In late 1914, an Indian youth had been arrested by the British authorities while attempting to cross the North West Frontier from Afghanistan and India. Sewn into the seams of his clothing were pieces of linen which carried the details of a world-wide plot to raise an Islamic Jihad or Holy War against Britain, France and Russia, the powers of the Triple Entente. The youth was the emissary of an Indian renegade called Barakat Allah, an agent of the Turkish government in Kabul, and had been on his way to meet contacts in India, who were to encourage Indian troops in the British army to mutiny, assassinate their foreign leaders and attack their quarters. He was, it turned out, just one of thousands of agents, preachers, scholars, holy men, spies and agitators being dispatched by the Committee of Union and Progress to infiltrate India, Persia, Egypt, Afghanistan, Arabia, Mesopotamia, the Libyan desert and the Sudan. The Jihad plot was intended to set the Islamic world ablaze. On 7 November, only a week after the declaration of war, the Sheikh al-Islam – the highest religious official in the Ottoman Empire – had declared the fatwa, making it the personal duty of every Muslim to take up arms against the Allies. A central tenet of the Jihad, though, was the protection of the Holy Cities, Mecca and Medina, and without the blessing of their steward, Sharif Hussain, the fatwa was a worthless scrap of paper.

His blessing Hussain had refused staunchly to give. In November he had written to Enver Pasha, Ottoman Minister of War, that he would support the Jihad with all his heart and pray for its success, but he could not endorse it openly for fear that the British Red Sea fleet would immediately launch a blockade. The population of the Hejaz was dependent on grain imported from British India, and its people would eventually be faced with famine, and might even – he suggested – revolt against Ottoman rule. He paid lip service to the Porte to the extent of raising a force of mujahidiyyin – Islamic volunteers – but simultaneously contacted the great chiefs of the Arabian Peninsula: Ibn Sa’ud of the Nejd, Ibn Rashid of the Shammar, the Imam Yahya of Yemen, and al-Idrisi of the Assir, in great secrecy, explaining why he had failed to support the Jihad, and eliciting their attitude towards the Turks. Of these, Ibn Sa’ud, who was receiving a substantial stipend from the Anglo-Indian Government, resolved to stay neutral and watch the outcome. His rival Ibn Rashid – who feared him – decided consequently to throw in his lot with the Turks. The Imam Yahya, facing the British in Aden, did the same, and al-Idrisi, now receiving a cash incentive from Britain, had always been implacably anti-Turk. Jamal Pasha, Military Governor of Syria as well as Commander-in-Chief of Turkish forces there, was preparing the Ottoman 4th Army for an assault on the Suez Canal. The attack was scheduled for February 1915, and the CUP hoped it would spark off a revolt by the Egyptians against their infidel masters, the British. That Hussain refused to play his part in stirring up his co-religionists infuriated them, and although they were powerless but to accept his refusal officially, they decided to get rid of him secretly by assassination or arrest. Unfortunately, the principal of the plot, Vehib Pasha – Governor of the Hejaz – mysteriously lost a trunk containing compromising documents, which was handed to ‘Ali, Hussain’s eldest son. The Sharif now had first-hand proof of the Machiavellian duplicity which lay beneath the Porte’s assurances that the Hejaz railway was the only bone of contention between them. He decided to send his third son, Feisal, to Istanbul to confront the CUP with the evidence of its own calumny. Meanwhile, he was able to take some comfort from the fact that the Hashemites were not entirely alone.

In January, an Arab officer who was to be attached to his personal bodyguard, Fawzi al-Bakri, a young member of a prominent merchant clan of Damascus which had long enjoyed cordial relations with the Hashemites, had brought a verbal message from al-Fatat, a secret Arab nationalist society in Syria. The message, which Fawzi had whispered into the Sharif’s ear as he sat gazing imperturbably out of the window of his palace in Mecca, was that nationalist leaders in Syria and Iraq, including certain Arab officers in the Turkish army, were in favour of a revolt against the Turks for Arab independence, and invited Hussain to be its leader. The cautious Sharif, secretly gratified, made no immediate reply, but, on Feisal’s departure for Istanbul, charged him to halt in Damascus for the purpose of hearing the proposals of al-Fatat. Feisal arrived in Damascus later that month and courteously turned down an invitation from Jamal Pasha, staying instead at the al-Bakri clan’s farmhouse outside the city. It was here, under the watchful eye of Nasib al-Bakri, Fawzi’s elder brother, that Feisal was initiated into the secrets of the Syrian Nationalist Societies, al-Fatat and al-‘Ahd. The result, which Feisal collected the following month on his way back to the Hejaz, was the famous ‘Damascus Protocol’, a document specifying the frontiers of a possible independent Arab state after the war, proposing the abolition of all privileges granted to foreigners, but advocating a defensive alliance with Great Britain and the future independent Arab state.¹³ In mid-July, having discussed the Damascus Protocol with his sons and advisers, Hussain felt strong enough to act. His terms for Arab intervention in the war against Turkey reached the High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Hugh McMahon, by secret emissary, on 18 August.

1915 had been a bad year for the British Empire and for Lawrence personally. In January, twelve British and four French capital ships led by H M S Queen Elizabeth – the biggest warship ever seen in Mediterranean waters – had attempted to force the straits of the Dardanelles. After only a day’s battle, the entire fleet had been sent packing by 176 Turkish guns dug in on the peninsula, only four of which had been put out of action. It was the swansong of the myth of British naval supremacy: Britannia no longer ruled the waves. At the end of April, the British had launched a massive amphibious landing at Gallipoli, where Medforce – the first of almost 200,000 Allied troops to be landed on its beaches – was cut to ribbons by Turkish artillery and machine-gun fire. Medforce had been expected to reach its objectives by the third day, but three months later it was still fighting desperately just to remain where it was. The failure of the Gallipoli landings was an appalling indictment of the inefficiency of British Intelligence, for, as even Lawrence admitted, Medforce was ‘beastly ill-prepared, with no knowledge of where it was going, or what it would meet, or what it was going to do’.¹⁴ Indeed, its maps were archaic, inaccurate, and of considerably less value than a copy of Baedeker: Lawrence recorded that the expedition ‘came out with two copies of some quarter-inch maps of European Turkey as their sole supply’.¹⁵ The element of surprise was completely missing, since security was non-existent, and as for assessment of enemy forces, no one even knew how many Turkish troops opposed it. In the end, no one believed it really mattered. Lawrence himself expressed the general air of complacency when, just before the landings, he wrote, ‘Poor old Turkey is hanging together … Everything about her is very sick.’¹⁶ The largest amphibious operation ever mounted in the history of war thus took place on the basis of virtually zero intelligence, and a vain belief in the superiority of the ‘white man’: after all, as one Australian infantryman wrote before the landing, ‘Who was going to stop us? Not the bloody Turks!’¹⁷ But the ‘bloody Turks’ did stop them, and not even the repulse of Jamal Pasha’s assault on the Suez Canal in February could easily redeem that fact.