"العراق والخليج الفارسي" [و‎‎٢‎٠‎٠] (٨٦٢/٤٠٤)

MODERN IRAQ 287
revolt (Oct. 1915), a guarded agreement had been made to recognize
and support the independence of the Arabs of the Baghdad and Basra
vilayets subject to the safeguard of British interests and to British
control; Mosul vilayet was not explicitly excluded. Next General
Maude, after entering Baghdad, promised in somewhat obscure
terms freedom from alien institutions . . . that the Arab race may
rise once more to greatness and renown’, all, however, ‘in collabora
tion with the political representatives of Great Britain’. In June 1918
a deputation of Faisal’s officers was told that the British Government
would recognize Arab independence in areas free before the war and
in areas freed from Turkish rule by the action of the Arabs themselves
during the war.
It was not, however, till the publication on 11 October 1918 in the
Mesopotamian newspapers of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points
that the possibility of independence began to be taken seriously by
the political public of Iraq. The Twelfth Point stated directly that
nationalities under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted
security of life and unmolested opportunity of autonomous develop
ment. The publication of this was followed after the armistice with
Turkey (30 Oct.) by an Anglo-French statement on 8 November that
the two governments intended to establish in the subject areas of the
Turkish Empire ‘national governments and administrations drawing
their authority from the free choice of indigenous populations . . .
and to assure by . . . (Allied) support and effective aid the normal
working of the governments and administrations which they have
adopted of their own free will’. The Anglo-French statement marked
the effective beginning of the nationalist ferment in Iraq, and particu
larly at Baghdad, where within a week the idea of an Arab Amir was
being universally discussed and widely approved among the Moslems
of the coffee-houses. But an attempt of the Civil Administration to
sound public opinion throughout the country did not at this time
produce any clear demand. Public opinion in the illiterate and
tribally organized countryside and in provincial towns meant the
views of the shaikhs, the Moslem clergy, and particularly the Shia
mujtahids (p. 327), the landlords, and other notables. Many regions
plumped for British direct control, others for various forms of Arab
or Arabo-British government, the mujtahids of Najaf and Karbala
for pure theocratic rule; only at Baghdad an assembly of Moslem
notables, said to be non-representative, asked clearly for an Arab
State headed by a Moslem king, chosen from the sons of Husain. The
Jews in alarm asked for British citizenship.