Arabs and Turks

The unpleasantness between the Arabs and Turks, now thrust upon the attention of the world by one of its latest developments, the rebellion of the Grand Sharif of Mecca against his suzerain at Constantinople, is not at all of such recent growth as some appear to think. Ever since the Abbasid Khalifs of Baghdad became puppets in the hands of their Turkish praetorians, and the effective assistance which Erto-grul and his four hundred of the Ottoman clan gave to the Seljuq Prince 'All ad-Din established their military ascendancy, no love has been lost between those usurpers of power in Islam and the children of the land of its birth, its Holy Land. From the moment Turkey began to dominate or rather to try dominating Arabia, Arabian revolts against Turkish rule were therefore a matter of course, and all along hardly a year elapsed without one or more being in progress here or there between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the Syrian Desert and the Indian Ocean. Far from imitating the Romans, who had overrun Asia Minor and adjacent territories from the West, always studious to obliterate racial differences, the new conquerors from the East, disdaining even the prudent policy of the earlier warrior statesmen of their own creed, did not care for the amalgamation of their subject races; in fact there was no homogeneity among themselves. The Turks despised the Arabs for their excitable temperament and the Arabs found food for ridicule in Turkish indolence, in the sluggish workings of the Turkish mind. Between Arab and Turk, physically and mentally in marked contrast, no attraction or accord was possible. Hence the sons of the shadowless desert under a cloudless sky, refractory already in their allegiance to the chiefs appointed by their common consent, proved superlatively troublesome to their intrusive Khalifs of the house of Othman. Excepting those who had private reasons to put up with it, the Arabs did not acknowledge the Ottoman Khalifate as an institution decreed by God. For them the claims to suzerainty

Ancient history · Political science · History · Islamic Studies and History

• Myth in the desert, or not the Great Arab Revolt

  Efraim Karsh, Inari Karsh•Middle Eastern Studies•1997

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