Arabs (37 page)

In mid-October 1924, the Ikhwan captured the holy city of Mecca. They met with no resistance and refrained from all violence toward the townspeople. Ibn Saud sent messengers to sound out Britain’s reaction to the conquest of Taif and Mecca. He was reassured of Britain’s neutrality in the conflict. The Saudi ruler then proceeded to complete his conquest of the Hijaz. He laid siege to the port of Jidda and the holy city of Medina in January 1925. The Hashemites held out for nearly a full year, but on December 22, 1925, King Ali surrendered his kingdom to Ibn Saud and followed his father into exile.

Having conquered the Hijaz, Ibn Saud was proclaimed “sultan of Najd and king of the Hijaz.” The vast extent of territory under his control placed Ibn Saud in a different category from the other Gulf rulers of the Trucial States. Britain recognized the change in his status and concluded a new treaty with King Abdul Aziz in 1927 that recognized his full independence and sovereignty, without any of the restrictions on external relations accepted by the Trucial States. Ibn Saud continued to extend the territory under his rule, and renamed his kingdom Saudi Arabia in 1932.

Not only had Ibn Saud succeeded in establishing his kingship over most of the Arabian Peninsula, but he had managed to preserve his independence from all forms of British imperial rule. In this he was assisted by a critical British miscalculation: they did not believe that there was any oil in Saudi Arabia.

T
he exiled King Husayn of the Hijaz was within his rights to feel betrayed by the British. Not only had Britain failed to fulfill Sir Henry McMahon’s written commitments to the Hashemites, but the British had stood by and watched as the French drove his son King Faysal from Syria in 1920, and the Saudis drove his eldest son King Ali from the Hijaz in 1925.

The British, for their part, were not entirely satisfied they had discharged their commitments to their wartime ally, and they looked for a way to redeem their promises in part, if not in full. As the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, explained to the House of Commons in June 1921, “We are leaning strongly to what I may call the Sherifian Solution both in Mesopotamia to which the Emir Feisal [Amir Faysal] is now proceeding, and in Trans-Jordania, where the Emir Abdullah is now in charge.”
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Churchill hoped that by putting Husayn’s sons on British mandate thrones he would go some way toward redeeming Britain’s broken promises to the Hashemites while providing Britain with loyal and dependent rulers in their Arab possessions.

 

Of all the British imperial possessions in the Middle East, Transjordan would prove the easiest to rule. However, the new state of Transjordan got off to a difficult start. With a land mass the size of Indiana or Hungary, Transjordan had a population of only 350,000, divided between the townspeople and villagers living in the high plateau overlooking the Jordan Valley and the nomadic tribesmen who made their home between the desert and the steppe. Its subsistence economy was based on agricultural and pastoral products that provided a modest tax base for a very small state. The politics of Transjordan were also fairly basic. The country was divided into distinct regions, each with its own local leadership whose view of politics was very local. A small British subsidy—£150,000 per annum—went a long way in such a place.

The British did not initially conceive of Transjordan as a separate state in its own right. The territory initially was awarded to Great Britain as part of the Palestine mandate. The decision to sever Transjordan from Palestine, formalized in 1923, was driven by two considerations: Britain’s wish to confine the Balfour Declaration’s promise of a Jewish national home to the lands
west
of the Jordan River; and Britain’s wish to confine Amir Abdullah’s ambitions to territory under British control.

Amir Abdullah first entered Transjordan uninvited, in November 1920. He was surrounded by a group of Arab nationalists, political refugees from his brother
Faysal’s defunct Arab Kingdom in Damascus. Abdullah announced he would lead Arab volunteers to liberate Syria from French rule and to restore his brother Faysal to his rightful throne in Damascus (Abdullah himself aspired to the throne of Iraq). The last thing the British government needed was for Transjordan to become a launching pad for hostilities against the neighboring French mandate of Syria. British officials scrambled to deal with the situation before things got out of hand.

Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence invited Amir Abdullah to a meeting in Jerusalem in March 1921, at which point they updated him on Britain’s plans for its empire in the Middle East. Faysal would never return to Damascus, which was securely in French hands; instead, he was to be king of Iraq. The best they could offer Abdullah was to place him at the head of the new state of Transjordan. Landlocked Transjordan (the territory did not yet include the Red Sea port of Aqaba) fell well short of Abdullah’s ambitions, but Churchill suggested that if Abdullah kept the peace in Transjordan and established good relations with the French, they might one day invite him to rule over Damascus for them.
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It was a long shot, but Abdullah agreed to these proposals, and the Sharifian Solution became British imperial reality in Transjordan.

When Amir Abdullah established his first government in Transjordan in 1921, he drew heavily on the Arab nationalists who had served with his brother Faysal in Damascus. The British and the people of Transjordan had a common dislike of Abdullah’s entourage. The British saw them as firebrands and troublemakers whose attacks against the French in Syria were a constant irritant. For the Transjordanians, the Arab nationalists, who came to form a new party called the Istiqlal
,
or “Independence,” represented a foreign elite who dominated the government and bureaucracy to the exclusion of the indigenous people of the land.

One of the most outspoken opponents of the Istiqlalis in Transjordan was a local judge named Awda al-Qusus (1877–1943). Qusus was a Christian from the southern town of Karak who had served in the Ottoman court system before the First World War. Fluent in Turkish, with a spattering of English learned from Methodist missionaries, al-Qusus had traveled widely throughout the Ottoman Empire and had worked with high government officials. He firmly believed that Amir Abdullah should form his government from Transjordanians like himself, who had a real interest in the welfare of their new country. His greatest objection to the Istiqlalis was that they were only concerned with liberating Damascus. The first article of their party’s constitution, Al-Qusus wryly remarked, was “to sacrifice Transjordan and its people on the road to Syria’s betterment.”
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Certainly his own persecution at the hands of the Istiqlalis would only confirm this view.

Al-Qusus openly criticized the Istiqlalis in articles he wrote for the local newspaper. He accused government ministers of corruption and the misappropriation of
treasury funds for their own projects, without Abdullah’s knowledge. The native Transjordanians responded to the judge’s criticisms by refusing to pay taxes to an “alien” government that was seen to be squandering their country’s limited funds. In June 1921 the villagers of northern Transjordan declared a tax strike that quickly escalated into a serious rebellion. The British had to resort to air strikes by Royal Air Force planes to quell the uprising.

The troubles between Amir Abdullah’s government and the natives of Transjordan only worsened after the 1921 tax revolt. Al-Qusus met regularly with a group of professional townsmen to discuss the cronyism and corruption they deplored in the amir’s government. These Transjordanian dissidents compared notes on government maladministration and openly discussed the need for reform. When Amir Abdullah faced a major tribal uprising in the summer of 1923, the Istiqlalis accused al-Qusus and the dissident townsmen of provoking the revolt, and they urged Abdullah to crack down on their domestic opponents. That very night, September 6, 1923, the police pounded on Justice Awda al-Qusus’s door and took him away.

Al-Qusus would not return home for seven months. Stripped of his official rank by order of the amir, he was exiled to the neighboring Kingdom of the Hijaz (which was still under Hashemite rule). He was joined by four other natives of Transjordan: an army officer, a Circassian, a Muslim cleric, and a rural notable who would later be celebrated as the national poet of Jordan, Mustafa Wahbi al-Tall. The five were accused of creating a “secret society” that sought to overturn the amir’s government and replace it with natives of Transjordan. They were falsely accused of being in league with the head of the Adwan tribe and encouraging the tribal revolt to facilitate their coup. The charge was high treason, and the severity of the charge was reflected in the harshness of the treatment meted out to al-Qusus and his fellows.

As they arrived at the railway station in Amman to take the train into exile, the five were in a defiant mood. Mustafa Wahbi, the poet, was singing nationalist songs and stirring the men’s defiance. “Before God and history, Awda!” he shouted. The men had no sense of the ordeal that lay before them. When they arrived in Maan, now a city in Jordan but then a town on the frontier of the Hijaz, they were taken to a dank and fetid cell in the basement of the old castle. Al-Qusus grabbed his guard and screamed: “Have you no fear of God? A place like this is not suitable for animals, let alone for people.”

The guards and their commanders, who knew their prisoners were respectable men, were embarrassed. Everything about their culture and society dictated that they should show hospitality to men entrusted to their care. Yet they were military men who had to obey orders. Their behavior toward their prisoners alternated radically between great kindness—finding clean bedding, providing tea and company—and great cruelty, torturing the detainees to secure their signed confessions to the
charges leveled against them by the government. The officials who ordered the torture and dictated the confessions were of course men from Amir Abdullah’s foreign retinue. Al-Qusus and his companions were then formally indicted in absentia of “plotting against the government of His Highness the Amir with intent to overthrow the government by armed insurrection.”
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They were then sent to prison in the Hijaz, first in Aqaba and then in Jidda.

The exiles were allowed to return to their homeland as part of a general amnesty issued on the occasion of King Husayn’s assumption of the caliphate in March 1924. The new Turkish president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had just abolished the institution of the caliphate as a final measure to eradicate the influence of the Ottoman sultanate, and King Husayn, now in exile from the Hijaz, was quick to seize the honor for the Hashemite family. As was customary on high state occasions, prisoners were released as part of the celebrations.

Their prison ordeal now at an end, the five men were given first-class berths on a steamship from Jidda to the Egyptian port of Suez, whence they made their way to Transjordan. Al-Qusus sent a telegram of thanks to King Husayn and congratulated him on his (ultimately unsuccessful) assumption of the caliphate. He received a quick reply from the exiled monarch, wishing al-Qusus a safe and speedy return to his homeland, “which is in need of people like you with patriotism and friendship towards the fatherland and true adherence to the great Hashemite household.” Was the old king being ironic, or was he admonishing the political prisoners to mend their ways and prove more loyal in future? The truth of the matter was that al-Qusus had never shown disloyalty to Amir Abdullah; he had only objected to the Istiqlalis the amir put into positions of authority over native Transjordanians.

Though he did not know it, the British colonial authorities fully shared Awda al-Qusus’s concerns. The British resident in Amman, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Cox, invited al-Qusus to visit him shortly after his return from exile in the Hijaz. He asked the judge to explain the reasons for his imprisonment, and to share his views on Amir Abdullah’s government. Cox took careful notes on their discussion, thanked al-Qusus, and saw him out.

In August 1924, Cox delivered an ultimatum from the acting high commissioner in Palestine, Sir Gilbert Clayton, to Amir Abdullah. In his letter, Clayton warned Abdullah that the British government viewed his administration “with grave displeasure” for its “financial irregularities and unchecked extravagance” and for allowing Transjordan to become a focus of disorder to neighboring Syria. Abdullah was asked to commit in writing to six conditions to reform his administration, chief among them the expulsion of leading Istiqlalis within five days’ time.
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Abdullah dared not refuse. The British had sent 400 cavalrymen to Amman and 300 troops to the northern town of Irbid to back up their ultimatum. Fearing the British would depose him as quickly as they had installed him, Amir Abdullah signed the ultimatum.

After this confrontation Amir Abdullah expelled the Istiqlali “undesirables,” reformed the finances of his government, and drew natives of Transjordan into his administration. Awda al-Qusus returned to service in the Jordanian judiciary, rising to the office of attorney general in 1931. Once he had thrown in his lot with the elites of Transjordan, Amir Abdullah enjoyed the support and loyalty of his people. Transjordan went on to be a model colony of peace and stability, at very little cost to the British taxpayer until its independence in 1946.