Born into a wealthy industrialist’s family in 1864 in England, Gertrude Bell’s decisions and actions 100 years ago in the Middle East shape the region to this day, including the turmoil in Iraq and Syria and their impacts in Lebanon, Iran, Jordan and the United States.
When he sat down this month with the prime minister of Iraq had Jared Kushner ever heard of Gertrude Bell (although incidental to and coincidental with this writing a new biopic about her just opened)?
It is reasonably certain, given that he did not know health care policy is complicated, that when Mr.Kushner’s father-in-law met this month with King Abdullah II of Jordan he had no idea the role Gertrude Bell played in the lives of the king’s family; no idea that history and Islamic/Arab tradition deem the king a person in line of descent from Muhammad. The family in question, with its 1,500-year history, is the Hashemite.
The notion that Mr. Kushner, with limited experience or knowledge beyond the seamy world of New York and New Jersey real estate, is up to dealing with the hatreds, divisions, complexities, and histories within histories within webs of so many more histories that are the story of Arabia and the wider spread of Islam in the region – the notion he might be up to that is ludicrous. Why is it ludicrous? Because no one is up to it. It’s been a mess since Adam and Eve purportedly left the Garden of Eden that, had it existed, would have been somewhere in present day Iraq.
Mr. Kushner might spend the next ten years studying the intricacies of all of this yet never qualify as an intermediary between Arabs and their nations. Who sends the unknowing to sort out nearly 1,500 years of feuds, tribal disputes, blood letting, intra-religion wars and a never-ending, never-settled, irreconcilable battle over descent?
The British, in the interest of their now long gone empire, constructed the modern Mideast 100 years ago. They had to walk away from it when WWII left them a second-tier power with a crumbling empire.
The United States is the pickle in a barrel the British brined in the Middle East but emptied long before we got there. A century ago they intervened in Arabia and re-ordered it to create modern nation states to suit their purposes.
The purposes were to control the eastern Mediterranean basin to safeguard the Suez Canal connection to the British Raj in India, the jewel in the crown of their long since dismantled empire and to control emerging oil resources and wealth of the region. A nation with a Navy converting from coal to oil needed a lot of oil. “Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves” was, in the first half of the 20th Century, a proposition that needed vast amounts of oil.
Suffice it to say that by 1915 the Hashemite were one of the two foremost powers in the Arab world. The other then and now is the House of Saud, an insular and peninsular extended family of emirs, sheiks, sharifs and princes, who controlled most of the barren Arabian peninsula in which no one was greatly interested before discovery of its vast oil reserves in the mid-1930s. It was a late discovery compared with discovery of Iraq’s oil about 1925 or Iran’s in the first decade of the 20th Century.
Aramco, the oil company now wholly owned by the Saudis, began as the Arab American oil company, hence the name. In Iraq various foreign interests including the United States exploited the oil, including the company that evolved into BP, formerly British Petroleum, which traces its start before 1910 to Persia (now Iran).
As a dependency of the Ottoman Turks, Hashemite power controlled a strip of land on the western edge of the Saudi peninsula known as the Hejaz that contain the two holiest cities in Islam, Medina and Mecca, where Mohammad was born and founded Islam. In 1915, the most important Hashemite was Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, emir and Sharif of Mecca (in 1924 the Saudi family seized Mecca and the Hejaz and have held it since, giving Saudi Arabia control of Islam’s holiest places).
An emir is like a prince, a secular figure. Sharif is a term of honor drawn from complexities of claims of branches of the family descended from Muhammad. Complex differences over who has legitimate claim to Islamic leadership in descent from the Prophet are the center of almost 14 centuries of Sunni and Shiite division. Who knew right? I didn’t. You didn’t. Apparently neither did George W. Bush. Does President Trump? does his son-in-law envoy?
In Islamic history and tradition there is not a fine line between religion and government. Religion shaped government. Creation of seemingly modern nation states after WWI by Britain and France, carved out of Arabian territories of the former Ottoman Empire, is an artifice that explains a lot about the present troubles in those countries today.
That has been hard for Americans to understand as we immersed and enmeshed ourselves in the shifting sands and political mirages of the Mideast. We are confused because the nation states the British and the French created in the Mideast after World War I look like conventional modern nations but they are not — not really.
They look to be like modern nations as we understand them, in which there is a separation of government from religion — as there is in western democracies — but the appearance is deceiving. Iran’s Revolutionary Republic in which the religious leader trumps the elected secular leader is much more alike to the historic Islamic model.
First the British and now we have sought to impose democracy in places that have no tradition of and little desire for it. They are places that understand faction and it is true that faction is at the center of democracy. But in Western democracies faction is a matter of differences of opinion organized in political parties. In the Mideast faction is about clans and tribes, sects and shared experience of ancient disagreements, quarrels and feuds bound up in religion and centuries of dispute about it.
Did George W. Bush, Richard Cheney Donald Rumsfeld or even Colin Powell, a reasonably enlightened man, or Paul Bremer, who the U.S. anointed American emir of Iraq — did they knew this history, know of Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds when they took the ill-fated decision to invade and conquer Iraq? No doubt desk officers at the State Department did. But who listens to them in recent Republican administrations?
Gertrude Bell knew all that when she stitched together a nation the British named Iraq.
Did they know any of this when our government made the decision to disband Iraq’s army, effectively intervening in the unending Sunni/Shiite feud? It is that decision that spawned Al Qaeda in Iraq and then ISIS/DAESH. Disgruntled former Iraq Army officers left without careers, without dignity, without a country, propelled these twinned movements.
Returning to the Hashemite. In 1915 Sharif Hussein ibn Ali saw the likelihood the Ottoman Empire, allied with Germany and Austria, would be destroyed by the war and that its ailing empire would shatter. As an adage of ours says, he saw his opportunity and he took it. He led an Arab revolt in the core Ottoman lands in Arabia, allying with the British.
He had two sons, Abdullah and Faisal. Each became a military and political leader in the Arab revolt. If you are a fan of the film “Lawrence of Arabia” you recognize the name Faisal. The great English actor Alex Guinness portrays Prince Faisal in the film. T.E. Lawrence, whose role in that fight the film is about, was one of several Englishmen often called Arabists. They had a love of the desert and fascination with Arabs, their language, customs, traditions and religion.
These English were all men but for one woman, Gertrude Bell.
The Hashemite began their rebellion in 1915. In 1916 Mark Sykes a British diplomat and Francois George-Picot from the Quai D’Orsay, the French foreign office, made an agreement to divide the Ottoman Empire, assuming defeat for the Turks allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The agreement apportioned certain parts of the Ottoman Empire to Russia, with whom the British and French were allied, reserving the best parts for Britain and France.
As the war continued and after it ended late in 1918 much of the Sykes-Picot pact would be subsumed in later agreements and consumed by events on the ground. But the essential, fundamental point it set in motion stuck – that England and France would decide the fate and future of Arabia and its dependent provinces and peoples.
The two European powers, with Italy and Spain, already had colonized North Africa — today’s Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt; and held colonies in largely Muslim parts of eastern and western Africa like Mali and the Sudan. Add to that British control of huge Muslim populations in what are now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and Dutch control of the East Indies, today’s Indonesia, the nation with the largest Islamic population in the world, and contemporary Muslim resentment of the west should not be the surprise it is to us.
By the terms of Sykes-Picot, northern parts of Ottoman territories in the Mideast were to come under French control and southern areas under British. Then came the League of Nations. England and France joined. The U. S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty that created the League, leaving the U.S. in the cold as the British and French declared League mandates to control the Mideast — mandate being a 20th Century euphemism for colony.
Sykes-Picot and subsequent events, agreements, diplomacy, interventions and myriad sorts of confusions that then and now characterize the Middle East resulted in the following by 1921:
Prince Faisal became king of a newly constituted nation called Syria but was deposed by the French, who regarded the place as theirs and had the League mandate for it including Lebanon.
Faisal’s brother Abdullah, with British support, became king of another nation carved out of the Ottoman provinces. They called it Trans-Jordan, because it straddled both sides of the Jordan River, including the area today known as the West Bank. Perhaps you remember Abdullah’s son, the late King Hussein — the very same who lost the West Bank to Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967 but later made peace with Israel. With the aide of another Englishman, Lt. Gen. John Baggot Glubb, King Abdullah I established the Arab Legion, which today is the Jordanian Royal Army. His grandson, King Hussein’s son, is King Abdullah II who lately visited our president.
The third important thing that happened is that Britain got a League mandate to rule Palestine, yet another piece of the expansive former Ottoman territories, one that contained history’s most disputed city – Jerusalem.
Palestine also contained a growing enclave of Jewish settlement brought to Palestine in the preceding 25 years by the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish nation where the Bible says one had last existed almost 2,000 years before, until extinguished and sent into restless exile by the Roman Empire.
All of this was further complicated when in 1917 then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour signed a letter pledging “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
In 1947 the British gave up the Palestine mandate as the new United Nations voted narrowly to divide the territory between Jews and Arabs. We know the rest of that never-ending tale.
Lastly, but most importantly since 2002 for the United States, in 1920 during the course of all this the British took the three eastern-most usable and inhabited Ottoman provinces, named from north to south for the major cities in each, Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, put them together, drew a line around them and named the place within the boundary Iraq.
They did this knowing the febrile mix of peoples and their seething history – Kurds, Arab Sunnis, Arab Shiites, Jews, Christians, Assyrians, Druz and others — within the artificial boundary drawn by? By none other than Gertrude Bell.
Peeling the Onion 