Jerusalem. The Biography

arranged the party.
    The two pashas set out for Mecca to see off any potential Arab rebellion. But Enver’s
haj
could not save Arabia for the Ottomans. 9

1916–17
     
    LAWRENCE AND THE SHERIF OF MECCA
     
    Just before the Great War began, a young princeling from Mecca, Abdullah ibn Hussein, on his way back from Istanbul, visited Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the reigning British Agent in Cairo, to ask for military aid for his father.
    Abdullah’s father was Hussein, the Sherif of Sherifs and the Amir of Mecca, the grandest potentate in Arabia, a Hashemite in direct descent from the Prophet. The family were traditionally amirs of Mecca but the Ottoman sultan Abdul-Hamid had kept him in luxurious limbo in Istanbul for over fifteen years while appointing other members of the family. Then in 1908, the Young Turks, faced with a lack of other candidates, despatched him to Mecca (where his telephone number was Mecca 1). Faced with Enver Pasha’s aggressive Turkish nationalism and the rivalry of the Saudis and other Arabian chieftains, Hussein wished to prepare for either war in Arabia or revolt against Istanbul.
    Abdullah proudly showed Kitchener a flesh wound gained fighting a southern Arabian sheikh, and Kitchener revealed his scars from the Sudan. ‘Your Lordship’, the squat Arabian told the towering Kitchener, ‘is a target that cannot be missed but, short as I am, a Bedouin hit me.’ Despite Abdullah’s charm, Kitchener refused to arm the Sherifians.
    A few months later, the start of the Great War changed everything. Kitchener returned to London to serve as secretary of state for war – and to launch the steely-eyed recruiting poster that read ‘Your Country Needs You’ – but he remained Britain’s pre-eminent Eastern expert. When the Ottoman sultan-caliph declared jihad against the Allies, he remembered Hussein and proposed appointing him as Britain’s own caliph to launch an Arab revolt. He ordered Cairo to contact the Sherif.
    At first there was no reply. Then suddenly, in August 1915, Sherif Hussein offered to lead an Arab revolt – in return for certain promises. The British, confronting the failure of their Gallipoli expedition,designed to break the Western Front stalemate by knocking the Ottomans out of the war, and the disastrous encirclement of an army at Kut in Iraq, were afraid that Jemal Pasha would conquer Egypt unless he was restrained by Arab unrest. London therefore ordered Sir Henry McMahon, high commissioner in Egypt, to agree whatever necessary to keep the Arabs on side without promising anything that clashed with French and of course British ambitions.
    Sherif Hussein, now over sixty, was described by no less an observer than Lawrence of Arabia as ‘conceited to a degree, greedy and stupid’ and ‘pitifully unfit’ to rule a state, but nonetheless ‘such an old dear’ and at this point the British badly needed his help. Guided by his canny second son Abdullah, he now demanded a Hashemite * empire of all of Arabia, Syria, Palestine and Iraq, an outrageously exorbitant gambit and an imperium on a scale that had not existed since the Abbasids. In return he would lead a revolt against the Ottomans not only in his native Arabia but also in Syria through the network of secret Arab nationalist societies such as al-Fatat and al-Ahd. None of this was quite true: he commanded only a few thousand warriors and did not even rule all of the Hejaz. Much of Arabia was controlled by rival chieftains like the Saudis and his position was precarious. The secret societies were tiny, with just a few hundred active members between them, and would soon be decimated by Jemal.
    McMahon was unsure how much to concede to these ‘tragi-comic pretensions’, but, while he agonized, Hussein simultaneously offered the Three Pashas the chance to outbid the British, asking for hereditary possession of the Hejaz and an end to Jemal’s terror. The sherif sent his third son Faisal to negotiate with Jemal, but the tyrant forced him to attend the hangings of Arab nationalists.
    The sherif had much more success with the British. London’s Eastern experts based in Cairo knew the contours of Palestine intimately through the espionage archaeology of the last century and Kitchener himself had photographed Jerusalem and mapped the country, sometimes in full Arab disguise. But many understood the clubs of Cairo better than the souks of Damascus: they were patronizing about the Arabs and prejudiced against the Jews