• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 818 0

Hussein wildly exaggerated his own influence when he hinted at vast Arab conspiracies waiting for his signal. In 1915, his position was precarious. He had spent much of his life waiting in Constantinople for the Ottomans to appoint him sharif and he recently had learned that they were thinking of deposing him.17 Close at hand, he faced a formidable rival in Ibn Saud, who was welding together the tribes of the interior to challenge him. From the British point of view it was not at all clear that the Arabs would ever rise, or that the Ottoman empire would collapse, or even that the Allies could win the war. Like the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Hussein-McMahon letters were a short-term expedient rather than a part of a long-term strategy. And there was yet another promise made in those war years that was going to cause trouble to the peacemakers. The Balfour Declaration, telling the Jews of the world that they could have a homeland in Palestine, was issued by the British government and subscribed to by the French and later the Americans. It was not clear how it meshed with the agreements with the Arabs.

Promissory notes given in wartime are not always easy to collect in peace but in June 1916, when the Arab revolt started, the British had every reason to feel pleased with their diplomacy. The sharif promptly proclaimed himself king of the Arabs, although the British would only recognize him as king of the Hejaz. Four of his sons fought the Turks, but the one who stood out was Feisal. Riding at Feisal’s side was his fair-haired, blue-eyed British liaison officer, later to become even more famous as Lawrence of Arabia.

A distinguished scholar and a man of action, a soldier and a writer, a passionate lover of both the Arabs and the British empire, T. E. Lawrence was, in Lloyd George’s words, “a most elusive and unassessable personality.” He remains a puzzle, surrounded by legend, some based in reality, some created by himself. It is true that he did brilliantly at Oxford, that he could have been a great archaeologist and that he was extraordinarily brave. It is not true that he created the Arab revolt by himself. His great account, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is part history, part myth, as he himself admitted. He claimed that he passed easily as an Arab, but Arabs found his spoken Arabic full of mistakes. He shuddered when the American journalist Lowell Thomas made him famous, but he came several times in secret to the Albert Hall to hear his lectures. “He had,” said Thomas, “a genius for backing into the limelight.” When he chose, Lawrence was enormously charming. His friends ranged across worlds and classes, from the desert Arabs to E. M. Forster. He could also be brutally rude. When his neighbor at a dinner party during the Peace Conference said nervously, “I’m afraid my conversation doesn’t interest you much,” Lawrence replied, “It doesn’t interest me at all.”18

In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the description of Lawrence’s first meeting with Feisal is epic: “I felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek—the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory.” His impressions at the time give a more human Feisal: “He is hot tempered, proud, and impatient, sometimes unreasonable, and runs off easily at tangents. Possesses far more personal magnetism and life than his brothers, but less prudent. Obviously very clever, perhaps not overscrupulous.”19

That last was equally true of Lawrence. To Feisal he held out the vision of the throne in an independent Syria, one that included Lebanon, and played down the other promises the British had made, to the French or to the Jews. He made sure that Feisal’s forces got credit for the capture of Damascus, much to the annoyance of the Australians who actually did the work. Feisal was appointed the chief administrator of Syria. Lawrence did all this for the Arabs but also for the British. He himself did not know which were the more important to him. Sometimes he talked of the Arabs as “we” and the British as “you.” Like other pro-Arabists, he hoped that the