FREEING THE ARABS.
f 1HE casual student of war-maps must often have been fascinated by the great blank space labelled " Syrian Desert " or " Arabia " which intervenes between our armies in Palestine and in Mesopotamia. It must seem to him full of unknown terrors, threatening at any moment to cut short the progress of our victorious forces. The blank space is so large, compared with the area occupied •by our armies, that our military effort may appear to be puny and ineffective, and the freedom of the Arabs, which the late General Maude promised to the inhabitants of Baghdad in March, 1917, may look a remote possibility. In reality, the situation is far more promising than the map would suggest. In the first place, though the great Arabian Desert, which stretches from the Indian Ocean to the mountains of Armenia and from the Tigris to the Syrian plains, is a region apart, it is by no means self-contained and self-supporting. The Arabs have to trade with the outer world, exchanging their produce for European goods and arms. Their chief markets are in Syria and Meso- potamia, to which they make periodical visits. But the British blockade of Germany and Turkey has closed the Syrian marts, and the occupation of the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys has placed the Mesopotamian marts under British control. The Arabs must now conduct their trade under our supervision. Without our approval, they could import or export nothing of commercial value. The remote oases of Arabia, to which few Europeans have ever penetrated, are as much subject as Berlin or Constantinople to the all-per- vading influence of the British Navy. This economic factor, so little regarded, counts for much in the effect which our Eastern campaigns have undoubtedly exercised over the Arab race as a whole. Our armies may be only on the fringe of Arabia, but they impress the Arab, who is above all a keen man of business, by their obvious mastery of his outlets for trade. From the Turk he can get nothing; through the British he can get almost everything that may be imported in time of war. Trade is a great teacher, and the moral of British eco- nomic superiority must have been impressed by now on many an Arab tribe that has never seen a British soldier.
Another important fact is the fundamental antagonism --etween Arab and Turk. They have nothing in common but their religion, and that bond of union has ceased to possess its old efficacy. Centuries have passed since the Turks, coming from Central Asia, overthrew the Arabian Caliphate, and gradually made themselves dominant over all the Arab lands. But the Arabs, though they yielded to the Turks and served their new masters well in military and civil positions, have always cherished a contempt for their conquerors. There is indeed all the difference in the world between the quick-witted and imaginative Arab, who has a passion for learning, and the dull heavy Turk, who cares for none of the arts and graces of life. If the Arab is the Frenchman of the East, the Turk is the Prussian without the Prussian's desire to accumulate knowledge. So long as the old Turkish Empire endured, Arabs and Turks could live side by side without much friction. The Sultan did not care whether the Arabs were docile subjects provided that they did not interfere overmuch with his control of the Holy Places of Islam. A Turkish writ did not rim in Arabia beyond the confines of the Turkish posts, but Constantinople was content to exercise a general supervision by means of intrigues and bribes. The advent of the Young Turks changed all that. The Arabs at first welcomed the Revolution, believing that it would bring them better government. They soon found that the Young Turks meant to follow the policy of Rehoboam and to subject them to a far harsher rule than they had ever known. For the Young Turks made it clear that they would have no more semi-independent races. Every subject of Turkey must be a good Turk. Armenians, Syrians Arabs, Greeks, and Kurds must abandon their racial idiosyncrasies and become Turks once for all. The Armenians, being Christians, were the first to suffer. Obviously they could not be made Turks, and therefore they were exterminated. The Greeks were treated almost as cruelly ; though they were not massacred wholesale, many thousands were robbed and expelled from the country. It was then the turn of the Syrians and their Arab kinsmen. The Young Turks took advantage of the war and the mobilization directed against Egypt to institute a systematic persecution in Syria, executing all the Syrian Moslem leaders whom they could catch and reducing the Maronites of the Lebanon by famine. The direct result of this fiendish policy was the revolt in the Hedjaz, where the Shereef of Mecca proclaimed war on the infidel Committee of Union and Progress who had slaughtered the faithful Moslems of Syria. The Shereef assumed the title of King of the Hedjaz, and speedily justified his claim to sovereignty by capturing all the Turkish garrisons in or near Mecca. At Medina, the terminus of the Hedjaz Railway, the Turks held firm, presumably because the Arabs lacked siege artillery. But the Red Sea coast was swept clear of the enemy, and the railway was subjected to incessant raids, extending as far as the head Sea, which is eight hundred miles to the north of Mecca. There is still a Turkish garrison in Yemen, the province at the south-western corner of Arabia, bordering on our Aden Protectorate, but it is completely isolated and helpless. Apart from this force, the Medina garrison, and the scattered posts along the railway, the Turks have no longer any hold on Western Arabia south of Amman. The Hedjaz rising has thus been successful. There can be no doubt, moreover, that the success of the Hedjaz Arabs, coupled with the British victories in Palestine and Mesopotamia, has had a great moral effect on all the Arab peoples, stimulating their dislike of the Turk and giving them new hopes of liberation from his tyranny.
We hear little or nothing of Central Arabia or Nejd, where the powerful Amirs, Ibn Rashid of Hail and Ibn Sa'ud of Riyadh, have long striven for supremacy. Ibn Sa'ud, whose domains extend to the Persian Gulf, is a good friend of ours, and has visited Basra during the present war to inspect the British Army. But Ibn Rashid, whose smaller and less powerful kingdom lies farther north, midway between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, is an old ally of the Turks, who helped him in his struggle with his rival. It would be interesting to know how far the course of the war has affected Central Arabian politics, and to what extent Ibn Rashid has seen fit to modify his pro-Turkish attitude. Lord Robert Cecil has stated that Ibn Rashid has been absent from his capital for a year. We may safely conjecture that Hail, the remote oasis which Doughty describes in his Arabia Deserta, is feeling the pinch, especially now that the Middle Euphrates Valley has been cleared of Turks, and the traffic in arms from Aleppo is thus made far more difficult than before. To the north of Nejd, the powerful confeder- acies of the Anazah and Shalimar control the nomads of the Syrian Desert, and they ton, like Nejd, are divided by ancient feuds. But the Turk never had much influence over these wandering tribes, and must have still less now that he has little to offer them as a set-off against the solid attractions of our good government in Mesopotamia and our trading facilities. The Arabs, though torn by tribal dissensions, have a strong feeling of kinship and are united by their eco- nomic interests. Nomad chiefs who own land in the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys are naturally predisposed to a British occupation which makes their property more secure, and therefore more valuable. One nomad who feels that he has gained by our advent is likely to impress the fact on others, and we may be sure that all Arabia has by now a shrewd idea of the superiority of British control over the misrule of the Turk. These considerations are greatly strengthened by the innate antagonism between Turk and Arab, and by the Hedjaz revolt., which has shown that the Turk, although a Moslem, can be lawfully fought by other Moslems. It will be seen, then, that the British armies in Palestine and Meso- potamia have already exerted a marked influence over the whole of that vast region which separates their fields of action, and that there is nothing fantastic in the programme of freeing the Arabs which General Maude announced at Baghdad. Only one word of caution is necessary in conclusion, if what we hope for cannot reasonably be achieved—or rather, if what has already been achieved cannot be secured—with the strength we are now using, that would not be an argument for pouring more troops into the East. Victory will be won or lost in Western Europe, and ultimately the Arabs will be freed or further enslaved according to the remit.
Previous page
