The Anglo-Russian entente which had been created by the 1907 Treaty, went to work in 1914 according to plan, the Russian mill-stone grinding in from the north and the British mill-stone from the south. The moment of the Ottoman Empire’s final break-up had arrived, such a moment as had never occurred before in the history of modern imperialism and is unlikely to occur again.
Early in 1915, Great Britain and Russia wrote the sequel to the 1907 Treaty in the Sazonoff agreement, negotiated in London. The British surrender continued. Under the terms of this agreement, Constantinople, the seat of the Caliphate and the political capital of Islam, was surrendered to Russia and the neutral zone in Persia (exception being made for the town of Ispahan) was added to the British zone. The agreement was necessarily kept secret. At a moment when the Government of India was exerting every effort to re-assure Indian Moslems on the subject of the Caliphate, its contents might have exploded India.
The Anglo-Russian partition of the Ottoman Empire was soon agreed upon. Mesopotamia was duly awarded to Great Britain and the eastern provinces to Russia (without provision for the independent Armenia for which the Allied Governments have so frequently expressed concern). Palestine, an integral part of the Caliph’s domain, was awarded to an international Western regime, and the rest of the Syrian corridor, together with a great hinterland running north-east to meet the new Russian frontier and east to the Persian frontier, was awarded to France as a buffer between the Russian and British acquisitions. But the German drive on Paris made it impossible for France to release an Army for the occupation of its zone. Under the military pressure on the Western Front, France had no recourse but to recall its Consul-General at Beirut and to maintain a diplomatic watch upon its zone. Incidentally, its zone included Aleppo, the Achilles’ heel of the Ottoman Empire, which lay only a two days’ marching distance from Alexandretta which in turn lay a half-days’ steaming from the British base at Famagusta on Cyprus. But although the British Government raised the project of striking at Aleppo time and again, France and Russia interposed and maintained their vetoes. As a result, the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force and Indian Expeditionary Force “D” in Mesopotamia were put in the interesting position of having to operate for four years against an enemy whose military rear was open at Aleppo.
It now becomes possible to reconstruct the British war program. The Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta project which proposed to embed the Suez Canal in 8,000 miles of British territory running from South Africa to India, was its goal. It was not an incident in the growth of the Empire, it was its very climax and full fruition. It was the peak of British imperialism.
Its center was Cairo and with the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the enemy alliance, the great British Embassy at Constantinople abdicated in favor of the British Agency in Cairo. It was from Cairo that Islam was paralyzed by the split between Arabs and Turks. If Lord Kitchener were alive today, it seems safe to say that he would be the ruler in Cairo of an Arab area stretching from the Sudan to Persia, with a protege at Mecca in the person of King Hussein dignified by the newly acquired Caliphate of Islam. As for the Ottoman Caliphate, Czarist Russia was to reduce the Sultans to simple Amirs of Anatolia, a program in which the Foreign Office connived and whose result has been what Englishmen since the war have referred to as British “abdication” in India. We in the West might understand more vividly what “our brother Turk” means to Islam in India if we had been in the habit of entering India by an overland route rather than by the sea route which we customarily use….
Great Britain’s declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire on Nov. 5, 1914, enabled it to transfer Cyprus to the Colonial Office at once. In Cairo, it enabled the British Agency to depose the Sultan’s Khedive and to set up a Khedive of its own. London’s repeated pledges to France on the subject of Egypt made it hesitate at the final cancellation of Ottoman sovereignty but the situation was a difficult one and the British Protectorate was duly proclaimed, the Agency’s Khedive assuming the title of Sultan. The Agency was now elevated to the status of a Residency and martial law was proclaimed. Very soon, German and Ottoman forces struck at the Suez Canal through which British Indian, Australian and New Zealand forces were streaming en route to France and whose banks were garrisoned with a mixed assemblage of troops known as the Force in Egypt, a Force uncertain as Lord Kitchener afterward reminded it whether it was expected to defend the Canal or the Canal was expected to defend it. The enemy was thrown back from the very banks of the Canal and, having itself crossed to establish the bridgehead of Kantara, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force marked time while the Grand Sherif of Mecca communicated the terms of Arab nationalism to the Residency in Cairo. Arab nationalism made it necessary for the Foreign Office in London to consult France and the result of that consultation was the secret Sykes-Picot agreement which did not long detain the Residency in Cairo and which need not long detain us here.
What is worthy of attention here, however, is the fact that Arab nationalism involved Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the three sites of the holiest places of Islam. With the Egyptian Expeditionary Force marking time at Kantara, Mecca and Medina lay on the southern flank of its advance and to the north in the lower end of the Syrian corridor lay Jerusalem. The three constituted a line lying across the line of the E. E. F.’s advance, a line guaranteed to all Islam by its Ottoman Caliph and additionally guaranteed to Islam in India by the Government of India’s undertaking that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem opinion alone to decide. This guaranteed line, however, lay across the Cairo-Calcutta leg of the Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle and in due time the Foreign Office handed down its instructions. The Residency in Cairo began the extemporization of a British Arabia which should pivot on Mecca with provincial capitals at Damascus and Bagdad.
Thus was carried into effect one of the most momentous decisions in the history of an Empire which once called itself “the greatest Moslem Power in the world,” a decision which plumbs the depths of the British surrender in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Ottoman Caliphate was the last great barrier in front of imperialism. The 1907 Treaty broke it.
The Residency now lost no time in establishing contact with the Grand Sherif of Mecca. The Ottoman Caliph hurried reinforcements to the Hejaz, but the Sherif’s son Feisal drew a cordon around them in Medina at the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway. Although British officers directed him in repeated efforts to isolate Medina by cutting the Hejaz Railway, the Caliph succeeded in holding it until after the Ottoman Government signed its armistice in 1918, but throughout the rest of the Hejaz, his garrisons sooner or later were removed to British prison camps in Egypt. In the summer of 1917 the Grand Sherif declared his independence of Constantinople, assuming the title of King Hussein I.
The loss of Mecca broke the Ottoman Caliphate. King Hussein had his own lineal qualifications for the Caliphate. An Anglican-Orthodox union had been projected with its capital in a Russian Constantinople, and an Arab king at Mecca may indicate the disposition which the Foreign Office in London proposed to make of the Caliphate. From that day to this, the burden of supporting the Hejaz has been transferred from Constantinople to London. Once it was part of the burden of the Ottoman Caliphate. Today it is maintained by a British subsidy. Two of the three most venerable shrines of Islam are financed by the Colonial Office which, whatever else may be said of it, is not a Moslem bureau.