Seven Pillars of Wisdom: Chapter IV by T. E. Lawrence Lyrics
CHAPTER IV
The first great rush round the Mediterranean had shown the world the
power of an excited Arab for a short spell of intense physical
activity; but when the effort burned out the lack of endurance and
routine in the Semitic mind became as evident. The provinces they had
overrun they neglected, out of sheer distaste of system, and had to
seek the help of their conquered subjects, or of more vigorous
foreigners, to administer their ill-knit and inchoate empires. So,
early in the Middle Ages, the Turks found a footing in the Arab States,
first as servants, then as helpers, and then as a parasite growth which
choked the life out of the old body politic. The last phase was of
enmity, when the Hulagus or Timurs sated their blood lust, burning and
destroying everything which irked them with a pretension of
superiority.
Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and
intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made
their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their
epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin
learning was fading from men's minds. By contrast the imitative
exercise of the Arabs seemed cultured, their mental activity
progressive, their state prosperous. They had performed real service in
preserving something of a classical past for a mediaeval future.
With the coming of the Turks this happiness became a dream. By stages
the Semites of Asia passed under their yoke, and found it a slow death.
Their goods were stripped from them; and their spirits shrivelled in
the numbing breath of a military Government. Turkish rule was gendarme
rule, and Turkish political theory as crude as its practice. The Turks
taught the Arabs that the interests of a sect were higher than those of
patriotism: that the petty concerns of the province were more than
nationality. They led them by subtle dissensions to distrust one
another. Even the Arabic language was banished from courts and offices,
from the Government service, and from superior schools. Arabs might
only serve the State by sacrifice of their racial characteristics.
These measures were not accepted quietly. Semitic tenacity showed
itself in the many rebellions of Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia against
the grosser forms of Turkish penetration; and resistance was also made
to the more insidious attempts at absorption. The Arabs would not give
up their rich and flexible tongue for crude Turkish: instead, they
filled Turkish with Arabic words, and held to the treasures of their
own literature.
They lost their geographical sense, and their racial and political and
historical memories; but they clung the more tightly to their language,
and erected it almost into a fatherland of its own. The first duty of
every Moslem was to study the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, and
incidentally the greatest Arab literary monument. The knowledge that
this religion was his own, and that only he was perfectly qualified to
understand and practise it, gave every Arab a standard by which to
judge the banal achievements of the Turk.
Then came the Turkish revolution, the fall of Abdul Hamid, and the
supremacy of the Young Turks. The horizon momentarily broadened for the
Arabs. The Young-Turk movement was a revolt against the hierarchic
conception of Islam and the pan-Islamic theories of the old Sultan, who
had aspired, by making himself spiritual director of the Moslem world,
to be also (beyond appeal) its director in temporal affairs. These
young politicians rebelled and threw him into prison, under the impulse
of constitutional theories of a sovereign state. So, at a time when
Western Europe was just beginning to climb out of nationality into
internationality, and to rumble with wars far removed from problems of
race, Western Asia began to climb out of Catholicism into nationalist
politics, and to dream of wars for self-government and self-sovereignty,
instead of for faith or dogma. This tendency had broken out first
and most strongly in the Near East, in the little Balkan States,
and had sustained them through an almost unparalleled martyrdom
to their goal of separation from Turkey. Later there had been
nationalist movements in Egypt, in India, in Persia, and finally in
Constantinople, where they were fortified and made pointed by the new
American ideas in education: ideas which, when released in the old high
Oriental atmosphere, made an explosive mixture. The American schools,
teaching by the method of inquiry, encouraged scientific detachment and
free exchange of views. Quite without intention they taught revolution,
since it was impossible for an individual to be modern in Turkey and at
the same time loyal, if he had been born of one of the subject
races--Greeks, Arabs, Kurds, Armenians or Albanians--over whom the
Turks were so long helped to keep dominion.
The Young Turks, in the confidence of their first success, were carried
away by the logic of their principles, and as protest against Pan-Islam
preached Ottoman brotherhood. The gullible subject races--far more
numerous than the Turks themselves--believed that they were called upon
to co-operate in building a new East. Rushing to die task (full of
Herbert Spencer and Alexander Hamilton) they laid down platforms of
sweeping ideas, and hailed the Turks as partners. The Turks, terrified
at the forces they had let loose, drew the fires as suddenly as they
had stoked them. Turkey made Turkish for the Turks--YENI-TURAN--became
the cry. Later on, this policy would turn them towards the rescue of
their irredenti--the Turkish populations subject to Russia in Central
Asia; but, first of all, they must purge their Empire of such
irritating subject races as resisted the ruling stamp. The Arabs, the
largest alien component of Turkey, must first be dealt with.
Accordingly the Arab deputies were scattered, the Arab societies
forbidden, the Arab notables proscribed. Arabic manifestations and the
Arabic language were suppressed by Enver Pasha more sternly than by
Abdul Hamid before him.
However, the Arabs had tasted freedom: they could not change their
ideas as quickly as their conduct; and the staffer spirits among them
were not easily to be put down. They read the Turkish papers, putting
'Arab' for Turk' in the patriotic exhortations. Suppression charged
them with unhealthy violence. Deprived of constitutional outlets they
became revolutionary. The Arab societies went underground, and changed
from liberal clubs into conspiracies. The Akhua, the Arab mother
society, was publicly dissolved. It was replaced in Mesopotamia by the
dangerous Ahad, a very secret brotherhood, limited almost entirely to
Arab officers in the Turkish Army, who swore to acquire the military
knowledge of their masters, and to turn it against them, in the service
of the Arab people, when the moment of rebellion came.
It was a large society, with a sure base in the wild part of Southern
Irak, where Sayid Taleb, the young John Wilkes of the Arab movement,
held the power in his unprincipled fingers. To it belonged seven out of
every ten Mesopotamian-born officers; and their counsel was so well
kept that members of it held high command in Turkey to the last. When
the crash came, and Allenby rode across Armageddon and Turkey fell, one
vice-president of the society was commanding the broken fragments of
the Palestine armies on the retreat, and another was directing the
Turkish forces across-Jordan in the Amman area. Yet later, after the
armistice, great places in the Turkish service were still held by men
ready to turn on their masters at a word from their Arab leaders. To
most of them the word was never given; for those societies were pro-Arab
only, willing to fight for nothing but Arab independence; and they
could see no advantage in supporting the Allies rather than the Turks,
since they did not believe our assurances that we would leave them
free. Indeed, many of them preferred an Arabia united by Turkey in
miserable subjection, to an Arabia divided up and slothful under the
easier control of several European powers in spheres of influence.
Greater than the Ahad was the Fetah, the society of freedom in Syria.
The landowners, the writers, the doctors, the great public servants
linked themselves in this society with a common oath, passwords, signs,
a press and a central treasury, to ruin the Turkish Empire. With the
noisy facility of the Syrian--an ape-like people having much of the
Japanese quickness, but shallow--they speedily built up a formidable
organization. They looked outside for help, and expected freedom to
come by entreaty, not by sacrifice. They corresponded with Egypt, with
the Ahad (whose members, with true Mesopotamian dourness, rather
despised them), with the Sherif of Mecca, and with Great Britain:
everywhere seeking the ally to serve their turn. They also were deadly
secret; and the Government, though it suspected their existence, could
find no credible evidence of their leaders or membership. It had to
hold its hand until it could strike with evidence enough to satisfy the
English and French diplomats who acted as modern public opinion in
Turkey. The war in 1914 withdrew these agents, and left the Turkish
Government free to strike.
Mobilization put all power into the hands of those members--Enver,
Talaat and Jemal--who were at once the most ruthless, the most logical,
and the most ambitious of the Young Turks. They set themselves to stamp
out all non-Turkish currents in the State, especially Arab and Armenian
nationalism. For the first step they found a specious and convenient
weapon in the secret papers of a French Consul in Syria, who left
behind him in his Consulate copies of correspondence (about Arab
freedom) which had passed between him and an Arab club, not connected
with the Fetah but made up of the more talkative and less formidable
INTELLIGENZIA of the Syrian coast. The Turks, of course, were
delighted; for 'colonial' aggression in North Africa had given the
French a black reputation in the Arabic-speaking Moslem world; and it
served Jemal well to show his co-religionists that these Arab
nationalists were infidel enough to prefer France to Turkey.
In Syria, of course, his disclosures had little novelty; but the
members of the society were known and respected, if somewhat academic,
persons; and their arrest and condemnation, and the crop of
deportations, exiles, and executions to which their trial led, moved
the country to its depths, and taught the Arabs of the Fetah that if
they did not profit by their lesson, the fate of the Armenians would be
upon them. The Armenians had been well armed and organized; but their
leaders had failed them. They had been disarmed and destroyed
piecemeal, the men by massacre, the women and children by being driven
and overdriven along the wintry roads into the desert, naked and
hungry, the common prey of any passer-by, until death took them. The
Young Turks had killed the Armenians, not because they were Christians,
but because they were Armenians; and for the same reason they herded
Arab Moslems and Arab Christians into the same prison, and hanged them
together on the same scaffold. Jemal Pasha united all classes,
conditions and creeds in Syria, under pressure of a common misery and
peril, and so made a concerted revolt possible.
The Turks suspected the Arab officers and soldiers in the Army, and
hoped to use against them the scattering tactics which had served
against the Armenians. At first transport difficulties stood in their
way; and there came a dangerous concentration of Arab divisions (nearly
one third of the original Turkish Army was Arabic speaking) in North
Syria early in 1915. They broke these up when possible, marching them
off to Europe, to the Dardanelles, to the Caucasus, or the
Canal--anywhere, so long as they were put quickly into the firing-line,
or withdrawn far from the sight and help of their compatriots. A Holy War
was proclaimed to give the 'Union and Progress' banner something of the
traditional sanctity of the Caliph's battle-order in the eyes of the
old clerical elements; and the Sherif of Mecca was invited--or rather
ordered--to echo the cry.
The first great rush round the Mediterranean had shown the world the
power of an excited Arab for a short spell of intense physical
activity; but when the effort burned out the lack of endurance and
routine in the Semitic mind became as evident. The provinces they had
overrun they neglected, out of sheer distaste of system, and had to
seek the help of their conquered subjects, or of more vigorous
foreigners, to administer their ill-knit and inchoate empires. So,
early in the Middle Ages, the Turks found a footing in the Arab States,
first as servants, then as helpers, and then as a parasite growth which
choked the life out of the old body politic. The last phase was of
enmity, when the Hulagus or Timurs sated their blood lust, burning and
destroying everything which irked them with a pretension of
superiority.
Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and
intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made
their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their
epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin
learning was fading from men's minds. By contrast the imitative
exercise of the Arabs seemed cultured, their mental activity
progressive, their state prosperous. They had performed real service in
preserving something of a classical past for a mediaeval future.
With the coming of the Turks this happiness became a dream. By stages
the Semites of Asia passed under their yoke, and found it a slow death.
Their goods were stripped from them; and their spirits shrivelled in
the numbing breath of a military Government. Turkish rule was gendarme
rule, and Turkish political theory as crude as its practice. The Turks
taught the Arabs that the interests of a sect were higher than those of
patriotism: that the petty concerns of the province were more than
nationality. They led them by subtle dissensions to distrust one
another. Even the Arabic language was banished from courts and offices,
from the Government service, and from superior schools. Arabs might
only serve the State by sacrifice of their racial characteristics.
These measures were not accepted quietly. Semitic tenacity showed
itself in the many rebellions of Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia against
the grosser forms of Turkish penetration; and resistance was also made
to the more insidious attempts at absorption. The Arabs would not give
up their rich and flexible tongue for crude Turkish: instead, they
filled Turkish with Arabic words, and held to the treasures of their
own literature.
They lost their geographical sense, and their racial and political and
historical memories; but they clung the more tightly to their language,
and erected it almost into a fatherland of its own. The first duty of
every Moslem was to study the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, and
incidentally the greatest Arab literary monument. The knowledge that
this religion was his own, and that only he was perfectly qualified to
understand and practise it, gave every Arab a standard by which to
judge the banal achievements of the Turk.
Then came the Turkish revolution, the fall of Abdul Hamid, and the
supremacy of the Young Turks. The horizon momentarily broadened for the
Arabs. The Young-Turk movement was a revolt against the hierarchic
conception of Islam and the pan-Islamic theories of the old Sultan, who
had aspired, by making himself spiritual director of the Moslem world,
to be also (beyond appeal) its director in temporal affairs. These
young politicians rebelled and threw him into prison, under the impulse
of constitutional theories of a sovereign state. So, at a time when
Western Europe was just beginning to climb out of nationality into
internationality, and to rumble with wars far removed from problems of
race, Western Asia began to climb out of Catholicism into nationalist
politics, and to dream of wars for self-government and self-sovereignty,
instead of for faith or dogma. This tendency had broken out first
and most strongly in the Near East, in the little Balkan States,
and had sustained them through an almost unparalleled martyrdom
to their goal of separation from Turkey. Later there had been
nationalist movements in Egypt, in India, in Persia, and finally in
Constantinople, where they were fortified and made pointed by the new
American ideas in education: ideas which, when released in the old high
Oriental atmosphere, made an explosive mixture. The American schools,
teaching by the method of inquiry, encouraged scientific detachment and
free exchange of views. Quite without intention they taught revolution,
since it was impossible for an individual to be modern in Turkey and at
the same time loyal, if he had been born of one of the subject
races--Greeks, Arabs, Kurds, Armenians or Albanians--over whom the
Turks were so long helped to keep dominion.
The Young Turks, in the confidence of their first success, were carried
away by the logic of their principles, and as protest against Pan-Islam
preached Ottoman brotherhood. The gullible subject races--far more
numerous than the Turks themselves--believed that they were called upon
to co-operate in building a new East. Rushing to die task (full of
Herbert Spencer and Alexander Hamilton) they laid down platforms of
sweeping ideas, and hailed the Turks as partners. The Turks, terrified
at the forces they had let loose, drew the fires as suddenly as they
had stoked them. Turkey made Turkish for the Turks--YENI-TURAN--became
the cry. Later on, this policy would turn them towards the rescue of
their irredenti--the Turkish populations subject to Russia in Central
Asia; but, first of all, they must purge their Empire of such
irritating subject races as resisted the ruling stamp. The Arabs, the
largest alien component of Turkey, must first be dealt with.
Accordingly the Arab deputies were scattered, the Arab societies
forbidden, the Arab notables proscribed. Arabic manifestations and the
Arabic language were suppressed by Enver Pasha more sternly than by
Abdul Hamid before him.
However, the Arabs had tasted freedom: they could not change their
ideas as quickly as their conduct; and the staffer spirits among them
were not easily to be put down. They read the Turkish papers, putting
'Arab' for Turk' in the patriotic exhortations. Suppression charged
them with unhealthy violence. Deprived of constitutional outlets they
became revolutionary. The Arab societies went underground, and changed
from liberal clubs into conspiracies. The Akhua, the Arab mother
society, was publicly dissolved. It was replaced in Mesopotamia by the
dangerous Ahad, a very secret brotherhood, limited almost entirely to
Arab officers in the Turkish Army, who swore to acquire the military
knowledge of their masters, and to turn it against them, in the service
of the Arab people, when the moment of rebellion came.
It was a large society, with a sure base in the wild part of Southern
Irak, where Sayid Taleb, the young John Wilkes of the Arab movement,
held the power in his unprincipled fingers. To it belonged seven out of
every ten Mesopotamian-born officers; and their counsel was so well
kept that members of it held high command in Turkey to the last. When
the crash came, and Allenby rode across Armageddon and Turkey fell, one
vice-president of the society was commanding the broken fragments of
the Palestine armies on the retreat, and another was directing the
Turkish forces across-Jordan in the Amman area. Yet later, after the
armistice, great places in the Turkish service were still held by men
ready to turn on their masters at a word from their Arab leaders. To
most of them the word was never given; for those societies were pro-Arab
only, willing to fight for nothing but Arab independence; and they
could see no advantage in supporting the Allies rather than the Turks,
since they did not believe our assurances that we would leave them
free. Indeed, many of them preferred an Arabia united by Turkey in
miserable subjection, to an Arabia divided up and slothful under the
easier control of several European powers in spheres of influence.
Greater than the Ahad was the Fetah, the society of freedom in Syria.
The landowners, the writers, the doctors, the great public servants
linked themselves in this society with a common oath, passwords, signs,
a press and a central treasury, to ruin the Turkish Empire. With the
noisy facility of the Syrian--an ape-like people having much of the
Japanese quickness, but shallow--they speedily built up a formidable
organization. They looked outside for help, and expected freedom to
come by entreaty, not by sacrifice. They corresponded with Egypt, with
the Ahad (whose members, with true Mesopotamian dourness, rather
despised them), with the Sherif of Mecca, and with Great Britain:
everywhere seeking the ally to serve their turn. They also were deadly
secret; and the Government, though it suspected their existence, could
find no credible evidence of their leaders or membership. It had to
hold its hand until it could strike with evidence enough to satisfy the
English and French diplomats who acted as modern public opinion in
Turkey. The war in 1914 withdrew these agents, and left the Turkish
Government free to strike.
Mobilization put all power into the hands of those members--Enver,
Talaat and Jemal--who were at once the most ruthless, the most logical,
and the most ambitious of the Young Turks. They set themselves to stamp
out all non-Turkish currents in the State, especially Arab and Armenian
nationalism. For the first step they found a specious and convenient
weapon in the secret papers of a French Consul in Syria, who left
behind him in his Consulate copies of correspondence (about Arab
freedom) which had passed between him and an Arab club, not connected
with the Fetah but made up of the more talkative and less formidable
INTELLIGENZIA of the Syrian coast. The Turks, of course, were
delighted; for 'colonial' aggression in North Africa had given the
French a black reputation in the Arabic-speaking Moslem world; and it
served Jemal well to show his co-religionists that these Arab
nationalists were infidel enough to prefer France to Turkey.
In Syria, of course, his disclosures had little novelty; but the
members of the society were known and respected, if somewhat academic,
persons; and their arrest and condemnation, and the crop of
deportations, exiles, and executions to which their trial led, moved
the country to its depths, and taught the Arabs of the Fetah that if
they did not profit by their lesson, the fate of the Armenians would be
upon them. The Armenians had been well armed and organized; but their
leaders had failed them. They had been disarmed and destroyed
piecemeal, the men by massacre, the women and children by being driven
and overdriven along the wintry roads into the desert, naked and
hungry, the common prey of any passer-by, until death took them. The
Young Turks had killed the Armenians, not because they were Christians,
but because they were Armenians; and for the same reason they herded
Arab Moslems and Arab Christians into the same prison, and hanged them
together on the same scaffold. Jemal Pasha united all classes,
conditions and creeds in Syria, under pressure of a common misery and
peril, and so made a concerted revolt possible.
The Turks suspected the Arab officers and soldiers in the Army, and
hoped to use against them the scattering tactics which had served
against the Armenians. At first transport difficulties stood in their
way; and there came a dangerous concentration of Arab divisions (nearly
one third of the original Turkish Army was Arabic speaking) in North
Syria early in 1915. They broke these up when possible, marching them
off to Europe, to the Dardanelles, to the Caucasus, or the
Canal--anywhere, so long as they were put quickly into the firing-line,
or withdrawn far from the sight and help of their compatriots. A Holy War
was proclaimed to give the 'Union and Progress' banner something of the
traditional sanctity of the Caliph's battle-order in the eyes of the
old clerical elements; and the Sherif of Mecca was invited--or rather
ordered--to echo the cry.