The reputation of TE Lawrence—"Lawrence of Arabia"—is shrouded in several layers of myth-making, much of it of his own devising. In his new book, "Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East" (Atlantic Books, £25), the American writer Scott Anderson offers a reappraisal of Lawrence's legacy, paying particular attention to his subject's relationship with three men: the German spy Curt Prüfer, the American oilman William Yale and the Zionist Aaron Aaronsohn.
The book begins with Lawrence refusing a knighthood from George V in October 1918. I met Anderson when he visited London last week. I began by asking him why he decided to start with that scene in Buckingham Palace.
SA: I thought it was a very intriguing moment—as a boy he was very caught up wit the chivalric code and heraldry and so on. So the idea of knighthood was something he’d always aspired to. What happened? This seemed like the beginning of the Lawrence mystery and so I decided to put it at the front.
JD: And the mystery endures doesn’t it? You present Lawrence as a kind of accidental hero. And related to that is the way the Allies (the British and the French) carved up the Middle East after the First World War almost in a fit of inattention.
That’s right. Lawrence is such a complicated figure. I find The Seven Pillars of Wisdom such a baffling book. There are moments of self-effacement and self-abasement. For example, there’s a moment where he shoots his own camel in the head. That’s the kind of detail that most people trying to style themselves as a hero would have left out! But there are also moments of breathtaking arrogance. In one passage early on, when he meets Faisal Ibn Hussein (later Faisal I of Iraq), he says he saw in him someone he could bend to his [Lawrence’s] vision for the Arab Revolt. And you think: “You’re 28 years old, you’ve been in Arabia for six days and suddenly this is your revolution!” So he’s a very complicated guy.
Is he representative of the influential “Arabist” strain that has long shaped British foreign policy in the Middle East?
I think he embodies two things. One is this idea of the junior officer or diplomat who goes off into the hinterland and meets kings and has this outsize influence on events. The other aspect is this sense of dual allegiance. He was effectively passing state secrets on to Faisal and the Arabs. From a technical standpoint, he was committing treason. And yet it’s clear that Lawrence’s superiors, certainly in the military, knew he was passing information to the Arabs. And I think there’s something very peculiarly British about the way they protected him—they knew what he was doing. There was this collective disgust, among a lot of military officers, knowing the promises that had been made to the Arabs, only then to see the British government turning round and making similar promises to the French. Even if British military men didn’t have much respect for the Arabs—and a lot of them certainly didn’t have much respect for their fighting ability—they still felt that a gentleman’s word was his bond. So there was this collective disgust at double-dealing by their government. There’s something peculiarly British about that.
Of the three figures you discuss alongside Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, a Romanian émigré who emigrated to Palestine with his parents in the late 19th century, is the most vividly evoked.
He’s the most fascinating figure. He’s also a victim of history: of all the Zionists, he was the one who put himself at the greatest personal risk. He was a real hothead and was pushed to the side by the more silver-tongued Zionist leaders, who realised that if they were going to move towards a Jewish state they were going to have to be more subtle. In Chaim Weizmann’s biography, there are only two mentions of Aaronsohn. He was pretty much airbrushed out of [Zionist] history.
How would characterise Lawrence's attitude towards Zionism?
Lawrence was, above all else, a master tactician. This is something that a lot of people don’t get right. You can find him saying a wide variety of different things to different people. When he first got an inkling that the Balfour Declaration was coming, he was aghast. He saw a disaster in the making. Famously, he said to William Yale that the only way that Jewish primacy in Palestine could be brought about was through force of arms. But he was also a realist. Once the Balfour Declaration had been made, he knew that the thing was a fait accompli—there was no way the government could roll that back. That led to the agreement between Faisal and Weizmann on the eve of the Paris Peace Conference, when, in return for Faisal recognising Jewish primacy in Palestine, the Zionists agreed to support his claim to the throne of Syria.
Lawrence’s misgivings about the Balfour Declaration were quite widely shared in the Foreign Office weren’t they?
Yes, they were. I still find the genesis of the Balfour Declaration somewhat mysterious. Glimmers of it were first seen in early 1916. People like Mark Sykes and a handful of other people in the Foreign Office saw the Balfour Declaration as a way to win over international Jewry, especially American Jews, who they wanted to push the Wilson government to enter the war. The British came to think that it would play to their long-term interests in the Middle East to have a Jewish state there. It was also a way to marginalise the French!
There’s an obvious distinction to be drawn between Lawrence’s attitude towards the Arabs in Palestine and Aaronsohn’s.
Absolutely. Aaronsohn was what we would think of today as a hard-right Zionist. One big debate within Zionism at the time was between the socialist Zionists, who felt that all labour should be done by Jews and another camp, to which Aaronsohn belonged, which had this kind of plantation idea. But both visions very much marginalised the local Arab culture. For instance, if the Jews were going to do all the Labour, what was going to happen to the Palestinians? They wouldn’t have jobs. Aaronsohn didn’t really care much what happened to the Palestinians, whether they left or stayed.
Is it your view that the current predicament of the Middle East is the consequence of the events you describe in the book?
What we’re seeing now, all across the Middle East, is the final collapse, almost a hundred years later, of the peace that was imposed in 1920. What I discovered from spending time in the Middle East is that whenever I’d have conversation with someone, whatever their religious or political affiliation, they’d always trace the roots of today back to that period. One of the problems in the Middle East has been this culture of complaint, but that’s coming to an end. In Iraq, they used to complain about the artificial composition of the state—well, that composition has gone now. You see this again and again across the region, a reversion back to the lines that existed in the Ottoman era.
Anderson's is not the only book about this period of Middle Eastern history to appear this spring. Another is "Faisal I of Iraq" (Yale University Press, £30) by Ali Allawi, who was appointed Minister of Defence in Iraq's first postwar civilian administration in 2004. Allawi offers a rather less generous account of Lawrence's role in the Arab Revolt that broke out in 1916, ended in 1918 with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and led to the establishment, in 1920, of an Arab government in Syria led by Faisal. When I spoke to Allawi in London a few days ago, I asked him about the mythology of "Lawrence of Arabia".
AA: He never lied, consciously. He artfully neglected, in some cases, to write about or mention important facts. Not only in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but also in the dispatches he sent to the Arab bureau. One of the problems with Lawrence is the way he presented his role and functions. It’s also partly to do with the way history has been written. A lot of the history of the period is based on archival material stored here [in the UK]. It became a history defined by the way people manipulated documents to fashion a story. There was no real counter-narrative until very recently. The sources with which to produce a credible counter-narrative weren’t there.
This changed in the last 15 years, firstly with the opening up of the Ottoman archives, and secondly by a number of memoirs of people who served in the Arab Revolt which, for some reason, remained unpublished for 80 years or so. These two changes made a very powerful counter-narrative possible. Not necessarily one which debunked Lawrence’s role. However you cut it, he did play a significant and in some cases critical role. But the whole thing didn’t revolve around him. There were other actors, some of them far more significant. There key events in Lawrence’s narrative, for example the battle of Tafila or what happened during and just after the capture of Damascus, that are at odds with other people’s descriptions, which cast serious doubt on his story. These other versions of the story show Lawrence as a mobilising figure, a cheerleader, to some extent an intelligence operative passing information and a conduit through which money, information, weapons and guidance were received. There was another Lawrence—in the Paris Peace Conference. There’s has been relatively little focus on his role in that. Then Lawrence pops up again as the main organiser of the Cairo Conference in 1921, having been outside of Middle Eastern events for more than a year. He’s brought back and given organisational responsibilities. But he didn’t make decisions. These were made in Whitehall, by Curzon and, to a lesser extent and at a later stage, by Churchill. Lawrence was a contributing factor. It is sometimes said that Lawrence was a “kingmaker”. He wasn’t. The whole issue of the kingdom of Iraq came up because of the rebellion of 1920. It wasn’t because that all of a sudden they had to find a job for a king (an ex-king).
Lawrence played in some cases an irresponsible role in his attempt to create some common ground between the Zionist movement, and Chaim Weizmann in particular, and Faisal. In some cases, I think his role was mischievous. He could fabricate documents and signatures at will. Many of the important decisions or documents to which Faisal’s name was appended were drafted by him, poorly translated—his Arabic was not as good as he claimed; he could speak well but his writing was childlike and inaccurate. Nevertheless, he was a significant figure.
JD: So much for Lawrence. As for Faisal, is this book an attempt to rehabilitate him?
Not so much. I don’t think he was denigrated to the extent that one might have expected. It is true that the Hashemites as a whole were tarred with the brush of complicity, first with the imperial powers and then with the formation of the state of Israel. Faisal managed to escape all that—I think for two reasons. One, he was never seen to be part of that relationship. Two, because he died in 1933, that somehow saved him being implicated in these various turns that affected the Arab world. So I wouldn’t say it’s rehabilitation. I’d say it’s more a recovery of his reputation. When he died, his reputation was at its peak. He was seen to be the champion of the Arab idea among the statesmen of the period. When he died, there was a massive outpouring of grief, not only in Iraq but throughout the Arab world.
By the end of his life, his thinking had taken a pan-Arabist turn hadn’t it?
I think he was actually a pan-Arab of sorts before he knew it—probably from the Arab Revolt on—in the sense that he recognised the principle upon which the Ottoman Empire, and Muslim political structures more generally, was coming to an end and with it the imperial system, modified through a kind of Sharia connection, under which Muslim peoples had lived for a thousand years. Its replacement had to be some of political structure that would fit into the world system, the system of nation states. Given the differences in the Middle East, the ethno-sectarian ones in particular, there was very little alternative except to espouse a mild form of Arab nationalism, a kind of Arab consciousness through which these nation states could relate to each other and form some kind of confederal system. That was the evolution of his thinking after he came to accept that the Ottoman Empire was going to be dismembered.
Would it be fair to say that today the dispensation in the Middle East that emerged from the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire is itself coming to an end?
I think so. The state system which evolved after World War One, and imposed on diversities a kind of rigid political structure which then lent itself either to fragmentation or a kind of uni-dimensional dictatorship, is coming to an end. But is the nation state system itself going to collapse? I don’t think so, because it seems to be extremely resilient and is what the international order is based upon. So I don’t see states being dismembered and reassembled in the way that, for example, Yugoslavia was broken up and its various reassembled as nation states. And I don’t wish for that, because there’d have to be a massive dislocation of peoples, sects and so in order to create the kind of homogeneity that is required by relatively stable nation states. So what I see is that the [post-World War One] system is coming to an end but its replacement is yet to announce itself.
But aren’t the old ethno-sectarian divisions reasserting themselves in Iraq today? Divisions of which, as you show in the book, Faisal himself was well aware.
There are two main threats today to the integrity of Iraq: one is the delayed fuse on the longstanding demand for a Kurdish state that was defused after World War One. Now because they have, as it were, a quasi-state, the promise of a potential state is real. The other force that is tearing the country apart is sectarianism. Sectarianism in the past was seen mainly as a kind of jockeying for power and influence. Now it is a kind of targeting the other. So the nature of the sectarian conflict has changed, exacerbated, of course, by regional power struggles and the civil war in Syria. For probably the first time in the modern history of Iraq, there are now claims that there should be a sectarian redefinition of the nature of the state. This only came about once before in the Middle East, during the early phases of the Lebanese civil war. Apart from that, the idea of reconfiguring the nation state along sectarian lines is a very recent idea.
Does Faisal have anything to teach modern Iraqis about that sectarian temptation?
Of course. He was clear that if you don’t recognise the temptation and understand it, it can jump and bite you. The only way to prevent that was by creating a state that was not aggressively secular, but which transcended the various divisions in the country and therefore acted as a kind of loyalty magnet that didn’t displace earlier loyalties but created another layer. That was his solution. Of course, that meant building up the central state. It meant building up institutions, including the military. And that required far-sighted and committed leadership.
To what extent was the model that Faisal created either sustained or distorted by the Baathist dictatorship?
The way that the Ba’athists distorted it was by imposing very fiercely and violently a peculiar definition of Arab nationalism and the role of the state. The Ba’ath party in the 1970s was on a kind of modernisation kick. It wasn’t into the sectarian distribution of central power. It just happened that there were more people from sect rather than another [in positions of power], and because of the emphasis on Arab nationalism, the Kurds naturally felt marginalised. The Ba’ath underwent a major shift after Saddam Hussein came to power. His aim was to protect his party’s rule from the effects of the Iranian revolution. Once the state fell into his hands, the exigencies of war [with Iran] meant that the state was much more narrowly focused on him, then on his relatives and his clan and then, by inference as it were, on the broader Arab Sunni community. That created a very powerful sense of alienation on the part of the Shia from the kind of state that Saddam had created in Iraq.
One of the pivotal moments in the story you tell in the book was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government declared itself in favour of the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In the book, you say that Faisal had a “benign” view of the Zionist project to begin with. Why was he relatively sanguine about Zionism?
He thought of the Jews as Arabs. The fact that they were Jews was a religious matter. Arabic was their language, not Hebrew. To him, the idea of Jews emigrating from Russia and the Pale of Settlement to the Middle East was not threatening. It was a project that should be welcomed—he thought it was part of the history of the area that people were accommodating to refugees. And if refugees brought with them skills, capital and international connections, so much the better. That was the way in which Weizmann presented the project. The benign perspective on Zionism was based on the assumption that it would be a limited migration of persecuted people, mainly from eastern Europe, who would bring with them skills, resources and connections. They would be welcomed within the framework of a confederal Arab state. Weizmann said that the Jews would never expect a Jewish state. The idea of a state being established for and by Jews in Palestine was not on the cards on that stage.
There was no contradiction between being accommodating to Jewish refugees coming into a loose Arab confederation and the milder forms of Zionism. But once it [Zionism] began to take on a more political aspect, Faisal’s attitude changed—drastically. As the Zionist project began to shift, and as the idea of Jewish immigration moved from being an accommodating environment for people seeking a new home to the idea of a Jewish state (and in some cases an exclusively Jewish state), his attitude changed.
Did Faisal come to think that he’d been misled by Weizmann?
No. He continued to receive him, to listen to him. And compared to others, Weizmann appeared to be more moderate. Weizmann seemed to Faisal and his advisers to be a reasonable man. But Faisal became wary, not so much of Weizmann but of the Zionist project during the Paris Peace Conference, when it became clear that there was a strong political aspect to it.
So Faisal remained as accommodating towards the Zionists as he could? At the end of the book, you argue that his "greatness" lay in this open, generous style of leadership and negotiation.
His greatness lay in his character and his ability to see through the thicket of the conflicts and contradictions in the Middle East and to try to expound a vision that was very profound for its time—and could have been, indeed for a brief period of time was, a unifying theme for the right-thinking people of the area. To my mind, his vision was way ahead of its time. The other thing is that he had an enormously flexible and extremely forbearing character, which I believe is essential for successful leadership in the Middle East. It’s no longer an issue of power, strength and charisma. He had charisma—no doubt. And he could be strong when he needed to be. But his inclination was more towards moderation, patience and accommodation. These qualities are essential and he had them in great measure. The third quality that he had, which was not evident in the early days but became apparent later, is his understanding of the international scene; his understanding not just of power but of relative power—how much you can get away with, given your relative weakness.
Would you say that flexible model of leadership is one that ought to be emulated in the Middle East today? For a brief but glorious moment, during the Arab Spring, it looked as if the era of the Middle Eastern “strongman” was coming to an end.
It’s coming back again with Sisi in Egypt. But absolutely: Faisal should be a model. It’s very easy to force things. But we’ve tried that—force through dictatorship, through one-party rule, force through some ideological version of Islam. It just doesn’t work, because it generates its own resistance. If Faisal had lived longer, the outcome [in the Middle East] would have been different.
The book begins with Lawrence refusing a knighthood from George V in October 1918. I met Anderson when he visited London last week. I began by asking him why he decided to start with that scene in Buckingham Palace.
SA: I thought it was a very intriguing moment—as a boy he was very caught up wit the chivalric code and heraldry and so on. So the idea of knighthood was something he’d always aspired to. What happened? This seemed like the beginning of the Lawrence mystery and so I decided to put it at the front.
JD: And the mystery endures doesn’t it? You present Lawrence as a kind of accidental hero. And related to that is the way the Allies (the British and the French) carved up the Middle East after the First World War almost in a fit of inattention.
That’s right. Lawrence is such a complicated figure. I find The Seven Pillars of Wisdom such a baffling book. There are moments of self-effacement and self-abasement. For example, there’s a moment where he shoots his own camel in the head. That’s the kind of detail that most people trying to style themselves as a hero would have left out! But there are also moments of breathtaking arrogance. In one passage early on, when he meets Faisal Ibn Hussein (later Faisal I of Iraq), he says he saw in him someone he could bend to his [Lawrence’s] vision for the Arab Revolt. And you think: “You’re 28 years old, you’ve been in Arabia for six days and suddenly this is your revolution!” So he’s a very complicated guy.
Is he representative of the influential “Arabist” strain that has long shaped British foreign policy in the Middle East?
I think he embodies two things. One is this idea of the junior officer or diplomat who goes off into the hinterland and meets kings and has this outsize influence on events. The other aspect is this sense of dual allegiance. He was effectively passing state secrets on to Faisal and the Arabs. From a technical standpoint, he was committing treason. And yet it’s clear that Lawrence’s superiors, certainly in the military, knew he was passing information to the Arabs. And I think there’s something very peculiarly British about the way they protected him—they knew what he was doing. There was this collective disgust, among a lot of military officers, knowing the promises that had been made to the Arabs, only then to see the British government turning round and making similar promises to the French. Even if British military men didn’t have much respect for the Arabs—and a lot of them certainly didn’t have much respect for their fighting ability—they still felt that a gentleman’s word was his bond. So there was this collective disgust at double-dealing by their government. There’s something peculiarly British about that.
Of the three figures you discuss alongside Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, a Romanian émigré who emigrated to Palestine with his parents in the late 19th century, is the most vividly evoked.
He’s the most fascinating figure. He’s also a victim of history: of all the Zionists, he was the one who put himself at the greatest personal risk. He was a real hothead and was pushed to the side by the more silver-tongued Zionist leaders, who realised that if they were going to move towards a Jewish state they were going to have to be more subtle. In Chaim Weizmann’s biography, there are only two mentions of Aaronsohn. He was pretty much airbrushed out of [Zionist] history.
How would characterise Lawrence's attitude towards Zionism?
Lawrence was, above all else, a master tactician. This is something that a lot of people don’t get right. You can find him saying a wide variety of different things to different people. When he first got an inkling that the Balfour Declaration was coming, he was aghast. He saw a disaster in the making. Famously, he said to William Yale that the only way that Jewish primacy in Palestine could be brought about was through force of arms. But he was also a realist. Once the Balfour Declaration had been made, he knew that the thing was a fait accompli—there was no way the government could roll that back. That led to the agreement between Faisal and Weizmann on the eve of the Paris Peace Conference, when, in return for Faisal recognising Jewish primacy in Palestine, the Zionists agreed to support his claim to the throne of Syria.
Lawrence’s misgivings about the Balfour Declaration were quite widely shared in the Foreign Office weren’t they?
Yes, they were. I still find the genesis of the Balfour Declaration somewhat mysterious. Glimmers of it were first seen in early 1916. People like Mark Sykes and a handful of other people in the Foreign Office saw the Balfour Declaration as a way to win over international Jewry, especially American Jews, who they wanted to push the Wilson government to enter the war. The British came to think that it would play to their long-term interests in the Middle East to have a Jewish state there. It was also a way to marginalise the French!
There’s an obvious distinction to be drawn between Lawrence’s attitude towards the Arabs in Palestine and Aaronsohn’s.
Absolutely. Aaronsohn was what we would think of today as a hard-right Zionist. One big debate within Zionism at the time was between the socialist Zionists, who felt that all labour should be done by Jews and another camp, to which Aaronsohn belonged, which had this kind of plantation idea. But both visions very much marginalised the local Arab culture. For instance, if the Jews were going to do all the Labour, what was going to happen to the Palestinians? They wouldn’t have jobs. Aaronsohn didn’t really care much what happened to the Palestinians, whether they left or stayed.
Is it your view that the current predicament of the Middle East is the consequence of the events you describe in the book?
What we’re seeing now, all across the Middle East, is the final collapse, almost a hundred years later, of the peace that was imposed in 1920. What I discovered from spending time in the Middle East is that whenever I’d have conversation with someone, whatever their religious or political affiliation, they’d always trace the roots of today back to that period. One of the problems in the Middle East has been this culture of complaint, but that’s coming to an end. In Iraq, they used to complain about the artificial composition of the state—well, that composition has gone now. You see this again and again across the region, a reversion back to the lines that existed in the Ottoman era.
Anderson's is not the only book about this period of Middle Eastern history to appear this spring. Another is "Faisal I of Iraq" (Yale University Press, £30) by Ali Allawi, who was appointed Minister of Defence in Iraq's first postwar civilian administration in 2004. Allawi offers a rather less generous account of Lawrence's role in the Arab Revolt that broke out in 1916, ended in 1918 with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and led to the establishment, in 1920, of an Arab government in Syria led by Faisal. When I spoke to Allawi in London a few days ago, I asked him about the mythology of "Lawrence of Arabia".
AA: He never lied, consciously. He artfully neglected, in some cases, to write about or mention important facts. Not only in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but also in the dispatches he sent to the Arab bureau. One of the problems with Lawrence is the way he presented his role and functions. It’s also partly to do with the way history has been written. A lot of the history of the period is based on archival material stored here [in the UK]. It became a history defined by the way people manipulated documents to fashion a story. There was no real counter-narrative until very recently. The sources with which to produce a credible counter-narrative weren’t there.
This changed in the last 15 years, firstly with the opening up of the Ottoman archives, and secondly by a number of memoirs of people who served in the Arab Revolt which, for some reason, remained unpublished for 80 years or so. These two changes made a very powerful counter-narrative possible. Not necessarily one which debunked Lawrence’s role. However you cut it, he did play a significant and in some cases critical role. But the whole thing didn’t revolve around him. There were other actors, some of them far more significant. There key events in Lawrence’s narrative, for example the battle of Tafila or what happened during and just after the capture of Damascus, that are at odds with other people’s descriptions, which cast serious doubt on his story. These other versions of the story show Lawrence as a mobilising figure, a cheerleader, to some extent an intelligence operative passing information and a conduit through which money, information, weapons and guidance were received. There was another Lawrence—in the Paris Peace Conference. There’s has been relatively little focus on his role in that. Then Lawrence pops up again as the main organiser of the Cairo Conference in 1921, having been outside of Middle Eastern events for more than a year. He’s brought back and given organisational responsibilities. But he didn’t make decisions. These were made in Whitehall, by Curzon and, to a lesser extent and at a later stage, by Churchill. Lawrence was a contributing factor. It is sometimes said that Lawrence was a “kingmaker”. He wasn’t. The whole issue of the kingdom of Iraq came up because of the rebellion of 1920. It wasn’t because that all of a sudden they had to find a job for a king (an ex-king).
Lawrence played in some cases an irresponsible role in his attempt to create some common ground between the Zionist movement, and Chaim Weizmann in particular, and Faisal. In some cases, I think his role was mischievous. He could fabricate documents and signatures at will. Many of the important decisions or documents to which Faisal’s name was appended were drafted by him, poorly translated—his Arabic was not as good as he claimed; he could speak well but his writing was childlike and inaccurate. Nevertheless, he was a significant figure.
JD: So much for Lawrence. As for Faisal, is this book an attempt to rehabilitate him?
Not so much. I don’t think he was denigrated to the extent that one might have expected. It is true that the Hashemites as a whole were tarred with the brush of complicity, first with the imperial powers and then with the formation of the state of Israel. Faisal managed to escape all that—I think for two reasons. One, he was never seen to be part of that relationship. Two, because he died in 1933, that somehow saved him being implicated in these various turns that affected the Arab world. So I wouldn’t say it’s rehabilitation. I’d say it’s more a recovery of his reputation. When he died, his reputation was at its peak. He was seen to be the champion of the Arab idea among the statesmen of the period. When he died, there was a massive outpouring of grief, not only in Iraq but throughout the Arab world.
By the end of his life, his thinking had taken a pan-Arabist turn hadn’t it?
I think he was actually a pan-Arab of sorts before he knew it—probably from the Arab Revolt on—in the sense that he recognised the principle upon which the Ottoman Empire, and Muslim political structures more generally, was coming to an end and with it the imperial system, modified through a kind of Sharia connection, under which Muslim peoples had lived for a thousand years. Its replacement had to be some of political structure that would fit into the world system, the system of nation states. Given the differences in the Middle East, the ethno-sectarian ones in particular, there was very little alternative except to espouse a mild form of Arab nationalism, a kind of Arab consciousness through which these nation states could relate to each other and form some kind of confederal system. That was the evolution of his thinking after he came to accept that the Ottoman Empire was going to be dismembered.
Would it be fair to say that today the dispensation in the Middle East that emerged from the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire is itself coming to an end?
I think so. The state system which evolved after World War One, and imposed on diversities a kind of rigid political structure which then lent itself either to fragmentation or a kind of uni-dimensional dictatorship, is coming to an end. But is the nation state system itself going to collapse? I don’t think so, because it seems to be extremely resilient and is what the international order is based upon. So I don’t see states being dismembered and reassembled in the way that, for example, Yugoslavia was broken up and its various reassembled as nation states. And I don’t wish for that, because there’d have to be a massive dislocation of peoples, sects and so in order to create the kind of homogeneity that is required by relatively stable nation states. So what I see is that the [post-World War One] system is coming to an end but its replacement is yet to announce itself.
But aren’t the old ethno-sectarian divisions reasserting themselves in Iraq today? Divisions of which, as you show in the book, Faisal himself was well aware.
There are two main threats today to the integrity of Iraq: one is the delayed fuse on the longstanding demand for a Kurdish state that was defused after World War One. Now because they have, as it were, a quasi-state, the promise of a potential state is real. The other force that is tearing the country apart is sectarianism. Sectarianism in the past was seen mainly as a kind of jockeying for power and influence. Now it is a kind of targeting the other. So the nature of the sectarian conflict has changed, exacerbated, of course, by regional power struggles and the civil war in Syria. For probably the first time in the modern history of Iraq, there are now claims that there should be a sectarian redefinition of the nature of the state. This only came about once before in the Middle East, during the early phases of the Lebanese civil war. Apart from that, the idea of reconfiguring the nation state along sectarian lines is a very recent idea.
Does Faisal have anything to teach modern Iraqis about that sectarian temptation?
Of course. He was clear that if you don’t recognise the temptation and understand it, it can jump and bite you. The only way to prevent that was by creating a state that was not aggressively secular, but which transcended the various divisions in the country and therefore acted as a kind of loyalty magnet that didn’t displace earlier loyalties but created another layer. That was his solution. Of course, that meant building up the central state. It meant building up institutions, including the military. And that required far-sighted and committed leadership.
To what extent was the model that Faisal created either sustained or distorted by the Baathist dictatorship?
The way that the Ba’athists distorted it was by imposing very fiercely and violently a peculiar definition of Arab nationalism and the role of the state. The Ba’ath party in the 1970s was on a kind of modernisation kick. It wasn’t into the sectarian distribution of central power. It just happened that there were more people from sect rather than another [in positions of power], and because of the emphasis on Arab nationalism, the Kurds naturally felt marginalised. The Ba’ath underwent a major shift after Saddam Hussein came to power. His aim was to protect his party’s rule from the effects of the Iranian revolution. Once the state fell into his hands, the exigencies of war [with Iran] meant that the state was much more narrowly focused on him, then on his relatives and his clan and then, by inference as it were, on the broader Arab Sunni community. That created a very powerful sense of alienation on the part of the Shia from the kind of state that Saddam had created in Iraq.
One of the pivotal moments in the story you tell in the book was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government declared itself in favour of the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In the book, you say that Faisal had a “benign” view of the Zionist project to begin with. Why was he relatively sanguine about Zionism?
He thought of the Jews as Arabs. The fact that they were Jews was a religious matter. Arabic was their language, not Hebrew. To him, the idea of Jews emigrating from Russia and the Pale of Settlement to the Middle East was not threatening. It was a project that should be welcomed—he thought it was part of the history of the area that people were accommodating to refugees. And if refugees brought with them skills, capital and international connections, so much the better. That was the way in which Weizmann presented the project. The benign perspective on Zionism was based on the assumption that it would be a limited migration of persecuted people, mainly from eastern Europe, who would bring with them skills, resources and connections. They would be welcomed within the framework of a confederal Arab state. Weizmann said that the Jews would never expect a Jewish state. The idea of a state being established for and by Jews in Palestine was not on the cards on that stage.
There was no contradiction between being accommodating to Jewish refugees coming into a loose Arab confederation and the milder forms of Zionism. But once it [Zionism] began to take on a more political aspect, Faisal’s attitude changed—drastically. As the Zionist project began to shift, and as the idea of Jewish immigration moved from being an accommodating environment for people seeking a new home to the idea of a Jewish state (and in some cases an exclusively Jewish state), his attitude changed.
Did Faisal come to think that he’d been misled by Weizmann?
No. He continued to receive him, to listen to him. And compared to others, Weizmann appeared to be more moderate. Weizmann seemed to Faisal and his advisers to be a reasonable man. But Faisal became wary, not so much of Weizmann but of the Zionist project during the Paris Peace Conference, when it became clear that there was a strong political aspect to it.
So Faisal remained as accommodating towards the Zionists as he could? At the end of the book, you argue that his "greatness" lay in this open, generous style of leadership and negotiation.
His greatness lay in his character and his ability to see through the thicket of the conflicts and contradictions in the Middle East and to try to expound a vision that was very profound for its time—and could have been, indeed for a brief period of time was, a unifying theme for the right-thinking people of the area. To my mind, his vision was way ahead of its time. The other thing is that he had an enormously flexible and extremely forbearing character, which I believe is essential for successful leadership in the Middle East. It’s no longer an issue of power, strength and charisma. He had charisma—no doubt. And he could be strong when he needed to be. But his inclination was more towards moderation, patience and accommodation. These qualities are essential and he had them in great measure. The third quality that he had, which was not evident in the early days but became apparent later, is his understanding of the international scene; his understanding not just of power but of relative power—how much you can get away with, given your relative weakness.
Would you say that flexible model of leadership is one that ought to be emulated in the Middle East today? For a brief but glorious moment, during the Arab Spring, it looked as if the era of the Middle Eastern “strongman” was coming to an end.
It’s coming back again with Sisi in Egypt. But absolutely: Faisal should be a model. It’s very easy to force things. But we’ve tried that—force through dictatorship, through one-party rule, force through some ideological version of Islam. It just doesn’t work, because it generates its own resistance. If Faisal had lived longer, the outcome [in the Middle East] would have been different.
