An officer and a Bedouin.

• Author: Morris, Benny
• Position: Lawrence of Arabia - Book review

Michael Korda, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (New York: Harper, 2010), 784 pp., $36.00.

Thomas Edward Lawrence, commonly known as Lawrence of Arabia, famously called the Arab Revolt during World War I, which for a time he orchestrated, a "sideshow of a sideshow." Of course, he was (at least partly) speaking in his customary self-deprecating voice, which he very successfully deployed alongside an even-more-powerful baritone of self-aggrandizement (his memoir of that rebellion, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is nothing if not self-promoting). Over time, observers began to speak of his wont of "backing into the limelight." No one ever did it more consummately.

But Lawrence's definition, taken simply, of the revolt's place in the Great War was spot-on, in flagrant contrast with Michael Korda's repetitive-to-the-point-of-tedium implicit inflation of the episode as the core military enterprise in the Middle Eastern theater of operations--where the Allies were slugging it out with a crumbling Ottoman Empire seeking to regain territory lost to the Russians nearly forty years earlier--if not in the Great War itself. It goes without saying that most historians believe that the key military episodes of World War I were the giant land battles on Europe's western and eastern fronts. Center stage in the Middle East were the to-and-fro of Ottoman-Russian encounters in the southern Caucasus and in the eastern provinces of Anatolia (now, Turkey's border with Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia), not to mention the protracted battle in Gallipoli during which Allied forces tried to reach Constantinople and secure a route to Russia through the Black Sea, as well as the Anglo-Turkish confrontations in Mesopotamia, Sinai and Palestine.

Indeed, the revolt led by the Hashemite princeling, or sharif, Husayn ibn Ali that began in June 1916 in Hejaz, the area of present-day western Arabia that includes the principal Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina, was never more than a minuscule affair and nuisance for the Ottoman armies.

It is difficult to quantify, but the Hejazi revolt probably diverted and commanded the energies of no more than one Turkish army division. (Korda speaks of "two," sometimes even "three," divisions, but this is a gross exaggeration. And Ottoman "divisions" were as a rule badly undermanned, perhaps a third or even one-quarter the size of the fifteen- to twenty-thousand-man divisions of the Allies.)

Which all means that at most, several thousand poorly disciplined, militarily in competent camel- and horse-borne bedouin tribesmen, in the later stages supported by a handful of British imperial artillery batteries and armored-car squadrons along with one or two airplanes, participated in the revolt. In fact, at low points in the campaign only several hundred Arabs were actually in the fight.

Rebel numbers, as Lawrence often admitted (and Korda echoes him on this point, again, repetitively), were entirely dependent on the arrival of sackfuls of British gold sovereigns; no sovereigns, no rebels--and no rebellion. Loyalty being at the mercy of the highest bidder, periodically tribes withdrew from the fray when offered or given slightly larger sacks of gold by Ottoman agents. For most of the participants, it was not ideology (Arab nationalism, overthrowing the Turkish tyrant, the Allied "cause") but loot that was the motivating factor. Lawrence, in Pillars (and its shorter version, Revolt in the Desert), described, with a sad shake of the head, how upon capturing a Turkish outpost, his "soldiers" almost invariably melted away in a mad dash for the spoils, which included the surrendering Turkish troops' shoes, clothes, cigarettes, etc. (Often throats of the conquered were subsequently slit, as was the custom.)

In general, twentieth-century Arab and pro-Arab historians have tended to predate the emergence of Arab nationalism and the Arab national movements. Rashid Khalidi, for example, in Palestinian Identity, marks the emergence of a separate Palestinian-Arab national consciousness and aspiration somewhere in the nineteenth cen tury. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, in their The Palestinian People: A History, place the ascendance at 1834, an obvious absurdity. In reality, there were glimmerings of a modern Arab nationalist consciousness and a...