The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (45 page)

The Anglo-Ottoman Society takes its place in prewar England as a well-intentioned, not particularly effective, but nevertheless active political lobbying group, most notable perhaps for its highly eclectic membership. Unanimity among members was impossible. Conservatives like George Lloyd believed Britain should ally with the Ottomans for strategic reasons; Muslims like Dusé Mohamed Ali and Mushir Hussein Kidwai believed Britain should support a regime that the other powers, great and small, were pecking to death. They saw the Young Turk government both as the victim of imperialism and as the protector of dark-skinned people throughout the world. Some British Muslims, like Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, wanted an Anglo-Ottoman alliance in part because both empires contained millions of Muslims.

Then came the war. Most British Turcophiles and British Muslims believed that Britain had to enter it. Most members of the Anglo-Ottoman Society agreed. Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, who
²⁴
thought Germany was the aggressor, endorsed Britain’s decision to fight: “Islam teaches that the use of arms in self-defense is perfectly legitimate.” Anti-imperialists like Dusé Mohamed Ali held back, although the possibility of German victory appalled even him. “Are the Germans to extend their rule over vast numbers of Black and Brown men?” he asked. “We who know something
²⁵
of what German rule means and of their treatment of Africans in Togoland, Kamerun and their other African Colonies, say fervently, God forbid!” One thing, however, every British Turcophile and every British Muslim agreed upon: War between Britain and Turkey would be disastrous. Britain must do everything in her power to woo the Ottomans, to keep them from the German embrace. Then Enver Pasha engineered his casus belli, and Turkey joined the war. Now British Turcophiles and Muslims
reached another shared conclusion: that Britain and the Ottoman Empire must negotiate a separate peace.

It took time for the British Turcophile and Muslim communities to develop spokesmen who could credibly articulate this demand, but once they did so, the British government could not ignore them. In fact, on occasion the easterners made use of them. This uneasy relationship lasted from early 1916 until the end of the war.

One British Turcophile who desperately wanted a separate peace was the deliciously named Marmaduke Pickthall. He was a successful novelist who often wrote about the mysterious, romantic Middle East, with which he had fallen in love as a young man while traveling there, “living native,” as he later put it. A second extended visit in 1907 at age thirty-three confirmed his early impressions, and a third trip in 1913 taught him to greatly admire Young Turk politicians as well. He spoke often at prewar and wartime Anglo-Ottoman Society meetings. Dusé Mohamed Ali may have been the instigator of the society, and Lord Lamington may have been its titular president, but Pickthall became its motor. He “did everything for it,
²⁶
except bathe the members,” writes his biographer.

Pickthall belonged not only to the British Turcophile community but to the British Muslim community too. Although he was the son of an Anglican minister and the stepbrother of two Anglican nuns, he was drawn to Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din and spent much time at the mosque in Woking. He would convert to Islam in 1917. Many years later he would write the first literal translation of the Quran into English. It is worth pointing out that Pickthall and Aubrey Herbert had formed a friendship. The Conservative MP introduced the novelist to important Young Turks who came to England and wrote introductions for Pickthall when he traveled to Turkey in 1913. Upon his return to England, Pickthall made a point of attending the House of Commons when Herbert spoke on Turkish questions.

With the commencement of the war, Pickthall wrote a steady stream of well-informed articles and letters to the press extolling Young Turk virtues and criticizing Britain’s Near Eastern and Middle Eastern policies. He feared, rightly, that Turkey would be drawn into the conflict on the side of Germany. In September 1914, before Enver Pasha maneuvered his country into the war, Pickthall attended an exclusive gathering at the home of Professor R. W. Seton-Watson, an expert on the Habsburg Empire and the Near East. He read a paper to “a group of men who were certainly not ill-informed on the subject of Foreign Affairs.” The subsequent discussion left
him aghast. No one who spoke thought the Ottoman Empire would be allowed to survive the war. Pickthall wrote incredulously: “The question was how much of Turkey should be left to Turks at the peace settlement!” He determined to find out what the British policy really was (no doubt by questioning his well-connected friends in the Anglo-Ottoman Society) and by February 18, 1915, was in a position practically to predict the Tripartite Agreement. This was about a year before the diplomats inked in its final clauses.

Long before Mark Sykes began rethinking the arrangements he had arrived at with Picot, Marmaduke Pickthall knew what to make of this plan: “It is essentially a mess and not a settlement, bound to produce another great war.”

Some nine months
²⁸
earlier Pickthall had become friendly with another pro-Ottoman, Dr. Felix Valyi, the Hungarian-born editor of a French journal of opinion,
La Revue politique internationale
. When the war began, Valyi moved to Lausanne, continuing to publish his
Revue
and connecting with the Turkish minister there, Fuad Selim al-Hijari.
²⁹
The latter disapproved of Enver Pasha’s pro-German policy and maintained contact with like-minded Turks. In the spring of 1916 this group made what appears to have been a concerted effort for a separate peace. Almost simultaneously Prince Sabaheddin, founder of the Turkish Liberal Union Party, sounded the British ambassador in Paris about peace talks; one of his followers approached Sir Henry McMahon in Cairo; and Fuad made discreet inquiries with the Italian ambassador in Switzerland.

By now the British government, which did not believe the Ottoman government was ready to make peace under any circumstances, was telling such men first to depose Turkey’s present rulers and then to bring up the matter with Russia, because the issue of Constantinople would have to be dealt with before any separate peace could be arranged, and Russia had specific
plans for that city. Even so, the separate peace idea remained alive in the minds of certain liberal Turks and their fellow travelers, including Dr. Valyi.

Valyi once said of himself, “I am more a philosopher
³⁰
than a politician, and my program is to remove politics from the exclusive influence of the personally ambitious and to introduce into its domain those unselfish intellectuals who, up to the present, balk at the idea of associating themselves with politics.” “Philosopher” may not have been
³¹
an accurate self-description, but “unselfish intellectual” was a fair rendering of Marmaduke Pickthall. When Valyi suggested to Fuad Selim al-Hijari that Pickthall was an obvious choice to serve as intermediary between British officials and nonconformist Turks interested in a separate peace, the latter agreed.

Valyi wrote to his English friend from Berne:

Pickthall, a political innocent, jumped at the opportunity. Unfortunately he could not consult with his more experienced friend Aubrey Herbert, who was now away in the army. He made his initial formal approach to Lord Newton, an assistant under secretary of state for foreign affairs, who warned him that Britain would not undertake anything “directed against the solidarity of the Entente.” What was this except a repetition of the recognition that Russia would veto any peace plan threatening its acquisition of Constantinople? It meant, really, that Pickthall’s assay in diplomacy was doomed from the start, yet the aspiring peacemaker wrote to Valyi that he was optimistic.

The mail was slow. On pins and needles, Pickthall wrote to Valyi again: “I am awaiting with some anxiety your answer to my letter.” He repeated the Foreign Office prescription about the solidarity of the Entente. If the Turks accepted that, then “I have been informed that I would be allowed to go to Switzerland to talk over the matter to which you refer.” This was like saying that he would be allowed to go when the Turks proved that the moon was made of cheese.

In Switzerland more experienced heads were mulling the thing over. Valyi might claim to be a better philosopher than he was a politician, but
Fuad Selim al-Hijari knew about politics. He probably understood that the “solidarity of the Entente” could not stand an Anglo-Ottoman peace agreement that left Constantinople in Turkish hands. Could he entice the Foreign Office to let Pickthall come to Switzerland anyway? Who knew what might develop if only discussions could begin? Valyi, undoubtedly coached by Fuad, wrote to his friend: “I cannot say more than this by letter, but there is no risk in granting you a passport. If the results of your voyage are nil you merely return to England. If, however, things are as I think you will find them [then] I am sure that you will be strongly requested to go on with the work.”

Before this message arrived, the fretful Pickthall had sought out Mark Sykes, whom perhaps he had met through Aubrey Herbert. Perhaps he thought he was playing a trump card. He did not realize that Sykes’s hatred of the Young Turk regime overshadowed his rosy prewar view of the Ottoman Empire—that, in fact, Sykes was one of the men planning its complete dismemberment. Sykes had just returned from Russia, where he had polished details of the Tripartite Agreement with Picot and Russian foreign minister Sergei Sazanov, skinning the Ottoman bear before it was a carcass. The busy, high-powered, roving British agent had little time for novelists and editors spinning dreams of a separate peace. He wrote to Pickthall on May 25, 1916, denying him permission to travel abroad. The invitation from Valyi did not warrant it: “The writer is apparently an Hungarian with no authority to speak on behalf of the Ottoman Government.”

Pickthall now appealed to the Reverend H. G. Rosedale, who had introduced him to Dr. Valyi in the first place. Rosedale knew another assistant under secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Maurice de Bunsen—chairman of the committee that had envisaged carving up and parceling out Ottoman territories the previous year! Rosedale wrote to de Bunsen: “The man whom the Turks like & trust & [who] especially finds an admirer in M. Valyi, is a man I know well, Mr. Pickthall, the writer of many books & an expert on Oriental questions … In my opinion there would be no danger in intrusting Mr. Pickthall with a mission to see what really lies behind this ‘olive branch.’” But it was not Rosedale’s opinion of Pickthall that mattered, it was the Foreign Office’s opinion. As to that: “Mr. Pickthall is most undesirable, and should in no way be encouraged. In fact he ought to be interned as an alien enemy!” wrote one mandarin when de Bunsen circulated Rosedale’s letter. And another, repeating the now-common British refrain, added: “If Turkey wishes to make peace, then the present Government must be ejected & overtures must be made, not to us, but to Russia.” Eventually
de Bunsen wrote to Rosedale and in similar vein to Pickthall: “I am directed by Sir Edward
³²
Grey to state that, in present circumstances, he regrets his inability to avail himself of Mr. Pickthall’s offer.”

Still the novelist could not quite let the matter lapse. He wrote again to Valyi, giving vent to his frustration, praising the Ottomans, criticizing the Foreign Office. Unwisely he sent a copy of the letter to Sykes. The latter replied cuttingly, “I do not consider that it is proper that you should assume absolute friendship to an enemy State in writing to the subject of another enemy State, and further speak in a distinctly hostile tone of your own government.” This appears finally to have burst Pickthall’s bubble. He had written six months before, “I am a nobody
³³
and can do nothing to avert the great disaster I have long seen coming.” It was true. The Turcophile community would eventually produce an envoy whom the British government took seriously, but Marmaduke Pickthall was not that man.

That the Ottoman Empire would or could have negotiated a separate peace with the Allies during 1915–16 seems unlikely, although serious men wished for it. Meanwhile British Zionists remained ignorant of the Turcophiles’ efforts. Had they known of them, they would have been angered and frightened, for a separate peace with Turkey might have left Palestine languishing (as they would have termed it) inside the Ottoman Empire. In those years British Zionists lacked the strength to effectively oppose such an outcome.

A year later they had gained strength—and knowledge. Now they knew what the British Turcophiles and Muslims and a few easterners and dissident Turks wished for. But meanwhile the advocates of a separate peace had grown stronger too. How could it have been otherwise, when the war continued to grind up lives and principles and the will to fight on? The pieces from both sides of the historical chessboard moved purposefully forward; already a pawn, Marmaduke Pickthall, had been sacrificed; now more powerful tokens slid into position. The fate of millions depended on where they would land.