The makers of the modern middle east

Tai Lieu Chat Luong




T G Fraser

The Makers of the Modern Middle East

with Andrew Mango and Robert McNamara


First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Haus Publishing Ltd
This revised and updated second edition published in 2015 by
Gingko Library
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Copyright their text © T G Fraser, Robert McNamara and Andrew Mango, 2011
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
1 The Birth of Nationalisms
2 Wartime Promises and Expectations
3 Arabs and Zionists in Paris
4 San Remo and Sèvres: the Flawed Peace
5 The Middle East Rebels and the Peace Settlement Revisited
6 From War to War
7 Conclusion: The Legacy

vii
1
44
115
167
219
275
327

Further Reading367
Index377

Preface and Acknowledgements
Historians have long known that the settlements negotiated at the end
of the First World War had ramifications well beyond Europe. Much
of Volume VI of H W V Temperley’s monumental study A History of
the Peace Conference of Paris, published in 1924, was devoted to the
affairs of the Middle East and the attempts to set in place a peace settlement with the Ottoman Empire and its successors. As such, the contributors ranged across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine and Persia,
as well as the Zionist movement.1 Since then, there have been many
investigations of how the region was transformed during the critical
years between 1914 and 1923, some of them becoming classic studies.2
This book approaches the problem of post-war reconstruction from
three very different perspectives; namely, the emerging but increasingly
insistent claims of Arab nationalism, Turkish nationalism and Zionism.
Whilst these movements, which recast the political shape of the region
in spite of the imperial ambitions of the triumphant European powers,
transcend any individual, three leaders emerged, who by any reckoning became the makers of the modern Middle East. The Hashemite
Prince Feisal, with British encouragement, raised the standard of Arab

1  H W V Temperley (ed), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, Vol VI,
(Oxford University Press, London, New York, Toronto: 1924) Chapter 1, ‘The Near
and Middle East’.
2 See, for example, George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (Hamish Hamilton,
London: 1988) and Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (Vallentine, Mitchell &
Co Ltd, London: 1961). For a discussion of Antonius’s book, see Chapter 1.


viiithe makers of the modern middle east

nationalism against centuries of Turkish rule, only to see his hopes of an

Arab kingdom destroyed, albeit with compensation for him in Iraq and
for his brother in Transjordan. From an obscure university position in
the north of England, the Russian-born scientist Dr Chaim Weizmann
enlisted the support of key British politicians for a Jewish national home
in Palestine in the shape of the Balfour Declaration, and then translated
that document into a British League of Nations Mandate for Palestine charged with bringing it into effect. The Turkish soldier Mustafa
Kemal came to prominence in the successful defence of the Gallipoli
peninsula in 1915, and then went on to lead and inspire his country’s
defiance of the victorious Allied powers to establish a modern, secular
Turkish republic, becoming Atatürk, the ‘Father of the Turks’. What
their movements achieved, and failed to achieve, are part of their legacies nearly a century later.
This volume was suggested to me by Dr Barbara Schwepcke of
Haus Publishing, who realised that the deliberations of the post-First
World War Peace Conference relating to the Middle East could be
approached from three very different perspectives. This was apparent
from three volumes she had published in The Makers of the Modern
World series under the editorship of Professor Alan Sharp: namely,
Andrew Mango, From the Sultan to Atatürk: Turkey; Robert McNamara, The Hashemites: The Dream of Arabia; and my own, Chaim
Weizmann: The Zionist Dream. This book, thus, attempts to bring these
studies together into an account of a seminal period of Middle Eastern
history.
The Middle East is an area both of fascination and controversy. As
an historian who has taught and researched its history at universities
in Northern Ireland and the United States for over four decades, I have
been lucky enough to have visited its countries many times, in the
belief, taught me years ago by the late Professor L F Rushbrook Williams, that it is essential for a scholar to get the ‘feel’ for the societies
under review. His kindly interest in my work as an apprentice historian
of the Middle East and South Asia is a memory I will always cherish. I
have never encountered anything other than the hospitality for which
the Middle East is justly renowned, and I retain the fondest memories

Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

of the people I have met and who have educated me in its affairs. If I
have become convinced of anything, it is that those brought up in the
West should have a proper appreciation of, and acknowledge, just how
much world civilisation has owed to the contributions of the peoples
of the Middle East.
Unfortunately, it is also a part of the world which has endured
more than its fair share of turmoil and tragedy, and this, too, must be
acknowledged and understood. Tragic events in the Middle East have
become standard fare in the headlines for decades, and it is, alas, all
too tempting to develop an indifference towards them, or worse. Such
a path is neither realistic nor justifiable. This book proceeds from the
belief that a sympathetic, but not uncritical, understanding of Middle
Eastern affairs is a sine qua non for the informed citizen. The Makers
of the Modern Middle East, then, analyses a critical series of events
before, during, and after the Paris Peace Conference when the future
shape of the Middle East as we have come to know it came into focus.
I am particularly grateful to my fellow authors Andrew Mango and
Robert McNamara for their tolerance as I worked with their texts, and
for their general advice. I have to note with great sadness that Andrew
Mango did not live to see this new edition. With his death, the world
of Turkish studies has lost a scholar of incomparable talent and experience. Barbara Schwepcke of Haus and Jaqueline Mitchell patiently
encouraged me through the unfamiliar experience of making a coherent text from three volumes. Janet Farren deployed her customary skills

in assisting with the preparation of the work for the publisher. The
Series Editor of The Makers of the Modern World, Alan Sharp, read and
commented on the text, as, amidst all the other priorities of academic
life, did Dr Leonie Murray of the University of Ulster, saving me from
many errors of expression and emphasis. Finally, my wife, Grace, was,
as ever, an unfailing source of critical understanding and support.
T G Fraser, MBE
Emeritus Professor of History and Honorary Professor of Conflict Research,
University of Ulster



1

The Birth of Nationalisms
The Middle East on the eve of war
In 1900 the Middle East was barely, if we may borrow Prince Metternich’s dismissal of Italy, a ‘geographical expression’. In the early 21st
century its affairs could not be ignored. At the end of the First World
War, the term ‘Middle East’ was being used by the British, who had
come to dominate the region as the result of military conquest, and
it has since passed into common usage, which may serve as some
defence against accusations of Eurocentrism. Definitions of the region
have varied over time, but the limits of this book are marked by the
boundaries of what was then the Ottoman Empire. The Turks emerged
in the 8th century CE when the Seljuks, guided, according to national
legend, by a grey wolf, conquered territories in central Asia. Their
name is commemorated in the modern city of Seljuk in Anatolia. Converting to Islam, the Turks, led by the House of Osman, commonly
known as the Ottomans, came into conflict with the Christian Byzantine empire, heir to ancient Rome. In 1453, the armies of Mehmed II,
‘the Conqueror’, took Constantinople, a pivotal event in world history.
At its height, the Ottoman Empire extended from the Turkish heartland in Anatolia across Egypt and North Africa, conquering much of

the Arab territories as far as the Shatt al-Arab waterway, and in Europe
pressing through the Balkans to the gates of Vienna.1 The Sublime
1  Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire
(Perennial edition, New York: 2002) Parts 1 and 2.


2the makers of the modern middle east

State, as it was officially known, was both an Asian and a European
empire, its capital uniquely spanning two continents across the narrow
Straits of the Bosphorus, one of the most strategic waterways in the
world. Constantinople, or Istanbul as it was known to the Turks, with
its incomparable skyline etched by the mosques of Aya Sophia, Sultanahmet and Süleymaniye, the first of these also a reminder of the
region’s Roman and Byzantine inheritance, was one of the great cities
of the world. It was then both imperial and cosmopolitan.2 From his
accession in 1876 until his forced abdication in 1909, the empire was
ruled by Abdülhamid II, who, like the Habsburgs and the Romanovs,
presided over a fascinating range of peoples and religions.

The Ottoman Empire in the new century
At the heart of Abdülhamid’s empire were the Turks, numbering,
perhaps, some 10 million. The empire was ruled by the House of
Osman, the Sultan uniting with his temporal rule the office of Caliph,
or protector of the Islamic faith.3 By the early 20th century, the empire
was the last remaining major Islamic polity in a world dominated by
the imperialisms of the major Christian powers and Japan, a fact which
bound the Turks to their Arab subjects, of whom there were around
7 million. This fact also attracted Muslims across the Islamic world,
not least those of British India. Amongst the cities of the empire were
Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Islam, and Jerusalem, sacred

to Jews, Christians and Muslims, the world’s three great monotheistic
faiths. Whilst the bulk of the empire’s Muslims, belonged to the Sunni,
or ‘Orthodox’, branch of Islam, in the historic lands of the Tigris and
Euphrates were Najaf and Karbala, the holy cities of the Shias, whose

2 While European diplomats were accredited to Constantinople, the Turks
themselves used Istanbul. For reasons of consistency, I have used the latter, which
the Turks insisted upon after 1923.
3 See entry for ‘Turkey’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, Vol XXVII
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1911) pp 426–7.




The Birth of Nationalisms

3

people did not instinctively identify with Ottoman rule.4 Shias, the
minority branch of the Islamic faith, believed that the true successors
of the Prophet Muhammad were his son-in-law Ali and his descendants. The two cities held particular sanctity for the Shias since Ali was
buried in Najaf and his son, Husayn, who had been killed in battle, was
buried in Karbala. They found an affinity with those across the border
in Persia, or Iran as it became in 1935, which was the main centre of
Shia power. The Shias of the Tigris and Euphrates did not sit entirely
comfortably in an empire in which the dominant Turks, as well as most
Arabs, were Sunnis, and this was to pose problems in later years once
independence came to the region.
Nor was it an homogeneously Muslim empire, since there were also
significant Jewish and Christian minorities. Jews were to be found in the

holy cities of Judaism, Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron, as well
as in considerable numbers in Baghdad, where they had lived since
the Babylonian captivity of the 6th century BCE. Jerusalem, especially
its Old City, held a unique place because of its significance for Jews,
Christians and Muslims. This deep religious feeling found its focus for
Jews in the Western Wall, the only remaining fragment of their Temple
which the Roman conquerors of Jerusalem had left intact, while for
Muslims the adjacent Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque comprised the Haram al-Sharif (the ‘Noble Sanctuary’), their most sacred
shrine after Mecca and Medina. For Jews the site was the Temple
Mount. Also in the Old City was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
sacred to Christians. In more recent years, as we will see, Zionist Jews
from eastern Europe had also begun to settle. Around Mount Lebanon
were the Maronites, a Christian denomination enjoying close links with
France and Rome. In Egypt, still technically part of the empire until
1914, there was a substantial Coptic Christian minority. The region’s
Byzantine heritage survived, too, since the Patriarch of Constantinople
was the acknowledged head of the eastern Christian Church, as well
.
as of the empire’s thriving Greek community. Izmir, or Smyrna, on the
Aegean coast, the second city of the empire in terms of population,
4  Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2007) p 12.


4the makers of the modern middle east

was half-Greek, while it was estimated that there were some 150,000
Greeks residing in Constantinople. It was inevitable that they would be
suspected of partiality towards their kinsmen across the border, who
had won their independence in the 1820s.
The position of two other substantial non-Turkish minorities, the

Kurds and Armenians, was even more problematic, not least because
large numbers of them were also to be found in other countries. Outside
the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim Kurds were a minority population in
the north-west of neighbouring Persia, whilst the Christian Armenians
were stretched across Turkey, Persia and Russia, whose officials were
not above encouraging their national aspirations. Armenians were also
aware of the success of the Christian Slavs in prising the Turks out of
the Balkans. The Turks, in turn, used the Kurds as a counter to the
Armenians. Massacres of Armenians in 1895–6 set an uneasy precedent. When we also include smaller communities such as the Alawites,
Chaldaeans, Circassians, Druzes and Yazidis, then the rich diversity of
the empire becomes clear, although, as its former Habsburg rival was
discovering, this was not always an advantage in an age of burgeoning
nationalisms.
Although it was emphatically a Muslim polity, believers in other
mono­theistic religions were accorded recognition through the millet
system, under which they ran their own affairs. Millet status was
accorded to the Latin Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Catholic,
Armenian Gregorian, Syrian and United Chaldaean, Maronite, Protestant and Jewish communities. Nor did the Jews forget that it was the
Turks who had given refuge to many of them after their expulsion from
Andalucia in the late 15th century. The millet system both acknowledged and respected the empire’s rich variety.5
It was, of course, in the Balkans that the most immediate threat
to the empire lay. From the time when the unfortunate Grand Vizier
Kara Mustafa had failed in his bid to take Vienna in 1683, the Habsburg armies, led by their great commander Prince Eugene, had steadily pushed the Turks back through the Balkans. Austrian expansion
5 ‘Turkey’, Encyclopaedia Britannica.




The Birth of Nationalisms

5

came to rest with the de facto acquisition of the Ottoman provinces of
Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, a poisoned chalice for the dynasty
if ever there was one, but by then the Turks were being further challenged in the Balkans. If the Austrians had led the charge to expel the
Turks from central and south-eastern Europe, their task was taken up
by the Russians, who encouraged the Serbs and Bulgarians to move
for independence, just as they had earlier done with the Greeks.6 By
the time of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro were also independent, and Bulgaria was soon to follow. The
empire’s long-standing dominance in the Balkans finally came to end
in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, which left it with a rump of territory
in eastern Thrace, although crucially still in possession of Istanbul and
the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, which linked the Black Sea to the
Aegean, the Mediterranean and the seas beyond.
By then, it may truly be said that it had become a Middle Eastern
empire. The Ottoman Empire still held suzerainty over Egypt, with its
fertile Nile valley and the historic cities of Cairo and Alexandria, but
this had become a fiction. Since 1882, the country had been ruled
by the British, whose interest was generated by the opening in 1869
of the Suez Canal, which provided a key route to their possessions in
the east, notably the Indian Empire. Their proconsuls, men like Lords
Cromer and Kitchener, paid no heed to the Sultan. Then, in 1911–12,
Italy seized Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in a war notable for the first use
of bombs dropped from aircraft, a dismal precedent for the century
to come.7 Italy’s colonial adventure also marked the emergence of a
young Ottoman major, Mustafa Kemal. In effect, by 1914 the Turks
had been shut out of their historic lands in North Africa as well as in
Europe.

6  Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire (Arnold, London:

2004) p 51.
7 Alan Palmer, The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (John Murray, London:
1992) p 214.


6the makers of the modern middle east

The ‘Young Turks’
If it were an empire in geographical retreat, the seeds of renewal were
there, nevertheless. The Ottoman state entered the First World War on
the side of the Central Powers in 1914 in a reckless gamble by a group
of adventurers, led by a triumvirate consisting of two young career officers, Enver and Cemal, and one civilian, Talât. Enver, the leading spirit,
was 33 years old in 1914, Cemal was 42 and Talât 40. Enver became
Commander-in-Chief (formally Deputy Commander-in-Chief, since the
Sultan was nominal C-in-C), Cemal Navy Minister, commander of the
Southern Front and Governor of Syria (which included Lebanon and Palestine), and Talât Minister of the Interior and then Grand Vizier (Prime
Minister). These leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress, or
Young Turks, as they were known in the West, had risen to power and
fame in Ottoman Macedonia in the first decade of the 20th century.
Their character had been moulded by their experience in fighting the
irregular bands of Balkan nationalists – Slav Macedonians, Bulgarians,
Greeks, Serbs and, finally, Albanians. Nationalist irregulars were known
in Turkish as komitacı (committee-men), a designation which became
a byword for ruthlessness, violence and treachery, but also reckless
courage. Such men were needed to carve nationally homogeneous
states out of a multinational empire – a process which involved massacres, deportations and the flight of millions of refugees. Enver, Cemal
and Talât were Turkish komitacıs in a literal sense, too, as leaders of
the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), whose members were
.
known as Unionists (Ittihatỗ). They were initiated in quasi-Masonic

ceremonies in which oaths were sworn on guns and holy books. They
conspired against the absolutist regime of Sultan Abdül­hamid II, forced
him to reintroduce constitutional rule in 1908, deposed him in 1909
and seized power in a coup in 1913. They believed initially that constitutional rule would reconcile all the ethnic communities of the Ottoman
Empire and turn them all into loyal Ottoman citizens under the banner
of freedom, fraternity and justice. It was their version of the ideals of the
French Revolution, which they admired as the ‘Great Revolution’. But
they admired Napoleon even more and also the German and Japanese
militarists whose example confirmed their belief that might was right.




The Birth of Nationalisms

7

Like many other young officers, Mustafa Kemal was attracted to
revolutionary politics in the hope that they might transform the fortunes of the empire. When the Young Turks acted against the Sultan in
1908, he was a member of their movement, although not a prominent
one. Mustafa, to give him his original name, was born some time in the
winter of 1880–1 in the cosmopolitan city of Salonica, now Thessaloniki in Greece. His father, Ali Riza, worked in the timber trade and as a
customs officer, providing a decent middle-class income for his young
wife Zübeyde. Mustafa was only a child when his father died, but he
remained close to his mother, even after her remarriage. In 1899, he
entered the imperial war college, doing well there and proceeding
to Staff College. That he was an able and assiduous student is amply
born out by his subsequent career. No less significantly, he was also
attracted to politics, leading to a brief arrest and effective banishment
to a military unit in Damascus. Here, too, according to his own account

he helped spread revolutionary ideas in Beirut, Jerusalem and Jaffa.
Various staff and regimental appointments followed the Young Turk
revolution, but it was Italy’s invasion of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica
which gave him the opportunity to make his mark. Travelling in disguise through British-ruled Egypt, he was soon in action against the
Italians. With a small force of Turkish regulars and thousands of Arabs,
he helped pin down the Italian forces on the coast. It was to no avail,
however. Faced with the ability of the Italian fleet to bombard Beirut
and the Dardanelles, as well as more immediate threats in the Balkans,
the empire was forced to cede its two provinces in October 1912. His
return to Turkey saw him posted as military attaché to Sofia the following year, which brought promotion to lieutenant-colonel. If in 1914, he
was not amongst the most prominent officers in the Ottoman army, he
was certainly a well-trained and serious-minded professional, who had
experienced active service against a modern European enemy. He also
had an acute political brain.8
Despite its defeats, the Ottoman state punched well above its weight.
This was partly due to the hardihood and courage of Turkish conscripts.
8 Andrew Mango, Atatürk (John Murray, London: 1999) Chapters 1–7.


8the makers of the modern middle east

‘The Turkish peasant will hide under his mother’s skirts to avoid conscription, but once in uniform he will fight like a lion’, a Russian expert
on Turkey wrote during the war.9 But there was another reason, to
which most Western observers were blind and which historians have
come to notice only recently. While the rural masses were illiterate
and ignorant of the modern world, there was an elite of experienced
and well-trained Turkish civil servants and army officers. Although the
reforms of the 19th century (known as the Tanzimat, meaning ‘the
(re)ordering’) were routinely decried in the West as inadequate and a
sham, by the beginning of the 20th century Ottoman administration

compared well with that of other contemporary empires – so much so
that many of its former subjects came to regret its eventual dissolution.
A recent study suggests that in the Arab lands placed under British and
French Mandates at the end of the First World War, there was little
improvement for indigenous Muslims in such basic areas as average life
expectancy, education, communications and public order.10 Ottoman
civil administration was organised on French lines, while in the army
French and British advisers were largely replaced by Germans from the
reign of Abdülhamid II onwards. The efficiency of Ottoman governors
and commanders was often overlooked by Western critics, however,
who decried their rule as backward and corrupt. Foreign observers
also overlooked the fact that many of the Greeks, particularly along
the Aegean coast, were immigrants from the newly independent Greek
kingdom who found life under Ottoman rule more rewarding than
in their own country. The Young Turks scored their only diplomatic
success in 1913 when the Balkan allies fell out among themselves,
allowing Enver to reclaim Edirne (Adrianople) and with it eastern
Thrace up to the river Meriỗ (Maritza/Evros) as the last Ottoman foothold in Europe. If the empire was no longer a European power, it had
not ceased to be of interest to the powers of Europe.

9  The expert was V A Gordelevski, a Russian Turcologist, in a rare Tsarist wartime
publication.
10 McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire, pp 171–92.




The Birth of Nationalisms

9

The Ottoman Empire and its Arab population
By the eve of war, the Ottoman Empire was predominantly a Middle
Eastern empire, whose future was likely to turn on relations between
the Turks and their most numerous subjects, the Arabs. At the outbreak of the First World War, the Turks had ruled the heartlands of the
Arab World encompassing the modern-day states of Syria, Iraq, Jordan,
Israel, Saudi Arabia and Arab North Africa for four centuries. Syria,
Iraq, Jordan and Palestine were known as the Fertile Crescent due to
the important rivers, notably the Tigris and Euphrates, that provided
the water resources that made the areas conducive to human settlement. The Ottomans, the last of the great Islamic Turkish tribes to forge
a major empire, had conquered the Arab lands in 1517, ruling them,
without serious opposition, until the beginning of the 20th century.
Only in the last decades of Ottoman rule did proto-nationalist challenges begin to become evident in the Arab territories.
When it emerged in the 7th century CE, Islam was initially synonymous with being Arab. However, within a century of the Arab
conquests, religion rather than ethnicity or nationality became ‘the
Supreme bond’,11 which partly accounts for the willingness of the
Arabs to accept Muslim Turkish overlords. Another reason was the
nature of Ottoman rule. While ostensibly one of the most centralised
empires in the world with all power held by the Sultan, this was, as one
observer noted, ‘make-believe’.12 Outside the main urban centres, such
as Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul and Baghdad, government control was
weak and the Arabic-speaking societies of the Fertile Crescent were
split into groupings based on family, tribal, ethnic and religious ties.13
While Turkish-speaking governors, in theory, held supreme power in
the Arabic-speaking regions, in practice linguistic barriers and a lack

11  C Ernest Dawn, ‘From Ottomanism to Arabism: The Origin of an Ideology’, The
Review of Politics, Vol 23, No 3 (Jul 1961) p 378.
12 English Arabist, traveller and diplomat Gertrude Bell, cited in David Fromkin, A
Peace to End All Peace (Andre Deutsch, London: 1989) p 35.

13  Ira Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge: 2002) p 535.


10the makers of the modern middle east

of military power meant they were dependent on local tribal leaders,
the urban rich and religious leaders to maintain even a modicum of
influence. These leading groups were known as the a‘yan or ‘notables’.
The politics of these notables was the dominant fact of political life in
the Ottoman Middle East in the 19th and early 20th century.14
One area of the Arab world held particular significance, Palestine.
Although the word ‘Palestine’ was widely understood to refer to the
area, it was not even a single provincial entity under the empire, with
the northern part lying under the vilayet, or administrative district, of
Beirut and the southern region constituting the sanjak of Jerusalem,
while across the river Jordan spread the vilayet of Syria. The Palestinians reflected the broader Arab society of the empire in that there were
identifiable Christian communities, especially in cities like Bethlehem
and Nazareth, which had associations with the life of Christ, but the
overwhelming majority were Sunni Muslims. Palestinian Arab society
was predominantly agricultural. While there was some industry, for
example the soap trade of Nablus based upon the widespread cultivation of olives, most urban economic activity, such as handicrafts,
weaving and construction, was related in some way to the agricultural
sector. The main inhibiting factor for Palestinian agriculture was, as
it has remained, the availability of water for irrigation, or rather the
comparative lack of it. The country’s principal river, the Jordan, was
unsuitable for irrigation purposes, and hence the peasant cultivators of
Palestine had to be careful that their farming methods and crops were
adapted to this and did not cause the erosion of what fertile soil they
had. The winter crops were wheat and barley, while in the summer

sesame and durra were harvested. Palestinian figs and olives were well
known, and sheep and goats provided the livestock, well adapted to
the hilly terrain of the country’s interior.15
14  Characterised in Albert Hourani, ‘Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables’,
in William R Polk and Richard L Chambers (eds), Beginnings of Modernisation in
the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, Chicago:
1968) pp 41–68.
15  Frank Adams, ‘Palestine Agriculture’, in Palestine: A Decade of Development,




The Birth of Nationalisms

11

The cultivators were the fellahin, who constituted the backbone
of the Palestinian population. Passionately attached to the land they
farmed, their title to it was often insecure, at least by European standards. The land of Palestine was held under various systems, decided
according to the Turkish land law of 1858. Much of it was designated
as state, or miri, land, which was then allotted to peasant cultivators,
subject to continuous cultivation. Under the Musha’a system, land was
rotated, which at least ensured that everyone would have a share of the
better land, but did not encourage soil improvement or fertilisation.16
A further significant element of the Palestinian population were the
Bedouin, who led a nomadic way of life, chiefly in the Negev Desert
in the south but also in Galilee. While village leaders were important
in their locality, power and status in Palestinian society rested primarily with the urban elites, who were also extensive landowners. The
leading Palestinian a‘yan families, the Husaynis, Nashashibis, Khalidis,
Jarallas and Nusseibehs, were to provide the leadership of Arab Palestine for the period under review. The Husaynis enjoyed particular

prestige since they had provided the city’s mayor and for a long period
the religious office of Mufti of Jerusalem had generally been held by
a member of the family. In time, the Husaynis were to emerge as the
driving force behind Palestinian Arab nationalism.17

The emergence of Arab nationalism
For many years, it was widely accepted that Arab nationalism, in its
early stages, arose from contact with the West. Unsurprisingly, the first
signs of a distinctively Arab nationalism begin to emerge in the urban
areas of Ottoman Syria, where European and American cultural and

The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (November
1932) pp 72–83.
16 Adams, ‘Palestine Agriculture’, pp 72–83.
17  Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al Hajj Amin Al-Husayni and the
Palestinian National Movement (Columbia University Press, New York: 1988)
pp 6–7.


12the makers of the modern middle east

educational influence was beginning to grow in the late 19th century
in tandem with increased Western political and economic penetration
of the region. European and American missionary work was linked to
the Holy Places in Palestine but also grew from a desire, especially
among Protestant congregations, to convert Muslims. Direct proselytisation was illegal but there seems to have been a vague, and ultimately
forlorn, hope that Arab Christians might transmit their faith to Muslims.18
A handful of Syrian Christians, educated in the American and French
missionary schools in the Lebanon that were established in the 19th
century, began to develop a quasi-secular Arab nationalism, however.

This included the revival of many classical Arabic literary texts and the
translating of Western texts into Arabic. In the 1860s a Syrian Christian, Ibrahim al-Yaziji, articulated an early vision of Arab nationalism.
He viewed the Ottoman conquest as a disaster for the Arabs who had
regressed from being a technically advanced and learned civilisation to
one that remained mired in backwardness and more interested in religion than science. Throwing off the Ottoman yoke, in his view, would
allow the Arabs to resume their previous trajectory of learning and
advancement. However, this secular vision of Arab nationalism was
anathema to the vast bulk of Muslim Arabs, who remained committed
to, or at least dispassionate about, the Ottoman Empire.19
George Antonius, in his 1938 book The Arab Awakening, perhaps
the key text of modern Arab nationalism, saw the genesis of Arab
nationalism within these very small cultural movements in late 19thcentury Ottoman Syria. Since the Second World War, there has been
increasing scepticism regarding some of Antonius’s claims regarding
the origins of Arab nationalism and his account of the Arab Revolt
during the First World War, however.20 Even a sympathetic observer

18  M E Yapp, The Making of the Modern Near East, 1792–1923 (Longman, Harlow:
1987) pp 132–3.
19  Dawn, ‘From Ottomanism to Arabism’, pp 10–11.
20 Among critical looks at Antonius are Sylvia G Haim, ‘“The Arab Awakening”, A
Source for the Historian?’, Die Welt des Islams, Vol 2, No 4 (1953), pp 237–50; Elie
Kedourie, England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire,




The Birth of Nationalisms

13

notes that it is not only ‘a work of historical narrative, but also of political advocacy’.21 Relying essentially on oral evidence, Antonius almost
certainly overplayed the role of a small Lebanese grouping, the Secret
Society, which distributed placards agitating against the Ottomans in
the late 1870s. This agitation, it is likely, was more to do with particular
local factors involving Maronite Christians than the genesis of an Arab
nationalism aimed against the Turks.22
Some 30 years later there were more concrete signs of a nascent
Arab nationalism. The spur was the 1908 Young Turk revolution. Arab
reaction was initially enthusiastic. The initial phase of liberalism delivered by the CUP saw political activity permitted in the empire, including the formation of specifically Arab parties. Yet it soon became
clear that the Young Turks’ flirtation with liberalism and pluralism was
merely a veneer behind which lurked a Turkish nationalist agenda,
which reinforced tendencies towards centralisation and Turkification
already evident in the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, there is little evidence
that the Young Turks drove forward these policies to any greater extent
than the old regime had.23 However, by briefly opening up Ottoman
politics, they made it harder to go back to the old authoritarian system.
After 1912, in a reaction to the end of the period of reform, parties
with an agenda of Arab autonomy began to emerge in Syria. The most
important of these, according to Antonius, was the Decentralisation

1914–1921 (London, Boulder: 1987) pp 29–66, 107–41; Elie Kedourie, In the AngloArab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpretations
1914–1939 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1976) pp 64–136, 266–9;
Albert Hourani, ‘“The Arab Awakening”, Forty Years Later’, in Derek Hopwood
(ed), Studies in Arab History: The Antonius Lectures, 1978–87 (Macmillan,
Basingstoke: 1990) pp 21–40.
21  Hourani, ‘“The Arab Awakening”, Forty Years Later’, p 26.
22 Antonius, The Arab Awakening, pp 37, 80, 81; Zeine N Zeine, Arab-Turkish
Relations and the Emergence of Arab Nationalism (Khayat’s, Beirut: 1958) pp 56, 57,
68.
23 See C Ernest Dawn, ‘The Origins of Arab Nationalism’, in Rashid Khalidi et

al, The Origins of Arab Nationalism (Columbia University Press, New York: 1991)
pp 18–19.


14the makers of the modern middle east

Party. Other bodies of importance, again in Syria, were secret societies
with similar manifestos including al-Fatat (the Young Arab Society) and
al-Qahtanyia. Antonius would seek later to link these groupings into
the Hashemite revolt against the Ottomans from 1916, thereby creating a bond between the more urban-based nationalism of the streets
of Damascus and that of the arid deserts from which the Hashemites
sprung.
According to its critics, however, Antonius’s vision of the origins
and development of Arab nationalism was exaggerated and fallacious. The pro-independence or autonomy-minded Arabs of Syria
were a tiny minority, numbering around 350 members according to
a recent authoritative survey,24 and Hashemite ambitions were nearly
all to do with their own aggrandisement rather than a high-minded
commitment to Arab nationalism.25 Today, the dominant scholarly
interpretation of the origins of Arab nationalism is C Ernest Dawn’s
hypothesis that the stirrings of Arab nationalism in the early part of the
20th century emerged not from Western-influenced Christian Arabs
but from reform-minded Muslims in the religious elite. It also arose
from the conflict among the Arab notables and the elite, particularly
in the major cities such as Damascus. Those who held favour, land
and office due to Ottoman patronage tended to support the status quo
while those excluded from this spoils system began to agitate against
it.26 Even among the recalcitrant, there was little desire for complete
independence. Most Arabs would have been content to ‘remain within
the frame of the Ottoman unity, as long as their proper place was
24 Eliezer Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements (Frank Cass, London:

1993) p 406; C Ernest Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins
of Arab Nationalism (University of Illinois Press, Urbana: 1973) pp 152–3, puts the
figure at only 144.
25  Most notably, Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle
for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789–1923 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge
MA: 1999) are very hostile to what they consider the imperialist ambitions of Sherif
Hussein and the Hasehemites.
26 A useful summation of Dawn’s more than three decades of musing on the
subject is in Dawn, ‘The Origins of Arab Nationalism’, pp 3–31.