Part 26
Without considering the future relations between Lebanon and Syria or turning its attention to the future mode of government of Syria and its four great towns Damascus, Hama, Homs, and Aleppo, the French Government decided to restore Greater Lebanon. M. Millerand informed Mgr. Abdallah Kouri, Maronite Archbishop of Arca, president of the delegation of Lebanon, of this by a letter dated August 24, 1920. The new State was to extend from the Nahr-el-Litani, which flows along the frontier of Palestine, to another State, called “Territoire des Alaonites,” or, in Arabic, Alawiya, coming between the Lebanon and Antioch, and to the crests of Anti-Libanus, including the Bukaa area, with the towns of Rayak and Baalbek. The ports of Beyrut and Tripolis in Syria were to enjoy local autonomy, but to keep in close connection with the new State. Beyrut was to be the seat of the new Government; Tripolis and its suburbs were to be grouped into a municipality. In this way Greater Lebanon would have recovered all its former territories, as it was before 1860, in conformity with the promises made by M. Clémenceau and confirmed by M. Millerand, and with the claims set forth in 1919 at the Peace Conference by the delegates of Lebanon.
Was it not a mistake in Syria, a country over which France had a mandate and where the proportion of Moslems is three to one, to start with a policy that favoured Lebanon and consequently the Christians? The question was all the more important as the discontent brought about by the Powers’ decisions was far from subsiding in these and the neighbouring regions.
Indeed, the Ansarieh tribes, living in the mountainous regions to the east of Antioch and Alexandretta, and in the Jebel Ansarieh between Latakia and Tartus, which had persistently kept aloof from us in the past, made their submission after the downfall of the Emir Feisal, and several Ansarieh chiefs—Ismail Pasha, Inad, and Ismail Bey Yaouah—accepted the conditions imposed on them. Yet dissatisfaction was still rampant in the Hauran area, and the train in which ed Rubi Pasha, the Syrian Premier, and other Ministers were going to Deraa was attacked on Friday, August 20, at Kerbet-Ghazeleh by Arabian bands. Ed Rubi Pasha and Abdurrahman Youssef Pasha were murdered. The railway line was recaptured later on, but the contingents sent to Deraa had to fight with Arabian bands at Mosmieh.
Farther north, in the part of Cilicia entirely occupied by Kemalist troops, Colonel Brémond, commanding a group of 3,000 to 4,000 men consisting of French troops and native recruits, after being blockaded at Adana for six weeks, had to sign a truce in August because he was short of water, and the provisioning of Adana could only be ensured by establishing a base in the former Roman port of Karatash. Mersina, where the French had enlisted all the Armenian and Greek manhood, was also besieged and blockaded, except along the coast where a French warship overawed the rebels. Lastly, Tarsus, the third place occupied by French troops, was in the same predicament, and was cut off from the other two towns. Under these circumstances whoever could flee sailed to Cyprus, and the few boats which called at Mersina took away crowds of fugitives.
In Mesopotamia the situation was quite as bad, and everywhere the Arabs evinced much discontent. In the zone of the lower Euphrates and Lake Hamar, as well as in the Muntefik area, many disturbances occurred.
The _Sunday Times_ of August 21, 1920, in an article in which the attitude of the British Government was severely criticised, wondered whether it was not too late to atone for the mistakes of England, even by expending large sums of money, and concluded thus:
“Would it not be wiser to confess our failure and give up meddling with the affairs of three million Arabs who want but one thing, to be allowed to decide their own fate? After all, Rome was not ruined when Hadrian gave up the conquests made by Trajan.”
The _Observer_ too asked whether a heavy expenditure of men and money could restore the situation, and added:
“The situation is serious; yet it is somewhat ludicrous too, when we realise that so much blood and money has been wasted for a lot of deserts and marshes which we wanted ‘to pacify,’ and when we remember that our ultimate aim is to impose our sovereignty on people who plainly show they do not want it.”
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The diversity of creeds among the various Moslem sects had also, from the beginning, imperilled the unity of the Arabian world within the Ottoman Empire by endangering its religious unity. By the side of the Sunnis, or Orthodox Moslems, the Shia—viz., the rebels or heretics, belonging to a schism which is almost as old as Islam itself—recognise nobody but Ali as the lawful successor of Mohammed. According to them, the title of Caliph should not go outside the Prophet’s family, and his spiritual powers can only be conferred upon his descendants; so, from a religious point of view, they do not recognise the power of the other dynasties of Caliphs—for instance, that of the Ottoman Sultans. As Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, was killed at Kufa in Mesopotamia, and as Ali’s sons, Hassan and Hossein, were also massacred at Kerbela, near the ruins of Babylon, together with some of their descendants who had a lawful right to the title of Imam, Mesopotamia is looked upon by the Shia as their Holy Places.
Many wealthy Persians, to whom the worship of the members of Ali’s family has become a symbol and who consider their death as a religious sacrifice, have their own coffins carried to Mesopotamia that their bodies may lie in the holy necropolis of Kerbela or of Nejef, to the north-east of Mecca and Medina; and as a great many Arabs of Mesopotamia are still Shia, this schism practically divides the Persian world from the Turkish world.
But though the Persians, who have never recognised any Caliph, and for the last thirteen hundred years have been waiting till the Khilafat should revert to the lineal descent of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, to acknowledge a Caliph’s authority, do not recognise the Ottoman Caliphate, yet their monarchs do not seek to deprive the Sultan of his title of Caliph to assume it themselves.
So their case is entirely different from that of the people of Morocco, who do not recognise the Ottoman Caliphate because their own sovereigns, as descendants of the Prophet, profess they have an hereditary right to hold the office of Caliph within the frontiers of their State.
The Shia faith has even spread as far as India and the Sunda Isles; and so the opposition between Shia and Sunnis may play an important part in freeing Mesopotamia from the Turkish influence of Constantinople.
Yet the English occupation has been so bitterly resented in Mesopotamia that the Shia Mujtahids, or imams of Nejef and Kerbela, have lately asked for the restoration of Turkish sovereignty over these towns, where are the two famous holy shrines of Islam. Moreover, the controversy on the question whether the Sultans of Turkey have a right to the Caliphate, because they do not belong to the tribe of Koreish, in which the Prophet was born, seems to have come to an end among the Moslems, or at least to have been laid aside in view of the present events.
Moreover, the Prophet, when he advised the Faithful to choose his successor in the tribe of Koreish, does not seem at all, according to the best Moslem authorities, to have wished to confer the supreme spiritual power for ever upon a particular section of the community related to him by ties of blood, and to have reserved the Caliphate to this tribe. It seems more likely that, as Islam at that time had not yet given birth to powerful States, he chose this tribe because it was the best organised and the strongest, and thus considered it as the fittest to maintain the independence of the Caliphate and defend the interests of Islam. Besides, within half a century after the Prophet’s death the Caliphate passed from Mohammed’s four immediate successors to the Omayyids for the reason indicated above, and in contradiction to the theory of lineal descent. It is obvious that, had Mohammed been guided by family considerations, he would not have merely given the Faithful some directions about the election of his successor, but he would have chosen one of his relations himself to inherit his office, and would have made it hereditary in the latter’s family.
The Wahhabis, who are connected with the Shia, are likewise a political and religious sect which was founded in the eighteenth century in Nejed, a region of Central Arabia conterminous with the north of Syria. The Wahhabi doctrine aims at turning Islam into a kind of deism, a rational creed, looking upon all the traditions of Islam as superstitions, and discarding all religious observances. Since the assassination of Ibn el Rashid in May, 1920, the present leaders of the Wahhabis are Abdullah ibn Mitah and Ibn Saud, over whom the Ottomans have a merely nominal power.
When King Hussein planned to join the Hejaz and Nejd to Syria, Ibn Saud refused to let Nejd fall under the suzerainty of the King of the Hejaz, who was powerful merely because he was supported by Europe and because Syria is a rich country. Most likely the religious question had something to do with this conflict. In August, 1919, the Wahhabis, who had asked the Emir Ibn Saud for his support, suddenly attacked the troops of the sons of the King of the Hejaz which were in the Taif area, and defeated them at Tarabad. The Wahhabi Emir gained a few more victories, and was about to threaten the Holy Cities when the rising of the Orthodox Moslem tribes compelled him to retreat.
So the hostility of the Wahhabis, whose independence was threatened by the Sunnis of the Hejaz, whom they look upon as heretics, still embittered the dissensions in the Arab world.
It has been asserted that this Wahhabi movement was at first started by the Turks, which would not have been unlikely at a time when it was Turkey’s interest to divide Arabia in order to raise difficulties to the Allies after the Sherif’s treason; but now it was no longer her interest—and it was beyond her power—to stir up an agitation.
The Ishmaelites, who laid waste Persia and Syria in the eighth century, and played an important part in the East till the twelfth century, have also broken off with the Shia.
Lastly, the Druses, who inhabit the slopes of Lebanon and the greater part of Anti-Lebanon between Jebeil and Saida along the Mediterranean, profess the creed of the Caliph Al-Hakem, who lived at the beginning of the eleventh century. They had withdrawn to Lebanon and long repelled the attacks of the Turks, whose suzerainty they acknowledged only in 1588. In 1842 the Porte gave them a chief, but practically they have remained almost independent. They have often fought with the Maronite Christians living to the north, especially in 1860, and there is still much hostility between them.
Moreover, all Moslem communities, without exception—whether the communities governed by independent national sovereigns such as Afghanistan; or by sovereigns owing allegiance to non-Moslem Powers such as Egypt, India, Tunis, Khiva, Bokhara; or the communities living under a non-Moslem rule, as is the case with those of Algeria, Russia, and also India and China—give their allegiance to the Sultan as Caliph, though they are always at liberty to refuse it. Even the Moslem communities of Algeria and Tunis, which are connected with those of Morocco by their common origin and language, and live close by them, do not deem it a sufficient reason to recognise the Emir of Morocco as Caliph that he is a descendant of the Prophet.
An even more striking argument is that the community of the Hejaz, which rebelled against Turkish sovereignty during the war and has made itself politically independent, still maintains its religious allegiance to the Sultan; and the present King, Hussein, who is the most authentic descendant of the Prophet, and who rules over the two holiest towns of Islam, Mecca and Medina, soon after the armistice addressed the Sultan a telegram of religious allegiance drawn up in the most deferential terms. The possession of Mecca and Medina being one of the attributes of the Caliph, and these towns having a great religious and political importance owing to the great annual pilgrimage, King Hussein might have taken advantage of this to dispute with the Sultan the title of Caliph. England had strongly urged him to do so, but King Hussein obstinately refused. Then the British Government, giving up all hope of bringing about the transference of the Caliphate from the Ottoman dynasty to another sovereign, concluded a secret alliance with Vahid ed Din.
Considering the intricate situation in the East due to the variety of races and religions, and the movements of all sorts by which the populations of those countries are swayed, it seems most unwise to increase the general restlessness by a vain intervention of the Powers, and to dismember what remains of Turkey in Europe and Aria Minor, a dismemberment which would necessarily have violent repercussions throughout the deeply perturbed Moslem world. Though the recent movements of emancipation in the East to a certain extent meet the legitimate wishes of the peoples and have somewhat cleared the situation in Asia Minor, yet it is obviously most perilous to infringe upon the Sultan’s sovereignty, to endeavour to drive away the Turks into Asia, and to set up a kind of fictitious official Islam by compelling the Moslem peoples of the East to give up their cherished independence and submit to an Arab imperialism which would soon become British imperialism. At the present moment all the Moslem elements are determined to unite together against any enemy of their liberty; and all Moslems, without any distinction of creed or race, might very well one day flock to the standard of a bold leader who should take up arms in the name of Islam, in order to safeguard their independence.
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These movements, and many other similar ones, were encouraged and strengthened by the development of the principle of nationalities and the support given to it by Mr. Wilson, who was bent upon carrying it out to its strictly logical consequences, without paying heed to the limitations imposed by the present material and political conditions. But we do not think it is true to say, as has been urged, that the assertion of the right of self-determination of peoples was the initial cause of these movements. The movement in favour of the rights of nationalities originated long before Mr. Wilson’s declarations, which merely hurried on this powerful movement, and also caused it to swerve somewhat from its original direction.
This movement, on the whole, seems chiefly to proceed—though other factors have intervened in it—from a kind of reaction against the standardising tendency, from a material and moral point of view, of modern Western civilisation, especially the Anglo-Saxon civilisation, and also from a reaction against the extreme unification aimed at by russifying the numerous peoples living within the Russian Empire. Modern civilisation, having reached its present climax, has aimed—and its political and social repercussions have had the same influence—at doing away with all differences between human minds and making the world homogeneous; thus all men would have been brought to live in the same way, to have the same manners, and their requirements would have been met in the same way—to the very great advantage of its enormous industrial development. Of course, all this proved an idle dream; human nature soon asserted itself, amidst the commotions and perturbations experienced by the States, and a reaction set in among those who hitherto only aimed at enslaving various human groups, or linked them together politically in a most artificial way. Then the same feeling spread among all those peoples.
All this enables us to see to what extent this movement is legitimate, and to know exactly what proportions of good and evil it contains.
It rightly asserts that various peoples have different natures, and by protecting their freedom, it aims at ensuring the development of their peculiar abilities. For let us not forget that the characters of peoples depend on physical conditions, that even the features we may not like in some peoples are due to the race, and that if, by blending and mixing populations nowadays these features are modified, they are generally altered only from bad to worse.
But this principle is true only so far as it frees and enables to shape their own destinies peoples who have distinctive qualities of their own and are able to provide for themselves. It cannot be extended—as has been attempted in some cases—to States within which men descending from various races or having belonged in the course of centuries to different nationalities have long been united, and through a long common history and a centuries-old co-operation have formed one nation. This is one of the erroneous aspects of Mr. Wilson’s conception, and one of the bad consequences it has entailed.
The eviction of the Turks from Constantinople, which the British wished for but which they dared not carry into effect, does not thwart the scheme of the Turkish Nationalists; it can only bring about a reaction of the Moslem populations against foreign intervention, and thus strengthen the Pan-Turanian movement. Though this movement cannot carry out all its aims, the eviction of the Turks obviously must urge those populations to constitute a State based both on the community of religion and the community of race of its various elements, and from which all alien ethnic elements would be expelled—viz., Slavs, Armenians, Greeks, and Arabs, who were all an inherent source of weakness to the Turkish Empire. This new State would include Anatolia, Russian Azerbaïjan, and Persian Azerbaïjan, the Russian territories in Central Asia—viz., Russian Turkistan, Khiva, Bokhara—the whole of the region of the Steppes; and towards it the Tatar populations of the Volga, Afghanistan, and Chinese Turkistan would necessarily be attracted.
As to the Arabs, the Turks have never been able to gain their friendship, though they have done their best to do so, and have drawn but little profit from the money squandered plentifully in their vast deserts. And the Russians have always stood in the way of an understanding between Turkey and the Arabian territories, because it would have benefited the cause of Islam and therefore would have hindered both their own designs on the territories of Asia Minor and the ambitions of the Orthodox Church. Yet to the Turks as well as the Arabs—and even to the Europeans—it would be a great advantage not to injure the understanding and goodwill that Islam engenders among these peoples, since its creed has both a religious and a political aspect.
The maintenance of this Islamic union has been wrongly called—in the disparaging sense of the word—Pan-Islamism. Yet its ideal has nothing in common with such doctrines as those of Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Americanism, Pan-Polism, Pan-Hellenism, etc., which are all imperialistic doctrines aiming at territorial conquests by military or economic means, and also by the diffusion of their own religious creeds and the extension of the influence of their Churches. While Pan-Germanism aims at the hegemony of the world; while Pan-Americanism wants to control the whole of America; while Pan-Slavism wishes to gather together all the Slavonic elements—which is defensible—but also means to supplant the old civilisation of Western Europe, which it considers as “rotten,” and to renovate the world; while Pan-Polism, which has not such ambitious aims, merely seeks, like Pan-Hellenism, to conquer wider territories in order to restore Greater Poland or Greater Greece—Islam, which does not try to make any proselytes, has no other ambition than to group all Moslem elements according to the commandments of the Koran. Yet, Islam having both a political and a religious purpose, a Pan-Islamic concept might be defensible, and would be legitimate from the Moslem point of view, whereas it cannot be so from the Christian point of view. Pan-Catholicism, on the contrary, is an impossible thing, because Christianity does not imply a political doctrine, and is distinct from temporal power—though such a doctrine has sometimes been advocated. For in the doctrine of monarchy, especially in France, religion has always been held merely as a help, a support, and the monarch, though he has often been a defender of the Faith, has never looked upon his power as dependent on the Papacy or bound up with it. Islam, however, does not want to assert itself in, and give birth to, a huge political movement—a Pan-Islamic movement in the imperialistic sense of the word—aiming at constituting a huge theocratic State, including all the 300 million Moslems who are now living. But there is between all Moslems a deep moral solidarity, a mighty religious bond which accounts for their sympathetic feeling towards Turkey, and owing to which even the Moslem inhabitants of countries which have lost their independence still earnestly defend and jealously maintain the privileges and dignity of the Caliph.
So it is a mistake to speak of the ambitious designs of Islam, and the mistake has been made wilfully. Those who profess such an opinion are Pan-Slavic Russians who want to deceive public opinion in the world as to their true intent, and thus prepare for territorial annexations, because Pan-Slavism is the enemy of Islamism. As this Pan-Slavism has always been, and is still more than ever, a danger to Europe, it is the interest of the latter, in order to defend its civilisation, not to fight against Islamism, but even to support it. This necessity has been understood by many Catholics who have always been favourable to Turkey and by the Mussulmans, which accounts for the long friendly intercourse between Moslems and Catholics, and the Moslems’ tolerance toward the devotees of a religion which, on the whole, is in complete contradiction to their own faith. On the other hand, Islam appears as counterbalancing Protestantism in the East, and it seems the future of thought and morality and of any culture would be endangered if the 60 million Indian Moslems and the 220 million Indian Brahminists, Buddhists, and the members of other sects ever listened to Mr. Lloyd George and were connected with Protestantism.
Moreover, King Hussein, in the course of the audience that he granted in July, 1920, to Prince Ruffo, the leader of the Italian mission to Arabia, before his departure, after saying that the Moslem world resented the hostile attitude of the Powers towards the Sultan of Constantinople, declared that the Moslems are not actuated by any feeling of conquest or proselytism, but simply claim the right to preserve their independence.
Footnotes:
36: _Hayassdan_, July 6, 1915; No. 25.
37: We are the more anxious to correct these figures as in 1916, at a time when it was difficult to control them, we gave about the same figures in a note to the Société d’Anthropologie as to the demographic consequences of the war. We then relied upon the documents that had just been published and on the statements of the Rev. Harold Buxton.
38: _Le Mouvement pan-russe et les Allogènes_ (Paris, 1919).
39: _The Times_, March 15, 1920.
40: H. Vambéry. _Cagataische Sprachstudien_ (Leipzig, 1867); _Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Turko-Tatarischen Sprachen_ (Leipzig, 1875); _Das Turkenvolk_ (1885).
41: Léon Cahun, _Introduction à l’histoire de l’Asie, Turcs et Mongols, des origines à 1405_ (Paris, 1896).
42: Liman von Sanders, _Fünf Jahre Türkei_, pp. 330-331.
43: _Le Temps_, July 21, 1920.
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