the Moslem Holy Places, was an obvious candidate, the more so as he was in a position to provide Britain with important assistance in the matter of pilgrimages.

  In the rhythm of life in the Islamic East, no activity was more important than the mass pilgrimage each year to the Holy Places of Arabia—a pilgrimage that every Moslem able to do so is commanded to make at least once in his lifetime. The world war interfered, particularly in 1915. Even if Indian Moslems were to forgive Britain for going to war against the only significant independent Islamic power, there was a question as to whether they would forgive the disruption of the pilgrimage that played so large a role in their lives.

  The Holy Places of Arabia, Mecca, and Medina are located in the Hejaz, whose ruler therefore was in a position to safeguard the right of British Moslems to continue visiting their shrines despite the war. Claiming descent from the Prophet’s family, the Emir of Mecca—in addition to being ruler of the Hejaz—was in a position to assume the mantle of the Caliph.

  In his secret memorandum, Clayton made the erroneous assertion that the rival regional leaders of the Arabian peninsula—the rulers of Asir and the Yemen, as well as Ibn Saud and perhaps Ibn Rashid of Nejd—were coming together with the ruler of Mecca to work for “an Arabia for the Arabs.”7 According to Clayton’s memorandum, the movement was encouraged by the Khedive, the nominal ruler of Egypt under the Sultan, who also regarded himself as a candidate to succeed the Sultan as Caliph of Islam. It is not clear how Clayton intended to reconcile the conflicting ambitions of this diverse group.

  The claim that the other rival leaders would unite behind the Emir of Mecca was one that Abdullah had advanced on his father’s behalf some five months before in conversations with Ronald Storrs. In presenting it as fresh information, Clayton may have been indicating that the information had been recently confirmed to him by al-Masri or by some other exiled Ottoman figure. The novelty of the memorandum lay in the suggestion that the Arabians could be of service to Britain during the war, and not merely afterward.

  Kitchener responded immediately. He sent a cable to Cairo on 24 September 1914, in which he ordered that Storrs be told to send a trusted messenger to Abdullah to ask a question in confidence: in the event of war, would the Hejaz be for or against Britain? Before sending his cable, Kitchener cleared it with Sir Edward Grey, who was impressed by Clayton’s memorandum, which he termed “very important.”8

  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.

  11

  INDIA PROTESTS

  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