XTHE 1907 TREATY AND THE CALIPHATEGREAT BRITAIN PROMISES CONSTANTINOPLE TO RUSSIA—ARAB NATIONALISM AND THE HOLY PLACES OF ISLAM—THE HEJAZ BECOMES INDEPENDENT OF CONSTANTINOPLE—THE BRITISH CAPTURE JERUSALEM—THE CALIPHATE AGITATION IN INDIA.TheAnglo-Russianententewhich had been created by the 1907 Treaty, went to work in 1914 according to plan, the Russian mill-stone grinding in from the north and the British mill-stone from the south. The moment of the Ottoman Empire’s final break-up had arrived, such a moment as had never occurred before in the history of modern imperialism and is unlikely to occur again.Early in 1915, Great Britain and Russia wrote the sequel to the 1907 Treaty in the Sazonoff agreement, negotiated in London. The British surrender continued. Under the terms of this agreement, Constantinople, the seat of the Caliphate and the political capital of Islam, was surrendered to Russia and the neutral zone in Persia (exception being made for the town of Ispahan) was added to the British zone. The agreement was necessarily kept secret. At a moment when the Government of India was exerting every effort to re-assure Indian Moslems on the subject of the Caliphate, its contents might have exploded India.The Anglo-Russian partition of the Ottoman Empire was soon agreed upon. Mesopotamia was duly awarded to Great Britain and the eastern provinces to Russia (without provision for the independent Armenia for which the Allied Governments have so frequently expressed concern). Palestine, an integral part of the Caliph’s domain, was awarded to an international Westernregime, and the rest of the Syrian corridor, together with a great hinterland running north-east to meet the new Russian frontier and east to the Persian frontier, was awarded to France as a buffer between the Russian and British acquisitions. But the German drive on Paris made it impossible for France to release an Army for the occupation of its zone. Under the military pressure on the Western Front, France had no recourse but to recall its Consul-General at Beirut and to maintain a diplomatic watch upon its zone. Incidentally, its zone included Aleppo, the Achilles’ heel of the Ottoman Empire, which lay only a two days’ marching distance from Alexandretta which in turn lay a half-days’ steaming from the British base at Famagusta on Cyprus. But although the British Government raised the project of striking at Aleppo time and again, France and Russia interposed and maintained their vetoes. As a result, the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force and Indian Expeditionary Force “D” in Mesopotamia were put in the interesting position of having to operate for four years against an enemy whose military rear was open at Aleppo.It now becomes possible to reconstruct the British war program. The Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta project which proposed to embed the Suez Canal in 8,000 miles of British territory running from South Africa to India, was its goal. It was not an incident in the growth of the Empire, it was its very climax and full fruition. It was the peak of British imperialism.Its center was Cairo and with the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the enemy alliance, the great British Embassy at Constantinople abdicated in favor of the British Agency in Cairo. It was from Cairo that Islam was paralyzed by the split between Arabs and Turks. If Lord Kitchener were alive today, it seems safe to say that he would be the ruler in Cairo of an Arab area stretching from the Sudan to Persia, with a protege at Mecca in the person of King Hussein dignified by the newly acquired Caliphate of Islam. As for the Ottoman Caliphate, Czarist Russia was to reduce the Sultans to simple Amirs of Anatolia, a program in which the Foreign Office connived and whose result has been what Englishmen since the war have referred to as British “abdication” in India. We in the West might understand more vividly what “our brother Turk” means to Islam in India if we had been in the habit of entering India by an overland route rather than by the sea route which we customarily use….Great Britain’s declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire on Nov. 5, 1914, enabled it to transfer Cyprus to the Colonial Office at once. In Cairo, it enabled the British Agency to depose the Sultan’sKhediveand to set up aKhediveof its own. London’s repeated pledges to France on the subject of Egypt made it hesitate at the final cancellation of Ottoman sovereignty but the situation was a difficult one and the British Protectorate was duly proclaimed, the Agency’sKhediveassuming the title of Sultan. The Agency was now elevated to the status of a Residency and martial law was proclaimed. Very soon, German and Ottoman forces struck at the Suez Canal through which British Indian, Australian and New Zealand forces were streamingen routeto France and whose banks were garrisoned with a mixed assemblage of troops known as the Force in Egypt, a Force uncertain as Lord Kitchener afterward reminded it whether it was expected to defend the Canal or the Canal was expected to defend it. The enemy was thrown back from the very banks of the Canal and, having itself crossed to establish the bridgehead of Kantara, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force marked time while theGrand Sherifof Mecca communicated the terms of Arab nationalism to the Residency in Cairo. Arab nationalism made it necessary for the Foreign Office in London to consult France and the result of that consultation was the secret Sykes-Picot agreement which did not long detain the Residency in Cairo and which need not long detain us here.What is worthy of attention here, however, is the fact that Arab nationalism involved Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the three sites of the holiest places of Islam. With the Egyptian Expeditionary Force marking time at Kantara, Mecca and Medina lay on the southern flank of its advance and to the north in the lower end of the Syrian corridor lay Jerusalem. The three constituted a line lying across the line of the E. E. F.’s advance, a line guaranteed to all Islam by its Ottoman Caliph and additionally guaranteed to Islam in India by the Government of India’s undertaking that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem opinion alone to decide. This guaranteed line, however, lay across the Cairo-Calcutta leg of the Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle and in due time the Foreign Office handed down its instructions. The Residency in Cairo began the extemporization of a British Arabia which should pivot on Mecca with provincial capitals at Damascus and Bagdad.Thus was carried into effect one of the most momentous decisions in the history of an Empire which once called itself “the greatest Moslem Power in the world,” a decision which plumbs the depths of the British surrender in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Ottoman Caliphate was the last great barrier in front of imperialism. The 1907 Treaty broke it.The Residency now lost no time in establishing contact with theGrand Sherifof Mecca. The Ottoman Caliph hurried reinforcements to the Hejaz, but theSherif’sson Feisal drew a cordon around them in Medina at the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway. Although British officers directed him in repeated efforts to isolate Medina by cutting the Hejaz Railway, the Caliph succeeded in holding it until after the Ottoman Government signed its armistice in 1918, but throughout the rest of the Hejaz, his garrisons sooner or later were removed to British prison camps in Egypt. In the summer of 1917 theGrand Sherifdeclared his independence of Constantinople, assuming the title of King Hussein I.The loss of Mecca broke the Ottoman Caliphate. King Hussein had his own lineal qualifications for the Caliphate. An Anglican-Orthodox union had been projected with its capital in a Russian Constantinople, and an Arab king at Mecca may indicate the disposition which the Foreign Office in London proposed to make of the Caliphate. From that day to this, the burden of supporting the Hejaz has been transferred from Constantinople to London. Once it was part of the burden of the Ottoman Caliphate. Today it is maintained by a British subsidy. Two of the three most venerable shrines of Islam are financed by the Colonial Office which, whatever else may be said of it, is not a Moslem bureau.With its right secured, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was now free to advance on Jerusalem. With British officers on its right fetching Feisal’s Hejaz Army northward toward Damascus, the E. E. F. wheeled into the lower end of the Syrian corridor against stubborn Turco-German opposition. With small French and Italian detachments posted to it in view of the award of Palestine to an international Westernregime, the E. E. F. finally occupied Jerusalem late in 1917 and, having broken up repeated enemy attempts to recover it, rested on its arms while the Residency at Cairo converted it into a Britishfait accompli.When Godfrey de Bouillon captured Jerusalem in a former episode, he waded through blood to his saddle girth to rescue the Holy Sepulchre, but mediaevalism has changed its methods. When General Allenby captured it in 1917, he tacked up an “Out of Bounds” sign on the Holy Sepulchre, the Residency at Cairo hurried up one of itsattachesto serve as military governor of the town, an assistant city engineer from Alexandria hurriedly arrived to draw up a new town plan for it and a landscape artist was hurried down from London to put the new town plan into effect. So Jerusalem became a Britishfait accompliand so it remains to this day. And the new town plan, having presumably served its purpose, has disappeared.The war has given us all an aptitude for loose thinking and a full share of loose thought has attached to General Allenby and his Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Under our Western political tradition, a majority of the population is given the right to determine its own destiny, provided it is of a sufficient degree of intelligence to shoulder its responsibilities. If the faith of that majority in Palestine happens to be Islam, is not Islam the only one of the three faiths to which both Christian and Jewish shrines are equally sacred with its own? Has Islam ever failed in respect to the Christian and Jewish shrines in Jerusalem during its centuries of trusteeship? And what has happened to Islam’s shrines in Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo, in Sicily and Malta, under Christian rule?At the British demand, the Ottoman Caliph finally withdrew his garrison from Medina after the armistice in 1918. It is simple enough to upset the theology of an Ottoman Caliphate, but the British Foreign Office, despite the Government of India’s specific undertaking to Moslems in India, has upset thefactof an Ottoman Caliphate and in the last fifty years the fact and the theology of the matters. The Caliphate has become the symbol of all those Eastern traditions which are woven into the fabric of Islamic civilization, a symbol thrown into vivid relief by the increasing inroads which Western and Russian imperialisms have been making into that civilization. However narrow Old Turkish opinion was, however stubbornly it confined the Young Turks to a rigidly conservative interpretation of the Caliphate, Islam in India could Caliphate may have come to be two quite separate adjust its Caliphate to such modern and healthy growths as that of Arab nationalism. But the forcible imposition of Western civilization upon the Arabs was a still further step in that process of Western imperialism against which the very existence of the Caliphate had become a protest.Until the war ended, Islam in India relied not only on the Government of India’s undertaking to the effect that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem opinion alone to decide, but on the fact that the Empire as a whole contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians. With these assurances, Indian Moslem troops even participated in the capture of Jerusalem, but when the peace proposed to continue what the war had begun, the Caliphate agitation in India soon became the most formidable fact in the British Empire. The Foreign Office and the India Office are supposed to be housed on the same quadrangle off Downing Street in London, but the distance which the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 has brought between them is one of the sheer curiosities of contemporary history. One sometimes wonders, on that exalted plane on which Sovereigns dwell, what the Emperor of India has been saying to the Defender of the Faith since 1907 and what reply the Defender of the Faith has been making to the Emperor of India.
GREAT BRITAIN PROMISES CONSTANTINOPLE TO RUSSIA—ARAB NATIONALISM AND THE HOLY PLACES OF ISLAM—THE HEJAZ BECOMES INDEPENDENT OF CONSTANTINOPLE—THE BRITISH CAPTURE JERUSALEM—THE CALIPHATE AGITATION IN INDIA.
TheAnglo-Russianententewhich had been created by the 1907 Treaty, went to work in 1914 according to plan, the Russian mill-stone grinding in from the north and the British mill-stone from the south. The moment of the Ottoman Empire’s final break-up had arrived, such a moment as had never occurred before in the history of modern imperialism and is unlikely to occur again.
Early in 1915, Great Britain and Russia wrote the sequel to the 1907 Treaty in the Sazonoff agreement, negotiated in London. The British surrender continued. Under the terms of this agreement, Constantinople, the seat of the Caliphate and the political capital of Islam, was surrendered to Russia and the neutral zone in Persia (exception being made for the town of Ispahan) was added to the British zone. The agreement was necessarily kept secret. At a moment when the Government of India was exerting every effort to re-assure Indian Moslems on the subject of the Caliphate, its contents might have exploded India.
The Anglo-Russian partition of the Ottoman Empire was soon agreed upon. Mesopotamia was duly awarded to Great Britain and the eastern provinces to Russia (without provision for the independent Armenia for which the Allied Governments have so frequently expressed concern). Palestine, an integral part of the Caliph’s domain, was awarded to an international Westernregime, and the rest of the Syrian corridor, together with a great hinterland running north-east to meet the new Russian frontier and east to the Persian frontier, was awarded to France as a buffer between the Russian and British acquisitions. But the German drive on Paris made it impossible for France to release an Army for the occupation of its zone. Under the military pressure on the Western Front, France had no recourse but to recall its Consul-General at Beirut and to maintain a diplomatic watch upon its zone. Incidentally, its zone included Aleppo, the Achilles’ heel of the Ottoman Empire, which lay only a two days’ marching distance from Alexandretta which in turn lay a half-days’ steaming from the British base at Famagusta on Cyprus. But although the British Government raised the project of striking at Aleppo time and again, France and Russia interposed and maintained their vetoes. As a result, the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force and Indian Expeditionary Force “D” in Mesopotamia were put in the interesting position of having to operate for four years against an enemy whose military rear was open at Aleppo.
It now becomes possible to reconstruct the British war program. The Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta project which proposed to embed the Suez Canal in 8,000 miles of British territory running from South Africa to India, was its goal. It was not an incident in the growth of the Empire, it was its very climax and full fruition. It was the peak of British imperialism.
Its center was Cairo and with the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the enemy alliance, the great British Embassy at Constantinople abdicated in favor of the British Agency in Cairo. It was from Cairo that Islam was paralyzed by the split between Arabs and Turks. If Lord Kitchener were alive today, it seems safe to say that he would be the ruler in Cairo of an Arab area stretching from the Sudan to Persia, with a protege at Mecca in the person of King Hussein dignified by the newly acquired Caliphate of Islam. As for the Ottoman Caliphate, Czarist Russia was to reduce the Sultans to simple Amirs of Anatolia, a program in which the Foreign Office connived and whose result has been what Englishmen since the war have referred to as British “abdication” in India. We in the West might understand more vividly what “our brother Turk” means to Islam in India if we had been in the habit of entering India by an overland route rather than by the sea route which we customarily use….
Great Britain’s declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire on Nov. 5, 1914, enabled it to transfer Cyprus to the Colonial Office at once. In Cairo, it enabled the British Agency to depose the Sultan’sKhediveand to set up aKhediveof its own. London’s repeated pledges to France on the subject of Egypt made it hesitate at the final cancellation of Ottoman sovereignty but the situation was a difficult one and the British Protectorate was duly proclaimed, the Agency’sKhediveassuming the title of Sultan. The Agency was now elevated to the status of a Residency and martial law was proclaimed. Very soon, German and Ottoman forces struck at the Suez Canal through which British Indian, Australian and New Zealand forces were streamingen routeto France and whose banks were garrisoned with a mixed assemblage of troops known as the Force in Egypt, a Force uncertain as Lord Kitchener afterward reminded it whether it was expected to defend the Canal or the Canal was expected to defend it. The enemy was thrown back from the very banks of the Canal and, having itself crossed to establish the bridgehead of Kantara, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force marked time while theGrand Sherifof Mecca communicated the terms of Arab nationalism to the Residency in Cairo. Arab nationalism made it necessary for the Foreign Office in London to consult France and the result of that consultation was the secret Sykes-Picot agreement which did not long detain the Residency in Cairo and which need not long detain us here.
What is worthy of attention here, however, is the fact that Arab nationalism involved Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the three sites of the holiest places of Islam. With the Egyptian Expeditionary Force marking time at Kantara, Mecca and Medina lay on the southern flank of its advance and to the north in the lower end of the Syrian corridor lay Jerusalem. The three constituted a line lying across the line of the E. E. F.’s advance, a line guaranteed to all Islam by its Ottoman Caliph and additionally guaranteed to Islam in India by the Government of India’s undertaking that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem opinion alone to decide. This guaranteed line, however, lay across the Cairo-Calcutta leg of the Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle and in due time the Foreign Office handed down its instructions. The Residency in Cairo began the extemporization of a British Arabia which should pivot on Mecca with provincial capitals at Damascus and Bagdad.
Thus was carried into effect one of the most momentous decisions in the history of an Empire which once called itself “the greatest Moslem Power in the world,” a decision which plumbs the depths of the British surrender in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Ottoman Caliphate was the last great barrier in front of imperialism. The 1907 Treaty broke it.
The Residency now lost no time in establishing contact with theGrand Sherifof Mecca. The Ottoman Caliph hurried reinforcements to the Hejaz, but theSherif’sson Feisal drew a cordon around them in Medina at the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway. Although British officers directed him in repeated efforts to isolate Medina by cutting the Hejaz Railway, the Caliph succeeded in holding it until after the Ottoman Government signed its armistice in 1918, but throughout the rest of the Hejaz, his garrisons sooner or later were removed to British prison camps in Egypt. In the summer of 1917 theGrand Sherifdeclared his independence of Constantinople, assuming the title of King Hussein I.
The loss of Mecca broke the Ottoman Caliphate. King Hussein had his own lineal qualifications for the Caliphate. An Anglican-Orthodox union had been projected with its capital in a Russian Constantinople, and an Arab king at Mecca may indicate the disposition which the Foreign Office in London proposed to make of the Caliphate. From that day to this, the burden of supporting the Hejaz has been transferred from Constantinople to London. Once it was part of the burden of the Ottoman Caliphate. Today it is maintained by a British subsidy. Two of the three most venerable shrines of Islam are financed by the Colonial Office which, whatever else may be said of it, is not a Moslem bureau.
With its right secured, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was now free to advance on Jerusalem. With British officers on its right fetching Feisal’s Hejaz Army northward toward Damascus, the E. E. F. wheeled into the lower end of the Syrian corridor against stubborn Turco-German opposition. With small French and Italian detachments posted to it in view of the award of Palestine to an international Westernregime, the E. E. F. finally occupied Jerusalem late in 1917 and, having broken up repeated enemy attempts to recover it, rested on its arms while the Residency at Cairo converted it into a Britishfait accompli.
When Godfrey de Bouillon captured Jerusalem in a former episode, he waded through blood to his saddle girth to rescue the Holy Sepulchre, but mediaevalism has changed its methods. When General Allenby captured it in 1917, he tacked up an “Out of Bounds” sign on the Holy Sepulchre, the Residency at Cairo hurried up one of itsattachesto serve as military governor of the town, an assistant city engineer from Alexandria hurriedly arrived to draw up a new town plan for it and a landscape artist was hurried down from London to put the new town plan into effect. So Jerusalem became a Britishfait accompliand so it remains to this day. And the new town plan, having presumably served its purpose, has disappeared.
The war has given us all an aptitude for loose thinking and a full share of loose thought has attached to General Allenby and his Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Under our Western political tradition, a majority of the population is given the right to determine its own destiny, provided it is of a sufficient degree of intelligence to shoulder its responsibilities. If the faith of that majority in Palestine happens to be Islam, is not Islam the only one of the three faiths to which both Christian and Jewish shrines are equally sacred with its own? Has Islam ever failed in respect to the Christian and Jewish shrines in Jerusalem during its centuries of trusteeship? And what has happened to Islam’s shrines in Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo, in Sicily and Malta, under Christian rule?
At the British demand, the Ottoman Caliph finally withdrew his garrison from Medina after the armistice in 1918. It is simple enough to upset the theology of an Ottoman Caliphate, but the British Foreign Office, despite the Government of India’s specific undertaking to Moslems in India, has upset thefactof an Ottoman Caliphate and in the last fifty years the fact and the theology of the matters. The Caliphate has become the symbol of all those Eastern traditions which are woven into the fabric of Islamic civilization, a symbol thrown into vivid relief by the increasing inroads which Western and Russian imperialisms have been making into that civilization. However narrow Old Turkish opinion was, however stubbornly it confined the Young Turks to a rigidly conservative interpretation of the Caliphate, Islam in India could Caliphate may have come to be two quite separate adjust its Caliphate to such modern and healthy growths as that of Arab nationalism. But the forcible imposition of Western civilization upon the Arabs was a still further step in that process of Western imperialism against which the very existence of the Caliphate had become a protest.
Until the war ended, Islam in India relied not only on the Government of India’s undertaking to the effect that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem opinion alone to decide, but on the fact that the Empire as a whole contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians. With these assurances, Indian Moslem troops even participated in the capture of Jerusalem, but when the peace proposed to continue what the war had begun, the Caliphate agitation in India soon became the most formidable fact in the British Empire. The Foreign Office and the India Office are supposed to be housed on the same quadrangle off Downing Street in London, but the distance which the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 has brought between them is one of the sheer curiosities of contemporary history. One sometimes wonders, on that exalted plane on which Sovereigns dwell, what the Emperor of India has been saying to the Defender of the Faith since 1907 and what reply the Defender of the Faith has been making to the Emperor of India.