Enemy on the Euphrates by Ian Rutledge Read Free Book Online

Mujtahid, Muhammad Kadhim Yazdi, the most senior Shi‘i cleric of Iraq, urging him to join the jihad.
    To his honour Sheikh Khaz’al Khan, from Najaf
    Salaams to the Exalted Sirdar of the Esteemed Sultanate, Sheikh Khaz’al, may His Majesty remain in perpetuity.
    In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
    It is well known that one of the most important duties towards the domain of Islam is the defence, at all costs, of the Muslims’ sea ports against attack by the Infidels, and since yours is one of the most important of those ports hence it is your duty to protect that port to the utmost that you are able. Likewise you have a duty to lead the local tribes in that region and it is required of you to inform them that it is forbidden for any Muslim to assist the Infidels and that their support must be for the Muslim war effort. We trust in your zeal and sense of honour to make every effort to repel the Infidels: and if God so wills it, may he support you in vanquishing his enemies.
    Muhammad Kadhim al-Tabataba’i al-Yazdi
    1 Muharram 1333 h.
    (19 November 1914) 15
    But Sheikh Khaz’al, now drawing considerable revenues from his lease of Abadan to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, ignored the Grand Mujtahid’s appeal and by now, had thrown his full support behind the British invaders.
    Meanwhile, in the Hejaz, hundred of miles away on the western flank of the Arabian peninsula, another Arab potentate, who had already decided against joining the jihad, was contemplating active support for the British. Before the outbreak of war between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, the deeply conservative Emir Husayn ibn ‘Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, had made it known to the British, via a meeting between his second son, the thirty-two-year-old Emir ‘Abdallah and Kitchener’s oriental secretary, Ronald Storrs, that he was fearful that the CUP government in Istanbul was planning to replace him by a candidate more favourable to their somewhat more progressive social and economic policies, and that under certain circumstances he might rebel against his Turkish overlords. 16 So on 24 September 1914, Kitchener telegrammed Cairo with instructions that a secret letter should be sent to the Emir ‘Abdallah to ascertain whether, in the event of the Turks entering the war on Germany’s side, ‘he, his father and Arabs of the Hejaz would be with us or against us’. Moreover, he closed his message to Mecca with these crucial words: ‘It may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Caliphate at Mecca or Medina and so good may come with the help of God out of all the evil that is now occurring.’
    Whatever Kitchener meant by his curious reference to the caliphate – and it seems that he probably thought of the caliph only as some kind of Islamic pope – to Sharif Husayn it meant only one thing: that, should he join them, the British were willing to make him the sole ruler of a vast Arab empire whose boundaries would broadly coincide with the historic territories of the medieval caliphs, stretching from Palestine and Lebanon, through Syria and Iraq to the border with Persia and as far south as the Yemen. 17 Needless to say, this was not at all what Kitchener and Sykes had contemplated when they mused over the possibility of a creating a loose collection of pliant ‘friendly native states’ under the protection of the British Empire. But from this point on, Britain wasdrawn into an increasingly labyrinthine exchange of communications with Husayn which slowly but surely committed it to accepting a much greater degree of ‘Arab independence’ in the Middle East than had ever been contemplated by either Kitchener or Sykes.
    So, in Mecca al-Mukarrama, the revered city of the Ka‘aba, the sixty-year-old diminutive white-bearded Sharif Husayn must have read the words of Kitchener’s message with growing pleasure. In his small plain white turban and black outer robe, he retired to his private chamber where he could make