Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied7; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile8. They were fortunate in their epoch9: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men’s minds. By contrast the imitative exercise of the Arabs seemed cultured, their mental activity progressive, their state prosperous. They had performed real service in preserving something of a classical past for a mediaeval future.
With the coming of the Turks this happiness became a dream. By stages the Semites of Asia passed under their yoke10, and found it a slow death. Their goods were stripped from them; and their spirits shrivelled in the numbing11 breath of a military Government. Turkish rule was gendarme12 rule, and Turkish political theory as crude as its practice. The Turks taught the Arabs that the interests of a sect13 were higher than those of patriotism14: that the petty concerns of the province were more than nationality. They led them by subtle dissensions to distrust one another. Even the Arabic language was banished15 from courts and offices, from the Government service, and from superior schools. Arabs might only serve the State by sacrifice of their racial characteristics. These measures were not accepted quietly. Semitic tenacity16 showed itself in the many rebellions of Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia against the grosser forms of Turkish penetration17; and resistance was also made to the more insidious18 attempts at absorption. The Arabs would not give up their rich and flexible tongue for crude Turkish: instead, they filled Turkish with Arabic words, and held to the treasures of their own literature.
They lost their geographical19 sense, and their racial and political and historical memories; but they clung the more tightly to their language, and erected20 it almost into a fatherland of its own. The first duty of every Moslem21 was to study the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, and incidentally the greatest Arab literary monument. The knowledge that this religion was his own, and that only he was perfectly22 qualified23 to understand and practise it, gave every Arab a standard by which to judge the banal24 achievements of the Turk.
Then came the Turkish revolution, the fall of Abdul Hamid, and the supremacy25 of the Young Turks. The horizon momentarily broadened for the Arabs. The Young-Turk movement was a revolt against the hierarchic26 conception of Islam and the pan-Islamic theories of the old Sultan, who had aspired27, by making himself spiritual director of the Moslem world, to be also (beyond appeal) its director in temporal affairs. These young politicians rebelled and threw him into prison, under the impulse of constitutional theories of a sovereign state. So, at a time when Western Europe was just beginning to climb out of nationality into internationality, and to rumble28 with wars far removed from problems of race, Western Asia began to climb out of Catholicism into nationalist politics, and to dream of wars for self-government and self-sovereignty, instead of for faith or dogma. This tendency had broken out first and most strongly in the Near East, in the little Balkan States, and had sustained them through an almost unparalleled martyrdom to their goal of separation from Turkey. Later there had been nationalist movements in Egypt, in India, in Persia, and finally in Constantinople, where they were fortified29 and made pointed30 by the new American ideas in education: ideas which, when released in the old high Oriental atmosphere, made an explosive mixture. The American schools, teaching by the method of inquiry31, encouraged scientific detachment and free exchange of views. Quite without intention they taught revolution, since it was impossible for an individual to be modern in Turkey and at the same time loyal, if he had been born of one of the subject races — Greeks, Arabs, Kurds, Armenians or Albanians — over whom the Turks were so long helped to keep dominion32.
The Young Turks, in the confidence of their first success, were carried away by the logic33 of their principles, and as protest against Pan-Islam preached Ottoman brotherhood34. The gullible35 subject races — far more numerous than the Turks themselves — believed that they were called upon to co-operate in building a new East. Rushing to die task (full of Herbert Spencer and Alexander Hamilton) they laid down platforms of sweeping36 ideas, and hailed the Turks as partners. The Turks, terrified at the forces they had let loose, drew the fires as suddenly as they had stoked them. Turkey made Turkish for the Turks —Yeni-turan— became the cry. Later on, this policy would turn them towards the rescue of their irredenti — the Turkish populations subject to Russia in Central Asia; but, first of all, they must purge37 their Empire of such irritating subject races as resisted the ruling stamp. The Arabs, the largest alien component38 of Turkey, must first be dealt with. Accordingly the Arab deputies were scattered39, the Arab societies forbidden, the Arab notables proscribed40. Arabic manifestations41 and the Arabic language were suppressed by Enver Pasha more sternly than by Abdul Hamid before him.
However, the Arabs had tasted freedom: they could not change their ideas as quickly as their conduct; and the staffer spirits among them were not easily to be put down. They read the Turkish papers, putting ‘Arab’ for Turk’ in the patriotic42 exhortations43. Suppression charged them with unhealthy violence. Deprived of constitutional outlets44 they became revolutionary. The Arab societies went underground, and changed from liberal clubs into conspiracies45. The Akhua, the Arab mother society, was publicly dissolved. It was replaced in Mesopotamia by the dangerous Ahad, a very secret brotherhood, limited almost entirely46 to Arab officers in the Turkish Army, who swore to acquire the military knowledge of their masters, and to turn it against them, in the service of the Arab people, when the moment of rebellion came.
It was a large society, with a sure base in the wild part of Southern Irak, where Sayid Taleb, the young John Wilkes of the Arab movement, held the power in his unprincipled fingers. To it belonged seven out of every ten Mesopotamian-born officers; and their counsel was so well kept that members of it held high command in Turkey to the last. When the crash came, and Allenby rode across Armageddon and Turkey fell, one vice-president of the society was commanding the broken fragments of the Palestine armies on the retreat, and another was directing the Turkish forces across-Jordan in the Amman area. Yet later, after the armistice47, great places in the Turkish service were still held by men ready to turn on their masters at a word from their Arab leaders. To most of them the word was never given; for those societies were pro-Arab only, willing to fight for nothing but Arab independence; and they could see no advantage in supporting the Allies rather than the Turks, since they did not believe our assurances that we would leave them free. Indeed, many of them preferred an Arabia united by Turkey in miserable48 subjection, to an Arabia divided up and slothful under the easier control of several European powers in spheres of influence.
Greater than the Ahad was the Fetah, the society of freedom in Syria. The landowners, the writers, the doctors, the great public servants linked themselves in this society with a common oath, passwords, signs, a press and a central treasury49, to ruin the Turkish Empire. With the noisy facility of the Syrian — an ape-like people having much of the Japanese quickness, but shallow — they speedily built up a formidable organization. They looked outside for help, and expected freedom to come by entreaty50, not by sacrifice. They corresponded with Egypt, with the Ahad (whose members, with true Mesopotamian dourness51, rather despised them), with the Sherif of Mecca, and with Great Britain: everywhere seeking the ally to serve their turn. They also were deadly secret; and the Government, though it suspected their existence, could find no credible52 evidence of their leaders or membership. It had to hold its hand until it could strike with evidence enough to satisfy the English and French diplomats53 who acted as modern public opinion in Turkey. The war in 1914 withdrew these agents, and left the Turkish Government free to strike.
Mobilization put all power into the hands of those members — Enver, Talaat and Jemal — who were at once the most ruthless, the most logical, and the most ambitious of the Young Turks. They set themselves to stamp out all non-Turkish currents in the State, especially Arab and Armenian nationalism. For the first step they found a specious54 and convenient weapon in the secret papers of a French Consul55 in Syria, who left behind him in his Consulate56 copies of correspondence (about Arab freedom) which had passed between him and an Arab club, not connected with the Fetah but made up of the more talkative and less formidable intelligenzia of the Syrian coast. The Turks, of course, were delighted; for ‘colonial’ aggression57 in North Africa had given the French a black reputation in the Arabic-speaking Moslem world; and it served Jemal well to show his co-religionists that these Arab nationalists were infidel enough to prefer France to Turkey.
In Syria, of course, his disclosures had little novelty; but the members of the society were known and respected, if somewhat academic, persons; and their arrest and condemnation58, and the crop of deportations, exiles, and executions to which their trial led, moved the country to its depths, and taught the Arabs of the Fetah that if they did not profit by their lesson, the fate of the Armenians would be upon them. The Armenians had been well armed and organized; but their leaders had failed them. They had been disarmed59 and destroyed piecemeal60, the men by massacre61, the women and children by being driven and overdriven along the wintry roads into the desert, naked and hungry, the common prey62 of any passer-by, until death took them. The Young Turks had killed the Armenians, not because they were Christians63, but because they were Armenians; and for the same reason they herded64 Arab Moslems and Arab Christians into the same prison, and hanged them together on the same scaffold. Jemal Pasha united all classes, conditions and creeds65 in Syria, under pressure of a common misery66 and peril67, and so made a concerted revolt possible.
The Turks suspected the Arab officers and soldiers in the Army, and hoped to use against them the scattering68 tactics which had served against the Armenians. At first transport difficulties stood in their way; and there came a dangerous concentration of Arab divisions (nearly one third of the original Turkish Army was Arabic speaking) in North Syria early in 1915. They broke these up when possible, marching them off to Europe, to the Dardanelles, to the Caucasus, or the Canal — anywhere, so long as they were put quickly into the firing-line, or withdrawn69 far from the sight and help of their compatriots. A Holy War was proclaimed to give the ‘union and Progress’ banner something of the traditional sanctity of the Caliph’s battle-order in the eyes of the old clerical elements; and the Sherif of Mecca was invited — or rather ordered — to echo the cry.
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1
Mediterranean
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| adj.地中海的；地中海沿岸的 | |
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inchoate
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| adj.才开始的，初期的 | |
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parasite
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| n.寄生虫；寄生菌；食客 | |
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4
politic
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| adj.有智虑的；精明的；v.从政 | |
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lust
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| n.性(淫)欲；渴(欲)望；vi.对…有强烈的欲望 | |
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pretension
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| n.要求；自命，自称；自负 | |
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7
applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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8
futile
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| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
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9
epoch
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| n.(新)时代；历元 | |
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10
yoke
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| n.轭；支配；v.给...上轭，连接，使成配偶 | |
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11
numbing
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| adj.使麻木的，使失去感觉的v.使麻木，使麻痹( numb的现在分词 ) | |
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12
gendarme
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| n.宪兵 | |
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13
sect
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| n.派别，宗教，学派，派系 | |
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patriotism
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| n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义 | |
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15
banished
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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16
tenacity
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| n.坚韧 | |
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17
penetration
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| n.穿透，穿人，渗透 | |
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18
insidious
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| adj.阴险的，隐匿的，暗中为害的，（疾病）不知不觉之间加剧 | |
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19
geographical
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| adj.地理的；地区(性)的 | |
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20
ERECTED
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| adj. 直立的，竖立的，笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立，建立 | |
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21
Moslem
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| n.回教徒，穆罕默德信徒；adj.回教徒的，回教的 | |
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22
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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23
qualified
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| adj.合格的，有资格的，胜任的，有限制的 | |
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24
banal
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| adj.陈腐的，平庸的 | |
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25
supremacy
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| n.至上；至高权力 | |
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hierarchic
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| 等级制的，按等级划分的 | |
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aspired
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| v.渴望，追求( aspire的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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rumble
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| n.隆隆声；吵嚷；v.隆隆响；低沉地说 | |
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29
fortified
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| adj. 加强的 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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32
dominion
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| n.统治，管辖，支配权；领土，版图 | |
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logic
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| n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性 | |
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34
brotherhood
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| n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊 | |
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35
gullible
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| adj.易受骗的；轻信的 | |
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36
sweeping
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| adj.范围广大的，一扫无遗的 | |
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37
purge
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| n.整肃，清除，泻药，净化；vt.净化，清除，摆脱；vi.清除，通便，腹泻，变得清洁 | |
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38
component
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| n.组成部分，成分，元件；adj.组成的，合成的 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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proscribed
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| v.正式宣布（某事物）有危险或被禁止( proscribe的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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41
manifestations
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| n.表示，显示（manifestation的复数形式） | |
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42
patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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43
exhortations
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| n.敦促( exhortation的名词复数 )；极力推荐；（正式的）演讲；（宗教仪式中的）劝诫 | |
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44
outlets
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| n.出口( outlet的名词复数 )；经销店；插座；廉价经销店 | |
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45
conspiracies
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| n.阴谋，密谋( conspiracy的名词复数 ) | |
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46
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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47
armistice
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| n.休战，停战协定 | |
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48
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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49
treasury
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| n.宝库；国库，金库；文库 | |
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50
entreaty
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| n.恳求，哀求 | |
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51
dourness
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| n.性情乖僻，酸味，坏心眼 | |
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52
credible
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| adj.可信任的，可靠的 | |
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53
diplomats
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| n.外交官( diplomat的名词复数 )；有手腕的人，善于交际的人 | |
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54
specious
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| adj.似是而非的；adv.似是而非地 | |
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55
consul
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| n.领事；执政官 | |
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56
consulate
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| n.领事馆 | |
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57
aggression
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| n.进攻，侵略，侵犯，侵害 | |
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58
condemnation
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| n.谴责; 定罪 | |
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59
disarmed
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| v.裁军( disarm的过去式和过去分词 )；使息怒 | |
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60
piecemeal
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| adj.零碎的；n.片，块；adv.逐渐地；v.弄成碎块 | |
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61
massacre
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| n.残杀，大屠杀；v.残杀，集体屠杀 | |
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62
prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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63
Christians
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| n.基督教徒( Christian的名词复数 ) | |
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64
herded
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| 群集，纠结( herd的过去式和过去分词 )； 放牧； （使）向…移动 | |
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65
creeds
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| （尤指宗教）信条，教条( creed的名词复数 ) | |
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66
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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67
peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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68
scattering
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| n.[物]散射；散乱，分散；在媒介质中的散播adj.散乱的；分散在不同范围的；广泛扩散的；（选票）数量分散的v.散射(scatter的ing形式)；散布；驱散 | |
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69
withdrawn
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| vt.收回；使退出；vi.撤退，退出 | |
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