First World War & The Arab Revolt
On 23 October 1916 at Hamra in the Wadi Safra, the first encounter took place between Faisal and Captain T. E. Lawrence, a relatively junior British intelligence officer from Cairo. Lawrence already had a vision of an independent post-war Arabian state, and knew it was essential to find precisely the right man to lead the Arab forces to achieve this.
With the help of Lawrence, Faisal sided with the British army and organised the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, helping to end the Caliphate. After a long siege he conquered Medina, defeating the defense organized by Fakhri Pasha.
Some of Faisal's critics considered fighting alongside Christians as a betrayal of Islam; this motivated Iqbal to write against him. Though Faisal was a descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, Arab nationalism and independence, not religion, was his main motivation. Iqbal wrote in one of his poems about King Faisal as, "What a beautiful message did Sanësâ give to King Faisal By descent you are Hijazi, but by heart Hijazi you could not be"
Faisal also worked with the Allies during World War I in their conquest of Greater Syria and the capture of Damascus, where he became part of a new Arab government in 1918.
Read more about this topic: Faisal I Of Iraq
Famous quotes containing the words world, war, arab and/or revolt:
“Ah! the best righteousness of our man-of-war world seems but an unrealized ideal, after all; and those maxims which, in the hope of bringing about a Millennium, we busily teach to the heathen, we Christians ourselves disregard.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Your length in clay’s now competent,
A long war disturbed your mind;”
—John Webster (c. 1580–1638)
“As the Arab proverb says, “The dog barks and the caravan passes”. After having dropped this quotation, Mr. Norpois stopped to judge the effect it had on us. It was great; the proverb was known to us: it had been replaced that year among men of high worth by this other: “Whoever sows the wind reaps the storm”, which had needed some rest since it was not as indefatigable and hardy as, “Working for the King of Prussia”.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It’s a remarkably shrewed and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)