Arab Revolt

The Arab Revolt was an armed uprising against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, launched in the Hejaz region of western Arabia on 10 June 1916 by Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, and his Hashemite family. Supported by Britain and France, the rebels drove the Ottomans from much of the Hejaz and Transjordan and entered Damascus in October 1918. The revolt is often regarded as the first organised movement of Arab nationalism, though historians debate how far it represented the Arabs of the empire as a whole.

Before the war, most Arab political activists sought reform and autonomy within the empire rather than independence. After 1908, however, the Young Turk government in Istanbul pursued centralisation and a stronger Turkish identity, which alienated many Arab leaders. When the empire joined the war on Germany's side, Arab nationalists in Damascus and Beirut were arrested and some were executed. Hussein, appointed Emir of Mecca in 1908, feared that he too would be removed.

Between July 1915 and March 1916, Hussein exchanged letters with the British official Sir Henry McMahon in Cairo. Hussein understood the correspondence as a promise that Britain would recognise a large independent Arab state in return for a revolt; Britain also supplied money, weapons and food. The British hoped the uprising would tie down Ottoman troops that might otherwise threaten the Suez Canal.

Hussein's sons Ali and Faisal attacked the Ottoman garrison of Medina on 5 June 1916 but were driven back. On 10 June the revolt was formally launched in Mecca, which fell after weeks of street fighting, with help from Egyptian artillery sent by the British. With support from British warships and aircraft, the rebels took Jeddah, Ta'if and the Red Sea ports, capturing thousands of prisoners. Medina, however, held out under Fakhri Pasha until January 1919.

In October 1916 the British sent Captain T. E. Lawrence to work with the Hashemites. He became close to Faisal, whose army received most of Britain's aid, though many other British and French officers also served with the revolt. Instead of storming Medina, the rebels attacked the long Hejaz railway again and again, forcing the Ottomans to tie down troops to guard it. In July 1917 Arab irregulars, with Lawrence and the tribal leader Auda Abu Tayi, took the port of Aqaba, opening a supply route for the advance north. The size of the Arab forces is hard to fix: estimates range from a few thousand regulars to tens of thousands of tribal fighters at the peak.

In 1918 the Arab Northern Army operated east of the Jordan in support of the British general Edmund Allenby's advance through Palestine and Syria. In September the Arabs harassed the retreating Ottoman armies, and near Tafas, a village the retreating troops had plundered, they destroyed a defeated column; Lawrence later claimed to have ordered that no prisoners be taken. Arab forces and Australian cavalry entered Damascus on 30 September and 1 October 1918, and a short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria was proclaimed under Faisal. Most Arabs in the empire, however, had stayed loyal to the Ottoman state, and the main military effort had been British.

Britain and France had already agreed in the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 to divide the region between them, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration supported a Jewish national home in Palestine. In the partition of the Ottoman Empire that followed, the Arab lands became British and French mandates, and many Arabs saw this as a betrayal. Hussein's Kingdom of Hejaz was conquered by Ibn Saud in 1925. His sons Faisal and Abdullah became rulers of Iraq and of Transjordan, the forerunner of Jordan, where the Hashemites remain closely identified with the revolt.

Our 1914 map shows the Ottoman Empire before the revolt; our 1920 map shows the Hejaz as a separate kingdom, alongside the new British and French mandates.