III
Lawrence once attended on the Emir Feisal, the chief Arab leader of the Revolt, when he was privately received at Buckingham Palace. Lawrence was wearing Arabian dress; the white robe, the belt, the dagger, the silk and gold head-dress, and was rebuked by a person of importance: ‘Is it right, Colonel Lawrence, that a subject of the Crown and an officer too, should appear here clothed in foreign uniform?’ He answered respectfully but firmly, ‘When a man serves two masters and has to offend one of these, it is better for him to offend the more powerful. I am here as official interpreter of the Emir Feisal, whose uniform this is.’ Lawrence’s problem, whether his loyalty lay towards the Arabs or towards England when England and the Arabs were in conflict, was the most difficult problem of his life. England could claim earlier rights of allegiance—he was for two years a British army officer before he began the Arabian adventure—while his natural instinct to side with the weaker cause inclined him to press the Arab claim even against the interests of British Imperial expansion. When further it seemed that the right lay on the side of the Arabs rather than on that of his own country he was even more divided in mind.
How he came to be in this position cannot be shown without a short chapter of history and geography. The first thing to be explained is what is meant by ‘The Arabs.’ The Arabs are not merely the inhabitants of the country called Arabia: the word includes all those Eastern races which speak the language called Arabic. The Arabic language is spoken over an area as big as India, lying between a line formed by the extreme eastern coast of the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, and a second line farther east parallel with it formed by the River Tigris and the Persian Gulf as far as Muscat on the Indian Ocean. This rough parallelogram of land, which is much longer than it is wide, includes Syria, Palestine, Transjordania, Mesopotamia and the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. The people who live in it are called Semites, the children of Shem. The Semites were cousins by blood even before they were given a common religious language, Arabic, by Mohammed’s conquests and his Koran. Arabic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, the principal Semitic languages, are all related to each other rather than to the languages of African Ham or Indo-European Japhet. Into this Semite country many foreign peoples have from time to time forced a way, but none have kept a footing for long. Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Franks (the Crusaders) have in turn tried, but their colonies have gradually been destroyed or swallowed up by the Semites. The Semites have themselves sometimes ventured out of their area and in turn been drowned in the outer world. France, Spain and Morocco to the west, India to the east, were reached in the great days of the Mohammedan conquests. But with few scattered exceptions the Semites have never been able to live outside their old area without changing their natures and customs.
THE ARAB AREA
This Semite country has many different climates and soils. On the west is a long range of mountains running all the way from Alexandretta in Northern Syria, through Palestine and the land of Midian till it reaches Aden in Southern Arabia. It has an average height of two or three thousand feet, is well watered and well populated. On the east is Mesopotamia, a plain lying between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, its soil one of the most fertile in the world, and below Mesopotamia another but infertile plain stretching from Kuweit along the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf. On the south there is a long range of hills facing the Indian Ocean, which supports a fair population. But these outer fringes of watered country frame an enormous waste of thirsty desert, much of it still unexplored. In the heart of the desert in Central Arabia there is a large group of well-watered and populous oases. To the south of these oases is a great sand desert stretching to the inhabited hills which line the Indian Ocean: it is impassable to caravans for lack of water and cuts off these Southern hills from true Arabian history. East of the oases, between them and Kuweit, the eastern limit, is a desert of gravel with some stretches of sand which make travelling difficult. To the west of the oases, between them and the populated western hills which line the Red Sea, is a desert of gravel and lava with not much sand in it. To the north, a belt of sand and then an immense gravel and lava plain filling up everything between the eastern edge of Syria and the banks of the Euphrates where Mesopotamia begins. It is over the western and northern deserts that Lawrence did most of his fighting.
The hills of the west and the plains of the east are the most active parts of the Arabic area, though being more exposed to foreign influence and trade, whether European or Asiatic, the Arabs there are not so typically Semitic in character as the inhabitants of the deserts and of the central oases protected by the desert. It was on the desert tribes that Lawrence depended most for military help in the Arab Revolt, and it was the Arabs of the northern Syrian desert to whom for personal reasons he was most anxious to give freedom. Lawrence has described the process by which the desert tribes come into being. The south-western corner of Arabia, south of the holy city of Mecca, is called Yemen. It is a fertile agricultural district famed for coffee but much overpopulated: and for the surplus population there is no easy outlet. To the north is Mecca, where a strong foreign population drawn from all the Mohammedan world jealously bars the way. To the west is the sea and across the sea lies only the Sudanese desert. South is the Indian Ocean. The only way out is east. So the weaker tribes on the Yemen border are constantly pushed out into the bad lands, where farming becomes less and less easy, and farther out still until they become pastoral and finally are forced into the actual desert. There they work about from oasis to oasis perhaps for several generations until they may be strong enough to establish themselves again as agricultural Arabs in Syria or Mesopotamia. This, writes Lawrence, is the natural circulation that keeps Arabia healthy.
The great deserts are not, as might be supposed, the common property of all the Arab tribes to wander about in according to their pleasure. The territories are strictly divided up between the various tribes and clans, who may graze their camels and flocks only in their own pastures. Thus any clan new to the desert must either fight or pay tribute to maintain itself in any fixed territory. It may pass through and be given free hospitality, but after three days the journey must be renewed. As if the natural hardships of desert life were not enough, the old-established desert tribes are at constant feud with each other, and until the Arab Revolt began had no common thought or motive. (There are moreover outlaws, men with no tribe, who rob and kill any man they meet.) The Bedouin’s curse has always been the curse of Ishmael, to have his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him. Yet on the whole he keeps to a very strict code of honour in his tribal warfare. The two most important cities in Arabia are the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Mecca is about fifty miles inland, about half-way down the Red Sea: Jiddah is its port. Medina, two hundred and fifty miles to the north of Mecca, is about one hundred and fifty miles inland behind the range of hills. Every year for more than a thousand years there has been a great pilgrimage to these cities from all over the Mohammedan world. The most famous route is from Damascus in Syria, twelve hundred miles south across the Arabian deserts. Until recently this was a painful journey on foot or camel back, from which thousands of pilgrims, mostly old men who made this pilgrimage as the final religious act of their life, used never to return. One of the chief sources of wealth for the desert tribes was then this yearly pilgrimage. They sold food and animals to the pilgrims and were paid for the caravan’s safe passage through each tribe’s territory. If the money, however, was not paid they would raid the caravan and cut off and rob the stragglers. The Bedouin Arab had a great contempt for the pilgrims, mostly townsmen from Syria and Turkey, and regarded them as his natural prey. A railway was at last built from Damascus to Medina, and the pilgrims were able, just before the outbreak of the War, to set out in reasonable hope of a safe return. There only remained the stretch between Medina and Mecca not yet linked by a railway. The Damascus-Medina railway was built for the Turks by German engineers. The pretext for building it was a pious one; the real reason was to give Abdul Hamid, the Sultan, access for his troops to the Holy Cities, other than by the Suez Canal.
The Turks, like the Arabs, need some explanation. They are not of the race of Shem but visitors from Central Asia; they were late converts to Mohammedanism as the Prussians to Christianity, and made their home in Anatolia, in Asia Minor. They are, like the Prussians, before anything else a fighting people. They are dull, brutal and enduring: their chief virtue is the soldierly one of united action against their neighbours, whom they divide and conquer like the Romans. After the first exciting days of Mohammedan conquest, when the Arabs overran half the known world, the huge new empire had to be knit together. The Arabs had no ruling power themselves and had to rely on the non-Semitic peoples whom they had conquered to provide a system of government. This was the opportunity of the Turks. They were first the servants, then the helpers, then the rulers of the Arab races. Finally they became tyrants and burned and destroyed everything that annoyed their soldier-minds by its beauty or superiority. They robbed the Arabs of their richest possessions and gave them nothing in return. They were not even great road-makers and bridge-builders and marsh-drainers like the Romans. They neglected public works and were the enemies of art, literature and ideas.
The Arabs by their early conquests in Spain and Sicily had been really helpful to European civilization in the Dark Ages: the Arabic origin of many early scientific terms is a reminder of the refreshment that Arab thought provided. True, they were imitative rather than creative, and the ideas that they brought were merely the remnants of Classical learning caught from the Greek city of Alexandria in Egypt before it died. But compared with the Turks they have always seemed cultured, prosperous, even progressive. Turkish rule was a parasite growth, strangling the Empire as ivy strangles a tree. It was cunning at setting subject communities at each other’s throats, and teaching them that the local politics of a province were more important than nationality. The Turks gradually banished the Arabic language from courts, offices, the Government service and superior schools. Arabs might only serve the State, now a mere Turkish Empire, by becoming imitation Turks.
There was of course great resistance to this tyranny. Many revolts took place in Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia; but the Turks were too strong. The Arabs lost their racial pride and all their proud traditions. But of one thing they could not be robbed, the Koran, the sacred book of all Mohammedans, to study which was every man’s first religious duty, whether Arab or Turk. Not only was the Koran the foundation of the legal system used throughout the Arabic-speaking world, except where the Turks had lately imposed their more Western code, but it was the finest example of Arabic literature. In reading the Koran every Arab had a standard by which to judge the dull minds of his Turkish masters. And the Arabs did succeed in keeping their rich and flexible language, and actually in filling the crude Turkish with Arabic words.
The last Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid, who reigned during the first few years of this century, went even further than those before him. He was jealous of the power of the Arab Grand Sherif of Mecca, who was the head of the priestly family of sherifs (or men descended from the prophet Mohammed) and ruled with great honour in the Holy City.[2] Previous Turkish Sultans finding the Sherif of Mecca too strong to be destroyed had saved their own dignity by solemnly confirming in power whatever Sherif was elected by his family, which numbered about two thousand persons. But Abdul Hamid, who, for autocratic reasons, laid new stress on his inherited title of Caliph or Ruler of the Faithful (the orthodox Mohammedans), wanted the Holy Cities to be under his direct rule; until now he had been safely able to garrison them with soldiers only by means of the Suez Canal. He decided to build the pilgrims’ railway and to increase Turkish influence among the tribes of Arabia by money, intrigue, and armed expeditions. Finally, not content with interfering with the Sherif’s rule even in Mecca itself, he even took away important members of the Prophet’s family to Constantinople, as hostages for the good behaviour of the rest.
[2] Mr. Lowell Thomas has described Lawrence as a Sherif of Mecca. This is plainly ridiculous. Whatever mixed blood Lawrence has in him he certainly is not a pedigreed descendant of the Prophet. He has never been to Mecca and would not offend the Arabs by so doing.
Among these captives were Hussein, the future Sherif, and his four sons, Ali, Abdulla, Feisal and Zeid, who are important in this story. Hussein gave his sons a modern education at Constantinople and the experience which afterwards helped them as leaders of the Arab revolt against the Turks. But he also kept them good Mohammedans and when he returned to Mecca took good care to cure them of any Western softness. He sent them out into the desert in command of the Sherifian troops that guarded the pilgrim road between Medina and Mecca, and kept them there for months at a time.