Books

A revisionist historian

Jan Morris

In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth Elie Kedourie (Cambridge University Press, £12.50) Revisionist history is much the most rewarding. It is rewarding for the reader, because it offers some surprises in the often too familiar record of human affairs. It is rewarding for the historian because it gives him a specific professional niche, associating his name for ever with his startling new theory about agricultural decline in mediaeval Poznan, or obliging colleagues to say of him that however preposterous his notions at least he's original. The first rule of conduct for ambitious historians should be this: if you can't make it art, make it revisionist.

Professor Elie Kedourie is a revisionist With a vengeance. He is out to demonstrate not only that history has been mis-written, but that a whole direction of thought among British policy-makers was, during a crucial period of British history, fatally misguided. He believes, as I understand him, that in the decades after the first world war the activities of the Foreign Office, with their academic apologists, displayed a craven irresolution before the forces of the radical, nationalist left. They accepted Without proper analysis the premises of their opponents, and by doing so they neglected their trust as keepers of the Empire.

I surmise that Professor Kedourie thinks this to be true in general terms, but since his specialist concern has been the Middle East, he has focussed his views into a Profound and angry scepticism about Britain's relationships with Islam. He thinks the British were not wicked, but feeble and inept in their dealings with the Arabs, and he traces many miseries of the contemporary Middle East, the tragic ordeals of the Palestinians and the Israelis, the coups d'etat and the civil wars, partly to this combination of weakness and incompetence, but even more to the sense of guilt With which the British compounded it. In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth, which is one of the most enthralling, demanding and infuriating works of historical reconstruction I have read for years, he narrows the field of revisionism still further, and sets out to show that it all began with that fateful exchange of courtly letters, the McMahon-Husayn correspondence of 1915-16.

This was the exchange of undertakings by which the British, during the first world War, encouraged Husayn, Sharif of Mecca, to join the Allied cause and rise against his Turkish overlords. Sir Henry McMahon, ICS, was the British High Commissioner in Egypt, and upon the commitments he then made was founded British Middle Eastern policy after the war, and so in effect the shape of the Arab world from that day to this.

The letters were deliberately, and necessarily, vague. They were a wartime device, to gain an ally. Nobody knew to what degree Husayn was qualified to speak for the majority of the Arabs, but the implication of the letters seemed to be that in return for his help the Sharif would be recognized, after the war, as titular head of an independent Arab kingdom, embracing most of the old Turkish Empire. The boundaries of that putative kingdom were hazily defined; British options were kept carefully open; the letters had no legal meaning, and did not constitute a treaty.

Nevertheless they came to be interpreted as a British pledge, and since almost simultaneously the British made apparently conflicting promises to the French, in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and since in the end the Arab Kingdom never happened, and part of the disputed territory became the Zionist National Home—and since Husayn himself professed to believe that undertakings had been wantonly broken, it became the accepted orthodoxy that the McMahon letters were instruments of infamy. The Arabs, arguing for their rights when the war was over, claimed that they had been betrayed: the British Foreign Office, persuaded by enthusiasts as varied as Lawrence and Arnold Toynbee, ashamedly agreed with them.

These interpretations Professor Kedourie believes to be false, and fatal. The British did not betray the Arabs, he argues. Husayn was far more slippery than McMahon. The various undertakings were not conflicting. And the sense of guilt which the British unnecessarily cherished, he maintains, cruelly debilitated their later policies, in matters ranging from the cataclysmic (Palestine) to the trivial (the appearance of a British Foreign Secretary dressed up as a Bedouin on a camel at the Pyramids).

So much for the theory. Professor Kedourie presents it with a staggering and fascinating complexity of evidence, some old, some new. He has consulted the official documents that have been made public during the last decade, and he has plumbed the depths of British, Arab and French political sophistry. Far more thoroughly than any predecessor, he has pieced together the whole evolution, sometimes murky, sometimes naive, of British attitudes towards the awakening Arabs. He demonstrates conclusively, I think; that the Sykes Picot agreement took the McMahon pledges into account, and that Husayn was informed of it long before the end of the war: otherwise, though, his case rests not upon newly discovered facts, but on newly constructed (or dissected) interpretations.

His own are disputable. He can argue till kingdom come, but the terms of the McMahon pledges, as against their force, can still be read however one chooses to read them. Like many another before him, Professor Kedourie is reduced to considering intentions and reactions. Did the British mean so-and-so? Did Husayn think that was what they meant ? The old arguments about sanjaks and vilayets, the familiar wranglings about Horns, Hama, Aleppo and Damascus, the imaginary extensions of frontier lines, the very meaning of words like `Arabia' or `Syria'—all these can no more be resolved today than they could half a century ago. There is no key to this labyrinth: it was created by the nature and circumstance of the McMahon correspondence, which was meant to be blurred.

Much of the book is therefore an examination, often waspish, of methods and personalities. Professor Kedourie deplores debating points in others, but loves them himself, and is adept at the subsidiary perjorative. He has few heroes indeed, and those whose opinions he despises are generally quoted adverbially—they write gratuitously, darkly, gloomily, eagerly, cuttingly, solemnly, baldly—they `distinguish themselves' by saying something foolish, they constantly add glosses to texts, they are `categorical', `ponderous', even Impertinent'.

And what does he really reveal? Nothing much. If the British were not guilty of deliberately deceiving the Arabs, they were certainly guilty of half-truths, opportunism, ineptitude, lack of foresight. Sir Walter Smart's summing-up of it all, many years ago, still seems adequate to me: The Anglo-French bargaining about other people's property, the deliberate bribing of International Jewry at the expense of the Arabs who were already our allies in the field, the immature political juggleries of amateur Oriental experts, the stultification of Arab independence and unity by the French occupation of the hinterland and by the splitting up into numerous unpractical States of lands ethnically, linguistically, economically one, not in the interests of the people concerned but to strike a balance between Anglo-French political ambitions—all the immorality and incompetence inevitable in the stress of a great war, could not be exposed to public view without creating a feeling of discomfort in the mind of any but, to steal Balfour's famous quip, 'a trained diplomat'.

But no, to Professor Kedourie this is a shrill and fanciful outburst of `extravagant moralism' and must be seen as a `startling and disturbing expression of self-hate and disgust'.

Extravagant moralism! Professor Kedourie's own values are hard to follow. His chief accusation against the diplomats is that they were troubled too much by selfreproach. He himself seems to stand for plain real-politik, and sees in such selfquestionings only a contemptible weakness. It was the diplomats' duty, he says, 'to uphold and defend the empire of which they were the servants': their doubts were a dereliction, handed down through the ranks of the English Arabists, and perpetuated in appeasement.

But at the same time he probably supposes that the old Turkish Empire was more beneficient to its Arab subjects than anything that has succeeded it. You cannot win, with Professor Kedourie. He is everyone's critic but his own. He recognises, it seems, no true morality to the conduct of affairs, and construes doubt as a failure of will. Of course it is true that conscience makes cowards of us all. But brilliant though this book is, compelling to read, irresistible to argue about, still I suspect that if there is one tradition of British affairs that does not deserve sarcastic revisionism, it is the old tradition of the liberal conscience, right or wrong, winning or losing, which gave its thread of nobility to the old Empire, and contributed honourably to its inevitable end.