How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs

The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of its Liberal-Islamic Alliance

Elizabeth F. Thompson

• Editore: Grove Press UK
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781611859003
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Middle Eastern History

When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against their Turkish rulers and allied with the British on the promise of an independent Arab state. In October 1918, the Arabs' military leader, Prince Faisal, victoriously entered Damascus and proclaimed a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria.Faisal won American support for self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference, but other Entente powers plotted to protect their colonial interests. Under threat of European occupation, the Syrian-Arab Congress declared independence on March 8, 1920 and crowned Faisal king of a 'civil representative monarchy.' Sheikh Rashid Rida, the most prominent Islamic thinker of the day, became Congress president and supervised the drafting of a constitution that established the world's first Arab democracy and guaranteed equal rights for all citizens, including non-Muslims.But France and Britain refused to recognize the Damascus government and instead imposed a system of mandates on the pretext that Arabs were not yet ready for self-government. In July 1920, the French invaded and crushed the Syrian state. The fragile coalition of secular modernizers and Islamic reformers that had established democracy was destroyed, with profound consequences that reverberate still.Using previously untapped primary sources, including contemporary newspaper accounts, reports of the Syrian-Arab Congress, and letters and diaries from participants, How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs is a groundbreaking account of an extraordinary, brief moment of unity and hope - and of its destruction.

PART I

An Arab State in Syria

Chapter 1

Damascus:
Enter the Prince

Monday, September 30, 1918. Night fell in Deraa, a small town at a major railway junction sixty miles south of Damascus. “How wonderful to be happy,” wrote Rustum Haidar in his diary. Haidar was personal assistant to Prince Faisal, leader of the Northern Arab Army, which had waged armed revolt against the Ottoman Empire for more than two years. The wartime Ottoman regime’s desperate measures had combined with the Allies’ blockade to starve and brutalize Syrians. That was why, earlier that day, the people of Deraa had cheered the Arab army’s arrival.¹

Haidar had just come from a meeting with Faisal at the local train station. The two-story stone structure stood in lonely vigil along the tracks of the Hijaz Railway, which stretched 820 miles south to the holy city of Medina. The revolt had followed those tracks northward from its starting point, in Arabia, in June 1916.

Outside the station, darkness shrouded the grim underside of victory. Wounded soldiers of the retreating Ottoman army groaned in alleyways. The dead lay strewn across the land, incompletely buried. Abandoned horses roamed the town. Desperate peasants, starved in the last years of the Great War, had plundered the Serail, the governor’s palace, and ripped off its wooden doors and window frames for fuel. The Serail’s forlorn shell symbolized the end of the Ottoman Turks’ four-hundred-year rule in this land.

Inside the station, the two men lit scented candles to ward off malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and took stock of their situation. Faisal spoke with the hard accent of his homeland in the Arabian Peninsula. At age thirty-five, he had the lean look of a desert warrior, with a neatly trimmed goatee. Only thirty years old, Haidar had the shorter and broader build of Mediterranean peoples. He looked at Faisal with intense, deep-set eyes and spoke with the soft lilt of his hometown near Mount Lebanon. A scholar, not a soldier, Haidar had attended a top college in Istanbul and studied political administration in Paris. He spent the war as principal of elite schools in Jerusalem and Damascus. Faisal was a sharif, a Sunni descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, and third son of Hussein, king of the Hijaz and caretaker of the holy city of Mecca. Haidar came from a prominent family of the opposing Islamic sect, Shiism. Despite the long history of conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, the two men bonded in their mission to claim an independent Arab state from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.

The revolt sprang from Arabs’ discontent with the rule of the Young Turks, who had betrayed the hopes for local autonomy, democracy, and rule of law that had been raised in the 1908 Ottoman constitutional revolution. The Young Turks’ 1912 coup had effectively suspended the constitution. They had purged the government and reorganized the military to privilege Turks over Arabs. Early in World War I, even as many Arab soldiers fought on the side of the Turks in the victorious battle at Gallipoli, the Ottoman governor of Syria had executed a dozen prominent Arab leaders and exiled many more on suspicion of treason for their earlier political dissent.

Within his family, Faisal remained the most loyal to the empire and especially to the Ottoman sultan who also reigned as the caliph, or spiritual leader, of Sunni Muslims. Faisal had grown up in Istanbul and served in the parliament at the outset of the war. He considered the Ottomans the best protection against Europeans’ long-standing desire to partition and colonize the empire, as they had already done in Egypt and the Arabic-speaking countries of North Africa. Ottoman defeats early in the war, at Basra in Iraq and at the Suez Canal in Egypt, cast doubt on that protection.

Even though Arabs were fighting in the Ottoman army, the Young Turks worried that Arab politicians might waver in their loyalty. When Faisal’s father learned of a Turkish plot to remove him from power, he chose Faisal, his most pro-Ottoman son, as his envoy to Istanbul. What Faisal saw on his trip in the spring of 1915 broke his faith. He arrived in Istanbul just as two hundred Armenian leaders were arrested; from his train windows he saw the first mass deportations of poor Armenians. Stopping at Damascus, he learned of similar arrests among Arab leaders. The Ottoman commander in the city, Jemal Pasha, greeted him coldly. Faisal secretly joined the Fatat nationalist organization that Rustum Haidar belonged to, and met the men who were now poised, in 1918, to build a Syrian state: General Ali Rida al-Rikabi, also known as Rida Pasha al-Rikabi and General Yasin al-Hashimi both assured him of military support; Dr. Ahmad Qadri and Dr. Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar pledged political support. In June 1915, Faisal carried the Damascus Protocol back to his father. It set the terms of a potential alliance with Entente powers against the Ottomans, primarily the promise of an independent Arab state stretching from Anatolia to the Gulf and Red Sea.²

On the basis of support in Damascus, Faisal’s father, Sharif Hussein, opened negotiations with the British high commissioner in Egypt in the summer of 1915. The British, who were then fighting a losing battle against the Ottomans at Gallipoli, desperately sought a prominent Muslim ally to wage a counter-jihad. They feared that the millions of Muslims under their rule, in Egypt and India and beyond, might otherwise rebel. But it was a risky move to rebel against the Ottoman caliph in wartime. Hussein could do so only by justifying the revolt as a means to defend the sovereignty of the Arabs and Islam. He therefore proposed to High Commissioner Henry McMahon in Cairo that Britain promise the Arabs an independent state covering the territory of Greater Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula. In October 1915 McMahon responded in the affirmative, with the exception of territories along the Syrian-Lebanese coast claimed by the French and in southern Iraq and along the Persian Gulf occupied by the British and their clients. Hussein rejected French claims and insisted that the Iraqi lands be evacuated after the war. The alliance was sealed in March 1916, but the vague wording of McMahon’s promises, unknown to Faisal in 1918, would haunt British-Arab negotiations at war’s end.³

The Arabs launched the revolt after Jemal Pasha ordered a second round of hangings of prominent Arabs, conducted in the main squares of Beirut and Damascus on May 6, 1916. By then, food shortages had already begun to starve the Syrian population. Jemal Pasha deported five thousand Syrian families to exile in Anatolia and transferred all Arab troops from the region. The Arab Revolt could no longer depend on internal Syrian support. The British alliance was now critical to its success. On June 10, 1916, Hussein launched the revolt with the conquest of Mecca. Arab forces moved northward and by the following summer liberated the key Red Sea port of Aqaba. The British spy T. E. Lawrence, who met Faisal in October 1916, masterminded the sabotage of the Hijaz Railway, crippling Ottoman troop movements. Faisal proved to be Hussein’s most militarily skilled son. His Northern Arab Army battled through today’s Jordan in coordination with the British-led Egyptian Expeditionary Forces, which conquered Jerusalem in December 1917. On the eve of the final push toward Damascus, Faisal commanded 8,000 regular troops and 4,000 irregulars, fighting alongside 69,000 troops under the British general Allenby, facing 34,000 Ottoman troops. By then, Faisal’s Northern Arab Army consisted of mainly Syrian soldiers and tribal units. Hijazi tribes who had launched the revolt two years earlier remained in the south as local Syrians deserted the retreating Ottoman army to join Faisal. Syrian-Arab troops played a critical role in disrupting the Ottoman communications hub at Deraa, disabling 25,000 enemy soldiers, and diverting Ottoman troops from British forces’ advance along the coast. General Allenby sent Faisal a thankful note crediting his Arab army as a key factor in the Allies’ success.⁴

Rustum Haidar had been the revolt’s contact behind Ottoman lines. In August 1918, as Ottoman fortunes sank, he and other Fatat members escaped Damascus to join Faisal’s army for the final push. The day before the Arab army entered Deraa, Faisal and Haidar had raised the Arab flag at nearby Busra, an ancient Roman town built on dark volcanic rock. The flag had three horizontal stripes—green, black, and white—representing the three ancient Arab caliphates. A red triangle represented the Hashemite dynasty of Faisal and his father. Busra’s support was crucial because the town controlled food supplies and roads needed for the march to Damascus.

At the same time, the approaching forces sent an open letter to the city’s Ottoman commander, announcing that they had come in judgment against the Young Turk regime that had heedlessly dragged their subjects into the Great War on Germany’s side in 1914. The Arab Revolt would avenge the victims of their war crimes. The letter read as follows:

God protect humanity from you and your Genghis-like evils. You destroyed the houses of the orphans with the intention of doing good and cut down the trees to burn in your trains which carry the sons of the country to destruction and death. You declared your unjustifiable war legal and you shattered the city of the Muslims [Mecca] and borrowed millions for your own benefit and burdened the people whom you did not even consult about the war and [who] had no will for it.⁵

The Arabs’ triumph now lay within reach. The next day, the army would enter Damascus.⁶ But, now, at the eleventh hour, a new obstacle arose. Faisal and Haidar heard rumors that the British aimed to reach Damascus first and place it under their own military command. Britain’s leaders appeared to have conflicting policies. Whereas in 1915 they had promised the Arabs an independent state simply for joining the Allies, the previous summer they had altered that promise: the Arabs would command only the territory that they themselves directly liberated from the Ottomans. It was therefore vital that the Arabs reach Damascus first, Haidar advised Faisal. Everything hinged on speed.

General Edmund Allenby, commander of Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, ordered his troops (mostly Australians) to move in on Damascus from the coast. British airplanes dropped leaflets warning the Turks that their ally Bulgaria had just surrendered. General Liman von Sanders, the German-Ottoman commander in Syria, ordered a full evacuation northward to Aleppo.⁷ That very night, September 30, the last Ottoman train pulled out of Damascus under a rain of rebel bullets fired from roofs and balconies. The last to depart were German soldiers, who exploded stockpiles of ammunition.

From a ridge overlooking the city, a British intelligence officer named T. E. Lawrence watched the geysers of flame and bursting shells. “The roar and reverberation of the explosions kept us all awake,” he recalled.⁸ Lawrence, also just thirty years old, had fought alongside the Arabs for almost two years. How many nights he and Faisal had talked of this moment! As the sun rose, he descended toward the fabled city with Faisal’s chief of staff, Nuri al-Said, a former Ottoman officer from Iraq. Peasants were already tilling their fields. “The silent gardens stood blurred green with river mist, in whose setting shimmered the city, beautiful as ever, like a pearl in the morning sun.”⁹

The cool Barada River had watered Damascus and its surrounding orchards since ancient times. At the heart of the city towered the seventh-century Umayyad Mosque, built on the site of a former Roman temple and church. Next to the mosque was the tomb of Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders five hundred years later. Since then, the faithful had gathered every year outside the mosque to launch the pilgrimage to Mecca. Damascus was already a center of religious faith and learning when the Ottomans conquered it in 1516. It was now also a center of the modern Arab cultural renaissance. Losing Damascus broke the Ottomans’ four-hundred-year hold on the eastern Arab world.

On the morning of October 1, the Arab army entered Damascus from its southern borders. Hundreds of soldiers marched ...