Seven Pillars of Wisdom: Chapter V by T. E. Lawrence Lyrics
CHAPTER V
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.
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.