Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Sir Hugh Bell outlived his daughter. She died in 1926, aged only fifty-seven, while her father died in 1931 at the age of eighty-two. Gertrude reported to her father on nearly everything she did in Iraq, writing not only about politics and military affairs, but also about cultural issues. She told him, in a letter on 18 December 1920, that ‘Mesopotamia is not a civilized state . . . it needs force for the maintenance of internal order.’ She was very clear about the nature of the British involvement in Iraq, and the obligations Britain had towards the new state. ‘Whatever our future policy is to be we cannot now leave the country in the state of chaos which we have created,’ she wrote to her father on 2 August 1920.20 As a woman, Gertrude Bell was not permitted to exercise ultimate authority in Iraq. That was very much the preserve of the military men like Arnold Wilson and her principal chief, Percy Cox, a tall wiry man of nearly sixty who could keep silence, it was said, in a dozen languages. Cox was the British High Commissioner in Iraq, and Bell was his oriental secretary.

  There was no doubting Gertrude Bell’s idealism, which meant that she had little interest in the commercial, petroleum side of things. Having made enough money in the steel business, the Bells could devote their lives to liberal imperialism, while others did the dirty work of actually making money. The empire was full of civil servants, polished officials of sophisticated literary education, who turned a blind eye to the more sordid, commercial aspects of the imperial mission. This is perhaps what Harry St John Philby, father of the Soviet spy Kim Philby, meant when he suggested that Gertrude Bell, for all her ability, ‘had no half-tones in her repertoire’.21 Idealism was not far from Humphrey Bowman’s repertoire, either. A forty-year-old Eton and Oxford old boy, he was appointed director of education in Iraq from 1918 to 1920. He had fond memories of his first sight of the country in August 1918: ‘As the ship steamed slowly up the Shatt al Arab on that hot summer day, the waving palm trees on either bank seemed to give me welcome.’ He remembered the happy, jostling crowds in Arab dress as he stepped ashore at Basra. A committed student of Arabic who had spent some of his earlier career in Cairo, Bowman was delighted to hear ‘again the Arab tongue’ which made him feel that he was coming to a land ‘not altogether strange’. All this he recounted in a broadcast on the BBC entitled ‘Memories of Iraq’, which was transmitted in 1942. His diaries of his time in Iraq paint a vivid picture of the reasonably civilized, enlightened time he spent there. He managed to celebrate 4 June 1919, a date which was remembered as King George III’s birthday at Eton, with some fellow Old Etonians in Baghdad. Five old boys of that school attended a dinner at the officers’ club, where they dined on ‘fish mayonnaise, iced soup, chicken, roast lamb’, followed by ‘trifle pudding’, rounded off with a savoury dish of ‘sardines on toast’.22

  Bowman was fortunate. He missed much of the action which quickly threatened to overturn Britain’s position in Iraq. The strange thing about the old boys’ dinners and the letters home is the insular world they evoke. The Iraqis themselves seemed to be a sideshow in their own country. Even a relatively genial man like Cox, whose good looks were ‘rather marred’ by a hooked nose, according to Bowman, was generally quite aloof. Sir Ronald Storrs, the great oriental civil administrator, described the attitude well, in a lecture delivered to the University of Leicester in 1932, when he accused the British of not being ‘good mixers’. He went on to say that ‘some of our officials, and I regret to say their ladies also, are apt to stand on their dignity in dealing with the men and women with whom they are thrown in contact’.23

  Humphrey Bowman did not have this problem. Gertrude Bell, in a letter to Lord Allenby, who had led the campaign in Palestine during the war, acknowledged that his departure from Iraq was a cause of ‘regret’ because he had the ‘invaluable gift, which is now more necessary than any other, of making friends with Arabs’.24 Not being very good mixers naturally meant that British officials were often insensitive to local concerns and states of mind. This frequently led to confusion and sometimes worse.

  The Arabs’ frustration over the post-war settlement can be easily described. They wanted, in the words Lawrence used in 1920, a ‘show of their own’. By now, there were tensions among the British themselves. Some favoured a more liberal approach, in which the aspirations of Arab nationalism would be accommodated; others supported a tougher line. In Wilson’s view the people of Mesopotamia ‘were obviously incapable of governing themselves’. He proposed only to educate them in ‘that art on the municipal level’. It was fine for them to operate independently on the parish-council level. Philby, in a characteristically pompous remark, was not filled with a ‘desire to serve in Iraq under his proconsulship’.25 For her part, Gertrude Bell saw herself as being more liberal, despite believing that force was the best means of ‘internal order’. At a dinner in October 1920 she explained to Jafar Pasha al-Askari, a local Baghdad politician, in her excellent Arabic that ‘complete independence’ was what Britain ‘ultimately wished to give’. He replied, ‘My Lady, “complete independence” is never given; it is always taken.’ A ‘profound saying’, she remarked in the letter to her father.26

  The scene of a polite dinner party in Baghdad at the end of 1920, at which British and Iraqi guests exchanged pleasantries in Arabic, belied the turmoil of the preceding months. Cox had departed from Iraq and Wilson had been left in charge. The political discontent and rumblings which Bowman had detected towards the end of 1919 were spilling over into open dissent by the beginning of 1920. Iraq was a country of only 3 million people, split on tribal, ethnic and religious lines. Bowman had observed the relative openness of Basra, where ‘Arabs, Indians, Egyptians, Kurds, Armenians, Syrians, Jews’ mixed freely, with ‘a large sprinkling of the ubiquitous British soldier’.27 The rest of the country was very different, as it was more sectarian and far less tranquil. Of the 3 million inhabitants, roughly 1.6 million, or 55 per cent, were Arab Shi’ites; 600,000, or 20 per cent, were Arab Sunnis. There were about 600,000 Kurds, while the remnants were Jews, Yazidis and Christians, among other faiths.28

  Then, as now, the Sunni–Shia divide was the main sectarian split in the country. The background to this political division in Iraq was, of course, the Ottoman Empire. Iraq had been an Ottoman province since 1638 and had marked the eastern frontier of that empire, beyond which lay the Safavid kingdom of Persia, the country we know today as Iran. The Safavids had adopted the Shia Islamic faith, while the Ottomans were proudly Sunni. Iraq had never been under Shia dominion, even though the majority of its people professed that branch of the Islamic faith.

  To Gertrude Bell, the Shias were fanatical and irrational, while Sunni Muslims were generally regarded by her and by many of her compatriots as being more compliant. In a letter to her stepmother Florence in March 1920, she had remarked that it was ‘a problem to get into touch with the Shiahs [sic]’. Their leaders of religious opinion carried enormous authority and, basing themselves on the Koran, could ‘loose and bind with a word’ –though Bell herself dismissed the Koran as ‘entirely irrelevant to human affairs and worthless in any branch of human activity’. The Muslims’ religious customs had made things particularly difficult for her, a Western woman. She had been ‘until quite recently’ completely ‘cut off from them because their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don’t permit me to veil’.29

  The potential religious conflicts within Iraq had not, of course, been considered in the negotiations surrounding the San Remo Agreement, which had been signed in the picturesque Italian town just east of Monte Carlo at the end of April 1920. Britain had been granted control over Iraq in the form of a mandate. No one, however, had bothered to ask any of the Iraqis what they thought of the Agreement. The reaction was perhaps predictable, in so far as it stirred religious passions within Iraq, as well as a yearning for independence. More than a year before the Agreement had been signed, Sheikh Muhammad Shirazi, a Shia cleric, had issued a fatwa, in January 1919, proclaiming that ‘a non-Muslim could not be allow
ed by Muslims to rule over the followers of the Prophet’. In March 1920 he was even more explicit, promulgating another fatwa forbidding Muslims to accept any office in the heart of the British administration.30 Later that month, Ayatollah Shirazi took the decision to launch a general uprising against the British.

  The revolt of 1920 has taken on a mythic status among Iraqis. Even foreigners, who have tried to compare the events of that long hot summer with subsequent occupations, have misunderstood it. To the British, it was often depicted as a case of ungrateful, ill-disciplined natives exploiting imperial weakness. To Wilson, the revolt was a typical example of the Arab ‘kicking a man when he is down’, which he believed was the ‘most popular pastime in the East’.31 Too often British and American historians, often Middle East specialists, have focused exclusively on the Iraqi angle of the revolt. It was, however, part of a general spasm of protest against British imperial rule in the aftermath of the First World War. Revolts, or incipient uprisings, had occurred in Egypt in March 1919, and the following month in India, where at Amritsar soldiers commanded by General Reginald Dyer officially killed 379 unarmed citizens, though Indian estimates put the figure at over 1,000.

  The extent to which the Iraqi revolt can be viewed as nationalistic has also been questioned. The one thing that British rule did manage to achieve was the union, if only briefly, of the adherents of both the Sunni and Shia branches of the Islamic faith. General Sir Aylmer Haldane, in his gruff memoirs of the insurrection, published only two years later in 1922, remembered that it ‘threw for a time the Sunni townsmen and the Shia country-folk’ together, an alliance which he regarded as ‘miraculous’. More generally, the insurrection aroused a sense of bewilderment among the British. General Haldane could only speculate on the ‘strangely subtle mind’ of the Arab, ‘a being so vain, so given to exaggerate, and so susceptible to propaganda’ that it was ‘extremely difficult for a European to understand’ him.32 To others, the answer was simple–perhaps the Iraqi Arabs just wanted to be free.

  The initial cause of the revolt is now fairly obscure, and many reasons have been given for its occurrence. Some say it was sparked by the arrest of a Shia cleric, others by the arrest of a clerk who recited a ‘fiery anti-British poem’ in Baghdad. What is certain is that the fury of the Baghdad mob, which has been a frequent participant in Iraqi affairs, was intense. The resistance movement itself was based around Najaf, one of the holiest Shia cities owing to its status as the final resting place of Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, and Baghdad, a town with a large Sunni population. Bowman noted in his diary, while complaining of the heat and damp, that the month of Ramadan saw the ‘first sign of restlessness’. He described how mosques in Baghdad were becoming, for the first time in a long while, hives of political agitation. Meetings which were nominally religious were now, he observed, becoming ‘centres of political activity’.

  In Iraq in 1920, Ramadan began on 17 May. As head of the education service, Bowman was particularly concerned about the looting of schools in Karbala, another Shia holy place. He also expressed concern that his staff, Iraqi primary school teachers, had fled to Baghdad for safety.33 There can be no doubt that a nationalist movement existed. The fact that both Sunni and Shia had combined during the revolt surprised British officials like General Haldane and Arnold Wilson, who had clearly underestimated ‘the strength of the nationalist movement’.34 Wilson himself, in his memoirs, readily admitted that the ‘deep prejudices which separate the Sunni and Shi’ah sects’ had been ‘temporarily overcome’ during the revolt.35 Despite the overt nationalism, which we, influenced by President Nasser and the Ba’athists of the 1950s, anachronistically regard as a largely secular movement, there was a strong religious element to the uprising. The Ayatollah Shirazi, the Shia cleric whose fatwa had started the trouble, ‘enjoyed unprecedented prestige’ among the Shia community, while his fellow Shia clerics clearly saw their struggle as a holy war.36 Gertrude Bell agreed. Writing to her stepmother in September 1920, she remarked that the British were ‘now in the middle of a full-blown Jihad’, a term we translate as ‘holy war’. She added that this meant that ‘we have against us the fiercest prejudices of a people in a primeval state of civilisation’.37 Of course, the revolt was both religious and nationalistic. St John Philby, in his mischievous way, was convinced of the overtly nationalist impulse behind it. ‘What they [the Iraqis] want, like the people of Arabia and Syria . . . is complete independence, nothing more and nothing less,’ he asserted in an address he gave in June that year to the Central Asian Society.38

  The cost of suppressing the revolt was very high. Two divisions of troops had to be sent from India. From October 1920 onwards, British soldiers systematically began to reconquer lost ground; Karbala was occupied by British troops on 13 October, Najaf the next day.39 The insurgency had lasted three months and affected about one-third of the country. The movement was disorganized, diverse and highly local.40 The British had lost 426 lives, with 1,228 wounded. Among the insurgents, over 8,000 were killed in those scorching months. In financial terms, the revolt had been disastrous: the cost has been put at £40 million.41 As control of Iraq was re-established, this made the British highly conscious of any future expenditure they would have to incur in Iraq.

  Although a committed imperialist, Winston Churchill, as secretary of state for air and war, argued for more economy in spending in the Middle East. In the summer of 1920, the large number of casualties and the high cost of the military campaign had provoked a political reaction against the mandate and Britain’s imperial mission in the Arab world. In August, a Times editorial asked, ‘what is the total number of casualties we have suffered in Mesopotamia during the single month of July, in our efforts to emancipate the Arabs, to fulfil our mandate, and to smooth the way for the seekers after oil?’ In Parliament, the Labour Party were lobbying for a complete withdrawal from Iraq. Churchill, as a senior member of the Lloyd George coalition, was pragmatic enough to suggest that the ‘cost of garrisoning Iraq’ was ‘prohibitive’ and ‘out of all proportion to its value’.

  Combined with high costs, there was also administrative confusion. Britain’s empire in the Middle East had come into being only as a result of the defeat and collapse of the Ottoman Empire. There was little infrastructure in Whitehall, the centre of the imperial government in London, from which to administer the new empire in the Middle East. Nominally, the Foreign Office was responsible for Palestine, Egypt and the Sudan, while the India Office was responsible for the Gulf and Iraq. The War Office also had considerable authority in the region. Middle East policy was a battleground, in which each of the three departments sought to gain advantage over the other two.42 By February 1921, Iraq had returned to a peaceful state. Churchill, who had now been moved to become secretary of state for the colonies, was anxious to create a more stable Iraq, at a much cheaper price. He had also staked a claim for the Middle East for his new department, the Colonial Office. Curzon, still foreign secretary, was anxious to maintain the prestige of his department, and in reality the Foreign Office still retained responsibility for Egypt, Persia and Central Asia. Churchill, with characteristic energy, convened a conference in Cairo in March 1921, after just a few weeks in the job. In the pleasant warmth of the Cairo sun, at favoured colonial-era haunts like the Shepheard’s Hotel, the Middle East experts of the British Empire gathered and, for three weeks, discussed the various problems which faced Britain in this turbulent part of the world. From Cairo, on 23 March, Gertrude Bell wrote to Humphrey Bowman, the Old Etonian Arabist, that the ‘stream of nationalist sentiment’ was often ‘the only visible movement’ in Arab politics.43

  The most famous man at the conference of the ‘forty thieves’, as Churchill called it, was undoubtedly T. E. Lawrence, an ‘object at once of awe and pity’.44 Lawrence continues to fascinate Western minds, influenced perhaps unduly by what is perceived to be the romance of the East. His participation in Iraqi affairs was peripheral, despite the fact that regarded himse
lf as a ‘foundation-member’ of the new kingdom of Iraq.45 Lawrence famously was convinced of the need for the Arabs to be independent. He boasted as much to Charlotte Shaw, the wife of the playwright George Bernard Shaw, declaring that he had been ‘right to work for Arab self-government through 1919 and 1920’. The self-government he had in mind was a figment of his own romantic imagination. Despite his vaunted support for the cause of Arab self-determination, Lawrence told Mrs Shaw in the same letter that the Arabs were not yet ready for the self-government he had so generously conceived for them. ‘As for Irak [sic] . . . some day they will be fit for self-government and then they will not want a king: but whether 7 or 70 or 700 years hence, God knows.’46 He was clear that until the Iraqis proved ‘fit’ for self-government they would have to make do with a king, provided by Britain.