The Makers of the Modern Middle East

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 vii

1 The Birth of Nationalisms 1

2 Wartime Promises and Expectations 44

3 Arabs and Zionists in Paris 115

4 San Remo and Sèvres: the Flawed Peace 167

5 The Middle East Rebels and the Peace Settlement Revisited 219

6 From War to War 275

7 Conclusion: The Legacy 327

Further Reading 367

Index 377

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 set￾tlement with the Ottoman Empire and its successors. As such, the con￾tributors 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 reckon￾ing 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.

viii the 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 Pales￾tine 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 lega￾cies 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 McNa￾mara, 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 Wil￾liams, 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 expe￾rience. Barbara Schwepcke of Haus and Jaqueline Mitchell patiently

encouraged me through the unfamiliar experience of making a coher￾ent 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 Met￾ternich’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. Con￾verting to Islam, the Turks, led by the House of Osman, commonly

known as the Ottomans, came into conflict with the Christian Byzan￾tine 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 heart￾land 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.

2 the 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, Sul￾tanahmet 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 descend￾ants. 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 com￾prised 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. I.

zmir, 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.

4 the 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 prece￾dent. 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, Protes￾tant 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 acknowl￾edged 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 Habs￾burg armies, led by their great commander Prince Eugene, had stead￾ily pushed the Turks back through the Balkans. Austrian expansion

5 ‘Turkey’, Encyclopaedia Britannica.