The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence 1914–1948

ALSO BY LAILA PARSONS

The Druze Between Palestine and Israel, 1947–49

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Published 2017 in Great Britain by Saqi Books

Copyright © Laila Parsons 2016

All rights reserved.

Laila Parsons has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-0-86356-166-5

eISBN 978-0-86356-176-4

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FOR ROB

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

1Ottoman Officer

2Syria in Revolt

3Palestine 1936

4Baghdad to Berlin

5Palestine 1948

Epilogue

Notes on Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1: Inside view of the dining hall at the Imperial Military Academy soon after it was built, between 1890 and 1893. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Abdul Hamid II Collection, Phébus (Studio). (LC-USZ62-80871)

FIGURE 2: The cavalry students from three classes at the Imperial Military Academy, in uniform, between 1880 and 1893. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Abdul Hamid II Collection, Abdullah Frères. (LC-USZ62-82201)

FIGURE 3: View of the new bridge and Galata area from Istanbul, between 1880 and 1893. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Abdul Hamid II Collection, Abdullah Frères. (LC-USZ62-81746)

FIGURE 4: Iraq, Mosul, general view with tall minaret in center of picture, 1932. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department. (LC-DIG-matpc-16200)

FIGURE 5: General view of Beersheba, 1917. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-13709-00135)

FIGURE 6: Fawzi al-Qawuqji with his medals on display, undated. Public domain.

FIGURE 7: Sir Edmund Allenby entering the Holy City of Jerusalem on foot, 1917. Public domain.

FIGURE 8: Hanging of Arab nationalists in Damascus, 1916. Public domain.

FIGURE 9: Map showing the capture of Damascus, 1918. C. Falls and A. F. Becke, Public domain.

FIGURE 10: Map of the British and French Mandates, from George Antonius (1891–1941), The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938.

FIGURE 11: King Faysal being welcomed in Aleppo, 1918. Public domain.

FIGURE 12: Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s military identity card, 1920. Courtesy of the Center for Historical Documents in Damascus.

FIGURE 13: General Henri Joseph Eugene Gouraud, July 23, 1923. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, National Photo Company Collection. (LC-DIG-npcc-09013)

FIGURE 14: Coronation of Prince Faysal as King of Iraq, August 1921. Public domain.

FIGURE 15: Hama, between 1898 and 1946. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, photograph by the American Colony Photo Department or its successor the Matson Photo Service. (LC-DIG-matpc-07192)

FIGURE 16: Sheikh Sultan el-Atrash, leader of Druze revolt, ca. 1926. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department. (LC-DIG-matpc-06444)

FIGURE 17: Fawzi al-Qawuqji wounded, 1926. Public domain.

FIGURE 18: Exiled Syrian rebels in Wadi Sirhan, 1929. Public domain.

FIGURE 19: Harry St. John Bridger Philby (1885–1960), 1930s. Public domain.

FIGURE 20: King Faysal I of Iraq funeral, 1933. Courtesy of the Institute for Palestine Studies.

FIGURE 21: Group from boys school with Mufti of Jerusalem and notable visitors at the mosque, The Noble Sanctuary, Jerusalem, between 1921 and 1937. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department. (LC-DIG-matpc-08280)

FIGURE 22: Fawzi al-Qawuqji outside his tent, ca. 1936. Courtesy of Mr. Hassan Eltaher (www.eltaher.org).

FIGURE 23: Fawzi al-Qawuqji with leaders of the rebel army, 1936. Courtesy of the Institute for Palestine Studies.

FIGURE 24: Palestine disturbances during summer 1936, Jaffa, edge of the dynamited area close to the shore street, 1936. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department. (LC-DIG-matpc-18038)

FIGURE 25: I.P.C. [i.e., Iraq Petroleum Company], welding pipes together, on Esdraelon stretch, between 1934 and 1939. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department. (LC-DIG-matpc-16862)

FIGURE 26: The Salt Lake Tribune, March 7, 1937. Courtesy of The Salt Lake Tribune.

FIGURE 27: The fort at Rutbah, Iraq, under attack from Bristol Blenheim Mark IVs of No. 84 Squadron RAF Detachment, based at H4 landing ground in Transjordan, 1941. The Imperial War Museum, the United Kingdom, Royal Air Force official photographer: Hensser H. © IWM. (CM 822)

FIGURE 28: Dayr al-Zur bridge. Courtesy of Mr. Fareed Abou Haidar from the collection of his father, Dr.Adib Abou Haidar. 168

FIGURE 29: Haus Vaterland, Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, January 1, 1940. Photograph by Ullstein Bild / Getty Images.

FIGURE 30: German citizens walking along Hermann Goering Strasse past destroyed military vehicles amid rubble piled outside walls of the home of German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels following the fall of the city to Allied troops, July 1, 1945. Photograph by William Vandivert / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.

FIGURE 31: A view of Cairo from roof of Semiramis Hotel, looking east, Continental Savoy entrance, between 1934 and 1939. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department. (LC-DIG-matpc-17897)

FIGURE 32: Aley, Lebanon. Courtesy of Mr.Fareed Abou Haidar from the collection of his father, Dr.Adib Abou Haidar.

FIGURE 33: Map of UN Partition Plan for Palestine, 1947. Public domain.

FIGURE 34: Fawzi al-Qawuqji inspecting the men in Jab‘a, 1948. Courtesy of the Institute for Palestine Studies.

FIGURE 35: Men of Emir Mohamed Saleh in their camp listening to latest news from Palestine, March 31, 1948. Photograph by John Phillips / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.

FIGURE 36: Group of soldiers smiling and posing for photograph, June 1, 1948. Photograph by Frank Scherschel / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.

FIGURE 37: Fawzi Kawkji smoking a cigarette, March 1, 1948. Photograph by John Phillips / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.

FIGURE 38: View of Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek, June 30, 1933. Photograph by Kluger Zoltan. Public domain.

FIGURE 39: Landing place, Jaffa, between 1898 and 1914. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photo graph Collection, American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department. (LC-DIG-matpc-11349)

FIGURE 40: Nahr al-Barid camp in Tripoli, Lebanon, 1951. UNRWA Photo Archive, S. Madver.

FIGURE 41: Fawzi al-Qawuqji at a banquet in Cairo, 1950s. Courtesy of Mr.Hassan Eltaher (www.eltaher.org).

PREFACE

The windswept town of Rutba lies in the far western desert of Iraq, just a few miles from the Syrian border to the north, the Saudi Arabian border to the south, and the Jordanian border to the west. The Damascus to Baghdad road runs east through Rutba toward the Euphrates River and the city of Ramadi. At Ramadi it crosses the Euphrates and then heads southeast through Falluja, through the suburb of Abu Ghrayb, and finally into the metropolis of Baghdad. On May 9, 1941, around the old fort in Rutba, fighting erupted between Arab nationalist rebels and the British army. Just over one month earlier, a group of officers in the Iraqi Army had mounted a successful coup against the British-controlled Iraqi government and laid siege to the British air force base at Habaniyya, west of Baghdad. The British landed troops at Basra in southern Iraq and sent a force of two thousand men and five hundred vehicles into Iraq from Transjordan in the west through the town of Rutba. The British air force and infantry troops took only a few weeks to quell the rebellion. The rebel leaders fled the country, and the former pro-British regime was reinstalled.

Fawzi al-Qawuqji, the commander of the Arab force charged with the task of defending the Rutba fort from the British advance, retreated east with two hundred men toward the town of Hit on the Euphrates, just north of Ramadi. From there Qawuqji continued to undertake guerrilla operations against British forces, even though the rebellion had been almost entirely crushed. One of his goals was to sabotage the oil pipeline that ran from the oil fields of Kirkuk through the town of Haditha and west out into the desert, ending up in another Middle Eastern city then under British control, the port of Haifa, which lay on the green hills of the eastern Mediterranean. Qawuqji appears briefly in the flurry of British telegrams about the revolt and its possible consequences for British interests in the region. His attempt to disrupt the flow of oil, so crucial for the war then being fought in France, Italy, and North Africa, grabbed the attention of British officials, who described Qawuqji as a scallywag of particular cunning and recommended that he be liquidated. By contrast, the men who fought alongside Qawuqji praised him as an Arab nationalist hero who fought on despite overwhelming British military force.

By 1941 Qawuqji was an old hand at confronting colonial armies. He fought as a young officer in the Ottoman army against the British advance into Palestine in the fall of 1917, he played a central role in the mass rebellion against French colonial rule in Syria in 1925, and he was one of the leading rebels in the revolt in Palestine against British occupation in 1936. After 1941 he went on to lead the Arab Liberation Army in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. This book tells Qawuqji’s story in an effort to open up his world and describe the Arab Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century from the inside out.

Qawuqji’s world was dominated by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of British and French military conquest; the drawing of new borders—by men in Paris and London—of the new states of Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq; the imposition of British and French colonial rule over those newly created states under the League of Nations mandate and protectorate system; the emergence of armed resistance by Arab men (and a few women) against that rule; and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. British and French soldiers and politicians in this period made decisions that entirely determined the futures of people in the Middle East; these include Mark Sykes, Georges Picot, Lord Balfour, Henri Gouraud, John Bagot Glubb, Alec Kirkbride, and Percy Cox. Few in the West remember these individuals now, but their names resonate in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Ramallah, and Amman. So too do the names of the Arab fighters who resisted the British and French occupying armies: Yusuf al-‘Azma, Sa‘id al-‘As, Sultan al-Atrash, ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Adib Shishakli, Ramadan Shallash, Ibrahim Hananu, and Fawzi al-Qawuqji.

Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s life was the story of one individual, not the history of a nation. He found himself in particular places, made particular choices, and even fought particular battles, largely as a result of personal circumstances. But his story is also part of a larger narrative of Arab resistance against British and French colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century. The events of Qawuqji’s life are recognizable to most Arabs, for whom Western colonialism and its responses, Arab nationalism and Islamism, form the political backdrop of their daily existence. Al-Jazeera talk shows, newspaper editorials, popular books, and dramatized TV series continue to depict the legacy of colonialism. Many people have their own stories of grandfathers and great-grandfathers killed in the fight against colonial forces. The history of colonialism in the region is held on to with such tenacity because most Arabs feel that little has changed. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the Westerners fighting around Rutba were no longer the British soldiers of 1941 but the American soldiers of the First Marine Expeditionary Force from Camp Pendleton, in California. The arrival in Iraq’s western desert of these British and American uniformed men from Newcastle and San Diego appears as a continuum of foreign invasion and occupation.

Qawuqji’s story is not a simple one of heroic resistance against colonial armies. It is complex and full of contradictions. We find him fighting with colonial forces rather than against them. We find him committed to the old Ottoman Turkish order in the region, rather than to the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. He detested European control over Arab lands, yet he was a Germanophile, spending the latter years of World War II in Berlin hoping that a German victory in the Middle East would bring the end of British and French colonial rule and the beginning of true Arab independence. He succeeded to the highest military ranks in his struggle against foreign occupation yet failed to push colonial troops out of Arab land. Because of this failure, many people in the Middle East regard Qawuqji and others like him as harbingers of an era of fruitless military adventures stretching from 1948 until today. For others, particularly those of an older generation, Qawuqji retains the status of a Garibaldi, struggling on against all odds in the fight for Arab independence.

Some of the contradictions in Qawuqji’s life story reflect larger historical trends: the wrenching transformation of the Arab peoples from Ottoman subjects to colonial citizens in the 1920s and 1930s; the co-opting of many Arabs into the ranks of their colonizers; the persistence of Germany as a counterbalance to British and French military power; and the emergence of Palestine as a central symbol of Arab nationalism. These broad historical themes—Ottomans into Arabs, European colonialism versus Arab nationalism, Germany in the Middle East, Palestine—form the backdrop of Qawuqji’s life. Although this book narrates the main events of his professional life, it is not a conventional biography. Instead, the goal has been to evoke, through a detailed description of the experiences of one individual, the historical landscape of the early- twentieth-century Arab Middle East. My hope is that I have done this in a way that will be easily recognizable to the majority of people living there today.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I have used a wide range of original sources to construct the narrative in this book. A detailed account of these sources can be found at the end of the book, under the section entitled Notes on Sources.

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1

■

OTTOMAN OFFICER

An Arab cadet in Istanbul—Posting in Mosul—From the Iraqi front to the Palestinian front—Reconnaissance and the Iron Cross—German officers and Jamal Pasha—The Arab Revolt—Retreat and famine

I opened my eyes to the world and found myself in the Ottoman military school system. This sentence opens Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s memoirs. Childhood games with his brothers, Qadri, Zafir, Yumni, and Bahjat, and his sisters, Fawziyya and Badriyya, in the alley outside his home; the smells of his mother’s cooking; visits to the family’s orchard of orange and lemon trees; glimpses of the small religious college where his great-grandfather the scholar Abu al-Muhassin al-Qawuqji used to teach; eating special sweets with his father on a trip to Libya: none of these memories is mentioned in his self-narrative. He saw himself as the product of Ottoman military education.

This was understandable. Qawuqji’s father, ‘Abd al-Majid al-Qawuqji, had served in the Ottoman Army, as did some of Qawuqji’s brothers, including his younger brother Yumni, with whom Qawuqji was particularly close. ‘Abd al-Majid and his wife, Fatima al-Rifa‘i, raised their children in a simple house on a small alley in the Attarin district of the Arab port city of Tripoli, in today’s Lebanon. They did not have the means to send their sons to the elite Ottoman civil school system. That system was reserved for the children of landowners or important merchant families. The military school system was free, and families with little income saw it as a practical way to ensure that their sons were educated and provided with a profession. The Qawuqjis were typical of military families in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire: neither wealthy nor poor, they were part of a respectable lower-middle-class Arab Sunni community in Tripoli.

AN ARAB CADET IN ISTANBUL

Qawuqji underwent officer training at the War College in Istanbul in the early 1900s. The Ottoman government had introduced the new military school system decades earlier, in the mid-nineteenth century. By the early 1900s thousands of boys from all over the Ottoman Empire had attended their local military school for free, and a select few, like Qawuqji, went on to train as officers in the War College itself. The military schools were expanded by the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II, who saw them as a crucial element in his plan to modernize the institutions of the Ottoman state. In the 1890s, during a state visit to Washington, D.C., Sultan Abdul Hamid presented the American government with a gift, a series of albums containing photographs of the Ottoman Empire. The albums highlighted the Ottoman government’s modernization drive, with photographs of new hospitals, factories, mines, harbors, railway stations, and government buildings. The albums also contained hundreds of photographs of the military schools. Some were exterior shots of the school buildings, which were nearly all neoclassical in style. Others showed cadets at drill practice on the training grounds of the schools, officer instructors in their classrooms, and dining tables laid for dinner (figure 1).

The military schools depicted in the albums ranged across the Ottoman Empire, from Istanbul itself, to Van in eastern Anatolia, to Damascus and Baghdad in the Arab provinces of the empire, all the way to San‘a in Yemen. The War College in Istanbul took pride of place. Another photograph (figure 2) shows officers and cadets gathered in front of the War College in the early 1890s. Taken by a photographer from Istanbul’s Abdullah Frères Studio, it captures the self-confidence that these men felt about their future in the Ottoman Army.

FIGURE 1

For Qawuqji and the other cadets, daily life in the War College was highly regimented. He spent his nights on a raised bed in a long gallery with dozens of other boys, listening to the horns of steamships moving slowly up the Bosphorus just half a mile from the windows of his dormitory. In the mornings he washed and dressed himself in his formal cadet’s uniform, stiff wool trousers and a frock coat with a high collar. At mealtimes he ate with the other cadets in a vast dining room, on raised tables laid with separate plates and knives and forks. Meals were simple—stewed beans, mutton, rice—except during Ramadan, when special dishes were prepared and Ramadan sweets were handed out. His days were punctuated by the rhythm of daily prayers in the mosque that sat inside the walls of the college. But he spent most of his waking hours sitting at a wooden desk, facing a blackboard, and learning the standard military curriculum, taught either by a staff officer or by a religious scholar (‘alim). His classes were conducted mainly in Ottoman Turkish and included oratory, theology and ethics, military theory, and history, as well as German and French.

FIGURE 2

Paintings of military heroes lined the walls of his classroom: a picture of Mehmet the Conqueror, the Ottoman sultan who captured Constantinople from the Byzantine Empire in 1453, hung next to portraits of Napoleon and Bismarck. Each classroom also had an official military map showing the Ottoman Empire stretching from the Balkans in the northwest to Mesopotamia in the east, to Egypt, Sudan, and the Arabian Peninsula in the south. The great metropolis of Istanbul, home of the War College itself, lay at the center of these maps. Often the maps did not reflect the true extent of Ottoman territorial control. Much of the Balkans was lost by the end of the nineteenth century, and Egypt was now ruled by the British, who pushed every day against the borders of the empire. Many cadets knew that the cartographic representation in their classroom differed from the reality on the ground, where the Ottoman Empire was increasingly besieged by French and British assaults. Some maps also included the empire’s new communications infrastructure then under construction, particularly the telegraph and the railway that by the early 1900s could take you from Istanbul to Ankara and Konya in central Anatolia and all the way to Damascus. Four hundred miles of new line pushed south from Damascus toward the holy cities of the Hijaz, and a branch line connected Damascus and Haifa.

Cavalry practice took Qawuqji outside the classroom into the hills just outside the city. Young cadets normally trained with decades-old Mauser rifles from Germany, although they were not allowed to use live ammunition. The few Ottoman cadets sent off to Germany came back with stories of different training practices. Everything in Germany was elaborately and precisely organized, and German cadets trained in battle scenarios using the latest model of the Mauser loaded with live ammunition. German cadets also ate good food in ornate dining rooms, wore uniforms made of fine cloth, and danced with pretty girls in elegant ballrooms.

The Ottoman cadets’ sense that emulating such European practices put them in the vanguard deepened as they moved through their days sleeping on raised beds, eating at raised tables, and studying German and French at raised desks set in rows. These experiences set the cadets apart from most other Ottoman subjects. Other aspects of Qawuqji’s daily life remained familiar from his childhood in Tripoli: the food he ate, the prayers he attended, and the classes he took in theology and ethics, grounded in the rich traditions of Islamic learning.

The stone neoclassical building of the War College stood on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus. The barracks of Tashkishla, which served as the city’s garrison, lay to the south of the college. Abdul Hamid’s walled palace lay to the north, and the cadets could see the older palaces and gardens of Dolmabahce and Chiragan on the shore of the Bosphorus below. The bars and restaurants of the European district of Beyoglu were within walking distance, as was the harbor area of Galata (figure 3), whose side streets were famous for their beer halls and brothels worked by Christian prostitutes.

Cadets often sneaked out for a night on the town, avoiding detection by one of the college monitors lest they lose points on the sections of their report cards labeled Moral Conduct. The cadets moved past public buildings built in the same neoclassical style and with the same dressed stone as the college itself: the railway station at Haydarpasha, the customs office at the port where the steamships docked, and Abdul Hamid’s new municipal buildings. This gave them a sense of the empire’s new direction.

FIGURE 3

The cadets at the War College were almost all Sunni Muslims, from every province of the Ottoman Empire. In his memoirs Qawuqji speaks of his Arab, Turkish, Albanian, and Circassian peers, all of them looking up to the Ottoman sultan as their leader. They shared a firm sense of being part of a new class of Ottoman soldiers who would spend their professional lives in the Ottoman Army. But social hierarchy did exist. In some cases the teachers treated the Turkish-speaking cadets from Istanbul and Anatolia with greater respect than the Arabic-speaking cadets from the Arab provinces of the empire. Although Qawuqji does not mention it in his memoirs, he complained in later years that certain cadets were served better food than he was. When he asked why, he was told that it was because they were Turks and he was an Arab.

During 1908 and 1909 Qawuqji’s vague sense of social difference started to connect with the turbulent politics in Istanbul. In 1908 the constitutionalists, the so-called Young Turks, took power from Abdul Hamid II, who was committed to reforming the infrastructure but not the principle of the direct rule of the sultan. The Young Turks were a group of progressive medical students and military cadets. Their movement stemmed from previous reform-minded groups, which had been driven underground after Abdul Hamid abolished the new Ottoman constitution in 1878. They wanted to replace the system of absolute monarchy with a constitutional monarchy. Many of them also rejected the Ottoman character of the empire, focusing instead on the use of specifically Turkish symbols to build a new Turkish-centered nationalism.

Qawuqji was startled that some of his teachers heralded the overthrowing of Abdul Hamid as the beginning of a new era:

I was getting on with the business of going from class to class when suddenly one day an officer came rushing in, all agitated, and shouting, The army of freedom has entered Istanbul and freedom and justice and equality and fraternity are declared in the State! I laughed to myself and wondered: What is the army of freedom? And what happens when it enters Istanbul? And what does freedom mean? Was it lost and have we suddenly found it? The officer kept talking at us in this way, and we listened to him as if we were listening to a lecture on Arabic literature given in Chinese by a Chinese professor.

Political events crashed through the walls of the college into Qawuqji’s world. By his own account, he now began to see differences between Arabs and Turks. After 1908 Qawuqji started hearing of the formation of secret Arab organizations. He noticed that the Turkish students seemed to feel connected to one another through what he calls a new bond. This new bond differed from the older, looser connection that the Turkish students had previously felt to other Ottoman subjects. To illustrate his point, Qawuqji tells the story of a fight between a group of Turkish soldiers and a group of Arab soldiers:

I heard one of them saying with great enthusiasm and seriousness, I am Turkish, and the other replying immediately with pride, I am Arab, and the Arab students rushed to support their colleague. And it was as if this moment of truth, which was released into the skies above the War College, had put an end to the bond that had tied us to the Ottoman state. From that moment we began to feel that we had an independent Arab nation and that behind it were a community and a history and a time-honored glory.

Political identities are not formed overnight. This young Arab cadet had many years of bloody fighting ahead of him defending the Ottoman Empire against British and French invaders. Even after the end of World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman state, Qawuqji nurtured the connections and broad networks that he had inherited as an Ottoman cadet and officer. But the fight that broke out in the college between Arab and Turkish cadets in the wake of the Young Turks’ revolution of 1908 was still a pivotal event in Qawuqji’s life. The most worrying question he now asked himself was whether professional success in the Ottoman Army would depend on merit or on being an Arab or a Turk. This doubt about his promotions unsettled his mind as he struggled with more immediate issues, such as his place in the yearly ranking of cadets, the state of his moral report card, and worries about where his first posting would be once he graduated from the War College in 1912.

POSTING IN MOSUL

It was the custom of the Ottoman Army at that time to assign some of the War College’s graduating officers to a particular corps by the drawing of lots. Qawuqji drew a corps stationed in Mosul in 1912, as did his close friend from the War College, Ahmad Mukhtar al-Tarabulsi. The normal route from Istanbul to Mosul was southeast through Aleppo and Dayr al-Zur. The two friends decided to go a different way. They went by boat from Istanbul to Samsun, on the northern coast of Anatolia, and then traveled by wagon due south to Diyar Bakr. From Diyar Bakr they floated down the Tigris all the way to Mosul, paddling a raft made of goatskins that were stretched and filled with air (kalak). The journey took fifty-three days, forty-one from Istanbul to Diyar Bakr and twelve on the river between Diyar Bakr and Mosul.

Qawuqji describes this trip in some detail, and the way he narrates it, his journey from Istanbul to Mosul symbolizes his transition from Ottomanism to Arabism. He tells how he and Tarabulsi decided to take this alternative route across Anatolia because they wanted to acquaint themselves with the traditions of the Anatolian Turks and to compare them with the traditions of the Arabs through whose lands they would pass as they moved south down the Tigris toward Mosul. Qawuqji encountered different groups of people along the way and realized with increasing clarity that there were substantial differences between the Turkish- and Arabic-speaking peoples. As they floated south down the Tigris, and the rocky hills of central Anatolia gave way to the grasslands of the rolling countryside north of Mosul, the people living on the banks of the river rushing out to greet them spoke Arabic, not Turkish:

The sights of Anatolia and its houses passed by us in a uniform way, until we got back onto the raft again and it took us southward with the flow of the Tigris. We found ourselves in a new world: the Arab tribes (qaba’il ) living on the banks of the river provided us with what we needed and gave to us the fruits of their lands. They would sing to us and recite poetry, poetry of war and poetry of the nation, songs and poems that stirred our spirits. For this was our language, heard in so many different dialects, and this was a shared feeling. These Arab customs showed them in every way to be part of our nation.

The romantic image of Arab tribesmen shouting out greetings from the banks of the Tigris, welcoming the two young officers with bountiful offerings and songs of war and nation, seems to spring less from a personal account of an experience of travel than from Qawuqji’s later desire to render a public story of Arab nationalism. A major component of Qawuqji’s brand of nationalism is the notion that the tribes represent the essence of the Arab nation. This does not mean that we must be skeptical of Qawuqji’s claim that he really experienced a feeling of kinship when he heard the people on the banks of the river speaking Arabic rather than Turkish and when he saw that their customs were more akin to his own than to those of the Turkish villagers he had encountered earlier. And yet one suspects that this young man, who had spent his early childhood in an urban environment in the port city of Tripoli and his young adulthood in the War College in Istanbul, where he was taught