La Perfide Albion

I grew up in an Arab Syria where passionate patriotic discourse was the norm and Arab nationalism often bordered on jingoism. Every national narrative has to have its heroes and villains. The latter could be native quislings or alien conspirators whose strings are pulled by some hostile power. Of heroes—real or imaginary—there certainly is no shortage, and the same goes for villains: the stronger those villains are, the better, as there is no glory fighting unworthy foes. This is self-evident: darkness is needed to better define the light, and every thesis needs an antithesis.

The super-villain I grew up with was the United States of America, sworn enemy of all “Progressives” worldwide and unconditionally supportive of a militaristic Israel, hell-bent on expansion to the detriment of its neighbors. The notorious Pentagon and CIA were plotting against the Arab World in general, and Syria in particular, day and night. Their nefarious designs aimed at nothing less than global hegemony, usurping Arabs’ national resources—oil first and foremost—and propping up “reactionary” Arab regimes and client states.

But the evil that my grandparents and great-grandparents were acquainted with was a different one. That malevolent superpower was—as my grandmother used to enviously repeat—the “empire on which the sun never sets.” It was mighty Great Britain, whose king or queen claimed the Indian Empire and ruled the Seven Seas. By contrast, we all know that England is now a has-been. To be sure, it still is prosperous and proud, but it no longer dominates Europe, let alone the world.

So a rising “Arab Nation” struggling to be born had to face the great power that was the United Kingdom. To an Arab nationalist of the first half of the twentieth century, the British committed two unforgivable sins: the first was to betray their promises to the Arab revolutionists, and the second was to issue the notorious Balfour Declaration pledging to facilitate the immigration of Jews to Palestine. Nothing the British would do could erase those twin crimes from Arab memory. Not even the White Paper of 1939 or the rapid decline of British influence after a ruinous WWII that they supposedly “won.”

It certainly is not my intention to exonerate England or to apologize for the Zionists. The British acted according to what they perceived as their national interest and—as I will try to demonstrate later—were as fair to the “Arabs” as could realistically be expected; as for the Zionists, they used every “legal” or illegal means at their disposal to realize their dreams, knowing full well this would be at the expense of the natives. No, my purpose in writing this post is to indict the Arabs (or rather their self-appointed representatives), their political immaturity, and their infantile ideology.

The once imposing Ottoman Empire was agonizing by the beginning of the twentieth century. From without, hungry European powers were disputing the leftovers of its vast territory when WWI erupted in 1914; from within, aš-Šarīf Ḥysayn of Mecca raised the banner of the Great Arab Revolution that was to revive the glory of early Islam while Egypt declared its independence from Constantinople under British auspices. As everyone knows, the Sublime Porte cast its lot with the Central Powers and lost, whereas the Hashemites of Hejaz bet on the Allies and won, or so they fancied.

Ḥysayn negotiated what many Arab historians described as an agreement with Great Britain to grant the Arabs their independence in a territory that extended from the Taurus Mountains in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to Iraq in the east; that was in exchange for the Arabs supporting the British campaign against Turkey with their guerrillas—themselves armed with British weapons and financed by British money. The details of this understanding were elaborated in the infamous Ḥysayn-McMahon Correspondence that spanned the interval between July 1915 and January 1916.

The contents of those letters are public knowledge, and I will not dwell on them. Suffice it to say that the British did not promise a whole lot no matter what Ḥysayn thought, and understandably so. England, which sacrificed hundreds of thousands of its young men and a tremendous treasure to defeat Germany and its allies, understood the proposed “independent” Arab kingdom as a client state to be stirred in the right direction by British “advisers.” Moreover, their vague promises were made to the Hashemites of Mecca, not to the “Arabs” whatever that term means. I would also argue that, after all was said and done, the British were fabulously generous with the Hashemites: they created a kingdom for Fayṣal—recently expelled from Syria by the French—in Iraq and concocted a realm for his brother Abdullah in a Transjordan forbidden to would-be Jewish immigrants. Ḥysayn would likely have kept the Hejaz fief to his family—his son Ali—had he been more realistic. Instead, he kept grumbling and whining until the frustrated British decided to abandon him to his fate at the hands of Ibn Sʿūd and his ʾIẖwān. In other words, the British were prepared to grant three kingdoms to the Hashemites and were perhaps justified in thinking that the territory claimed by Ḥysayn was vast enough to satisfy the appetite of many vassals and buy out quite a few enemies.

For in reality Šarīf Ḥysayn was asking the British to grant him a vast empire that they conquered on his behalf. Let there be no mistake about it: the Ottomans defeat was achieved by the British and only the British. Not only were Ḥysayn’ guerillas little more than British mercenaries, but also the entire “Great Arab Revolution,” as T. E. Lawrence would put it, was a “side show of a side show.” WWI was fought and decided in Europe, and the Ottoman Empire would have been terminated with or without Ḥysayn’s contribution. Had he and his apologists possessed a healthy dose of common sense, they would have realized that empires are conquered, not given.

Contrast Arabs’ attitude with that of the Zionists. Chaim Weizmann worked tirelessly towards preparing the conditions that would eventually lead to the creation of a Jewish state. He accepted a relatively modest territory and did not insist on a state right from the start. To him, a vague promise of a “Jewish National Home in Palestine” was adequate to begin with, it being implied that more could be demanded in due time. Indeed, there was no reason back in 1917 to conclude that a Jewish state was inevitable.

In summary, England deliberately issued vague promises to Arab and Jew, and its politicians went out of their way in wording their documents as to leave ample room for maneuver for their successors. While it is true that the Balfour Declaration gave a “legal” basis for the Zionist enterprise, it remains undeniable that Israel became a reality in 1948 mainly thanks to the commitment of wealthy European and American Jews financing the—mainly Eastern European—Jewish settlement in Palestine and providing the settlers with arms and ammunition to conquer the land at the expense of its inhabitants. Contrary to the Hashemites, the Zionists relied first and foremost on themselves.

Heroes and villains are the stuff out of which movies are made, comic books are illustrated, and tales are told. In real life we have winners and losers/ If you win, all is or would be forgiven in time. If you lose, you accept the crumbs the victor might leave you out of the goodness of his heart or hold your peace. Many losers did not even survive to relate their ordeal.

The White Man's Burden

Years ago, I came across a curious narrative concerning the conquest of Egypt by ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, completed by the end of 642 CE. Muslim chroniclers have from time immemorial glorified what undoubtedly was an impressive military achievement and a seminal event in the epical history of Egypt. According to Muslim tradition, the conquered peoples of Egypt and Syria—the overwhelming majority of whom were Christians—welcomed their Muslim brethren from Arabia with open arms as deliverers from the Byzantine yoke and went out of their way to collaborate with them against their Roman oppressors.

There certainly is a kernel of truth in this account, and this goes a long way in explaining the ease with which Muḥammad’s followers were able to defeat the vast and—in theory—mighty Eastern Roman Empire. I stress “in theory,” for Byzantium at the time was a mere shadow of its former self; it barely survived a protracted and ruinous conflict with Sassanid Persia, and its people were engaged in an endless and bloody civil strife concerning the nature of Christ: did Jesus have a divine nature? Human nature? or both? The Incarnation Controversy preoccupied legions of theologians and was slowly but surely tearing the Byzantine Empire asunder. For the sake of brevity, suffice it to say that Egypt’s Christians followed the Monophysite Doctrine, which maintained that Jesus had one single divine nature as opposed to the Chalcedonian creed that insisted that Jesus had two natures, one divine and the other human; the latter doctrine was promoted by Constantinople to the exclusion of others.

Relieved to see the back of the Romans, the Copts lost no time in dispatching a delegation to the victor. They congratulated ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ on his great exploit, professed allegiance to the rising Arab Empire, and proceeded to explain to the conqueror the irreconcilable differences between them and Byzantium. They mourned the persecution they had to endure for adhering to their faith. Perhaps they also harbored the hope that ʿAmr would exact revenge against their erstwhile foes on their behalf.

Unfortunately for them, ʿAmr understood next to nothing about their esoteric disputes. He was a brilliant general and an astute politician, but a theologian he was not. His practical mind could not fathom the nuanced and convoluted arguments about the nature of Christ. Worse still, he expressed not the least interest in the subject. He laconically replied that since they all were Christians, they all were subject to the poll tax (ǧizīā), and no retaliation would be tolerated. The rest is history, or at least the victor's version of it.

It would be too simplistic to attribute cynical motives to ʿAmr or many other great conquerors for that matter. It is indeed quite likely that he and his fellow desert warriors genuinely believed that they were “liberating” the Copts from Byzantine occupation, the same way Saʿd ibn abi Waqqāṣ “freed” Sassanid Iraq from Persian tyranny. Most humans love to attribute lofty, even altruistic motives to their deeds, and many manage to convince themselves at some level of the truthfulness of those motives. I see no reason to doubt the good intentions of Napoléon or that Tamerlane considered himself a devout Muslim, though everyone knows that those two men perpetrated or at least played a dominant role in wholesale slaughters.

Fast forward to the year 1920, when General Henri Gouraud marched on Damascus, deposed King Fayṣal, and inaugurated the French Mandate of Syria. British arms “liberated” Syria from Ottoman rule in 1918, and now came the French to “civilize” a then barbarous Syria. The “Liberating Mission” of Great Britain begat the “Civilizing Mission” of France, or, as the French would put it, “la Mission Civilisatrice.” Enfranchising and civilizing the backward peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were sacrosanct goals in the best tradition of “the White Man’s Burden.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, the French managed to commit quite a few atrocities during their relatively brief stay in Syria—a little more than 25 years—but the Mandate was more than a brutal occupation by a ruthless colonial power. Along with soldiers and high commissioners came educators, missionaries, scientists, archeologists, financiers, and administrators. True, many of these came pursuing a career, but quite few truly believed that they had the best interests of the natives at heart.

The Mandate was doomed to fail, however, and for numerous reasons, both internal and external. The French discovered that there was no peaceful way to keep Syria, and they were too weakened by WWII to impose their will by crude force. Had they tried to do so, the price in blood and treasure would have been unacceptable. The year 1946 witnessed the last French soldiers leaving Syria; for most Syrians it was a day to celebrate, but for the French it was a mere episode in a long series of retreats that would culminate in evacuating Algeria in the early 1960s following a bloodbath that disillusioned all but the most fanatic believers in “civilizing missions.”

Decades would pass before the West, led by a rising transatlantic empire, recovered its appetite for “liberating” and civilizing.” I no longer can keep track of how many countries were “liberated” within the last 25 years: Kuwait, Bosnia, Iraq, Libya… To name but a few. Syria is the most recent candidate for “liberation,” a process that started in 2011 and is still underway today.

Just to be clear about where I stand and what I believe in, the vast majority of Syria’s would-be “liberators” are acting according to their own geopolitical calculations and with utter disregard to Syria’s best interests. To add to the confusion, those “benefactors” represent numerous nations with different goals and varying methods of achieving those goals.

That those nations would pursue their perceived interests is not surprising in the least. What I find hard to digest is the ease with which many Syrians have put their trust in outsiders. It would be tedious to analyze the motives of each and every actor separately, and I don’t even believe that I qualify for such a complex task. I will therefore choose one actor, unquestionably the major actor, without whom the Syrian scene would have been drastically different as I type those sentences: the American Union, or its government, to be precise.

Not all those who advocate “liberating” Syria are cynics, though there is no dearth of hypocrisy. I have no doubt in my mind that some American statesmen would love to help Syria and Syrians, and perhaps they—like many warriors throughout history—really believe that the best way to do it would be through some military intervention that may include bombing the hapless country into “freedom and democracy,” whatever those terms mean.

 My questions to those Syrians who would entrust outsiders (the USA) with their fate are:

1. Regardless of what American politicians state and what their media repeat, do you really think that Syria is a priority for the USA? One has to separate rhetoric from fact. Americans have many issues to worry about that are far more important to them than anything that might or might not happen in Syria: jobs, healthcare, education, retirement benefits, and so on. This is totally understandable.

2. Do you know that millions of Americans can’t locate Syria on a map if their life depended on it? Do you know that millions of Americans (perhaps most Americans) can’t tell the difference between Arab and Muslim, let alone between a Sunni and an Alawite?

3. Suppose America does indeed “liberate” Syria. How long would it take for Syria to vanish from US news like magic, the way Libya did after the fall of Colonel Gaddafi? Heck, the Kardashians’ exploits are a much higher priority for many Americans than anything happening or that might happen in the Near East.


Syria is imploding before our eyes while some Syrians busy themselves imploring foreigners to “liberate” them. They seem to be anticipating a Messiah or a Mahdi, but I am afraid they’ll be waiting for a very long time.