Kingdom of Hejaz

A kingdom on the Red Sea coast of Arabia containing Mecca and Medina, created by a revolt and destroyed by a rival within a decade. Hussein bin Ali, the Ottoman-appointed Sharif of Mecca, rose against Istanbul in June 1916 on the strength of correspondence with the British high commissioner in Egypt which he read as a promise of an independent Arab state across the Levant and Arabia. The revolt tied down Ottoman troops along the Hejaz railway and took Aqaba and then Damascus alongside British forces. What Hussein was actually given was the Hejaz. The territory his correspondence had described was divided between Britain and France under an agreement negotiated while the revolt was being organised, and a further British declaration promised a Jewish national home in part of it. He declared himself king in 1916 and caliph in 1924, days after the Turkish republic abolished the office, which offended almost everyone. Ibn Saud's forces took Taif, Mecca and Jeddah within eighteen months. Hussein abdicated and died in exile in Amman. His sons did better than he did: one became king of Iraq and another king of Jordan, whose dynasty still reigns. The kingdom's brief life is the origin of several arguments that are still running. The correspondence with Cairo, the Anglo-French agreement and the declaration on Palestine were three promises made by one government to three parties within eighteen months, and whether they were compatible has been contested ever since the Bolsheviks published the secret treaty in 1917. The revolt itself produced the Arab nationalist claim to have earned independence rather than received it, and the man who reported it to the English-speaking world made a literary career out of his own bad conscience about the terms.

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