Going by the movie, and by a piece I recently heard on All Things Considered,T.E. Lawrence’ end-goal in the Arab Revolt was an independent Arabia (defined. from what I can gather, as all Arabic-speaking lands east of Egypt) united under Prince Faisal with Damascus as its capital. But the British and French governments weren’t having none of it, they wanted colonial rule, and got it, at least in the Levant.
What if the British and French governments had stayed out of the way? Could Faisal have united Arabia? Even if he had ended up with control of Syria and Iraq, he still would have had to conquer the Saudis and a lot of Gulf emirates to do it.
Assuming he could have, what then? What kind of country would the Kingdom of Arabia have become?
T.E. Lawrence was well-known as being a pathological liar and his autobiography and the movie based upon it were largely fiction, so basing your knowledge of him on the movie strikes me as extremely foolish.
The NPR piece, which I can’t seem to find by googling but was broadcast within the past few weeks, looks at the liar-theory and concludes that at least what I said above about his war-aims and his own government obstructing it is perfectly true. (They do cast doubt on Lawrence’ account of the time he was captured, resisted rape by a Turkish officer, and was beaten in punishment, because he never could have walked away afterwards like he did if beaten that badly – the more likely alternative is that he was raped and was embarrassed to admit that.)
The movie is utter garbage, as insulting to an incredible story as was Bridge On The River Kwai. David Lean was an idiot.The book is called 7 Pillars Of Wisdom and is one of the great books I’ve read. Lawrence does exaggerate odd things in the book, but his portraits of the leaders of the Arab revolt are wonderful, and he is lavish in describing the desert he loved. Robert Graves found Lawrence’s writing overwrought, ascribing it to what was then called combat related neurasthenia, but it’s brilliance is undeniable. There is good and bad history in the book but it is a great introduction to a time in history we have, to the sorrow of millions, always ignored.
If Lawrence had had his way the war that is just starting might have been finished before we were born, the map would be very different, and Israel would probably be somewhere like Montana.
But, no one is really addressing the questions: Could Faisal have united Arabia, and, if so, what sort of country would a united Arabia have turned out to be? E.g., would religious fundamentalists rule it, or modernist secularizers? Would it be a unitary or a federal state? Could the Sunni and Shi’a have grown comfortable sharing it, or would there be endless intractable strife between them? Could a sense of Arab nationalism transcending local/tribal/sectarian politics have developed and stuck? Would it be an absolute monarchy like SA is now, or a constitutional one to some degree, or would the kingdom by now have given way to a republic, or some sort of dictatorship, or chaos and fragmentation? Economically, would it be a raw-resource-exporting state merely, or would the government have had the foresight to stimulate the development of native industry? What would be its relations with Iran and Turkey? And, why do they call the camel “the ship of the desert”?
Probably not, as his daddy couldn’t hang on to Hejaz for more than 7 years before the Sauds took it from him. I don’t think the Sauds ability to take Hejaz was that surprising - they hung back while other groups engaged either the Turks or their opponents. I assume there were other groups who kept their powder dry, and would have been able to carve a piece out of united Arabia.
There have been attempts at pan-Arabic and pan-Islamic movements that haven’t panned out, and while you can lay some of the blame for that on colonialism and Cold War policies, you can’t lay all of the blame on that. I’m just not sure exactly what all these disparate groups are supposed to have in common that would make a unified nation function. There are plenty of nations which have common religions or common languages that have nonetheless fractured because of geography, or ideology, or ethnicity or any number of reasons.
Plus, I don’t see how Faisal could have maintained the military logistical train necessary to keep order over such a large area with post-WWI technology and the infrastructure of the area at the time. Yeah, there are a lot of potential recruits to draw from in Iraq/Syria/Jordan, but you still need to be able to get your troops across the peninsula to put down hot spots. Faisal would have been heavily dependent on some European nation to maintain control, and that would essentially have been another round of colonialism.
At first; but a united Arabia, with its oil wealth, almost certainly could have stood on its own eventually – depending on what they did with the revenue.
Oil money did not save the Hashemites in Iraq. It was in fact their heavy reliance and alliance with the former colonial powers in areas like managing their oil wealth that helped do them in.
It is interesting to speculate what would have happened had Faisal been allowed to keep Syria which he seized in 1920 with some local support. But whether the Hashemites would have eventually weathered the storm there any better ( in many ways it was the intellectual heartland of pan-Arabism ) is an open question. It was a rather different beast than Jordan.
Meanwhile this continuing use of ‘Arabia’ for anything other than the Arabian peninsula is causing sufficient cognitive dissonance to give me the vapors ;).