The richest part of Arabia, excluding Mesopotamia, always has been, and still is, the province of Yemen in the extreme southwestern corner, a mountainous region just north of Aden, famous these thousands of years for its wealth, its delightful climate, the fertility of its valleys, and as the home of Mocha coffee. Strabo, the Greek geographer, tells us that Alexander the Great, shortly before his death, planned to return from India and there establish his imperial capital. Many scholars believe this rich region to have been the original habitation of man and the country whence the early Egyptians came. Beginning earlier than 1000 B. C., highly organized monarchies existed here such as the Minæan, the Sabæan, and the Himyaritic. After the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, many Jews fled here, and their quaint descendants still reside in Yemen. But when the Ptolemies introduced the sea-route to India, the Yemen became less important, and for centuries the best-known part of Arabia has been the province of Hedjaz on the Red Sea, north of Yemen, bounded on the east by the Central Arabian region known as Nejd, and on the northeast and north by Syria, the Dead Sea, Palestine, and the Sinai Peninsula. The word “Hedjaz” or “Hijaz” means “barrier.” The fame of this particularly waterless country is due to its two chief cities: Mecca, the birthplace of Mohammed, in olden times called Macoraba; and Medina, the ancient Yathrib, where the Prophet spent the last ten years of his life and where he was interred. It is the duty of all Moslems who can afford it to make a pilgrimage to these sacred cities, just as it was the duty of the people to journey here in idolatrous pre-Islamic times.
About a thousand years before Columbus discovered America, a boy was born in the city of Mecca. This boy was destined to shape very materially the history of the world. As a youth he herded goats and sheep on the hills around Mecca, and then as a young man he hired himself out as a camel-driver to a rich widow in Mecca. He used to drive her camel caravans up to Syria to trade with rich merchants there. In Syria he became better acquainted with the religions of the Jews and the Christians and became convinced that his fellow-Arabs, who were worshipers of idols, did not possess a true religion. So this camel-driver appropriated some of the tenets of Christianity, some of the principles of Judaism, a few scraps of philosophy from the Persian fire-worshipers, a sprinkling of Arabian tradition, then threw in a number of his own ideas for good measure, and established a new religion. He encouraged his followers to regard Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Christ as prophets of Islam. To-day, however, they are looked upon as of infinitely less importance than Mohammed himself, whose teachings are regarded as a later and final revelation of the will of God. Nearly every family in Arabia has at least one child named after the Prophet. There are more men in the world bearing the given name “Mohammed” than there are with such names as “John” and “William.”
Is it so strange, after all, that the desert should he the old homestead of three of the world’s greatest religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism? The Arabs call the desert the Garden of Allah; they say there is no one in the desert but God. Out in the deserts of Arabia, even more than in many other parts of the world, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handy-work. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.” There is no striving in the desert to amass wealth for wealth’s sake; there is no mad rush to get ahead of one’s fellow-men. One of the curses of our modern civilization is that we do not have time to think or meditate. The desert is a fitting place for one to ponder over man’s destiny and to meditate upon the things that moth and rust do not corrupt and that thieves do not break through and steal.
Mohammed, the camel-boy of Mecca, was the first man to bind together in any sort of unity the peoples of Arabia. He came at the opportune time when a great leader was needed to drive out foreign domination. It was by his amazing evangelization that he succeeded in uniting the Arabs. To an even greater degree than most leaders of men this camel-boy of Mecca had:
The Monarch mind, the mystery of commanding,
The birth-hour gift, the art Napoleon,
Of wielding, moulding, gathering, welding, bending,
The hearts of thousands till they moved as one.
Following the death of Mohammed came that great wave of fanatical fury when the Arabian peoples, filled with religious fervor, swept out of the desert, overran a great part of the world, and built up that huge Moslem Empire which was even greater than the empire of the Romans. In those triumphant days of Islam, the Arabs supplied the dominant religious, political, and military leaders for all the countries they conquered. They seemed irresistible. “When the Arabs, who had fed on locusts and wild honey, once tasted the delicacies of civilization in Syria, and reveled in the luxurious palaces of the Khosroes,” writes El Tabari, the Moslem historian, “they said, ‘By Allah, even if we cared not to fight for the cause of God, yet we could not but wish to contend and enjoy these, leaving distress and hunger henceforth to others.’ ” Within a century after the death of Mohammed the Hedjaz Arabs had built up an empire vaster than either that of Alexander or of Rome; “Islam swept across the world like a whirlwind.”
But the vast empire reached its zenith in the seventh century of this era, and its decline dates from the battle of Tours, A. D. 732, when the Arabs were defeated in France by the Christians under Charles Martel.
Many of the Arabs remained in the lands they had conquered. As merchants and missionaries they have carried the crisp, brief creed of Mohammed from Arabia to Gibraltar, Central Africa, Central China, and the islands of the South Seas. Unlike followers of other faiths, they shout their creed from the minarets and housetops of every land where they are to be found: “La-ilahu illa Allah! Allahu Akbar!”
And even to-day we find thousands of Arabs occupying positions of affluence in far-off Hong-Kong, Singapore, the East Indies, and Spain. The others drifted back to their old life in the Arabian Desert. Once more Arabia stood isolated from the world by the barren mountain ranges which fringe its coasts and by its trackless belts of shifting sand. In the twelfth century the descendants of Saladin, who was half Kurd, conquered the fringes of Arabia. Then three centuries later a new tribe swept down from the unknown plateaus of Central Asia. They were of the tribe of Othman, forefathers of the modern Turks, and they attempted to govern the Arabs as though they were a people of an inferior race. The Turks claimed possession of Arabia for four hundred years, simply because they were able to maintain a few garrisons along the coast. A few of these garrisons were successful in holding out to the very end of the Great War, but at last they surrendered, leaving Arabia once again in the undisputed possession of its freedom-loving inhabitants.
The Hedjaz tribes have never acknowledged the sovereignty of any foreign ruler. They have preserved their liberty with but little interruption since prehistoric times, and consequently they regard their personal freedom above all else. Great armies have been sent against them, but not even the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the Greeks, or the Romans were able to conquer them.
Ever since the decline of the Arabian Empire, more than a thousand years ago, generals, sultans, and califs have attempted to unify the peoples of Arabia, and particularly of the province of Hedjaz, because it contains the two sacred Mohammedan cities. None were successful, but where they failed, Thomas Edward Lawrence, the unknown unbeliever, succeeded. It remained for this youthful British archæologist to go into forbidden Arabia and lead the Arabs through the spectacular and triumphant campaign which helped Allenby break the backbone of. the Turkish Empire and destroy the Pan-German dream of world dominion. The way in which he swept the Turks from Holy Arabia and temporarily built this mosaic of peoples into a homogeneous nation, now known as the Kingdom of the Hedjaz, is a story that I should have failed to believe had I not visited Arabia and come into personal contact with Lawrence and his associates during their campaign.
Perhaps no factor played a greater part in simplifying Lawrence’s task in Arabia than the existence of an ancient desert fraternity which has
been called “the cult of the Blood of Mohammed.” We must know something about this cult and its present-day leaders in order to understand the diplomacy and strategy of Colonel Lawrence which we are to follow during the desert war.
CHAPTER IV
THE CULT OF THE BLOOD OF MOHAMMED
DURING the long centuries of uncertain Turkish rule, there had persisted, in the sacred cities of the Hedjaz, “the cult of the Blood of Mohammed,” with its membership limited to descendants of the Prophet. These people were called shereefs or nobles by the other Arabs, and they had never lost their hatred for the Turks, whom they regarded as intruders. So powerful was this cult that the Ottoman Government could not destroy it. However, when shereefs living within reach of the string of fortified Turkish posts along the fringe of the desert protested openly against Ottoman tyranny, the sultan usually “invited” them to come and reside near him in Constantinople. There they would either remain as virtual prisoners or quietly be put out of the way. Abdul Hamid, the last great sultan, was an expert in following this private policy of his predecessors, and among the prominent Arabs he found it the better part of discretion to have near him at the Sublime Porte was one Shereef Hussein of Mecca. He was the oldest living descendant of Mohammed and was therefore believed by many to be the man really entitled to the califate, the spiritual and temporal head of Islam. The title of calif had originally been given only to the lineal descendants of Mohammed but later had been usurped by the Turks.
No people in the world take more pride in their ancestry than the Arabs. The births of all the leading princely families are recorded in Mecca at the mosque built around the black stone which millions of people regard as the most sacred spot in the world. Here, on a scroll of parchment, is inscribed the name of Hussein Ibn Ali, direct lineal descendant of Mohammed through his daughter Fatima and her eldest son Hassan.
When King Hussein was young, he had too much spirit to live tamely with his family in Mecca. Instead, he roamed the desert with the Bedouins and took part in all their raids and tribal wars. His mother was a Circassian, and much of his vigor is inherited from her. Abdul Hamid, the Red Sultan, received many disturbing reports regarding the wild life led by this independent shereef. Abdul had two ways of dealing with a man whom he feared or distrusted. He would either tie him in a sack and throw him into the Bosporus or keep him in Constantinople under close personal observation. Although he was afraid that Hussein might conspire against him, the fact that Hussein was a direct descendant of Mohammed made it difficult for old Abdul to chuck him into the Bosporus. So he gave him a pension and a little house on the Golden Horn, where the shereef and his family were compelled to live for eighteen years.
When the revolution of the Young Turks came in 1912 and Abdul was overthrown, all political prisoners were released from Constantinople, and Hussein and other Arab Nationalist leaders thought they saw the dawn of a new era of freedom and liberty. In fact, they too had assisted the Young Turks in overthrowing the old régime. But their hopes were soon dispelled, for the new Committee of Unity and Progress rashly set out to Ottomanize all the peoples of that complex of races which made up the Turkish Empire. They even went so far as to insist that the Arabs should give up their beautiful language—“the tongue of the angels”—and substitute the corrupt Ottoman dialect. It was not long before Hussein discovered that the Committee of Unity and Progress, headed by Enver, Talaat, and Djemal, was far more tyrannical than old Abdul in his bloodiest moments. They now looked back on the villainous Abdul as a harmless old gentleman in comparison with his successors. The Young Turks even suggested that in the Koran Turkish heroes should be substituted for the ancient patriarchs. Words of Arabic origin were deleted from the Turkish vocabulary. In Mecca the exaggerated story was told that the Turks were reverting to the ancient heathenism of Othman and that soldiers in Constantinople were required to pray to the White Wolf, a deity of the barbaric days before the Ottoman horde left its early home in the wilds of Central Asia.
Although the Arab leaders despaired of seeing a happier day for their country, Shereef Hussein and his sons concealed their hatred for the autocratic triumvirate and the whole Young Turk party. Because of the help he had given the triumvirate before he was disillusiond as to their real aims, they granted him the title of Keeper of the Holy Places of Islam, or the sixty-sixth Emir of Mecca of the Ottoman period.
Miss Gertrude Bell, the only woman staff captain in the British army and one of the foremost authorities on Near Eastern affairs, in a letter to “The Times” of London declared that the Arab Nationalist movement was given vitality by the Young Turks, who as soon as they came into power changed their whole attitude.
“Liberty and equality are dangerous words to play with in an empire composed of divergent nationalities,” wrote Miss Bell. “Of these the Arabs, adaptable and quick-witted, proudly alive to their traditions of past glory as founders of Islam, and upholders for 700 years of the authority of the Khilafat, were the first to claim the translation of promise into performance, and in the radiant dawn of the constitutional era the Arab intelligentsia eagerly anticipated that their claim would be recognised. If the Turks had responded with a genuine attempt to allow Arab culture to develop along its own lines under their aegis, the Ottoman Empire might have taken on new life, but their inelastic mentality precluded them from embracing the golden opportunity. Moreover, Prussian militarism made to them a peculiarly powerful, and, if the political configuration of their Empire be considered, a peculiarly dangerous appeal. The Committee of Union and Progress was determined to hack its way through the sensibilities of subject races, and, not content with this formidable task, by neglecting the cautious diplomatic methods of Abdul Hamid it found itself involved in a disastrous and debilitating struggle with its neighbour States in Europe.
“Before the war of 1914 broke out, not only were the Arab provinces filled with hatred and desire for vengeance . . .”
In the luxurious atmosphere of the Ottoman metropolis Hussein’s four sons quite naturally had grown up more like young Turkish bloods than Arab youths. They had spent most of their time rowing on the Bosporus and attending court balls. For six years, Prince Feisal had acted as private secretary to Abdul Hamid. When the Grand Shereef returned to Mecca he immediately summoned his four sons and informed them that they were altogether too effete and too accustomed to the soft ways of Stamboul to suit him. “Constantinople and its accursed life of luxury are now behind thee. Praise be to Allah! Henceforth thou art to make thy home under the canopy of heaven with thy brothers of the black tents in order that the glory of our house may not be disgraced. Allahu Akbar!” So saying the aged emir fitted the deed to the word and ordered them out to patrol the pilgrim routes. These routes are mere camel-tracks across the burning sands connecting the Red Sea coast with Mecca, the Holy City, and the summer capital of Taif, and between Medina and Mecca. With each of his sons he sent a company of his best fighting men. They were not even permitted to use tents but were compelled to sleep in their cloaks. They spent their days chasing robbers. The worst robbers in the desert are the men of the Harith clan, some one hundred outlaws, nearly all of them banished members of Shereefian families. These men of Harith had entrenched themselves in a naturally fortified village fifty miles northeast of Mecca. Expeditions against them and other bandits developed Hussein’s sons into self-reliant, capable leaders. That Emir Feisal is such a prominent figure in the Near East to-day is not entirely because of his royal blood but partly because he excels in ways which make for leadership in the Arabian Desert. These are not a knowledge of bridge or Browning!
Ali, the eldest son, is a small, thin, well-groomed prince. He has delightful manners, great personal charm, and is an accomplished diplomat. He is deeply religious, the essence of generosity, and a martinet on all questions of morality. Like the other members of his family he has far-reaching views and aspirations for his country. But he has no personal aspirations beyond the emirate of Mecca, to which he will, in all probability
, fall heir at the death of his father. Abdullah, the second son, is ambitious and vigorous but is not quite such an idealist. At the termination of the war he became the ruler of Transjordania, with a famous English traveler by the name of St. John Philby as his adviser. The youngest member of the family, Prince Zeid, is half Turk. There is not so much of the Oriental about him, and when the revolt was at its height he still lacked the seriousness of his older brothers. This youth left such solid enthusiasms as Arab nationalism to the rest of his family and devoted himself to fighting and to the lighter joys of life, as one would expect from a normal prince in his early twenties. He is nevertheless rich in common sense. Zeid loves hunting, riding, and dancing. After the Arabs and Anzacs took Damascus he jazzed all over the city until Feisal convinced him that he should conduct himself with greater dignity. He also is a man of considerable charm and, if his ambition to attend Oxford is realized, may yet prove himself the ablest of an illustrious family.
Feisal, third and best known of Hussein’s four sons, is an idealist. Although modest and reserved, he is a man of great personality. Every Arab is a born diplomat, and Feisal is well above the average.
Children of the desert have few games. They do not know how to play as our Western children do. Life is a serious and sober affair from the moment the Arab baby opens his eyes on the woman’s side of the black tent. As soon as he is able to crawl, he comes into the tribal council. His only school is the coffee hearth; his only education consists in the handling of men and camels.
Emir Feisal began life as a dirty little shepherd boy. His mother was an Arab girl of Mecca and a cousin of his father. When Feisal was a little baby, Shereef Hussein sent him into the desert to live with a Bedouin tribe, because it is considered more beneficial for a boy to grow up in the open desert country than in a city or village. Later, in Constantinople, Feisal contracted consumption, but since then the desert has cured him. He is still very thin, however, and measures only twenty-one inches around the waist. He smokes cigarettes day and night and eats sparingly. Among the tribes he is considered an unusually fine shot and good horseman and an excellent camel-rider. Feisal is enlightened and thoroughly modern in his views, and Colonel Lawrence, who knows him better than any one else, declares that he is as honest as daylight. His people follow him not through fear but because they admire him and love him. He is much too kind and liberal-minded to rule as an Oriental despot of the old school. Given the opportunity, he may he depended upon to do his utmost to usher in an entirely new order of things for his people.
With Lawrence in Arabia Page 5
