T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of
Wisdom
BOOK FIVE
CHAPTER 58
Changing skins August 1917 - Syria in 1915 -
Syrian elements - Syrians
Again there fell a pause in my work and again my
thoughts built themselves up. Till Feisal and Jaafar and Joyce and
the army came we could do little but think: yet that, for our own
credit, was the essential process. So far our war had had but the
one studied operation – the march on Akaba. Such haphazard playing
with the men and movements of which we had assumed the leadership
disgraced our minds. I vowed to know henceforward, before I moved,
where I was going and by what roads.
At Wejh the Hejaz war was won: after Akaba it was
ended. Feisal’s army had cleared off its Arabian liabilities and
now, under General Allenby the joint Commander-in-Chief, its role
was to take part in the military deliverance of Syria.
The difference between Hejaz and Syria was the
difference between the desert and the sown. The problem which faced
us was one of character - the learning to become civil. Wadi Musa
village was our first peasant recruit. Unless we became peasants
too, the independence movement would get no further.
It was good for the Arab Revolt that so early in its
growth this change imposed itself. We had been hopelessly labouring
to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of
the certainty of God, that upas certainty which forbade all hope.
Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass - a
beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell
dusty. Aims and ideas must be translated into tangibility by
material expression. The desert men were too detached to express the
one; too poor in goods, too remote from complexity, to carry the
other. If we would prolong our life, we must win into the ornamented
lands; to the villages where roofs or fields held men’s eyes
downward and near; and begin our campaign as we had begun that in
Wadi Ais, by a study of the map, and a recollection of the nature of
this our battleground of Syria.
Our feet were upon its southern boundary. To the east
stretched the nomadic desert. To the west Syria was limited by the
Mediterranean, from Gaza to Alexandretta. On the north the Turkish
populations of Anatolia gave it an end. Within these limits the land
was much parcelled up by natural divisions. Of them the first and
greatest was longitudinal; the rugged spine of mountains which, from
north to south, divided a coast strip from a wide inland plain.
These areas had climatic differences so marked that they made two
countries, two races almost, with their respective populations. The
shore Syrians lived in different houses, fed and worked differently,
used an Arabic differing by inflection and in tone from that of the
inlanders. They spoke of the interior unwillingly, as of a wild land
of blood and terror.
The inland plain was sub-divided geographically into
strips by rivers. These valleys were the most stable and prosperous
tillages of the country. Their inhabitants reflected them:
contrasting, on the desert side, with the strange, shifting
populations of the borderland, wavering eastward or westward with
the season, living by their wits, wasted by drought and locusts, by
Beduin raids; or, if these failed them, by their own incurable blood
feuds.
Nature had so divided the country into zones. Man,
elaborating nature, had given to her compartments an additional
complexity. Each of these main north-and-south strip divisions was
crossed and walled off artificially into communities at odds. We had
to gather them into our hands for offensive action against the
Turks. Feisal’s opportunities and difficulties lay in these
political complications of Syria which we mentally arranged in
order, like a social map.
In the very north, furthest from us, the
language-boundary followed, not inaptly, the coach road from
Alexandretta to Aleppo, until it met the Baghdad Railway, up which
it went to the Euphrates valley; but enclaves of Turkish speech lay
to the south of this general line in the Turkoman villages north and
south of Antioch, and in the Armenians who were sifted in among
them.
Otherwise, a main component of the coast population
was the community of Ansariya, those disciples of a cult of
fertility, sheer pagan, anti-foreign, distrustful of Islam, drawn at
moments towards Christians by common persecution. The sect, vital in
itself, was clannish in feeling and politics. One Nosairi would not
betray another, and would hardly not betray an unbeliever. Their
villages lay in patches down the main hills to the Tripoli gap. They
spoke Arabic, but had lived there since the beginning of Greek
letters in Syria. Usually they stood aside from affairs, and left
the Turkish Government alone in hope of reciprocity.
Mixed among the Ansariyeh were colonies of Syrian
Christians; and in the bend of the Orontes had been some firm blocks
of Armenians, inimical to Turkey. Inland, near Harim were Druses,
Arabic in origin; and some Circassians from the Caucasus. These had
their hand against all. North-east of them were Kurds, settlers of
some generations back, who were marrying Arabs and adopting their
politics. They hated native Christians most; and, after them, they
hated Turks and Europeans.
Just beyond the Kurds existed a few Yezidis,
Arabic-speaking, but in thought affected by the dualism of Iran, and
prone to placate the spirit of evil. Christians, Mohammedans, and
Jews, peoples who placed revelation before reason, united to spit
upon Yezid. Inland of them stood Aleppo, a town of two hundred
thousand people, an epitome of all Turkey’s races and religions.
Eastward of Aleppo, for sixty miles, were settled Arabs whose colour
and manner became more and more tribal as they neared the fringe of
cultivation where the semi-nomad ended and the Bedawi began.
A section across Syria from sea to desert, a degree
further south, began in colonies of Moslem Circassians near the
coast. In the new generation they spoke Arabic and were an ingenious
race, but quarrelsome, much opposed by their Arab neighbours. Inland
of them were Ismailiya. These Persian immigrants had turned Arab in
the course of centuries, but revered among themselves one Mohammed,
who in the flesh, was the Agha Khan. They believed him to be a great
and wonderful sovereign, honouring the English with his friendship.
They shunned Moslems, but feebly hid their beastly opinions under a
veneer of orthodoxy.
Beyond them were the strange sights of villages of
Christian tribal Arabs, under sheikhs. They seemed very sturdy
Christians, quite unlike their snivelling brethren in the hills.
They lived as the Sunni about them, dressed like them, and were on
the best terms with them. East of the Christians lay semi-pastoral
Moslem communities; and on the last edge of cultivation, some
villages of Ismailia outcasts, in search of the peace men would not
grant. Beyond were Beduin.
A third section through Syria, another degree lower, fell between
Tripoli and Beyrout. First, near the coast, were Lebanon Christians;
for the most part Maronites or Greeks. It was hard to disentangle
the politics of the two Churches. Superficially, one should have
been French and one Russian; but a part of the population, to earn a
living, had been in the United States, and there developed an
Anglo-Saxon vein, not the less vigorous for being spurious. The
Greek Church prided itself on being Old Syrian, autochthonous, of an
intense localism which might ally it with Turkey rather than endure
irretrievable domination by a Roman Power.
The adherents of the two sects were at one in
unmeasured slander, when they dared, of Mohammedans. Such verbal
scorn seemed to salve their consciousness of inbred inferiority.
Families of Moslems lived among them, identical in race and habit,
except for a less mincing dialect, and less parade of emigration and
its results.
On the higher slopes of the hills clustered
settlements of Metawala, Shia Mohammedans from Persia generations
ago. They were dirty, ignorant, surly and fanatical, refusing to eat
or drink with infidels; holding the Sunni as bad as Christians;
following only their own priests and notables. Strength of character
was their virtue: a rare one in garrulous Syria. Over the hill-crest
lay villages of Christian yeomen living in free peace with their
Moslem neighbours as though they had never heard the grumbles of
Lebanon. East of them were semi-nomad Arab peasantry; and then the
open desert.
A fourth section, a degree southward, would have
fallen near Acre, where the inhabitants, from the seashore, were
first Sunni Arabs, then Druses, then Metawala. On the banks of the
Jordan valley lived bitterly-suspicious colonies of Algerian
refugees, facing villages of Jews. The Jews were of varied sorts.
Some, Hebrew scholars of the traditionalist pattern, had developed a
standard and style of living befitting the country: while the later
comers, many of whom were German-inspired, had introduced strange
manners, and strange crops, and European houses (erected out of
charitable funds) into this land of Palestine, which seemed too
small and too poor to repay in kind their efforts: but the land
tolerated them. Galilee did not show the deep-seated antipathy to
its Jewish colonists which was an unlovely feature of the
neighbouring Judea.
Across the eastern plains (thick with Arabs) lay a
labyrinth of crackled lava, the Leja, where the loose and broken men
of Syria had foregathered for unnumbered generations. Their
descendants lived there in lawless villages, secure from Turk and
Beduin, and worked out their internecine feuds at leisure. South and
south-west of them opened the Hauran, a huge fertile land; populous
with warlike, self-reliant and prosperous Arab peasantry.
East of them were the Druses, heterodox Moslem
followers of a mad and dead Sultan of Egypt. They hated Maronites
with a bitter hatred; which, when encouraged by the Government and
the fanatics of Damascus, found expression in great periodic
killings. None the less the Druses were disliked by the Moslem Arabs
and despised them in return. They were at feud with the Beduins, and
preserved in their mountain a show of the chivalrous semi-feudalism
of Lebanon in the days of their autonomous Emirs.
A fifth section in the latitude of Jerusalem would
have begun with Germans and with German Jews, speaking German or
German-Yiddish, more intractable even than the Jews of the Roman
era, unable to endure contact with others not of their race, some of
them farmers, most of them shopkeepers, the most foreign,
uncharitable part of the whole population of Syria. Around them
glowered their enemies, the sullen Palestine peasants, more stupid
than the yeomen of North Syria, material as the Egyptians, and
bankrupt.
East of them lay the Jordan depth, inhabited by
charred serfs; and across it group upon group of self-respecting
village Christians who were, after their agricultural
co-religionists of the Orontes valley, the least timid examples of
our original faith in the country. Among them and east of them were
tens of thousands of semi-nomad Arabs, holding the creed of the
desert, living on the fear and bounty of their Christian neighbours.
Down this debatable land the Ottoman Government had planted a line
of Circassian immigrants from the Russian Caucasus. These held their
ground only by the sword and the favour of the Turks, to whom they
were, of necessity, devoted.
|
|