Turkish-Syrian Relations in the Time of Faisal 1918-1920

Abstract

Husain, Sharif of Mecca, on the strength of an agreement with the British, embodied in the so-called MacMahon
correspondence, revolted against the Gttoman government
on June lA, 1916, in the middle of the Great war. Reading
the Memoirs of his son, King Abdullah, one is frequently
reminded by the writer that the quarrel of the Hashimites
was not with the Gttoman state but with the Committee of
Union and Progress (CUp).l Specifically, Abdullah's quarrel
is, on the one hand, with the CUP's policies of Turkish
nationalism which tried to exclude the Arabs and/or to
Turkicize them, and, on the other hand, with the policy of
reducing the power of feudalism from the Suıtan down to
the the local Sheikh (in other words, democratization).
(One important issue closely related to the latter was modernization: the Hashimites, for instance, were opposed to
the completion of the Hijaz railwayJ How far Abdullah
was sincere in his protestations of loyalty to the Ottoman
state, we cannot know for certain. What is clear is that the
CUP was an instrument of Turkish nationalism and that,
at least for some time, it did try to follow a policy of Turkincation which aroused reactions not onlyamong Arabs, but
also among other Moslem peoples, most notably the Albanians.

Keywords

• Turkish-Syrian Relation
• Time of Faisal
• 1918-1920