Welcome to the deep dive. Before we get into
the heavy history today, I really want you to
start off by picturing a scene. It is a pretty
wild scene to visualize, honestly. It really
is. Just imagine a ragtag group of nomadic desert
tribesmen, right? Their loyalties are largely
tied up with their own local clans. And suddenly...
They are taking on one of the world's oldest,
most entrenched military powers. And they aren't
just doing it on a whim. No, exactly. They are
doing this while being fueled by a relentless
flow of gold coins and some of the grandest geopolitical
promises imaginable. It genuinely sounds like
the clot of a sprawling blockbuster movie. It
totally does. But it is very real history. We
are diving into the Arab revolt today. which
tore through the Middle East from 1916 to 1918.
Right, right. And today's stack of sources comes
from a really comprehensive historical overview
detailing this massive uprising against the Ottoman
Empire, all happening during the utter chaos
of World War I. Which is a chaotic enough backdrop
on its own. Completely. So our mission today
is to cut through the Hollywood myths. Yes, we
are actively looking past that singular romanticized
image of Lawrence of Arabia riding a camel through
the dunes. There is so much more to it than just
him. So much more. We want to understand what
really happened in the sand and the cities. The
goal here is to figure out how this two year
irregular war basically birthed modern Arab nationalism.
And directly drew the borders and the conflicts
of the modern Middle East that you see on your
maps today. OK, let's untack this. Why revolt
in the first place? I mean, what was the actual
breaking point for these tribes? Well. To really
grasp the origin of the revolt, you have to look
at the state of the Ottoman Empire in the early
20th century. For hundreds of years, the Ottomans
had ruled this vast, incredibly diverse empire.
But the Arab subjects of the empire, while they
weren't initially demanding full independence...
Really, they didn't want out completely? Not
at all. Their demands were actually incredibly
moderate early on. At the 1913 first Arab Congress,
which was held in Paris, interestingly enough,
Arab intellectuals and politicians put together
a set of reformist requests. What kind of requests?
Very basic things. They simply wanted the ability
to use the Arabic language in their elementary
and secondary schools. OK, that makes sense.
And they asked that Arab conscripts in the Ottoman
military be allowed to serve their peacetime
duty closer to their home regions. Oh, instead
of being shipped off across the empire. Exactly.
They also requested at least three Arab ministers
in the Ottoman cabinet. So it was a push for
autonomy and equality within the existing empire
rather than an attempt to burn the empire down.
So they're pushing for basic representation,
not a violent revolution. But then something
changes, right? The political climate in Istanbul.
shifts dramatically. It does. The empire was
undergoing these sweeping secular changes known
as the Tanzimat reforms. To put that in perspective,
these reforms weakened the concept of the Ummah.
The Ummah being the religious community. Right.
The Ummah was this powerful unifying idea that
all these different ethnic groups Arabs, Turks,
Kurds were bound together simply because they
shared the Islamic faith. That was the glue holding
them together. Yes. And when you weaken that
religious glue, you need something else to hold
the empire together. And then in 1908, the Young
Turk Revolution happens. A political group known
as the Committee of Union and Progress, or the
CUP, gains the upper hand. They start pushing
a hardline policy of centralization, and more
specifically, Turkification. Turkification. Meaning
what exactly? They essentially make Turkish nationalism
the state ideology. They demand that Turkish
language and culture be the dominant force across
the board. Which obviously alienates the Arab
subjects completely. I mean, if you were told
your language and your identity take a back seat
to a newly invented nationalistic standard, you
start looking for an exit strategy. You absolutely
do. And this brings us to a major player in this
story. Sharif Hussain of Mecca. This guy's pedigree
is just incredible. It really is unmatched in
the region. Right. He is a 37th generation direct
descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, part of the
Hashemite family. The Ottoman Sultan appoints
him as the Emir of Mecca in 1908. He is highly
ambitious. But according to the sources, by 1916,
he's also absolutely terrified. Yeah. Fear was
a massive motivator here. Really? Oh, definitely.
The Ottoman government, under that CUP leadership
we just talked about, had just carried out highly
publicized, brutal executions of prominent Arab
nationalists. Where was this? In Damascus and
Beirut. So Hussein is sitting down in Mecca hearing
very credible rumors that he is going to be deposed
in favor of a rival family. Or worse. Or worse,
brought to Damascus and executed himself. He
realizes that staying loyal to Istanbul is becoming
way more dangerous than rebelling. That is a
stark realization. But he also knows he does
not have the military capability to take on the
Ottoman army alone. Right. He needs a powerful
friend. And that is where the British enter the
equation. There is this famous exchange of letters
between July 1915 and March 1916, known as the
McMahon -Hussain correspondence. Yes, a crucial
piece of the puzzle. Henry McMahon, representing
the British government in Egypt, essentially
makes A massive historic promise to Hussein.
It was a monumental diplomatic guarantee. The
British agreed that if the Arabs launched a rebellion
against the Ottoman Turks, who remember were
allied with Germany in World War One, Britain
would recognize and support an independent, unified
Arab state after the war. And the map they discussed
was huge, wasn't it? Vast. It stretched roughly
from Aleppo and modern day Syria all the way
down to Aden in Yemen. So with that British guarantee
in his pocket, Hussein pulls the trigger. On
June 10th, 1916, the Arab revolt officially begins.
He orders his supporters to attack the Ottoman
garrison right in Mecca. The die is cast. But
the moment the shooting starts, you realize just
how insane of a mismatch this war is going to
be. It is a total David versus Goliath situation.
How are they even planning to fight a modern
military? The disparity in forces is honestly
staggering. At the outbreak of the revolt, the
Ottomans had an entire army corps stationed in
the Hejaz region. Hejaz being the coast. Basically
the harsh, mountainous, western coast of the
Arabian Peninsula bordering the Red Sea. By 1917,
the Ottomans had about 20 ,000 troops there,
led by very experienced commanders. Wow. More
importantly, they were backed by their German
allies. That meant they had modern artillery,
machine guns, a functioning railway system. and
even aviation support. Airplanes against guys
on camels. Exactly. And the air forces start
out with maybe 5 ,000 irregulars. Yeah. Just
a bunch of nomadic Jedi tribesmen who are very
loosely allied. armed with outdated rifles if
they have rifles at all. It was not a conventional
army in any sense. But here is the part that
I found so surprising from our sources. We tend
to think of this as a purely ideological uprising.
But the nomads fighting the battles weren't exactly
doing it for abstract concepts of Arab nationalism,
at least not at first. Not at first, no. The
Bedouin fighters demanded to be paid in advance.
In gold coin. Gold coin. Yes. The financial logistics
of keeping this revolt alive were unbelievable.
The sources showed that by the end of 1916, the
French had subsidized the revolt with 1 .25 million
gold francs. That is an insane amount of money.
And it only grew from there. By September 1918,
the British were dumping 220 ,000 pounds a month
into the desert just to keep the various tribes
allied and fighting. So the British were basically
acting like venture capitalists funding a remarkably
violent high burn rate desert startup. That is
a very modern way to put it, but accurate. The
ultimate irony here is that the Arabs used the
gold of one European empire to forge their own
national identity, only to have their land stolen
by another European empire later on. A tragic
foreshadowing. But we will get to that. Before
the betrayal, they had to actually survive the
war. Right. What's fascinating here is how that
initial weakness actually dictated a brilliant
strategy. The Arab forces quickly realized they
could not win massive pitched battles against
entrenched Ottoman infantry and artillery. They'd
just be slaughtered. Exactly. An early direct
attack on the city of Medina in October 1916
was a bloody disaster for the Arab forces, so
they adapted. The greatest military contribution
of the Arab revolt wasn't winning traditional
battles. It was conducting textbook asymmetric
warfare. It basically became a ghost army. Precisely.
They utilized camel -mounted raiding parties
that could travel hundreds of miles across the
desert. They carried their own food and navigated
a hidden network of wells. Moving totally off
the grid. They simply existed in the harsh terrain,
harassed Ottoman supply lines, and vanished back
into the dunes. Which drives a conventional army
crazy. And by doing this, they pinned down tens
of thousands of Ottoman troops in the Hegez,
who otherwise would have been sent north to attack
the British forces defending the Suez Canal in
Egypt. It's the ultimate war of distraction.
And to coordinate this distraction, the British
and French start sending military advisors. This
is where the names we know start showing up.
Right. This is where the Hollywood connection
comes in. In October 1916, a young British officer
named Captain T .E. Lawrence arrives in the port
of Jeddah. He finds the rebellion completely
stalled out. Dead in the water. So he goes on
a long camel journey to meet the various Arab
leaders. And he correctly identifies Hussein's
third son, Faisal, as the one guy who actually
has the charisma and vision to unite these fractured
tribes. Lawrence definitely had an eye for leadership.
He did. Lawrence gets the fame. He gets the Peter
O'Toole movie. But the sources point out something
incredibly surprising about where his intelligence
actually came from. Who was actually providing
the roadmap? for these desert campaigns. The
intelligence network behind the scenes is crucial
here. While T .E. Lawrence becomes the face of
the allied effort in the desert, historians like
David Hogarth point out that Lawrence was relying
heavily on the work of a woman named Gertrude
Bell. Gertrude Bell. Yes. Bell was an Oxford
graduate who had been traveling extensively throughout
the Middle East since 1888. Way before the war.
Way before. By the time the war broke out, she
had unparalleled knowledge of the tribal dynamics,
the geography, and the politics of the region.
She provided a crucial mass of information about
the local Howitat tribe. So while Lawrence is
getting the credit for mastering the desert,
it was Gertrude Bell's homework that paved the
way. Her mapping of the tribal elements between
the railway and the desert made Lawrence's famous
campaigns of 1917 and 1918 possible. The British
military simply did not have the granular tribal
-level intelligence required to forge these alliances.
Because they were just looking at maps from a
distance. Exactly. But... Bell had it because
she had spent decades sitting in their tents
and learning their politics. So with that intelligence,
the strategy shifts away from attacking heavily
fortified cities like Medina. Instead, the Arabs
decide to just torture the 1300 kilometer Hejaz
railway that supplied the Ottoman garrisons.
A brilliant shift in focus. It's the military
equivalent of repeatedly slashing the tires of
your enemy's only delivery truck. They couldn't
beat the Ottomans in a fair fight, so they just
made sure the Ottomans couldn't eat or reload.
It was a relentless campaign of bleeding the
enemy's logistics, and the sabotage was highly
creative. How so? Well, you had British officers
like Major Herbert Garland who actually invented
a device called the Garland Mine specifically
designed to blow up moving locomotives. Wow.
custom -built train killers. Exactly. And you
had French officers too, like Captain Mohammed
Oud Al -Iraho, a Muslim officer in the French
army. He led Bedouin forces on raids that destroyed
five kilometers of track and four massive bridges
in a single operation. The scale of the sabotage
is wild. to coordinate blowing up five kilometers
of track in the middle of the desert while avoiding
patrols. And that was just one raid. To give
you an idea of the sheer volume of attacks, in
July 1917, British officers Stuart Newcomb and
Pierce Joyce planted over 500 explosive charges
on the Hejaz Railway in a single night. 500 in
one night? Yes. The Ottomans were at the end
of a very long, very tenuous supply line. They
were forced to string their troops out in small
isolated garrisons just to protect the tracks.
Constantly on defense. Constantly repairing the
damage instead of fighting the war. Here's where
it gets really interesting. All of this sabotage
is softening up the Ottomans for major offenses.
In 1917, the Arab forces set their sights on
the port city of Aqaba. A massive turning point.
It's the last remaining Ottoman port on the Red
Sea. Now the Ottomans heavily descended it from
an evil assault. Their big guns were pointed
out at the water. Which is standard doctrine.
Right. So Lawrence, along with the fearsome local
leader, Ota Abutai, comes up with an audacious
plan. Attack Aqaba from behind by crossing the
brutal, seemingly impassable Nefud Desert. It
was a strategic masterstroke, but a total logistical
nightmare. They marched an irregular force through
some of the harshest, most unforgiving terrain
on earth. And the Ottomans had no idea. None.
The Ottomans never expected a large scale attack
from the deep desert because they assumed a traditional
army simply couldn't survive the crossing. Right.
Because of that element of total surprise, the
Arab forces managed to sweep into the city from
the landward side in July 1917 with almost no
casualties. Taking a heavily fortified port city
from the by crossing an uncrossable desert is
the kind of stuff you usually only read about
in fiction. Truly. And the payoff was massive.
The capture of Aqaba fundamentally changed the
geometry of the war. It removed the threat to
the right flank of the British forces defending
Egypt. Okay. But more importantly, it opened
a massive supply artery. The British Royal Navy
could now sail right into the port of Aqaba and
flood the Arab Northern Miami with food, weapons,
armored cars, and supplies. Entirely bypassing
the dangerous overland routes. Exactly. Up until
this point, we've talked a lot about the adventure,
the strategy, the blowing up of trains. It all
sounds very dashing, but it is crucial we don't
gloss over the immense human cost of this revolt.
It's deeply important to remember that. This
is a brutal localized world war, and the trauma
was profound. found. It absolutely was. The sources
are very clear about the grim realities of this
kind of warfare, particularly toward the end
of the campaign. Yeah, things get very dark.
By September 1918, the Ottoman army is retreating
north and military discipline is completely breaking
down. During their retreat, a column of Ottoman,
Austrian and German troops plundered and massacred
the inhabitants of an Arab village called Tafas.
Awful. The Arab forces, including T .E. Lawrence,
arrived shortly after to find the horror of what
had been done to the civilian villagers. And
the retaliation was horrific. In a state of sheer
rage, Lawrence issued a no -prisoners order.
In his book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence
wrote candidly about the psychological toll and
the sheer brutality of that day. What did he
write? He wrote, in a madness born of the horror
of Tafas we killed and killed, even blowing in
the heads of the fallen and of the animals as
though their death and running blood could slake
our agony. It's a stark reminder that beneath
the romanticized image of desert warfare was
a deeply traumatic, blood -soaked reality that
broke the people fighting it. That quote strips
away all the glamour completely. It leaves you
with the raw trauma of these men in the desert.
It does. But despite that horror, The military
momentum of the Arab forces was unstoppable by
late 1918. They're pushing north into Syria,
working in tandem with the British General Allenby's
massive conventional offensives. A two -pronged
attack, essentially. Right. The Arab camel cavalry
is harassing retreating columns, providing intelligence,
and wiping out garrisons. And then they reach
the ultimate prize. Damascus. Damascus was the
political and cultural heart of the region. By
October 1st, 1918, Arab troops, including Oda
Abutai and T .E. Lawrence, ride into the city.
The big victory march. But the symbolic victory
had actually already been achieved. When Sharif
Noser's camel cavalry and the Ruala tribe arrived
just outside the city walls the day before, they
found that surviving Arab nationalists inside
Damascus had already raised the flag of the Arab
revolt. So the city had already flipped? Yes.
The Ottoman Empire was in full total retreat.
The two -year desert campaign had actually worked.
So what does this all mean? The fighting stops.
The Ottomans are defeated. The Arab forces are
sitting in Damascus. Sharif Hussein is down in
Mecca expecting to be handed the keys to this
massive new independent kingdom stretching from
Aleppo to Aden. But while he was fighting in
the sand, what was actually happening in the
backrooms of Europe. What happened in those backrooms
is what the sources, modern historians and the
Arab world widely characterized as a profound
world -altering betrayal. The Rug Bull. A massive
one. Remember that grand promise Henry McMahon
made to Hussein in 1915? The independent state.
Right. Well, in 1916, while the Arabs were bleeding
in the desert fighting the Ottomans, British
and French diplomats secretly signed the Sykes
-Picot agreement. And this agreement basically
voids everything they told Hussein. Entirely.
Sykes -Picot carved up the post -war Middle East
into European mandates. Mandates. Right. A mandate
was effectively colonialism by a different name.
It divided the Arab territories into spheres
of British and French control. How was it split?
France would get control of modern -day Syria
and Lebanon. Britain would get control of modern
-day Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine. Just drawing
lines on a map. Exactly. And to further complicate
matters, the British also issued the Balfour
Declaration in 1917, which promised support for
the establishment of a Jewish national home in
Palestine. When the war officially ended, the
Allies reneged on their original deal with Hussein.
The unified Arab empire he fought for was partitioned
away by diplomats in Europe who simply drew new
lines on a map. The heartbreak of that is just
immense. You have Hussein who staked his life,
his family, and his people on this alliance.
He launched a war beast on a handshake with an
empire. And he paid the price. He did. When the
dust settles, he is left with only the kingdom
of Hejaz, that harsh strip of land bordering
the Red Sea. He is so furious and principled
about the betrayal that he flat out refuses to
sign the Treaty of Versailles. A huge political
statement. And he refuses to legitimize the mandate
system or the Balfour Declaration. His protest
was highly principled, yes, but it cost him his
kingdom. By refusing to sign the treaties, he
alienated the British government, which promptly
cut off his financial and military support, leaving
him completely exposed. Isolated, weakened, and
without his powerful European ally, his kingdom
was left vulnerable. Within a few years, it was
invaded by the Saudi armies from the Central
Arabian Peninsula. The final blow. By December
1925, Hussein was forced to surrender and his
kingdom of Hezbollah was conquered, bringing
his sure fate to a permanent end. It is a tragic
personal arc, but the ideas he unleashed didn't
die with his kingdom. Not at all. Despite the
diplomatic betrayal and the tragic end for Sharif
Hussein himself, the legacy of the Arab revolt
is undeniable. It changed everything. Historians
view it as the very first organized movement
of Arab nationalism. Before 1916, loyalty was
primarily local to a family, a clan, or a specific
tribe. The revolt brought incredibly diverse
groups together for the first time under a shared,
regional goal of independence. You figured out
there were unified people. And the people who
fought in this revolt went on to shape the entire
region. Sharifian officers formed the first political
parties in Iraq. Hussein's sons became kings
of newly created states. The Hashemite. Yes.
The Hashemite family still rules in Jordan today.
The borders drawn in the aftermath of this revolt.
those mandates created by Sykes -Picot and the
fierce nationalist spirit the revolt awakened
created a ripple effect. A ripple effect we still
see. Absolutely. It directly dictates the politics,
the borders, and the conflicts of Iraq, Syria,
Jordan, and the broader Middle East in the 21st
century. The modern Middle East was forged in
the fires of the specific revolt. This raises
an important question, though. Just how far did
this sudden, fierce awakening of identity reach?
That is the question. Was it just contained to
the soldiers fighting in the trenches of the
Hejaz, or the politicians arguing in Damascus?
I want to leave you with one final fascinating
nugget from our sources to mull over, because
the answer to that question is wild. This fight
for identity, this total rejection of the old
Ottoman labels, it reached thousands of miles
away. All the way across the Atlantic Ocean.
Right. While the war was raging in the desert,
immigrants living in the United States, specifically
Arab and Hebrew immigrants who had originally
come from Ottoman Turkey, actually organized
and petitioned the U .S. State Department. In
the middle of the war? In the middle of it. Yeah.
They formally demanded that the federal government
stop classifying them on state registers as Turkish
subjects. They insisted on being recognized specifically
as Arab or Hebrew. That is just amazing to think
about. It really is. The struggle to define who
they were wasn't just happening with rifles and
explosives in the desert. It was happening in
the bureaucratic offices of America. A complete
awakening. Exactly. It goes to show that when
people wake up to their own identity, it cannot
be contained by the arbitrary lines drawn on
a map by an empire. Keep questioning those lines
and keep digging into the history beneath them.
Thanks for joining us on this deep dive.