As we have seen, the Arab uprising
duringWorldWar I helped bring about
the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Actually,
unrest against Ottoman rule had
existed in the Arabian peninsula since the eighteenth
century, when theWahhabi revolt attempted to purge the
outside influences and cleanse Islam of corrupt practices
that had developed in past centuries. The revolt was eventually
suppressed, but the influence of theWahhabi movement
persisted, revitalized in part by resistance to the centralizing
and modernizing efforts of reformist elements in
the nineteenth century.
World War I offered an opportunity for the Arabs to
throw off the shackles of Ottoman rule—but what would
replace them? The Arabs were not a nation but an idea, a
loose collection of peoples who often do not see eye to
eye on what constitutes their community. Disagreement
over what it means to be an Arab has plagued generations
of political leaders who have sought unsuccessfully to
knit together the disparate peoples of the region into a
single Arab nation.
When the Arab leaders in Mecca declared their independence
from Ottoman rule in 1916, they had hoped for
British support, but they were sorely disappointed when
much of the area was placed under British or French authority
as mandates of the League of Nations. To add salt
to the wound, the new state of Lebanon had been created
to place the Christian peoples there under a Christian
administration.
The land of Palestine—once the home of the Jews but
now inhabited primarily by Muslim Arabs—became a
separate mandate. According to the Balfour Declaration,
issued by the British foreign secretary Lord Balfour in November
1917, Palestine was to be a national home for the
Jews. The declaration was ambiguous on the legal status
of the territory and promised that the decision would not
undermine the rights of the non-Jewish peoples currently
living in the area. But Arab nationalists were incensed.
How could a national home for the Jewish people be es-
tablished in a territory where 90 percent of the population
was Muslim?
In the early 1920s, a leader of the Wahhabi movement,
Ibn Saud (1880 –1953), united Arab tribes in the northern
part of the Arabian peninsula and drove out the remnants
of Ottoman rule. Ibn Saud was a descendant of the
family that had led the Wahhabi revolt in the eighteenth
century. Devout and gifted, he won broad support among
Arab tribal peoples and established the kingdom of Saudi
Arabia throughout much of the peninsula in 1932.
At first, his new kingdom, consisting essentially of the
vast wastes of central Arabia, was desperately poor. Its
financial resources were limited to the income from Muslim
pilgrims visiting the holy sites in Mecca and Medina.
But during the 1930s, American companies began to explore
for oil, and in 1938, Standard Oil made a successful
strike at Dahran, on the Persian Gulf. Soon an Arabian-
American oil conglomerate, popularly called Aramco,
was established, and the isolated kingdom was suddenly
inundated by Western oilmen and untold wealth.
In the meantime, Jewish settlers began to arrive in
Palestine in response to the promises made in the Balfour
Declaration. As tensions between the new arrivals and
existing Muslim residents began to escalate, the British
tried to restrict Jewish immigration into the territory and
rejected the concept of a separate state. They also created
the separate emirate of Trans-Jordan out of the eastern
portion of Palestine. After World War II, it would become
the independent kingdom of Jordan. The stage was set for
the conflicts that would take place in the region after
World War II.
World History
