Elie Kedourie In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpretations, 1914–1939.
Frank Cass, 350 pages, $28.50 paper

This book was originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1976. It was immediately hailed as a model of historical scholarship and remains the most careful and judicious study ever written of the genesis of Britain’s troubled relations with the Arabs. Drawing on the evidence contained in recently released archives from the Foreign Office, Kedourie was able to refine the indictment of the failures of British policy in the Middle East he had already put forward in such works as England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1921 (1956) and The Chatham House Version and Other Essays (1970).

The Labyrinth has two parts. The first, called “The Quicksand,” borrows its title from a minute in which the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, gave vent to his exasperation over the hornet’s nest of conflicting pledges: “This Arab question is a regular quicksand.” Kedourie explored in detail the character and extent of the commitments made by the British government to the Arabs in order to induce them to take up arms against the Turks during the First World War. The second part of the book is called “The Fly in the Fly Bottle,” after a celebrated passage in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Here Kedourie conducted a ruthless examination of the official historiography from the time of the frenzied deliberations generated by the peace negotiations at Versailles—when the British cabinet had not one but two foreign secretaries to watch over its far-flung interests—to the White Paper of 1939, which by restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine was deliberately designed to appease the Arabs as a way to atone for British errors in the past.

The second part of the book is a dazzling academic exercise. Kedourie scrutinizes every scrap of documentary evidence culled from the minutes, précis, and memoranda scattered in the Foreign Office records, laying bare an appalling record of ignorance and wishful thinking within the ranks of Britain’s foreign policy establishment. The folly he describes ranged all the way from the lofty pronouncements of the mandarins in Chatham House—Britain’s counterpart to the American Council of Foreign Relations—to the minutes scribbled by all those lowly officials in Whitehall who felt compelled to put pen to paper on the subject of Anglo-Arab relations. Displaying an enviable command of the sources, Kedourie shows how a succession of junior officials, acting from a mixture of guilt, anti-Semitism, and sheer ineptitude were able to create and perpetuate the legend that Britain had betrayed the cause of its wartime Arab allies. This legend had fateful consequences on the conduct of British policy in the region between the wars. By twisting the meaning of documents entrusted to their care, such openly partisan civil servants as Harold Nicolson and Arnold Toynbee, but most notably George Rendel, head of the Foreign Office’s Eastern Department, conducted a vigorous campaign to convince their hierarchical superiors that British policy, especially with regard to Palestine, was out of step with pledges solemnly undertaken by their predecessors in the course of the war.

The foundation document of these pledges was to be found in the so-called McMahon-Husayn correspondence, letters and supplementary notes exchanged from the fall of 1914 to January 1916 by Sharif Husayn of Mecca and Sir Henry McMahon, newly appointed from India to replace Kitchener as Britain’s High Commissioner in Egypt. The first approach was, in fact, made by Husayn before there was any prospect of an Anglo-Turkish conflict. Fearing deposition by his Ottoman sovereign, the sharif contacted Kitchener through one of his sons in view to securing British arms and support to maintain his precarious autonomy against both the sultan and such rival tribes as the Saudis, who were already being subsidized by the British government in India. Kitchener returned a correct but negative reply. The outbreak of the war and McMahon’s arrival in Cairo, however, revived interest in winning Arab sympathies and in resuming talks with a possible ally. The ensuing correspondance, couched in deliberately vague and ambiguous terms and largely conducted on the British side by such Arabists as Ronald Storrs, the Oriental Secretary in Cairo, held out the hope that much of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab territory might fall under Sharifian rule if the Arabs cast in their lot with the Entente powers and rose against the Turks. No effective action was ever taken by Husayn, who was not even able to capture the neighboring city of Medina. And the French, who had great say in the disposal of such territory, were never consulted.

This promise, in the Arab view, was broken at the end of hostilities. In defiance of President Wilson’s proclamation that the war had been waged to make the world safe for democracy, McMahon’s pledges were set aside in favor of a veiled form of colonialism whereby the Arab portions of the defunct Turkish empire were placed under Anglo-French control with a mandate from the League of Nations. Husayn and his sons paraded their grievances at the peace conference, alleging a breach of faith on the part of their British patrons. Another example of British perfidy, they contended, was the Sykes-Picot Agreement of April 1916 in which the British joined the French in carving up the Middle East into spheres of influence in accordance with their own political and strategic interests.

Arab recriminations against such broken pledges and double-dealing remain alive to the present day. They were repeatedly heard during the Gulf War with all its rhetoric about “lines in the sand” that were said to stand in the way of Arab aspirations for national unity. And they were echoed, for instance, by King Hussein of Jordan, the great-great-grandson of the Sharif of Mecca, when he declared that “the real purpose behind this destructive war… is to destroy Iraq and rearrange the area in a manner far more dangerous to our nation’s present and future than the Sykes-Picot Agreement.”

Kedourie’s earlier writings had already dis- credited this version of events, which rests on the dubious proposition that the Arab world’s predicament should be traced to the intrusion of the West and the duplicity of European imperialists. But The Labyrinth goes one step further by demonstrating that the Arabs’ indignation against perfidious Albion and, even more significantly, Britain’s sense of remorse and misgivings for having somehow let the Arabs down, are flatly contradicted by the weight of the evidence.

On the vexed question of the relation between the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the McMahon-Husayn correspondence, Kedourie presents a comprehensive exploration of the different conditions and changing circumstances under which these two undertakings were reached and later modified or discarded. The clarity of Kedourie’s account allows the reader to draw his own conclusions on the respective merits of the Anglo-Arab dispute. On the controversial question of whether the provisions of Sykes-Picot were ever disclosed to Husayn, for instance, he demonstrates conclusively not only that Sykes-Picot took the McMahon pledges into account but also that the sharif was informed on at least two separate occasions of the extent of French territorial claims and declared himself to be not unduly perturbed by their demands.

The evidence also confirms, however, that Britain’s role as the imbroglio with the Sharifians began to unfold was by no means beyond reproach. Consider Kitchener, who had been ordered to relinquish his post in Egypt to become the Secretary of War in Asquith’s cabinet. In October 1914, on the very day Britain declared war on Turkey, he took the first step in arousing Husayn’s ambitions by dangling the bait of the Caliphate as a way to forestall the impact that the sultan’s imminent proclamation of jihad would have on Britain’s Muslim subjects in India.

There has been considerable debate about the ambiguous wording of Kitchener’s message. Despite their long experience on the spot, both Kitchener and the officials in Cairo seemed to have conceived the Caliphate as designating a sort of spiritual leadership divorced from political power, something along the lines of the papacy in the West. The sharif, driven only by political ambition and a desire to expand the prestige of his Hashemite clan in the rest of the Arab world, was emboldened by the British initiative to put forward his claim to a title that had traditionally designated temporal dominion in the Islamic world. As transmitted by Storrs in the high-flown language he liked to affect on such occasions, the letter had the effect of conjuring up wide-ranging possibilities for the future. “It may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Caliphate of Mecca or Medina and so good may come, by the help of God, out of all the evil which is now occurring.”

Then again, at a critical juncture in the exchange of letters, during September of the following year, Lieutenant Muhammad Sharif al-Faruki’s fanciful revelations about the enormous power wielded by the shadowy Arab secret societies operating behind enemy lines in Syria and Mesopotamia produced an even more drastic shift in British overtures to Husayn. Faruki was a very junior Arab officer from Mosul who had deserted from the Ottoman army in Gallipoli. Nevertheless he appears to have had little trouble in persuading his British interrogator in Cairo—no less a figure than Gilbert Clayton, the director of military intelligence—that the sharif’s claim to represent the Arabs rested on a vast and powerful nationalist movement that stood ready to lend its strength to an Arab revolt. Faruki was quite unknown to Husayn, but these fantasies were accepted at face value by the British and would have far-reaching consequences in shaping their reactions to Sharifian demands. Reservations about the sharif were expressed by the Foreign Office and even more forcefully by the Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain, who dismissed him as “a nonentity.” But Clayton’s gullibility gave new impetus to the view widely held in Cairo that Husayn was a leader of national stature with a large following among Arab officers serving in the Ottoman forces.

It was such faulty intelligence that persuaded the High Commissioner to send off his letter of October 24, containing the most generous terms that the British had ever been willing to concede to the Sharifian side. This was the famous and controversial letter in which Storrs, inspired perhaps by a passage he had come across in Gibbon, laid down the now-familiar chain of “Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hama” as marking the boundaries of some future Arab state. In chapter 58 of Decline and Fall, Gibbon had referred to this particular conjunction of place names as defining the limits of the area left in Muslim hands after the First Crusade had swept through most of Syria and Lebanon to establish the Latin kingdoms of the Levant. McMahon went to great lengths, however, to exclude any areas where the French might have prior claims, which at that time meant both Syria and Palestine. It is clear from the evidence collected by Kedourie that Husayn’s real concern was to be recognized as “King of the Arabs,” or better still as caliph, and territorial claims only occurred to him later when his higher ambitions seemed likely to be frustrated.

The men on the spot in Cairo—Ronald Storrs, the fastidious man of letters whose command of Arabic left much to be desired; Reginald Wingate, the governor-general of the Sudan and Sirdar (“commander-in-chief”) of the Egyptian army—who succeeded McMahon as British High Commissioner before the end of the war—and Gilbert Clayton, the blundering spymaster who failed to see that Arab nationalism was, in fact, a nationalism without nationalists; as well as that colorful band of Arabists brought together by the Oxford archaeologist David Hogarth in the Arab Bureau— do not emerge unscathed from Kedourie’s brisk and lively account. He is careful to emphasize, however, that the McMahon-Husayn correspondence never reached the point of becoming a binding document. It was conceived by both sides as the basis for future negotiations to be resumed during the postwar settlement. Hastily and carelessly drafted under considerable stress, they were designed to devise a formula that would be mutually acceptable to both parties, but were never meant to constitute a treaty in any legal sense. The question of Palestine was never contemplated nor even mentioned. The correspondence can only be interpreted as a provisional wartime agreement between two unequal partners laying down declarations of intent regarding future policy that would inevitably be contingent on changing circumstances and the interests of other possible claimants to the Ottoman legacy, whether Greeks or Zionists, Kurds or Armenians. Nor was McMahon in any position to sign a formal alliance with the Sharifians along the lines of the treaty relations that the British government in India had established with Ibn Saud of Najd—who in 1924 was to overthrow the Sharifs of Mecca—the Emir of Kuwait, and the other rulers of the Gulf emirates.

Perhaps the most revealing commentary on how the weaker party remained capable of exploiting its weakness in order to extract concessions from the stronger party even under such adverse conditions can be illustrated by the statement made by the twenty-one-year-old Faruki, soon to become Husayn’s official representative in Cairo, following his debriefing on October 11, 1915. As reported by Clayton, Faruki declared: “Our scheme embraces all the Arab countries including Syria and Mesopotamia, but if we cannot have it all, we want as much as we can get.” The French, who played no part in these negotiations, were more realistic than their British counterparts in their dealings with the Arabs. They rejected all of Husayn’s claims as outrageous and dismissed the pan-Arab movement conjured up by Faruki as a sham and a delusion fabricated by the British officials in Cairo as part of a conspiracy “to biff the French out of all hope of Syria,” as T. E. Lawrence, a member of the Arab Bureau, was to put it.

McMahon emerges as a confused and ineffective Indian civil servant who found himself completely out of his depth when confronted by the wiles and stratagems of Husayn and his sons. Knowing neither French nor Arabic, he felt increasingly helpless. He desperately cast about for a way to reconcile all the conflicting pledges made in the name of His Majesty’s Government by the Indian Government—which was pursuing its own traditional interests in Iraq, the Persian Gulf, and most of Arabia —the Colonial and Foreign Offices, often acting at cross purposes, and a formidable but secretive Secretary of War who continued to exert enormous influence on Arab affairs through his personal agent, Mark Sykes. In fact, among all the protagonists of this story, it was Sykes who made the largest single contribution to shaping the destiny of the modern Middle East.

Handpicked by Kitchener to serve as his understudy in Egypt, McMahon relied entirely on Storrs to help him find the elusive Ariadne who would rescue him from the labyrinth. At one point, in April 1916, overwhelmed by the contradictory advice on the Arab question he was receiving from so many different quarters, he confided in a private letter to the Foreign Secretary, “I feel at times somewhat bewildered at the numerous agencies who have a hand in it.” In India, McMahon is chiefly remembered for having drawn the McMahon line in 1913 to keep the peace between India and China. The border was never recognized by China, either before or after Mao, and produced a war between India and China in 1962. Kedourie’s account of McMahon’s efforts to grapple with the Arab problem shows that he was capable of creating an even greater muddle in the Middle East. But it is not McMahon’s shortcomings, but the self-accusing sophistries of those who championed his efforts which are the real target of this devastating book.