By Gamal Nkrumah Robert McNamara, The Hashemites: The Dream of Arabia, 2009, the American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, New York The story is typical of the quirky narratives that inspired Lawrence of Arabia. In a bizarre blend of mythic yarn-spinning, one of the most tenacious of the Muslim world's dynasties survives threadbare to this day. Mention the Hashemites at a dinner party in an Arab capital and you will probably provoke a lively debate about the economic viability of Jordan, the moral foundation of creating such an artificial state and the very morality of the dynasty that founded the kingdom. A phrase unlikely to crop-up is "the dream of Arabia". It will be a sobering start to explain that the Hashemites, descendants of the Prophet Mohamed, originally hailed from Hijaz, the northwestern portion of Arabia that includes at its core the holiest cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina. The Hashemites traded in their Islamic ideology for power. To begin with, they sought to be assured a place in history as the creators of an Arabian kingdom encompassing the Arab heartland, and ended up securing a foothold in the Fertile Crescent. They did so with the help of Western powers, primarily the British. As the legendary Lawrence of Arabia demonstrates, they showed considerable enthusiasm for regional military adventures. There has been hyperbole as well as history in the discourse on the Hashemites. A little known Arabian prince of Constantinople, the Hashemite (descendant of Prophet Mohamed) King Hussein Ibn Ali, slipped into Arab political mythology, parleying his pedigree and prestige into a dubious role as Arabia's postwar caretaker. King Hussein was self-styled Caliph of Islam, Commander of the Faithful, King of Hijaz, Grand Sherif and Emir of Mecca. His benefactor, Britain, had its eye on the Arabian Peninsula as a strategic gateway to India. There was talk of oil and another rival Arabian potentate, with far more credulous credentials than the Hashemites, was poised to stamp out the inherent fractiousness of his sprawling desert homeland. The rival prince in question was Abdel-Aziz Ibn Saud, the Machiavellian Emir of Nejd. Ibn Saud was the very antithesis of Hussein Ibn Ali. His successes were largely due to his unequivocal loyalty to the British and to London's largesse. Hussein, in sharp contrast, prevaricated. His humourless arrogance led him astray. He could not control his headstrong sons -- Ali (1879), Abdullah (1889-1951), Faisal (1883-1933), and Zaid (1898-1970). Even though Hussein and his sons pretended to pose as the embodiment of all that is noble in the Arabian aristocracy, they ended up personifying all that is exasperating about the axiomatic Arabian sovereigns. Ibn Saud, seemingly above the fray, was blessed with propriety; in much the same fashion as his overlords the British, to conquer Arabia and establish the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he manipulated friends and foes alike. The Hashemites were unceremoniously driven out of Arabia, never to return as political bigwigs. Instead, in desperation they sought in vain their fortunes in the Fertile Crescent. The phrase "the dream of Arabia" is resonant with eulogistic connotations. Moreover, the collaboration of the Hashemites with first the British and then the Americans was the beginning of a "new politics" in the Middle East. the Sherif Hussein and his sons failed to leave an indelible mark on the region. Only Abdullah partially succeeded by ensuring that his progeny rule a resource-poor and Lilliputian desert kingdom after him. This is logical and hard to argue with. Abdullah's Arab followers, the tribalists of his homeland, ruled over a restive Palestinian population. The tribalists were triumphant and honoured to be designated henchmen of the Hashemites. The nationalists of the Levant, first Syrians and then Palestinians were dismayed with the turn of events. The protagonists -- Hashemite henchmen and the nationalists were at each other's throats for most of the Lilliputian kingdom's volatile history. Yet they learnt eventually to co-exist under Hashemite hegemony. McNamara has moments of great insight and perspicacity in this attractively reader-friendly narrative of the ups and downs of the Hashemites. His account of the political intrigues of the British and their playing off the Sauds against the Hashemites is especially fascinating. "The British considered that Hussein had been the cause of most of his own troubles by failing to parley with Ibn Saud. Lord Curzon now saw Britain's erstwhile ally as 'a pampered and querulous nuisance'. His sons, particularly Abdullah and Faisal, were estranged from him; Faisal, because of his success, and Abdullah as a result of the disaster at Turaba. His eldest son Ali, who remained at his father's side in Mecca, believed that the temperamental behaviour of his father was isolating him and was increasingly dangerous to the Arab cause. "Situated on a barren and inhospitable stretch of coastline," the book says of the Hijaz, "its importance lay in the fact that two of the holiest sites of Islam lay within it: Mecca, the holiest city, and Medina, the first city to accept the word of the Prophet Mohamed. It was remote from the capital Costantinople, poor and thinly populated. Indeed, it is estimated that towards the end of the 19th century, the combined population of the three main towns of the Hejaz -- Mecca, Medina and Jeddah -- was little more than 100,000 with perhaps another 400,000 nomadic tribesmen in the hinterland around them... It remained a pre-modern, highly traditional society. There were little outward signs of nationalism or other modern political ideas permeating the area during the 19th century... "By the outbreak of the First World War, the Turks, who originated from the Central Asian steppes, had ruled the heartland of the Arab World encompassing the modern-day states of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Arab North Africa for over a thousand years... Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine were known as the Fertile Crescent due to the important rivers, the Jordan, Tigris and Euphrates, that provided the water resources that made the areas conducive to human settlement... "However, by 1914, the Arab lands of the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula, the cradle of one of the world's great civilisations and an all-conquering Islamic empire, were reduced to little more than barren, poverty-stricken, disease- ridden and all-ill-educated backwaters... The Ottomans, the last of the great Islamic Turkish tribes to forge a major empire, conquered the Arab lands in 1517 and ruled them without serious opposition, for just over four centuries. Only in the last decades of Ottoman rule did proto-nationalist challenges begin to emerge in the Arab territories." McNamara spotlights the predicament of the Arab nationalist cause, cleverly conveying the import and implications of Arab disunity through the perspicacious observations of the contemporaries of the Hashemites. "There is no nation of Arabs; the Syrian merchant is separated by a wider gulf from the bedouin than he is from the Osmanli [Ottoman]," noted Gertrude Bell. McNamara's informative reference work is elegantly structured with an array of sudden shocks and telling revelations. "Arthur Zimmermann, the German Deputy Foreign Minister was enthusiastic about using Turkey and pan-Islamism to ferment uprisings against the British, French and the Russians... "Even if a call to Jihad was only a partial success, it could still be a cause of serious disruption to the Allies. There were some 70 million Muslims in India and 16 million in Egypt and Sudan under direct British control along with 20 million in French Africa, and a similar number of adherents within Russia's borders. Enver, the architect of Turkey's entry into the War, shared these views and planned to use pan-Turkish ideology to inflame the Turkish populations of the Caucus and Central Asia against the Russians and pan-Islamic ideology to inflame Egypt and Muslim areas of India against the British." Such historical anecdotes make McNamara's book exceptionally timely. Today we witness the rising role of Turkey in the Arab world with some ambiguity. Yet historically, Turkey -- be it Ottoman or secularist Kemalist -- has always championed the Islamic cause. Key Arab leaders had a tendency to shy away from usurping the mantle of Islamic leadership. They proved notorious in their unabashed collaboration with Western powers and invariably disappointed the downtrodden among their co-religionists. McNamara ingeniously spells out the implications of this sorry tale. "The British, in particular, were desperately concerned that the Turkish Sultan would proclaim a Jihad, for fear it would work. Now, pre-war contacts that the British had with both Sherif Hussein and Ibn Saud took on an unexpected importance. If the British could engineer a split in the Muslim world and cast doubt on the verisimilitude of the Sultan's declaration, its effect could be mitigated." The British succeeded in thwarting the Arab dream of unity, with the tacit connivance of the Hashemites and their ilk. Years later, Hussein was to commit yet another gaff. "Hussein made one final blunder. In spite of his financial and military weakness, he took the opportunity provided by the abolition of the Caliphate by the Turkish National Assembly tin March 1924 to declare himself Caliph." McNamara depicts the history of Hashemite collaboration with Western colonial powers with admirable verve and perspicacity. "In February 1914, Sherif Hussein's second son Abdullah, who was a member of the Ottoman Parliament in Constantinople, had paid a visit to the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener." Key colonial characters such as the Oriental Secretary to the British Residency in Cairo, Ronald Storrs, come into play. "Kitchener, who had stayed in London at the outbreak of hostilities to become Secretary of State for War, ordered Storrs to reactivate contacts with Abdullah." The complicity of the Hashemites in colonial schemes was comically matched by the very confusion of the colonialists themselves. "Storrs seems to have taken further local initiatives without referring to London, which committed Britain almost completely to the general cause of Arab nationalism and an Arab Caliphate." Western powers were rewriting the history of the Islamic heartlands. "At the same time as Storrs was taking his initiatives, the Entente Powers -- Britain, France and Russia -- were negotiating over the fate of the Ottoman Empire. It was clear that they now all desired to turn the 'sick man of Europe' into a corpse, which they would dissect in the aftermath of victory." The prickly foreign policy of Western powers, and in particular Britain's, was little more than an attempt to pacify Muslim ambition and aspirations and to maintain at all costs British primacy in the Arab and Muslim worlds. "Kitchener, in a remarkably prescient paper proposed that 'it is to our interests to see an Arab Kingdom established in Arabia under the auspices of England, and containing within it the chief Mahomedan Holy Places -- Mecca, Madina and Karbala." Britain's main concern was to protect the route to India. Arabia was an aside. "The two most substantial elements in the Arab claim of duplicity against the British were the top-secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 (published by the Bolsheviks in late 1917 in the aftermath of the October Revolution) and the Balfour Declaration of November 1917." But as McNamara notes, Hussein still inclined to seek compromise with the Turks, thereby sealing his fate as a loser. "In return for promises of a widespread Arab revolt that he only partially delivered, Hussein, a relatively minor Arab emir with extremely limited military means, succeeded in getting the Entente Powers to recognise an enormous Arab Kingdom substantially bigger than Britain and France combined. It was inevitable that the independence of such an entity was going to be circumscribed." The consequences for the Arab world were tragic. The Middle East degenerated into an anarchic connective between Europe and India. "It was also inevitable that the fringes of this Arab state or federation were going to be chipped away." The Hashemites with high hopes of inheriting the Ottoman legacy in the Arab world were to be bitterly disappointed and betrayed by their British patrons. "Hussein's raising of the standard of revolt on 5 June 1916 turned out to be rather a damp squib." "If a weak Arab confederation, dominated by the British, ended up as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, it did not really matter what its boundaries were." Not even Lawrence of Arabia could save the Hashemites from catastrophe. "By mid- July 1916, the revolt was running out of steam." Yet the British still refused to candidly pronounce the Hashemites written off as a waste of time and money. Hussein's subsidy was almost doubled and arms and ammunition were also supplied. "The subsidy was vital for the Revolt since gold, rather than appeals to patriotism, was the key to recruiting Bedouin tribesmen." The Hashemites, and Arabs in general, were turned into a subject rich in targets for ridicule. "T E Lawrence, who became the Arabs' key military adviser from the end of 1916, was often critical of the tendency of Bedouin forces to go home with plunder before achieving their objective." Hussein had no reputation as a military strategist, however, and on McNamara's treatise it is easy to see why. "The strategic direction of the Revolt was increasingly removed from Hussein's hands." McNamara, however, often emerges as something of a humourist. He occasionally turns a satirical eye on history. "'I felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek -- the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory,' Lawrence recognised that Feisal was not without faults -- he viewed him as excessively tribal in his allegiances. The alternatives, his three brothers, were far worse: Ali suffered from ill health, Zeid was too young and callow, and Abdullah, the most obvious choice, was considered by Lawrence to be too much of a politician and not enough of a statesman." Alas, the statesman lost his kingdoms (first Syria and then Iraq) and the politician won the Lilliputian kingdom (Jordan). "Feisal was transformed from being one of a number of brothers to primus inter pares. Feisal would now eclipse his elder brother Abdullah and ultimately even his father. He became the driving force behind the Revolt." Abdullah, whose namesake today sits on the throne of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, had the last laugh. McNamara has an original take on the Hashemites. "As Lawrence noted, the four sons of Hussein 'were natives of no country, lovers of no private plot of ground. They had no real confidants or ministers; and no one of them seemed open to another, or to the father, of whom they stood in awe.'" Action grips throughout McNamara's compelling narrative. "Lawrence and Feisal's relationship was the key to the successes that the Arab Revolt enjoyed. Feisal always gave the orders, while Lawrence merely advised." McNamara's work is worth picking up at the American University in Cairo Press Bookshop in the heart of the Egyptian capital, for it as much a book about Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq as it is about Jordan. The Hashemites, using Hejaz as a staging post, crossed into the desolate wilderness of what is today Jordan simply as a conduit to Syria. Little did they know then that they were there to stay for good. "Lawrence and Feisal led operations against Turkish forces in the towns of Maan and Amman and the Damascus-Medina railway line." The British permitted the Arab Bedouin forces of Sherif Hussein to enter Damascus first. Feisal and his followers were given the honour of capturing Damascus with all the stint symbolism. "This final coup de théâtre ensured that the Arab cause came to the attention of the wider world." McNamara draws attention to innate weaknesses of Arabs divided on religious grounds. The Hashemites ultimately lost Syria to the French precisely because the Christians of the Levant could not stomach the notion of an Arabian aristocracy, claiming descent from the Prophet, feigning lordship over Christian subjects. "The large Christian minorities in both Lebanon and Syria viewed the Hashemites with distaste. An American report on Syria concluded that the country was deeply divided between those who were desirous of immediate annexation of France and those, mainly Muslim, who believed Arabs could rapidly evolve politically and did not require French tutelage." The Jews, too, played no small part in curtailing the ambitions of the Hashemites. "The prospects for a British endorsement of Zionism were further aided when Mark Sykes and Georges Picot revisited and revised their agreement. By June 1917, the French government had, tacitly at least, agreed that Palestine would move from international control to British control and that there was no objection to Jewish settlement there under British rule." Clashing cultures and a resurgent Zionism drive the Hashemites from Palestine and eventually from their consolation prize, East Jerusalem, which the British awarded them in exchange of their loss of Mecca and Medina to Ibn Saud. McNamara first indulges in a bittersweet reflection on the vacuous policy of prewar British prevarication concerning Zionism. "Squaring the British Cabinet took somewhat longer. The senior Jewish minister in the Cabinet, Edward Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, was strongly opposed to the creation of a Jewish ghetto in the Middle East, which might impact on the position of assimilated Jews in Europe." Across the Atlantic in America, the collision between the locals and Zionists was less tortuous. "Then, in October 1917, the American President Woodrow Wilson endorsed the proposal, demonstrating to Lloyd George the power of the Zionist lobby in the United States." McNamara appears to have had fun exploring the cauldron of duplicity and double-dealing that ended in Hashemite ousting from Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel. "The public announcement of the Balfour Declaration brought no response from Sherif Hussein. While many Syrian notables loudly complained about the Declaration, Hussein remained conspicuously silent." Those who would rather forget Hashemite complicity in the creation of the Zionist political entity are forced to live with those who cannot in contemporary Jordan. McNamara's book boldly navigates the seas of ideological fundamentalism from Zionism to Wahabism with the Hashemites caught in between. "Ibn Saud was an adherent to the particularly austere Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, which was founded in the 18th century by Mohamed Ibn Abdel-Wahhab (1703-92), who formed an alliance with the Sauds. By 1806, most of the Arabian Peninsula including Mecca and Medina had been conquered. Eventually forces from Egypt crushed the Sauds and the Wahhabis. The family's fortunes did not recover until the early 20th century when Ibn Saud launched his wave of conquest." So how did Ibn Saud triumph while the Hashemites irrevocably forfeited their rights to the Muslim holy lands? "Ibn Saud forged a new instrument of state building and military power with his creation of the quasi-military religious brotherhood called the Ikhwan." McNamara notes how the Ikhwan (Brothers) provided societal cohesion and became the kernel that grew into the Muslim Brotherhood. Here again British complicity tipped the balance in favour of the Saudis. "Hussein wanted the British to be overwhelmingly dependent on him, but they, while leaning towards Hussein, also wanted to keep Ibn Saud as an ally and continued to cultivate him." Power play in the Arabian Peninsula had reached a critical historical juncture. Hussein's son Abdullah's army was surprised by a night attack spearheaded by the Ikhwan warriors and Abdallah only just escaped with his life. "Hussein's power in the Arabian Peninsula was now severely diminished. Only British pressure on Ibn Saud prevented him pressing home his advantage." McNamara's study is as rich in its evocation of a dynasty's lost land as in its depiction of the real reasons behind the loss. "Leadership in the Arabian Peninsula in the early 20th century grew out of the barrel of the gun. If he could not suppress recalcitrant tribes such as the Utayba in Khurma, Hussein's claims to primacy would inevitably fail." Tribes once loyal to the Hashemites turned against them and instinctively inclined towards Ibn Saud. The Turaba attack was to alter the course of history in the Arabian Peninsula. The Hashemites were fast loosing ground in their homeland Arabia. And, back to Cairo, Egypt. "The venue for the conference was the Semiramis Hotel. Beginning on 12 March 1921, for 12 days over the course of more than 40 secret sessions, some 40 British Middle Eastern experts and policy-makers -- including all of the high commissioners, the senior regional military commanders, the political residents, and governors of territories such as Somaliland -- worked through an agenda that would shape the Middle East to the present day." McNamara's is a judicious study of the strained relations between Arab rulers, and between Arab puppet rulers and their Western overlords. While the Hashemites scored a qualified victory in Jordan, they failed miserably in Mesopotamia. Iraq was to be the true prize of the Hashemites, but the timing of their seizure of this most thorny prize could not have been more propitious. "It was rapidly agreed that in Mesopotamia, which was to be renamed Iraq, Faisal offered the best and most economical chance of success." McNamara's first-class contemplation on the fate of the Hashemites is a lively lay reader's guide to failures of a fascinating family and its feuding siblings.
