Chapter 3, Part 4: The Arab Revolt, the McMahon Letters and the Martyrs of 6 May 1916
Section Four
The Arab Revolt
The British, in military difficulties in their war with the Ottoman caliphate and its two allies Germany and Austria, found that an understanding with the Arabs would hasten victory, if they could be won over to the side of the Allies.
First: because they could then launch their war from loyal and friendly land.
And second: because they would spare themselves the charge of waging a rabid crusade, reawakened seven centuries after the end of the earlier Crusades, if they had at their side an ally such as the Sharif of Mecca, descendant of the Prophet of Islam, lord of Quraysh and protector of the two sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina.
The Arab nationalists in the lands of Syria were keen to push al-Hussein bin Ali to rise against the Turkish regime, having despaired of any understanding with the hard-line Turanian rulers. A favorable opportunity came to them with the retreat of the Turkish military forces. Al-Hussein found that the Arab lands were unable to carry out a national revolt on their own, and so decided to come to an understanding with a foreign state that was at war with the Turks, and the foreign state geographically closest to him was Britain, which lay beyond the border of the neighboring Red Sea, in Egypt and the Sudan. The suffocating economic hardship in the Hejaz may also have played its part in encouraging the Sharif of Mecca to take the road of revolt.
Among the things the Sharif asked in his first letter, which Muhammad Urayfat of the Harb tribe carried (without signature and without date) to the Englishman Storrs in Cairo, was that the Egyptian government be allowed to send the grain it used to send to the people of the two holy cities. The personal letter enclosed with it, however, was dated 14 July 1915.
The Sharif of Mecca's main demand, though, was above all the proclamation of an Arab Islamic state recognized by Britain, taking in the Arab lands bounded on the north by the Mersin-Adana line parallel to latitude 37 and running through Birecik, Mardin and Jazirat Ibn Umar to the borders of Persia and on to the Gulf of Basra; on the south by the Pacific Ocean (except for the port of Aden); and on the west by the Mediterranean as far as Mersin.[1]
McMahon answered this letter with a reply dated 30 August 1915 that contained nothing but vague promises and warm feelings, on the grounds that "most of these areas are still under Turkish occupation".. But in his second letter, dated 24 October 1915, he spoke more forcefully and more clearly. Despite his reservations about the provinces of Mersin and Alexandretta and certain lands lying west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, "which cannot be said to be purely Arab", he said: "We accept those limits."
McMahon sent a letter from Cairo to the British Foreign Office dated 26 October 1915 in which he said: "I have given a definite assurance (to the Arabs) that Britain will recognize the principle of Arab independence in the purely Arab areas".. and that Britain, as McMahon's last letter to the Sharif of Mecca dated March 1916 put it, "has approved all your demands".[2]
The British government published this correspondence between al-Hussein and McMahon in 1939, at the insistence of the Arab delegations taking part in the London Conference on Palestine.
During this period the Ottoman government managed to seize letters that some Syrians and Lebanese had sent to the French consulate general in Beirut. Their existence was revealed to Djemal Pasha in person by the interpreter of the French consulate, Philippe Zalzal, whom the Pasha had promised a pardon if he gave away the secrets of these documents. He showed him their hiding place in the consulate after the consul general, Georges Picot, had left Beirut. The documents were found in a place prepared inside one of the walls of a room in the consulate, and they plainly condemned those who had signed them. Among them was a document bearing the signatures of forty Syrians and Lebanese "asking in it for the protection and help of France so that Syria might gain its independence as an Arab part bound to the Ottoman state by nothing but the domination of the Turkish element over it".[3]
We learn from the books of General Mustafa Tlass and Professor Yusuf al-Hakim that one of the accused, Joseph al-Hani, was executed in Beirut on 5 April 1916, that fourteen of the accused were executed in Beirut on 6 May 1916, and that seven were executed in Damascus on the same day.
For the record we give, from these two authors, the names of the men who became martyrs of the nation, in whose memory government offices close on 6 May every year in Syria and Lebanon:
Those executed in Beirut were:
1. Sheikh Ahmad Tabbara (a newspaper owner).
2. Abd al-Ghani al-Uraysi.
3. Said Aql.
4. Petro Paoli.
5. Tawfiq al-Bisat.
6. Emir Arif al-Shihabi (a lawyer from Haifa).
7. Georges Musa Haddad.
8. Umar Hamad.
9. Sayf al-Din al-Khatib (a judge from Haifa).
10. Muhammad Hussein al-Shanti (from Jaffa).
11. Salim al-Jazairi (an officer in the Ottoman army).
12. Muhammad Amin Hafiz (miralay, a colonel).
13. Jalal al-Din al-Bukhari.
14. Ali Umar al-Nashashibi (from Jerusalem).
Those executed in Damascus, in Marjeh Square, were:
1. Shafiq al-Muayyad al-Azm.
2. Sheikh Abd al-Hamid al-Zahrawi.
3. Shukri al-Asali.
4. Rushdi al-Sham'a.
5. Abd al-Wahhab al-Inglizi.
6. Rafiq Rizq Sallum.
7. Emir Umar al-Jazairi (a descendant of Emir Abd al-Qadir).
It should be noted that this bloodthirsty Turkish commander met his end by assassination at the hands of an Armenian group.
Among the things that have been said is that these executions hastened the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in the Hejaz on 9 Sha'ban 1334, corresponding to 10 June 1916.
The proclamation of the Arab Revolt stated that the Turks "tried to kill the Arabic language in all the Ottoman provinces by abolishing it in the schools and banning it from the government offices and the courts. It is no secret that killing the Arabic language is killing Islam itself.. They have killed and hanged the leading men and the geniuses of the Arab awakening, who were known for their zeal for the nation and the state".
Dr. Ahmad Qadri says in his memoirs[4] that Shukri al-Quwatli cut his veins in his cell, trying to kill himself so that he would not be forced to give away the secrets of his brothers, the Arab nationalists.
Opinions on what moved these men have differed sharply.
Some praise them as martyrs for a cause,[5] while others mock them for having worked with a foreign state against the interest of the state whose citizens they were.
God, glory be to Him, alone knows the truth of what souls hide and what hearts hold.
Djemal Pasha defended their execution in his memoirs, accusing them of being "traitors and enemies of religion and the government", and published some of the documents that condemned them, among them a document signed by a number of Lebanese Christians in which they made three demands:
First: the occupation of Syria by France.
Second: the complete independence of the province of Beirut under the protection and guardianship of France.
Third: the merging of the province of Beirut into Lebanon, which must be under French sovereignty.
The signatories of this document in 1913 were:
Michel Tueni, Joseph al-Hani, Pierre Trad, Dr. Ayyub Thabit, Rizqallah Arqash and Khalil Zayn.
In their letter to the French consulate they said:
"Even if we suppose it were possible to obtain the reforms without the help of Europe, this would not quench the thirst of the Christians of Syria, because they are united with France 'in a union that cannot be broken'."[6]
Attention is drawn by what Yusuf al-Hakim (a Christian) wrote in his memoirs[7] about the Ottoman state's treatment of its subjects. He said:
"Neither while I was studying in the institutions of the (Ottoman) state nor while I held office in its courts and departments did I ever feel any difference in rights and duties between myself and the other officials. I saw the government's justice and its equal treatment of all its subjects without distinction of race or belief.. Do we find greater justice than this among the Europeans?"
The late al-Hakim was born in Latakia in 1879 and died in Damascus in 1979, which means that he lived forty years under the Ottoman state.
Endnotes:
[1] We would recall that Sharif Hussein did not accept proclaiming himself caliph of the Muslims after the coup against Sultan Abdulhamid in 1909, so that the caliphate would remain one and would bring the scattered Muslims together. It seems he changed his mind when the caliph became a plaything in the hands of the leaders of Union and Progress, who were known for their secular leanings and their Masonic ties.
[2] From General Tlass, The Great Arab Revolt, p. 146.
[3] Yusuf al-Hakim, vol. 2, p. 233.
[4] In his book Mudhakkirati an al-Thawra al-Arabiyya al-Kubra (My Memoirs of the Great Arab Revolt), Damascus 1956, p. 60.
[5] Among those who praised them was the Iraqi poet Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi, who said of them:
On every gallows-wood a companion and a friend,
And in every house a keening and a wail.
They rode the saddles of the camels, urged on
To death by a departure from the valley of life.
One raced ahead so none would call him timid,
Another hurried so none would call him slow.
It is no more than a shudder that seizes a young man
Suddenly, and then his head falls to one side.
His spirit went, folding up the sky toward its Lord,
With no guide but the light of the two Farqad stars.
[6] These memoirs were translated into Arabic by Ali Ahmad Shukri and printed at al-Hilal Press in al-Fajjala in 1923. They run to 560 medium-sized pages in nine chapters.
The eighth chapter (pages 335 to 424) is given over to the Arab Revolt, and the ninth chapter to the Armenian part.
[7] Vol. 2, p. 410.