On 3 December 1908, the steamer Tanta dropped anchor in Jeddah harbour with Hussain and all his family aboard. The crystal-white tenement houses of the port with their baroque latticework and hidden balconies peeped over the half-ruined sea-gate, where, on the wharf, a crowd of officials and local Arabs had gathered to meet him. From the deck of the Tanta, piled high with sea-chests, boxes and furled carpets – the gleanings of fifteen years of exile – the Sharif watched the sunlight flashing off the sails of scores of dhows cutting through the sea towards the ship. They were packed with cheering people from stem to stern: Bedu chieftains, merchant traders, minor dignitaries, court plaintiffs, distant relatives of the Hashemite family – all come to look over their new Emir and ingratiate themselves if possible. Hussain cannot but have suppressed a wry smile. His predecessor had been virtually the toy of the Ottoman Governor – the Vali – who controlled the cities, the army and the courts, and was responsible for budget, taxation, security and defence. In theory, the Emir had responsibility only for the unruly Bedu tribes, who answered to no one. In practice, though, the position was very different. The Turkish administration was regarded as an alien force by most of the indigenous Hejazis, five-sixths of whom were nomadic or semi-nomadic Bedu. That there were ways and means of manipulating the tribes, Hussain had learned almost as a child, for he had been brought up in the court of his uncle – the Emir – in daily contact with Bedu chiefs, and had been well schooled in the art of playing off tribes and factions, of navigating the endless maze of vituperation, vacillation and discussion which had filled the Emir’s days. The Turks controlled the cities, but between the cities lay the desert, and there the Bedu ruled. Only the Hejaz railway effectively connected the Ottoman garrisons with the outside world. Hussain had thought a great deal about rebellion as a youth: he had been a party to his uncle’s conspiracy to foment a revolt in the Assir – the province immediately to the south of the Hejaz – which had led directly to the Emir’s assassination. He was astute enough to be aware of the advantages of courting the British: the Hejaz depended on grain from British India, and the Royal Navy controlled the Red Sea. He admired the British for their straight-dealing and honesty – a refreshing contrast to the Sultan’s forked tongue – and his pro-British tendency was well known to the Porte. When Hussain made a visit to the British Embassy in Istanbul not long after his uncle’s murder, the Sultan had warned him sharply that he should ‘fish in healthier waters’. A secret report made at the same time by a government spy described him as ‘wilful and recalcitrant … with a dangerous capacity for independent thought’; it was just such a capacity which he intended to exercise now to restore the office of Emir of Mecca to its rightful glory.² As he stepped upon his native soil on that day in December 1908, the Sharif’s dreams ran far beyond the borders of the Hejaz.

When the Prophet Mohammad died in AD 632, he left no male heirs and had made no provision for a ‘Successor’ or ‘Caliph’. For a moment the whole future of Islam hung in the balance. Mohammad had made it clear in his lifetime that he was ‘the Seal of the Prophets’ – the last in the line of God’s apostles which had begun with Father Adam and included Jesus Christ. For some of his followers the very idea of a ‘Successor’ was thus questionable. Finally, the Muslims had declared in favour of the Prophet’s oldest companion, Abu Bakr, initiating a period of rule by the so-called ‘Rightly Minded Caliphs’, all of whom had been early converts to Islam, none of them related closely to the Prophet. Westerners saw the Caliph as a kind of Muslim ‘Pope’ – a misconception which continued to be held up to the twentieth century. In fact, the Caliph was not responsible for religious doctrine, which was determined by the ‘ulama – a consensus of learned elders. His function was always that of defensor fidei – a role almost parallel to the one played in the Catholic Church by the Holy Roman Emperor in medieval times. In 661 the Caliphate had returned to the Prophet’s own line, and the centre of power had shifted from the Hejaz to Damascus in Syria, under the ‘Umayyads. Centuries later, the capital was moved again, this time to Baghdad, under the Abbasids, whose most famous scion was Hirun ar-Rashid. The Abbasids were much influenced by Persia, and had long since forsaken their Bedu levies in favour of the Mamluks, a caste of military slaves drawn mainly from the Caucasus. In doing so they had sown the seeds of their own downfall. Inevitably slaves had become masters, and the Caliph had been reduced to a mere puppet whose function was to lend credibility to the Mamluk regime. When the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim broke the Mamluk army in Syria in 1516, he found among the prisoners an unimpressive personage called Mutawakkil, who turned out to be the last in the line of Caliphs of direct descent from the Prophet. Though Selim the Grim never adopted the title Caliph, it was taken informally by his son, Sulayman the Magnificent, whose empire stretched from Baghdad to Budapest. The Caliphate had remained in Turkish hands ever since.

If the Caliphate featured in Hussain’s thoughts, though, it was subordinate to the furtherance of his own family, in particular his four sons, ‘Ali, ‘Abdallah, Feisal and Zayd. The last, born in Stamboul to the Sharif’s second wife, the Circassian beauty Adlah Hanum, was still a boy. The others were in their twenties, born in the Hejaz but brought up in Turkey as young patricians of the Empire. They had been well educated, spoke Turkish more fluently than Arabic, and knew French and some English. Sophisticated townsmen, to some extent cosmopolitan, multilingual, religious, they were very much Turkish in outlook, and though well versed in court intrigue, they knew little except by hearsay of the desert, the Bedu, black tents and camel-raids. Despite the driving ambitions of the Sharif, it is unlikely that as the young Sharaifs went ashore that December they imagined that two of them would end their lives as kings, or that the instrument of their elevation would be a young Oxford undergraduate who had yet to step on Arabian soil, and who had but weeks before stood on a hill at Les Baux thrilling at his first sight of the Mediterranean sea.

5. A Rather Remarkable Young Man

Oxford and Syria 1908-9

Lawrence returned from his tour of France with his head full of the East, Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades. He had even photographed an Arabic inscription on the castle at Montreuil Bellayn – supposed to have been built by Richard – which he believed had never been translated. He had cycled 2,400 miles, lived on milk and fruit, and had come home ‘brown as a jap and as thin as paper’, enraptured by the idea for his thesis on military architecture: ‘Eureka!’ he wrote to Scroggs Beeson. ‘I’ve got it at last for a thesis: the transition from the square keep form: really, it is too great for words.’¹

He had also had a vision of the real Middle Ages as opposed to the Morrisian romantic image of them. In Chartres cathedral, he had been overwhelmed by a sense of space and light – just as William Morris had been fifty years earlier. It was, he wrote, ‘a feeling I had never had before … as though I had found a path … as far as the gates of heaven and had caught a glimpse of the inside, the door being ajar’.² Throwing off his Ruskinesque mannerism, Lawrence’s genuine ecstasy shines through in this, the most moving of all his pre-war letters, as for the first time he realized that not freedom – as Ruskin believed – but absolute faith had enabled medieval craftsmen to create a masterpiece like Chartres. The world of the medieval mason had been a narrow one, indeed, but he had had certainty: a certain connection with God, a certain knowledge of his place in the cosmos. It was not freedom which the industrial era had lost – for technology was ultimately a liberating force – but certainty. While the Renaissance, which Lawrence so much despised, had introduced rational enlightenment, it had also introduced doubt, which he would later call ‘our modern crown of thorns’: ‘Certainly Chartres is the sight of a lifetime,’ he concluded, ‘a place truly in which to worship God. The Middle Ages were truer that way than ourselves, in spite of their narrowness and hardness and ignorance of the truth as we complacently put it: but the truth doesn’t matter a straw, if men only believe what they say or are willing to show that they believe something.’³ It is another of the great paradoxes of Lawrence’s life that as a thinking man par excellence he was able to see that faith was everything, but was too rational to believe in anything himself. His condemnation of himself as ‘insanely rational’ was the perfect expression of this paradox. He would come to envy the Arabs, who humbled him by their simple faith. They were, he saw, a people who still inhabited the spiritual certainties of the Middle Ages: ‘a people of primary colours’, as he put it, ‘or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour’.⁴ By 1908 Lawrence had already begun to lose his faith in Christianity and, according to one story, had lost his job as a Sunday School teacher for reading ‘his boys’ a story by the disgraced Oscar Wilde. It was Sarah who destroyed his faith for him, just as she destroyed almost everything else in his life: ‘she begs us to love her … he wrote to Charlotte Shaw, ‘and points us to Christ, in whom, she says, is the only happiness and truth. Not that she finds happiness herself … she makes Arnie and me profoundly unhappy. We are so helpless; we feel that we would never give any other human being the pain she gives us, by her impossible demands … we cannot turn on love to her … like a water-tap; and Christ is not a symbol but a personality, spoiled by the accretions of such believers as herself.’⁵ Any vestige of faith he might have had at twenty was certainly gone by the time he wrote: ‘I haven’t any convictions or disbeliefs – except the one that there is no “is”.’⁶ His admission later that though he had ‘fenced his life with scaffolding of more or less speculative hypotheses’ one could ‘really know nothing’⁷ was entirely in keeping with the Lawrence who told Robert Graves: ‘I fall … into the nihilism which cannot find, in being, even a false God in which to believe.’⁸