“Just as we have certain religious obligations with regard to the Khilafat that have brought us here, we have other religious obligations, equally solemn and binding, that require us to approach the Turks and Arabs. ‘All Muslims are brothers, wherefore make peace between your brethren,’ is a Quranic injunction. We have come here in the interests of peace and reconciliation, and propose going to the Arabs and Turks for the same purpose.
“Quite apart from the main claim for preservation of the Khilafat with adequate temporal power, the Muslims claim that the local centre of their Faith—namely, the ‘Island of Arabia’—should remain inviolate and entirely under Muslim control. This is based on the dying injunction of the Prophet himself. The Jazirat-ul-Arab, as its name indicates, is the ‘Island of Arabia,’ the fourth boundary being the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. It therefore includes Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, as well as the region commonly known to European geographers as the Arabian peninsula. Muslims can acquiesce in no form of non-Muslim control, whether in the shape of mandates or otherwise, over any portion of this region. Religious obligations, which are absolutely binding on us, require that there at least there shall be exclusively Muslim control. It does not specify that it should be the Khalifa’s own control. In order to make it perfectly clear, I may say the religious requirements, sir, will be satisfied even if the Emir Feisal exercises independent control there.
“But, since we have to provide sufficient territories and resources and naval and military forces for the Khalifa, the necessity for the utmost economy which has to rule and govern all our claims in these matters suggests that both these requirements may easily be satisfied if the Jazirat-ul-Arab remains, as before the war, under the direct sovereignty of the Khalifa. We have great hopes that if we have opportunities of meeting our co-religionists we shall bring about a reconciliation between them and the Turks. After all, it cannot be said that Turkish rule in Arabia has been of such a character that other Powers are bound to interfere.”
Moreover, he added:
“With regard to the Arabs, about whom you asked me a little while ago, the delegation are not apprehensive with regard to the feasibility of an adjustment between the Khalifa and the Arabs. As I have already pointed out, there is the Quranic injunction: ‘All Muslims are brothers, wherefore make peace between your brethren.’ That is a duty laid upon us, and recently, at the Bombay Session, the All-India Khilafat Conference passed a resolution authorising a delegation to proceed to the Hejaz and other parts of Arabia to reconcile the Arabs and the Turks. Our interest is in the Khilafat as Mussulmans. No population and no territory could be so dear to the Muslim as the Arabs and Arabia. The Turks could not win such affection from us as the Arabs do. This is the land that we want to keep purely under Muslim control. Even if the Arabs themselves want a mandate in that country we will not consent. We are bound by our religious obligations to that extent. Therefore, it cannot be through antipathy against the Arabs or because of any particular sympathy for the Turks that we desire the Khalifa’s sovereignty over the Island of Arabia. The Turks are much farther removed from us. Very few of us know anything of the Turkish language; very few of us have travelled in the Turkish Empire. But we do go in large numbers to Mecca and Medina. So many of us want to die there. So many Mussulmans settle down and marry in Arabia; one of my own aunts is an Arab lady. Wherever we have met Arabs on our journey—we have had no opportunity, of course, of discussing the subject with well-educated people, but—we have asked the class of people we have met what they thought of the action of the King of the Hejaz—‘King’ in a land where God alone is recognised as a king: nobody can ever claim kingship there. They said his was an act that they condemned, it was an act they did not in the least like. They considered it to be wrong; the Arabs spoke disparagingly of it. I do not know to what extent it may be true, but there are a number of people who now come forward as apologists for the Arabs. They say that what Emir Feisal and the Sherif did was to save something for Islam; it was not that they were against the Turks, but they were for Islam. Whether this was or was not the fact, it is very significant that such apologies should be made now. Honestly, we have no apprehensions that we could not reconcile the Arabs and the Turks. This is a question which I think the Allied Council, the Peace Conference, could very well leave the Mussulmans to settle amongst themselves. We do not want British bayonets to force the Arabs into a position of subservience to the Turks.”
Resuming the idea he had already expressed, he concluded his speech thus:
“That can be very easily arranged, and if such a Federation as we dream of becomes a reality—and I do not see why it should not—the Arabs would have all the independence they require. They may claim national independence, but they cannot forget that Islam is something other than national, that it is supernational, and the Khilafat must be as dear to them as it is to us. Even now the King of the Hejaz does not claim to be the Khalifa. When people began to address him as such, he rebuked them, and he published in his official organ, Al-Qibla, that he wanted to be called King of the Hejaz, and not Amir-ul-Mumineen, a title reserved only for the Khalifa.”
M. Syud Hossain declared in his turn:
“We are not opposed to the independence of Arabia. We are opposed to Emir Feisal’s declaration of independence only for this reason—that Arabia, throughout the history of Islam, has up till now remained under the direct control of the Khalifa. This is the first time in the history of Islam that anyone who is not the Khalifa has set up any claim over Arabia. That is why there is, from the Muslim point of view, a conflict of religious obligations with actual facts. We are not opposed to Arabian independence. On the contrary, we wish very much for complete autonomy in that region, but we want it to be in harmony and not in conflict with the Khilafat and its claims. The idea is not unrealisable, as both Arabs and Turks are Muslims.”
Naturally the concentration of the French troops, during the Cilician troubles, had made the action of the Syrian Nationalists popular among the Moslem masses. On the other hand, an anti-Zionist agitation had gained ground in Palestine and quickly developed into a propaganda in favour of the union of Palestine and Syria under one sovereign. All these facts, which point to the existence in Syria of a movement in favour of an independent State, explain how it turned out that the Emir Feisal, who favoured the scheme of a confederate Arabian Empire, was proclaimed King.