by ADAM MESTYAN
Amid the chaos of the First World War, a new pan-Arab empire was proclaimed. It faltered, but its historical lessons remain
In December 2022, Abdullah II, the king of Jordan, gave an interview to the CNN anchor Becky Anderson. Sitting close to the Jordan River, not far from where Jesus is believed to have been baptised, this Muslim ruler expressed his concerns about the status of Jerusalem and the Christians under pressure from the new, extremist Israeli government. He emphasised that the ‘Hashemites’, his family, are the custodians of both Christian and Muslim sites in the holy city. Abdullah II cited his great-great-grandfather Sharif Hussein. It was from Hussein’s time, sometime at the end of the First World War, according to Abdullah II, that the Hashemite custodianship of Jerusalem’s holy sites originates. His ancestor even gave sanctuary to Christian Armenian refugees in Jordan, said the king proudly on CNN.
Abdullah II’s remarks presented him as a confident and reassuring monarch but they also refer to a history of modern Arab kingship and the modern Middle East that has mostly been forgotten. Wikipedia in English, for instance, tells us that the custodianship of the Muslim sites in Jerusalem by the Hashemites follows from a ‘verbal agreement’ of Hussein with the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine in 1924. The Indonesian version of Wikipedia repeats the claims of the English article. The Arabic version, however, tells us about the financial help Hussein gave for restoring the holy sites of Jerusalem and subsequent donations by the Hashemite dynasty for further improvements to the holy city. So, who was Hussein and what’s his relevance today?
Sharif Hussein is a legendary figure of the 1910s and ’20s. For some – certainly for Abdullah II – Hussein was the nationalist leader of the ‘Arab revolt’ during the First World War who won the war for the Arabs. In an alliance with Britain, he revolted against the Ottoman Empire in 1916 in order to establish a giant independent state that he called the ‘Arab Kingdom’. Others see him in less heroic terms. They blame him for ‘stabbing the Ottomans in the back’, the inability to stop the partitions decided by Europeans, and the Zionist settlement of Palestine – so, in a way, for losing the war.
The importance of Hussein and his Arab Kingdom for today is a forgotten experiment with state-formation exactly 100 years ago. Modern states do not originate only from nationalism. Abdullah II’s remarks at the Jordan River evoke Islam as a principle of government and Muslim rulers as protectors of Christians. This use of Islam is very different from what we usually hear about religion in the Middle East – for instance, ‘sectarianism’ (religion-based claims to institutionalised representation within nation states, often erupting in violence) or the fascist brutality of ISIS. But neither should we follow the king of Jordan into a monarchist-nationalist nostalgia. His great-great-grandfather Hussein was not born a nationalist. Here, I tell Hussein’s story as an exercise in unearthing ideas about Muslim government that we can call ‘imperial’. This is important because the imperial techniques of state-making defined the early 20th century in many regions of the world, and not nationalist or egalitarian revolutions.
Sharif Hussein bin ‘Ali was the scion of an important family from the sacred city of Mecca. Sharif means ‘nobleman’. Individuals who claim that they are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad use the Arabic honorific terms sharif (plural ashraf) and sayyid (meaning ‘master’, plural sada). Tens of millions of Muslims today claim this heritage. Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator until 2003, was one of them, for example. The rulers of Morocco, too, are ashraf. (The Saudi kings are emphatically not.) Furthermore, among all ashraf and sada, only the Jordanian ruling family and their relatives are called ‘Hashemites’ publicly, after Hashim, a legendary ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. So, yes, both Hussein and his great-great-grandson King Abdullah II, sitting next to the Jordan River talking to CNN, are also ashraf, descendants of the Prophet.
Yet Hussein was born not in Mecca, but in Istanbul, at the metropolitan centre of the Ottoman Empire, sometime in the 1850s. The Ottoman Empire, a vast, three-continental administration in Europe, Asia and Africa, existed roughly between the 14th century and 1922. This empire was the Mediterranean Muslim superpower. The Ottoman emperor – sultan – assumed the title of the caliph of (Sunni) Islam, too. Today, in its final former territory across Europe and Asia, we find the states of Turkey, Albania, Bulgaria, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Saudi Arabia, as well as Egypt, Libya and Tunis in North Africa. In 1914, at the threshold of the First World War, its directly ruled population was estimated at around 25 million (at that time, the US population was about 100 million; Austria-Hungary was about 50 million).
For the Ottomans (a non-Arab, Turkic Muslim imperial dynasty), the most important ashraf were those in Mecca and Medina, the sacred cities in the Hijaz region of Arabia. Hence the value of Sharif Hussein bin ‘Ali for this Muslim empire. The loyalty of the Meccan descendants of the Prophet meant the symbolic recognition of the Ottoman caliphate. Since their conquest in the early 16th century, the Ottoman sultans usually appointed a sharif to serve as the emir of Mecca, its local ruler. From the mid-19th century, the descendants of the Prophet became closer and closer to Istanbul, literally. Hussein was born in Istanbul because his family branch in exile competed for the emirate of the holy city. He knew Turkish, his wife was Turkish-speaking, and his sons received Ottoman education. Hussein, known in the Ottoman administration as ?erif Ali Pa?azade Hüseyin Bey (in Turkish transliteration), became quite an Ottomanised descendant of the Prophet.
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