The Arab Revolt in the Hejaz

In June 1916, in the midst of the First World War, Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, the Hashemite emir of Makkah, proclaimed a revolt against the Ottoman Empire, encouraged and armed by Britain, which had promised in the correspondence with him to support an independent Arab state after the war. His sons, above all Faisal and Abdullah, led Arab and Bedouin forces in a mobile desert campaign, aided by British officers including T.E. Lawrence, and their most effective weapon was the raid: repeatedly blowing up the Hejaz Railway and cutting the telegraph to strangle the Ottoman garrisons strung along it, taking the Red Sea port of Aqaba in 1917, and advancing northward to enter Damascus in 1918. The revolt is remembered in sharply different ways. To Arab nationalists it was the founding struggle of modern Arab independence; from the standpoint of Islamic unity it was a grievous fracturing of the last Muslim empire in its hour of greatest danger, set against fellow Muslims; and in the end its central hope was betrayed, for the very powers that armed it had secretly agreed, in the Sykes-Picot accord, to divide the Arab lands between themselves rather than grant the promised independence. This scene depicts a characteristic moment of the desert war around 1917, a wrecked stretch of the Hejaz Railway with a camel column of the revolt and a severed telegraph line, in the bare mountains of the Hejaz.