Pan-Islam Part 3

The incident is worth noting in view of remarks made by a popular fiction-monger in one of his latest works, that indiscriminate aerial raids on civil centres in England are on the same level of humanity as naval bombardments.

I visited the fishing-banks off Hasani Island a week or so after to get the latest news of Um-Lejj, which came from Turkish sources. There was one civilian casualty--a woman who was in the Turkish concealed position. No casualties among Turkish officers, but one of them left in charge of the fort had disappeared. There were bits of the fort left, but the Commandant had moved his headquarters to the school-house within the precincts of the mosque--sagacious soul. The object-lesson which we gave the Arabs at Um-Lejj put a check to their irresponsible sniping of boats and landing-parties, though one could always expect a little trouble with an Arab dhow running contraband for the Turks. In these cases their guilty consciences usually gave them away. Returning to the coast toward Jeddah unexpectedly, having played the well-worn ruse of "the cat's away," we sighted a small dhow close in-sh.o.r.e, and should have left her alone as she was in shoal-water, but, on standing in to get a nearer view of her, she headed promptly for the beach and ran aground, disgorging more men than such a craft should carry.

I went away in the duty cutter to investigate, and we had barely realised that she was heavily loaded with kerosene in tins (a heinous contraband) when the fact was emphasised by a sputtering rifle-fire from the scrub along the beach. The ship very soon put a stop to that demonstration with a round or two of shrapnel, while we busied ourselves with the dhow. There was no hope of salving her, as she had almost ripped the keel off her when she took the ground and sat on the bottom like a dilapidated basket. We broached enough tins to start a conflagration, lit a fuse made of a strip of old turban soaked in kerosene, and backed hard from her vicinity, for the kerosene was low-flash common stuff as marked on the cases, and to play at snapdragon in half an acre of blazing oil is an uninviting pastime. However, she just flared without exploding, and we continued our cruise up the coast just in time to overhaul at racing speed a perfect regatta of dhows heeling over to every st.i.tch of canvas in their efforts to make Jeddah before we could get at them, for they had seen the smoke of that burning oil-dhow and realised that the cat was about. Good money is paid at Cowes to see no more spirited sailing--we had to put a shot across the bows of the leading dhow before they would abandon the race.

There was always trouble off Jeddah--the approaches to that reef-girt harbour lend themselves to blockade-running dhows with sound local knowledge on board. At night, especially, they had an advantage and would play "Puss-in-the-Corner" until the cutter lost patience, and a flickering pin-point of light stabbed the velvet black of the middle watch, asking permission to fire; one rifle-shot fired high would stop the game, and I made them come alongside and take a wigging for annoying the cutter and turning me out; there was seldom anything wrong about the dhow--it was sheer cussedness.

All through the early part of 1916 we were keeping in touch with the Sharif of Mecca by means of envoys, whom we landed where they listed, away from the Turks, picking them up at times and places indicated by them. Sharif Husein had long chafed under Turkish suzerainty, in spite of his subsidy and the deference which policy compelled them to accord him. He knew that the Hejaz could never realise its legitimate aspirations under Ottoman rule, which was a blight on all Arab progress and prosperity, as the Young Turkish party was hardly Moslem at heart, being more national (that is Tartar)--certainly not pro-Arab.

Husein's difficulty was to get his own people to rise together and throw off the Turkish yoke, for the Hejazi tribesman, especially between the coast and Mecca, has long been more of a brigand than a warrior, as any pilgrim will tell you. Such folk are apt to jib at hammer-and-tongs fighting, and of course we could not land troops to a.s.sist them, as it would have violated the sacred soil that cradled Islam and merely stiffened the bogus _jihad_ which the Turks had proclaimed against us, besides compromising the Sharif with his own tribesmen.

The Hejazis' ingenuous idea was to go on taking money from us, the Turks and the Sharif, while--thanks to our lenient blockade--a regular dhow-traffic fed them. We did not approve of this Utopian policy, and the fall of Kut brought matters to a climax. After certain communications had pa.s.sed between the representatives of His Majesty's Government and the Sharif, it was decided to tighten the blockade and so induce the gentle Hejazi to declare himself. The day was fixed, May, 15, on and after which date no traffic whatever was to be permitted with the Arabian coast other than that specially sanctioned by Government. In palaver thereon I managed to get local fishing-craft exempted. The fisher-folk are not combatants either on empty stomachs or full ones, and could be relied on to consume their own fish in that climate unless very close to a market, where the pinch would be great enough to make them exchange it for foodstuffs, thus helping the situation we wished to bring about. I knew that all _bona fide_ fishing-craft were easily recognisable by their rig and comparatively small size, and hoped that good will would combine with freedom of movement to make these folk useful agents for Intelligence.

I heard with some relief that the movements of the patrol would place H.M.S. "Hardinge" (a roomy ship of the Indian Marine) on station duty off Jeddah, which was to be my post while the enhanced blockade was in force--there are few more trying seasons than early summer in those waters. I joined her from Suez the day after the blockade was closed, and found her keeping guard over a perfect fleet of dhows. There were about three dozen craft with over three hundred people on board, for many native pa.s.sengers were trying to make Jeddah before we shut down.

The f.e.c.kless mariners in charge had made the usual oriental calculation that a day more or less did not matter, but found to their horror that the Navy was more precise on these points--and there they were.

The first thing to ensure was that the crew, and especially the pa.s.sengers, among whom were a good many women and children, did not suffer from privation. This had already been ably seen to by the ship's officers--I merely went round the fleet to sift any genuine complaints from the discontent natural to the situation in which their own slackness had placed them. I insisted on hearing only one complaint at a time, otherwise it would have been pandemonium afloat, for they were anch.o.r.ed close enough together to converse with each other; vociferous excuses for their unpunctuality were brushed aside, legitimate requests for more water or food or condensed milk for the children or more adequate shelter for the women from the sun were attended to at once, and our floating village quieted down.

The craft were all much the same type of small dhow or _sanbuk_ which frequents the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, having little in common with the big-bellied buggalows which ply with rice and dates between the Persian Gulf and Indian ports but do not come into the Red Sea. These were much smaller and saucier-looking craft, some fifty to eighty feet long, with a turn of speed and raking masts. All were lugger-rigged with lateen sails, and only the p.o.o.p and bows were decked, the bulwarks being heightened with strips of matting to prevent seas from breaking in-board. Sanitary arrangements were provided for by a box-like cubby-hole over-hanging the boat's side; inexperienced officers often take it for a vantage-point to heave the lead from, and only find out too late after attempting to board there, that things are not always what they seem.

These little vessels are practically the corsair type of Saracenic sailing-galley which used to infest the Barbary coast in days gone by.

They do everything different from our occidental methods. For example, they reef and furl their tall lateens from the peak, and have to send a man up the long tapering gaff to do it. Their masts rake forward and not aft, which enables them to swing gaff, sail, and sheet round in front of the mast when they come about, instead of keeping the sheet aft and dipping the b.u.t.t of the gaff with the sail to the other side of the mast, which would be an impossibility for that rig, as the b.u.t.t of their enormous mainyard or gaff is bowsed permanently down in the bows, while the soaring peak may be nearly a hundred feet above the water. Cooking was done over charcoal in a kerosene tin half full of sand, and the "first-cla.s.s" pa.s.sengers lived under an improvised awning on the p.o.o.p, the women's quarters being under that gim-crack structure. All the same, they are good sea-boats and remarkably fast, especially _on_ a wind, quite unlike the big-decked buggalows which are built for cargo capacity and have real cabins aft but sail like a haystack on a barge.

It was inhuman (as well as an infernal nuisance) to keep all those people sweltering indefinitely at sea; on the other hand, our orders as to the strict maintenance of the blockade were explicit. The "owner" and I conferred and decided that the situation could be met by transferring their cargo to the ship and letting the dhows beach. This was referred and approved by wireless. The job took us some days, as the weather was rather unfavourable and all the cargoes had to be checked by manifest with a view to rest.i.tution later. Each dhow as she was cleared had to make for the sh.o.r.e and dismast or beach so that she could not steal out at night and add to the difficulties of the blockade. None attempted to evade this order, most carried out both alternatives; perhaps a casual reminder that they would be within observation and gun-fire of the ship had some influence on their action.

Hitherto the Turco-Teutonic brand of Holy War had been fairly successful. The Allied thrust at the Dardanelles and Gallipoli had failed, the Aden Protectorate was in Turkish hands, we had spent a most unpleasant Easter in Sinai, and Kut had fallen. Still, the Turks were soon to realise that a wrongly-invoked _jihad_, like a mishandled musket, can recoil heavily, and, before the end of May, signs were not wanting that trouble was brewing for them in the Hejaz.

We were in close touch with the sh.o.r.e through fishing-canoes by day and secret emissaries by night, who brought us news that some German "officers" had been done to death by Hejazi tribesmen some eight hours'

journey north of Jeddah. They had evidently been first over-powered and bound, then stabbed in the stomach with the huge two-handed dagger which the Hejazis use, and finally decapitated, as a Turkish rescue party which hurried to the spot found their headless and practically disembowelled corpses with their hands tied behind them. Their effects came through our hands in due course, and we ascertained that the party consisted of Lieut.-Commander von Moeller (late of a German gunboat interned at Tsing-Tao) and five reservists whom he had picked up in Java. They had landed on the South Arabian coast in March, had visited Sanaa, the capital of Yamen, and had come up the Arabian coast of the Red Sea by dhow, keeping well inside the Farsan bank, which is three hundred miles long and a serious obstacle to patrol work. They had landed at Konfida, north of the bank, and reached Jeddah by camel on May 5.

Against the advice of the Turks they continued their journey by land, as they had no chance of eluding our northern patrol at sea. They were more than a year too late to emulate the gallant (and lucky) "Odyssey"

of the Emden's landing-party from Cocos Islands up the Red Sea coast in the days when our blockade was more lenient and did not interfere with coasting craft. They hoped to reach Maan and so get on the rail for Stamboul and back to Germany, as the Sharif would not sanction their coming to the sacred city of Medina, which is the rail-head for the Damascus-Hejaz railway. After so staunch a journey they deserved a better fate. Among their kit was a tattered and blood-stained copy of my book on the Aden hinterland.[A]

Meanwhile affairs ash.o.r.e were simmering to boiling-point, and on the night of June 9 we commenced a bombardment of carefully located Turkish positions, firing by "director" to co-operate with an Arab attack which was due then but did not materialise till early next morning, and was then but feebly delivered. We found out later that the rifles and ammunition we had delivered on the beach some distance south of Jeddah to the Sharif's agents in support of this attack had been partly diverted to Mecca and partly hung up by a squabble with their own camel-men for more cash.

We continued the bombardment on the night of the 11th and were in action most of the day on the 12th, sh.e.l.ling the Turkish positions north of Jeddah, which we had located by gla.s.s and the co-operation of friendly fishing-craft who gave us the direction by signal. During the morning the Hejazis made an abortive and aimless attack along the beach north of Jeddah, and so masked our own supporting fire, while the Turks gave them more than they wanted.

By this time the senior ship and others had joined us, and the S.N.O.

approved of my landing with a party of Indian signallers to maintain closer touch with their operations, provided that Arab headquarters would guarantee our safety as regards their own people. This they were unable to do.

The bombardment grew more and more strenuous and searching as other ships joined in and our knowledge of the Turkish positions became more accurate. On the 15th it culminated with the arrival of a seaplane carrier and heavy bombing of the Ottoman trenches which our flat-trajectory naval guns could hardly reach. The white flag went up before sunset, and next day there were _pourparlers_ which led to an unconditional surrender on June 17, 1916.

Mecca had fallen just before, and Taif surrendered soon after, leaving Medina as the only important town still held by the Turks in the Hejaz.

We began pouring food and munitions into Jeddah as soon as it changed hands; for the rest of this cruise my ship was a sort of parcels-delivery van, and when the parcel happens to be an Egyptian mountain battery its delivery is an undertaking.

My personal contact with the Turks and their ill-omened _jihad_ ended soon after, as I was invalided from service afloat, but I kept in touch as an Intelligence-wallah on the beach and followed the rest of it with interest.

They got Holy War with a vengeance. The Sharif's sons (more especially the Emirs Feisal and Abdullah, who had been trained at the Stamboul Military Academy), ably a.s.sisted by zealous and skilled British officers as mine-planters and aerial bombers, harried outlying posts and the Hejaz railway line north of Medina incessantly.

The Turkish positions at Wejh fell to the Red Sea flotilla, reinforced by the flagship. I should like to have been there, if only to have seen the Admiral sail in to the proceedings with a revolver in his fist and the _elan_ of a sub-lieutenant. The Hejazis failed to synchronise, as usual, so the Navy dispensed with their support.

On February 24, 1917, Kut was wrested from the Turks again; on March 11 they lost Baghdad; on November 7 their Beersheba-Gaza front was shattered, and Jerusalem fell on December 9.

Early next year Jericho was captured (February 21), a British column from Baghdad reached the Caspian in August, and after a final, victorious British offensive in Palestine the unholy alliance of Turkish pan-Islamism and German _Kultur_ got its death-blow when Emir Feisal galloped into Damascus.

The Turks had drawn the blade of _jihad_ from its pan-Islamic scabbard in vain; its German trade-mark was plainly stamped on it. There had been widespread organisation against us, and the serpent's eggs of sedition and revolt had been hatched in centres scattered all over the eastern hemisphere, but their venomous progeny had been crushed before they became formidable.

As a world-force this band of pan-Islamism had failed because it had been invoked by the wrong people for a wrong purpose. Such a movement should at least have as its driving power some great spiritual crisis: this Turco-German manifestation of it had its origin in self-interest, and if successful would have immolated Arabia on the demoniac altar of _Weltpolitik_. Seyid Muhammed er-Rashid Ridha, a descendant of the Prophet and one of the greatest Arab theologians living, has voiced the verdict of Islam on this unscrupulous and self-seeking adventure in a trenchant article published in September, 1916. He showed up Enver and his Unionist party as an atheist among atheists who had deprived the Sultan of his rightful power and Islam of its religious head, and contrasted their conduct with that of the British, who exempted the Hejaz from the blockade enforced against the rest of the Ottoman Empire until it became quite clear that the Turks were benefiting chiefly by that exemption, and who, out of respect for the holy places of Islam, refrained from making that country a theatre of war.

True to the Teutonic tradition, the movement had been laboriously organised, but lacked psychic insight, for the Turk is too much of a Tartar and too little of a Moslem to appreciate the Arab mind, and the German ignored it, rooting with eager, guttural grunts among the carefully cultivated religious prejudices of Islam like a hog hunting truffles until whacked out of it by the irate cultivators.

The following incident may serve to ill.u.s.trate their crude tactics. Soon after the Turks came into the war the mullah of the princ.i.p.al mosque at Damascus was told to announce _jihad_ against the British from his pulpit on the following Friday in accordance with an order from the Grand Mufti at Stamboul. The poor man appears to have jibbed considerably and sent his family over the Nejd border to be out of reach of Turkish persecution. Finally he decided to conform, but when he climbed the steps of his "minbar" and scanned his congregation he saw a group of German officers wearing tarboushes with a look of almost porcine complacency. His fear fell from him in a gust of rage and he spoke somewhat as follows: "I am ordered to proclaim _jihad_. A _jihad_, as you know, is a Holy War to protect our Holy Places against infidels.

This being so, what are these infidel _pigs_ doing in our mosque?"

There was a most unseemly scuffle; the Turco-German contingent tried to seize the mullah; the Arab congregation defended him strenuously from arrest. In the confusion that worthy man got clear away and joined his family in Nejd. _Jihad_ is inc.u.mbent on all Moslems if against infidel aggression. We stood on the defensive when the Turks first attacked us on the Ca.n.a.l, and when we finally overran Palestine and Syria it was in co-operation with the Arabs, who have more right there than the Turks.

Those who forged the blade of this counterfeit _jihad_ could not temper it in the flame of religious fervour, and it shattered against the shield of religious tolerance and good faith: we make mistakes, but can honestly claim those two virtues.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: "The Land of Uz," Macmillan.]

CHAPTER III

ITS STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS

To gauge the strength or weakness of pan-Islam as a world-force we may best compare it with its great militant rival, the Christian Church, choosing common ground as the only sound basis of comparison, and remembering that it is pan-Islam we are examining rather than Islam itself--the tree, not the root; and though we cannot study the one without considering the other, Islam has already been extensively discussed by men better qualified than myself to deal with it: the requirements of this work only call for comparison so far as the driving-power of pan-Islam is concerned as a material force.

First of all we must discard common factors. I set the great Shiah schism against the Catholic Church (omitting the word "Roman" as a contradiction in terms) and cancel both for the purposes of comparison.

Catholicism, is not, of course, schismatic, otherwise there are points of resemblance, such as observances of saints and shrines, which have permeated the other sects to a certain extent; also the degree of antagonism is about the same. Therefore we can ignore the Catholic Church in this chapter, and when we are talking of pan-Islam we should consider it a Sunnite (or Orthodox) movement, and count the Shiites out, as they do not even recognise the same centre of pilgrimage.

Perhaps the strongest factor in pan-Islam as a political movement or a world-wide fellowship is the Meccan pilgrimage. I have already alluded to its cosmopolitan nature in the previous chapter, but never realised it so much till after the surrender of Jeddah, when stately Bokhariots, jabbering Javanese, Malays, Chinese, Russians, American citizens and South Africans were among those who beset me as stranded pilgrims. This implies a very wide sphere of influence, against which we can only set the well-known immorality and greed which pilgrims complain of at Mecca; a huge influx of cosmopolitan visitors to _any_ centre will generally cause such abuses. On the feast of Arafat there are normally 100,000 pilgrims in the Meccan area who represent 100 million orthodox Moslems throughout the world, while the actual population of the city is only 50,000.

The Arabic language is another strong bond of brotherhood in Islam. I do not mean to say that it is generally "understanded of the people," any more than Latin is throughout the Catholic world; but it is the language of most Sunnites and is moderately understood in Somaliland, East Africa, Java and the Malay peninsula as the language of the Koran; in fact, it is the only written language in Somaliland, and Turkey uses the script though not the tongue.

The daily observances of prayer, with their simple but obligatory ceremonial, and the yearly fast for the month of Ramadhan unite Moslems with the common ties of duty and hardship, as in the comradeship which sailors and soldiers have for each other throughout the world.

Then, again, there is no colour-line in Islam; a negro may rise to place and power (he often does), and usually enjoys the intimate confidence of his master as not readily amenable to local intrigue. Difference of nationality is not stressed except by the Young Turks, who have slighted Semitic Moslems to their own undoing. Contrast this att.i.tude with our Church and estimate the precise amount of Christian brotherhood between an Orthodox Greek, a Welsh Wesleyan, an Ethiopian priest, a Scotch Presbyterian, and an Anglican bishop (since the Kikuyu heresy). Even within the narrow limits of one sect there is nothing like the fellowship one finds in secular societies. Which is the stronger appeal, "Anglican communicant" or "Freemason"? Is a cross or the quadrant and compa.s.ses the more potent charm?

Arabs credit us Christians with a much stronger bond of sympathy between co-religionists than is actually the case. It is true that those who come into any sort of contact with us realise that there is a distinct difference in form of worship and sentiment between Catholics (whom they call _Christyan_) and Protestants (or _Nasara_), but I shall not readily forget the extraordinary conduct of a Hejazi who boarded us off Jeddah with some of the effects belonging to the murdered Germans mentioned in the previous chapter. He must have had the firm conviction that we Christians would avenge the killing of other Christians by Moslems, for he merely told me that he had in his possession certain property of the _Allemani_, and I told him that he would be suitably rewarded on producing it; I found out later that he had boasted to our ship's interpreter (a Mussulman) that he was one of the slayers, and it occurred to me that if that were the case he might be able to give me further information, or perhaps produce papers of theirs which might appear valueless to him but would be of interest to us. I interviewed him on deck and suggested this, reminding him of what he had told the interpreter, but laying no stress on the deed he had confessed, for it was outside our jurisdiction and no concern of mine.

"Papers?" he said. "By all means, I will go and fetch them," and breaking from my light hold of his sleeve he flickered over the rail and dropped into the sea some thirty feet below. Two armed marines stepped to the rail with a clatter of breech-bolts and looked inquiringly at me.

Meanwhile my bold murderer was calling on his G.o.d, for he wore a full bandoleer, which was weighing him down. Out darted a fishing-canoe from under our quarter and made for him, but its occupants took the hint I conveyed through a megaphone and confined their efforts to saving him for the duty-cutter to pick up.

He was brought before me dripping wet, with the fear of death in his eyes. I thought this was due to the foolish risk he had taken, and spoke in gentle reproof of his conduct, pointing out that if any boat had been alongside where he leaped he would have met with a bad accident. To my surprise he fell at my feet and scrabbled at my clean white shoes, imploring me to spare his life. I put him down as somewhat mad, and asked "Number One" to put a sentry over him to see that he did not repeat his attempt to avoid our acquaintance. He clung to me like a limpet and had to be removed by force, with despairing entreaties for mercy, disregarding my still puzzled a.s.surances as to his personal safety. I learned afterwards his true reason for alarm; he thought that after leaving my presence he would be quietly made away with in traditional Eastern style.