https://aeon.co/essays/sharif-hussein-a ... rab-empire
Tens of millions of Muslims today claim this heritage. Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator until 2003, was one of them, for example. The rulers of Morocco, too, are ashraf. (The Saudi kings are emphatically not.)
In December 2022, Abdullah II, the king of Jordan, gave an interview to the CNN anchor Becky Anderson. Sitting close to the Jordan River, not far from where Jesus is believed to have been baptised, this Muslim ruler expressed his concerns about the status of Jerusalem and the Christians under pressure from the new, extremist Israeli government.
Abdullah II cited his great-great-grandfather Sharif Hussein. It was from Hussein’s time, sometime at the end of the First World War, according to Abdullah II, that the Hashemite custodianship of Jerusalem’s holy sites originates.
Wikipedia in English, for instance, tells us that the custodianship of the Muslim sites in Jerusalem by the Hashemites follows from a ‘verbal agreement’ of Hussein with the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine in 1924. The Indonesian version of Wikipedia repeats the claims of the English article. The Arabic version, however, tells us about the financial help Hussein gave for restoring the holy sites of Jerusalem and subsequent donations by the Hashemite dynasty for further improvements to the holy city.
Sharif Hussein is a legendary figure of the 1910s and ’20s. For some – certainly for Abdullah II – Hussein was the nationalist leader of the ‘Arab revolt’ during the First World War who won the war for the Arabs. In an alliance with Britain, he revolted against the Ottoman Empire in 1916 in order to establish a giant independent state that he called the ‘Arab Kingdom’. Others see him in less heroic terms. They blame him for ‘stabbing the Ottomans in the back’, the inability to stop the partitions decided by Europeans, and the Zionist settlement of Palestine – so, in a way, for losing the war.
The loyalty of the Meccan descendants of the Prophet meant the symbolic recognition of the Ottoman caliphate. Since their conquest in the early 16th century, the Ottoman sultans usually appointed a sharif to serve as the emir of Mecca, its local ruler. From the mid-19th century, the descendants of the Prophet became closer and closer to Istanbul, literally. Hussein was born in Istanbul because his family branch in exile competed for the emirate of the holy city. He knew Turkish, his wife was Turkish-speaking, and his sons received Ottoman education. Hussein, known in the Ottoman administration as Şerif Ali Paşazade Hüseyin Bey (in Turkish transliteration), became quite an Ottomanised descendant of the Prophet.
From the 1870s, the descendants of the Prophet received political roles in the Ottoman imperial capital. Many other more ordinary Arabs from the provinces also became part of the modernising imperial bureaucracy. Hussein and his sons (and the rival sharifian Meccan family members), circulating between Mecca and Istanbul, benefitted from this modern experiment fusing Islam with imperial patriotism. It’s helpful to think of this as an ‘unelected system of representation’, for the sultan suspended the imperial constitution in 1878 and substituted the parliament with these new practices. The ashraf ‘represented’ their regions (in a way, Hussein’s family stood for Mecca and the Hijaz region) but also in general the Muslim community. Many ashraf sat on imperial councils, travelled on steamships and the new railway lines, and so provided a symbolic cover for the empire. After the coup d’état usually known as the Young Turk Revolution to restore the constitution in 1908, Hussein’s sons became elected members of the new imperial assembly. And from 1908, Hussein held the imperial office of the emir of Mecca.
In the 1910s, Hussein and his sons made cautious contact with the British consul in Cairo. Intriguing, in early 1914 Hussein’s son Abdullah asked the British consul to consider a British protectorate over the emirate of Mecca like the British did with the subdued Afghan emir.
By the 1910s, many faith- and ethnicity-based groups in the Ottoman Empire demanded reforms to transform the empire into a federation. Bourgeois Arabs were no exception as some Syrians started to imagine a decentralised Ottoman Empire with Arab autonomy. Other Arab groups – for instance, the religious entrepreneur-journalist Sheikh Rashid Rida and his activists, with some European encouragement – imagined a new empire as a Muslim association of emirs, and some other sheikhs even advocated for an Arab caliph instead of an Ottoman one. In many of these 1910s plans, the ashraf had a role and Hussein, as the ruler of Mecca, personally could expect a potential caliphate. European commentators imagined this would-be Arab caliphate as a type of papacy, restricted to the holy cities in the Hijaz. This would have ended the age-old Ottoman system of combining the emperor and caliph titles. In short, the spirit of the time was to create autonomous polities in some sort of federation as a better way to accommodate economic and political demands of ethnic groups, and to challenge the Ottoman leadership of Sunni Islam.
After an exchange of letters with the British High Commissioner in Cairo (this correspondence came to be known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence), Hussein declared his revolt – the ‘Arab revolt’ – against the Ottoman government in June 1916. Ever since, there has been a debate over what the British promised exactly, what a promise means in informal diplomacy, and whether the British betrayed their promises later.
Despite the assurances about a large Arab polity in the correspondence with McMahon, no Allied planners really expected that the emir of Mecca would want something more than a small emirate with the holy cities in the Hijaz. When, in October 1916, Hussein and his sons announced their claim to a giant polity, with Hussein as ‘King of the Arabs’, it took the Allied Powers by surprise. The ‘Arab Kingdom’ was an idea about a new empire stretching from the Levant (what is today Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon) to the Iraqi regions, even Arabia, thus including most of the Arabic-speaking Asian Ottoman provinces (but not the North African ones). Overcoming their surprise, in January 1917 and later repeatedly, the Allied Powers recognised Hussein as king only over the Hijaz, a small portion of Arabia. But this new ruler and his sons were not satisfied with a kingdom of the Hijaz. They maintained their claims to a much larger state, a new Muslim-Arab empire. This is why, when the sharifian troops entered Ottoman Damascus in October 1918 under the orders of his second son Faisal, many Damascenes understood that they are now in the ‘Arab Kingdom’, being the subjects of Hussein, a new Muslim sultan.
During 1918 and 1919, the sharifian advocates of the Arab Kingdom projected Islam and Arab ethnicity as the founding norms of a new political order. From early 1918, the official journal in Mecca and his sons called Hussein ‘the Commander of the Faithful’ in Arabic (amir al-mu’minin) while the new king craved for the title of caliph. Both the sharifian and British propaganda started to advertise Prophetic descent as an important quality for Muslim rulership. The Arab Kingdom was to be ruled by Hussein and his sons, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Islam, Prophetic genealogy and ethnicity were to serve as the constitutional foundations of Hussein’s Arab Kingdom. We can call this idea of a state a ‘genealogical empire’.
