'Fulfilling our Promises': The Creation of Jordan

'HE IS A HERO for another country, not for us', declared Bassam Saket, urbane, Oxford-educated chairman of the Jordan Securities Commission – the agency that regulates the Amman stock exchange – and a former minister of trade and industry. 'He was a British officer who helped his own country's cause' in a campaign that 'ended up in disappointment for the Arabs', he told me during our meeting at his well-appointed office. 'The freedom-fighters were stabbed in the back'. Laith Shubailat, Islamist, civil engineer, ex-MP and leading democracy campaigner who in November 1992 was sentenced to death but pardoned 48 hours later, takes the same view. T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – was 'an instrument of the British government who felt ashamed of himself for helping his government lie to the Arabs'. Even more caustic was Dr Mustafa Hamarneh, a connoisseur of Cuban cigars who directs the University ofJordan's Centre for Strategic Studies. 'Jordanians don't know him. They just know he was some white man who ran around in the desert'.

It's a far cry from the Western love-affair with the Lawrence myth, a tale of courage and derring-do set against the vastness and purity of the desert. 'I was fascinated by Lawrence', said Wilfred Thesiger, the greatest of modern desert travellers, whose crossing of Arabia's Empty Quarter is chronicled in his classic Arabian Sands. 'How others have tried to diminish him! Rubbish! I stand no talk against Lawrence!'1 met Thesiger, a figure in his way as enigmatic as Lawrence, at his nursing home in Coulsdon on the Surrey Downs, shortly before his death. At age 94 his eyes still shone with the vigour that once propelled him across the arid sand seas.

Sharif Hussain ibn Ali was not only the ruler of Islam's holiest city of Mecca and a Hashemite – a member of the Prophet Muhammad's branch of the Quraish tribe; he was also a direct descendant of the Prophet. These attributes underpinned his claim to leadership of the nationalist movement that was stirring in the Ottoman Empire's Arab territories early last century. In June 1916, when Sharif Hussain launched the Arab Revolt against the Turks, setting in train events that shape the Middle East to this day, Lawrence was a young Arabist officer based at British headquarters in Cairo. Posted as liaison officer to the rebels, Lawrence fought with them throughout their campaign. Bedu tribesmen formed the core of the rag-tag Sharifian army although its ranks also included numbers of Arab officers and men from the towns and settled agricultural areas of Iraq and Syria who had defected from the Ottoman forces. The army was commanded by Hussain's third son, the Amir (Prince) Faisal.

Having taken control of the Hejaz – the mountainous western region of the Arabian Peninsula lapped by the Red Sea – the rebels moved into Greater Syria – the territory today fractured into Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. North of the Hejaz, they operated in tandem with a British army, commanded initially by Sir Archibald Murray and then, more successfully, by General Edmund Allenby, that had invaded Palestine along the coast from Egypt. For both the British and the Arabs, the prize was Damascus, that greatest of all Arab cities. While the British advanced via a series of set-piece battles, Faisal's highly mobile, camel-mounted irregulars harassed the Turks and disrupted their communications along the desert fringe to the east. A key target for the guerrillas was the Hejaz Railway, a 1,320 kilometre narrow gauge line linking Damascus and Medina built by the Ottomans with German technical assistance in 1900-08. Ostensibly, Sultan Abdul Hamid had launched the project to facilitate the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Its rolling stock included a novel mosque carriage with a large open floor area for prayers and a two-metre minaret that could be retracted to permit passage through tunnels. But the railway also had a critical strategic role as an imperial artery, supplying Turkish garrisons and outposts in a part of the Empire where the Ottomans' grip was tenuous. The fast-moving, colourful and decisive Middle Eastern war was a welcome diversion for a British public horrified by the slaughter in Flanders, where bloody advances and retreats were measured in metres. Faisal took Aqaba, at the head of the Red Sea, in July 1917 and Amman – today Jordan's capital but then little more than a large village – in September. Jerusalem fell to the British three months later. The first British unit – actually the Third Australian Division – entered Damascus on 1 October 1918, to be followed the next day by Amir Nasir, the brother of the Amir of Medina (Islam's second holiest city) and one of the key Sharifian leaders, Lawrence and the bedu, and on 3 October by Amir Faisal, who arrived on a Hejaz Railway train.

The Arab Revolt had been launched only after discreet negotiations with the British. In 1915–16 Sharif Hussain and Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, exchanged a series of letters known as the McMahon Correspondence. These outlined a quid pro quo under which Britain agreed to reward an Arab rebellion against its Turkish foe by recognising the independence of the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire, within certain limits. Britain excluded from the region where independence would apply the areas west of Mersin and Alexandretta, at the junction of Anatolia and Syria; the coastal regions to the west of a line linking the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Damascus; and the Ottoman vilayets, or provinces, of Baghdad and Basra. It also stipulated that Arab independence would apply only where that did not conflict with the interests of its wartime ally, France. Hussain did not accept the British territorial exemptions. In the interests of securing a workable alliance, however, the two sides agreed to leave these outstanding issues for future discussion.

Perfidy

Perfidious Albion did not gain its appellation for nothing. At the same time as it was urging Sharif Hussain to rebel with promises of Arab independence, London was quietly negotiating a...