The British, the Sharifians and the Shiites
Middle East Study Group
Grand Lake Neighborhood Center
July 8, 2006
History From Competing Perspectives
The British, the Sharifians and the Shiites
In Iraq: The Search for National Identity, Liora Lukitz shows how the wartime partnership forged between the British and the Sharifians—which the career of Nuri al-Said dramatizes-- led to a hegemonic legacy of Sunni Arab power, imposed upon an exploited and impoverished Shiite majority. For our purposes, it’s useful to consider the horizon of choices as they appeared within each of the three perspectives. It “might have been otherwise,” certainly, for the Shiites as well as for the Sharifians or the British. The sheer contingency of history is never more obvious than in the mess of war and its aftermath. But there are also constraints—the economic, military, political and ideological conditions of power and weakness—that limit the options for each player in more or less specifiable ways. From this perspective the Shiite majority was doomed, politically speaking, as soon as the British took full control of Iraq.
While reading Gertrude Bell’s letters—particularly from 1919 to 1921— we become aware of the impasse her government had reached in the summer of 1920, with a full-blown anti-British uprising sweeping the region and with Arnold Wilson’s hard-line policy stimulating new oppositional alliances. Essentially, Wilson viewed the colonialist mission the way Conrad’s Kurtz does in The Heart of Darkness—“Exterminate the brutes!” This the RAF did, by bombing villages (over and over) and by testing out a new poison gas on the Shiite tribesmen. As the British hoped, the class interests of the Baghdad notables, merchants and landowning sheikhs eventually triumphed over the anti-imperialist appeals of scattered Shiite tribesmen led by Najaf clerics. Lukitz’s main point is that the myth of the 1920 uprising as “the starting point in the process of forging a national Iraqi identity” is exposed as just that, a nationalist myth, when we see how quickly the Sunni-Shiite alliance broke down into competing interests (p. 63).
It was also, however, Bell’s connection with Faisal, Lawrence and the Arab Bureau that pulled the British out. Wilson did all he could to keep the ex-Ottoman Sharifian officers from returning to their own country, since they had no reason not to actively support the revolt. When Percy Cox displaced Wilson in October 1920, Bell apparently found it easy to persuade Cox to bring the Sharifians in as allies, to help set up a previously unthinkable Arab nationalist government as the basis of a British client state. Conveniently, the British could appear to be finally keeping their promises to the Arab nationalists, after letting the French drove Faisal out of Syria.
All that really mattered, the British realized, was finding a cheap way to control Iraq’s oil resources and foreign policy. As it turned out, the British managed to hold onto those prerogatives for four decades, in the teeth of massive Iraqi opposition. It took the revolution of 1958 to end the client role of the Faisal dynasty and its Sharifian military elite, which Nuri’s career embodied. All of which prompts one to suggest that Gertrude Bell might be credited with inventing the modern formula of Western imperialism, which is still weathering the storms around the planet. Who says the natives can’t govern themselves? All that’s needed is a military regime that is locked into the service of a great power’s economic interests.
The Sharifians’ perspective was haunted by the British betrayal of its wartime promises. As Charles Smith shows in his history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the McMahon-Husayn correspondence that established the quid pro quo for the Arab Revolt has to be viewed as a British con—say anything to pull the Arabs out of the Ottoman orbit and to prevent an anti-British jihad. For Faisal and the Sharifians, however, the most brazenly deceptive promise was the November 1918 Anglo-French Declaration, in which both powers reaffirmed the commitment to back an Arab state, even as the war was in the process of ending. Given the anti-imperialist feelings of the Iraqi Sharifians, it is not surprising that their representatives initially joined with Shiite tribal leaders “to open a Sunni-Shiite front,” as Lukitz puts it (61), in the 1920 rebellion. However, the Sharifians’ frustrated ambitions for power soon led to still another alliance with the British, as well as with the Sunni notables and merchants of Baghdad. There was little sense of loyalty to the more or less impoverished Shiites, whose “Arab” identity was compromised by their submission to a Persian-based heresy and its mujtahids. Apparently it was Nuri and his brother-in-law Jafar al-Askari who brought the extremists around in time to collaborate with the Arab Bureau’s program for Iraq, which Churchill backed because it cut costs. The pervasive distrust of the British, however, forced Faisal and Nuri to chart a policy course of placating both sides, year after year.
Fuller and Francke’s succinct account of the economic plight of the Shiite tribes that revolted shows that 19th century Ottoman land reforms had created a “captive peasant class” and an urban-based landowning elite long before the British invasion (Arab Shia, p, 92). The British easily exploited this power imbalance to get a foothold in a hostile social environment. The handout from Lukitz’s study enables us to view the alliance between the British and Faisal’s Sharifians from a deeply troubled, self-consciously marginalized Shiite perspective. Lukitz emphasizes that the “victim” traditions of Shiism were extremely attractive to the recently converted, newly settled Bedouin tribesmen. Their fate in the 1920 uprising and its political aftermath could only have deepened this religious identification, encouraged by the mujtahids (activist clerics) of Najaf and Karbala. Lukitz describes the Shiites’ inability to get British protection from an increasingly oppressive Sunni Arab regime, whose rigged tax and electoral systems locked in the power imbalance (Lukitz, p. 63). The Shiite clerics simply refused to participate in the unjust political system (historically, the “correct” Shiite position) but remained prepared to lead or support insurgencies against it, trusting that their day would come. And probably it has come, amid the sea of violence that is now U.S.-occupied Iraq. “They are in charge now,” as Nir Rosen says. “They control Iraq so everything has been reversed.”
---------------
References:
Christopher Birdwood, Nuri As-Said: A Study in Arab Leadership (1959).
Elizabeth Burgoyne, Gertrude Bell From Her Personal Papers, 1914-1926 (1961).
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (1989), pp. 449-454.
Graham Fuller and Rend Rahim Francke, The Arab Shi’a (1999), pp. 90-109.
Liora Lukitz, Iraq: The Search for National Identity (1995), pp. 56-65.
Adla Massoud, “Author Says Iraq Worse Than Reported,” July 6, 2006 english.aljazeera.net.
Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell (1996).
Grand Lake Neighborhood Center
July 8, 2006
History From Competing Perspectives
The British, the Sharifians and the Shiites
In Iraq: The Search for National Identity, Liora Lukitz shows how the wartime partnership forged between the British and the Sharifians—which the career of Nuri al-Said dramatizes-- led to a hegemonic legacy of Sunni Arab power, imposed upon an exploited and impoverished Shiite majority. For our purposes, it’s useful to consider the horizon of choices as they appeared within each of the three perspectives. It “might have been otherwise,” certainly, for the Shiites as well as for the Sharifians or the British. The sheer contingency of history is never more obvious than in the mess of war and its aftermath. But there are also constraints—the economic, military, political and ideological conditions of power and weakness—that limit the options for each player in more or less specifiable ways. From this perspective the Shiite majority was doomed, politically speaking, as soon as the British took full control of Iraq.
While reading Gertrude Bell’s letters—particularly from 1919 to 1921— we become aware of the impasse her government had reached in the summer of 1920, with a full-blown anti-British uprising sweeping the region and with Arnold Wilson’s hard-line policy stimulating new oppositional alliances. Essentially, Wilson viewed the colonialist mission the way Conrad’s Kurtz does in The Heart of Darkness—“Exterminate the brutes!” This the RAF did, by bombing villages (over and over) and by testing out a new poison gas on the Shiite tribesmen. As the British hoped, the class interests of the Baghdad notables, merchants and landowning sheikhs eventually triumphed over the anti-imperialist appeals of scattered Shiite tribesmen led by Najaf clerics. Lukitz’s main point is that the myth of the 1920 uprising as “the starting point in the process of forging a national Iraqi identity” is exposed as just that, a nationalist myth, when we see how quickly the Sunni-Shiite alliance broke down into competing interests (p. 63).
It was also, however, Bell’s connection with Faisal, Lawrence and the Arab Bureau that pulled the British out. Wilson did all he could to keep the ex-Ottoman Sharifian officers from returning to their own country, since they had no reason not to actively support the revolt. When Percy Cox displaced Wilson in October 1920, Bell apparently found it easy to persuade Cox to bring the Sharifians in as allies, to help set up a previously unthinkable Arab nationalist government as the basis of a British client state. Conveniently, the British could appear to be finally keeping their promises to the Arab nationalists, after letting the French drove Faisal out of Syria.
All that really mattered, the British realized, was finding a cheap way to control Iraq’s oil resources and foreign policy. As it turned out, the British managed to hold onto those prerogatives for four decades, in the teeth of massive Iraqi opposition. It took the revolution of 1958 to end the client role of the Faisal dynasty and its Sharifian military elite, which Nuri’s career embodied. All of which prompts one to suggest that Gertrude Bell might be credited with inventing the modern formula of Western imperialism, which is still weathering the storms around the planet. Who says the natives can’t govern themselves? All that’s needed is a military regime that is locked into the service of a great power’s economic interests.
The Sharifians’ perspective was haunted by the British betrayal of its wartime promises. As Charles Smith shows in his history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the McMahon-Husayn correspondence that established the quid pro quo for the Arab Revolt has to be viewed as a British con—say anything to pull the Arabs out of the Ottoman orbit and to prevent an anti-British jihad. For Faisal and the Sharifians, however, the most brazenly deceptive promise was the November 1918 Anglo-French Declaration, in which both powers reaffirmed the commitment to back an Arab state, even as the war was in the process of ending. Given the anti-imperialist feelings of the Iraqi Sharifians, it is not surprising that their representatives initially joined with Shiite tribal leaders “to open a Sunni-Shiite front,” as Lukitz puts it (61), in the 1920 rebellion. However, the Sharifians’ frustrated ambitions for power soon led to still another alliance with the British, as well as with the Sunni notables and merchants of Baghdad. There was little sense of loyalty to the more or less impoverished Shiites, whose “Arab” identity was compromised by their submission to a Persian-based heresy and its mujtahids. Apparently it was Nuri and his brother-in-law Jafar al-Askari who brought the extremists around in time to collaborate with the Arab Bureau’s program for Iraq, which Churchill backed because it cut costs. The pervasive distrust of the British, however, forced Faisal and Nuri to chart a policy course of placating both sides, year after year.
Fuller and Francke’s succinct account of the economic plight of the Shiite tribes that revolted shows that 19th century Ottoman land reforms had created a “captive peasant class” and an urban-based landowning elite long before the British invasion (Arab Shia, p, 92). The British easily exploited this power imbalance to get a foothold in a hostile social environment. The handout from Lukitz’s study enables us to view the alliance between the British and Faisal’s Sharifians from a deeply troubled, self-consciously marginalized Shiite perspective. Lukitz emphasizes that the “victim” traditions of Shiism were extremely attractive to the recently converted, newly settled Bedouin tribesmen. Their fate in the 1920 uprising and its political aftermath could only have deepened this religious identification, encouraged by the mujtahids (activist clerics) of Najaf and Karbala. Lukitz describes the Shiites’ inability to get British protection from an increasingly oppressive Sunni Arab regime, whose rigged tax and electoral systems locked in the power imbalance (Lukitz, p. 63). The Shiite clerics simply refused to participate in the unjust political system (historically, the “correct” Shiite position) but remained prepared to lead or support insurgencies against it, trusting that their day would come. And probably it has come, amid the sea of violence that is now U.S.-occupied Iraq. “They are in charge now,” as Nir Rosen says. “They control Iraq so everything has been reversed.”
---------------
References:
Christopher Birdwood, Nuri As-Said: A Study in Arab Leadership (1959).
Elizabeth Burgoyne, Gertrude Bell From Her Personal Papers, 1914-1926 (1961).
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (1989), pp. 449-454.
Graham Fuller and Rend Rahim Francke, The Arab Shi’a (1999), pp. 90-109.
Liora Lukitz, Iraq: The Search for National Identity (1995), pp. 56-65.
Adla Massoud, “Author Says Iraq Worse Than Reported,” July 6, 2006 english.aljazeera.net.
Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell (1996).
