Proclamation of the Sharif of Mecca

Under the date of the 25th day of the month of Sha’ban in the year 1334 of the Hijra, that is 26 or 27 June 1916, the Sharif of Mecca signed a proclamation to all Muslims. In it he condemned the Committee of Union and Progress ruling in Constantinople and proclaimed the independence of the Hejaz. English translations, published during the war and in the 1920s, give the date as 27 June. The Lebanese historian George Antonius writes that the sharif circulated this first proclamation of his in July. The British chronology of the war records it under 7 June, but that is impossible, because the text describes events that took place in Mecca only after 10 June. The available sources mention no document of the sharif’s dated 7 June.

An appeal to all Muslims

Hussein bin Ali had begun the revolt against the Turks in the first days of June. The proclamation was meant to explain it to the world of Islam. It began with the words: “This is our general circular to all our Muslim brothers”. The sharif recalled that the emirs of Mecca had been the first among Muslim rulers to recognise the authority of the Ottoman sultans, because they ruled in accordance with the Qur’an and the Sunnah. He himself, he wrote, had in 1909 raised the Arab tribes to break the siege of Turkish-held Abha in Asir. Everything changed when the Young Turks came to power. Under their rule the state had lost territory and prestige, and the war had brought destitution. In the Holy Land people were said to be selling the doors and ceiling beams of their houses to survive.

An indictment

Most of the text was taken up with religious charges. The sharif wrote that in one of the newspapers in Constantinople, under the eyes of the Grand Vizier, the Sheikh ul-Islam and the ulema, the life of the Prophet had been slandered and the Qur’anic rule of inheritance, under which a son receives twice as much as a daughter, had been called into question. The Young Turks had also allowed soldiers in Medina, Mecca and Damascus to break the fast in Ramadan, as if they were fighting on the Russian front. They had stripped the sultan of his power, even of the right to choose the Grand Vizier, and had ordered the qadi in Mecca to recognise only evidence written down in court. The state, the sharif wrote, was in reality governed by Enver Pasha, Djemal Pasha and Talat Bey, “as they pleased”.

The strongest passage concerned the executions in Syria. The sharif recalled that 21 eminent Muslims and Arabs had been hanged at once, naming several of them, and that their families, “infants, weak women and old men”, had been exiled and their property confiscated. He also accused the authorities of desecrating the tomb of Emir Abdelkader, the hero of the fighting against the French in Algeria, who had died in Damascus.

The gravest charge concerned Mecca itself. When, after the outbreak of the revolt in Mecca, the Turkish guns shelled the city, they fired two shells at the Kaaba. According to the proclamation, one fell about a yard and a half above the Black Stone and the other three yards from it, and the covering of the shrine caught fire. Thousands of the faithful rushed to put out the blaze, and a third shell struck the Maqam Ibrahim, the stone beside the Kaaba on which, according to tradition, Abraham stood while building the shrine. The sharif left the judgement of this “contempt and profanation” to the whole Muslim world. Some historians believe that the Turks hit the shrine by accident, but the sharif’s propaganda made full use of it.

Independence of the Hejaz

The Hejaz, the sharif announced, had won its independence “in the fullest sense of the word” and freed itself from foreign rule. The new state was to defend Islam and base justice on religious law, while at the same time spreading education among all classes. Hussein called on Muslims “in the East and the West” to follow his example. He signed himself as Sharif and Emir of Mecca. He did not yet use the royal title.

The proclamation justified the revolt almost entirely on religious grounds, and said little about the Arab nation. Antonius considered that its significance lay above all in calling on Muslims to rise against Turkey. In the Arab world it was, in his view, the last nail in the coffin of the jihad the sultan had proclaimed in November 1914. The guardian of the holy cities of Islam had not only failed to support it but had rebelled against the caliph. Djemal Pasha admitted as much indirectly a few months later in Damascus, calling the sharif a villain who had stopped the holy war and forced Turkey to send against him troops that should have been fighting the British on the Suez Canal. In the autumn of 1916 Hussein proclaimed himself king.