Abstract
The Crusades were the first large-scale Western intervention into the Muslim world. Their impact however on the centres of Islamic power was limited: most of the great Muslim cities remained intact and the most impressive Christian victories were in due course thrown into reverse. But the Arabs — with a ‘most lively feeling of their own history’ — have never forgotten the series of Western aggressions that came to an end more than seven hundred years ago. The leaders of the Arab world still rejoice in the successes of Saladin, still constantly refer to the recapture of Jerusalem from the Christian interlopers, with modern Israel itself depicted as a new crusader state. The Suez expedition of 1956 has been regarded as a Frankish Crusade, akin to the aggression of 1191; and an Arab writer has pointed out that the Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, who on 13 May 1981 almost killed the Pope, declared: ‘I have decided to kill John Paul II, supreme commander of the Crusades.’1 We are reminded that the schism between the Arab East and the West dates from the Crusades; and that this schism is ‘deeply felt by the Arabs, even today, as an act of rape’.2 The Crusades were the first great Western onslaught on Muslims, but it was in the twentieth century that the most comprehensive Western interventions were to take place — with all the exploitation, miseries and humiliations that this implied.
I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.
Winston Churchill
If the Kurds hadn’t learned by our example to behave themselves in a civilised way then we had to spank their bottoms. This was done by bombs and guns.
Wing Commander Gale, 30 Squadron (RAF), Iraq
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, Al Saqi Books, London, 1984.
H. L. Hoskins, British Routes to India, London, 1966, p. 64.
M. and T. Zinkin, Britain and India, Requiem for Empire, London, 1966, p. 64.
G. N. Curzon, 31 March 1903, quoted in D. Judd, Balfour and the British Empire. A Study in Imperial Evolution 1874–1932, London, 1968, p. 231.
D. E. Lee, Great Britain and the Cyprus Convention Policy of 1878, Harvard, 1934, chs 1–3.
S. H. Longrigg, Oil in the Middle East: Its Discovery and Development, London, 1954, ch. 1;
D. G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, London, 1905, ch. 12.
H. V. F. Winstone and Zahra Freeth, Kuwait: Prospect and Reality, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1972, p. 125.
William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey and the Anglo-American World Order 1918–1930, Ithaca, NY and London, Cornell University Press, 1982, p. 111.
Laurence Evans, United States Policy and the Partition of Turkey 1914–1924, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md, 1965, p. 300.
H. V. F. Winstone, The Illicit Adventure, Jonathan Cape, London, 1982, p. 348.
Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters, The Great Oil Companies and the World They Made, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1975, p. 67.
Thomas Kiernan, The Arabs, Sphere, London, 1978, p. 302.
David Fromkin, A Peace to End all Peace, Creating the Modern Middle East 1914–1922, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 96.
George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement, Capricorn Books, New York, 1965, p. 133.
Elie Kedourie, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpreters 1914–1939, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1976, p. 22.
Stuart A. Cohen, British Policy in Mesopotamia 1903–1914, published for The Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford by Ithaca Press, London, 1976, p. 298;
the early history of IEF ‘D’ is described in vol. 1 of F. J. Moberley, History of the Great War based on Official Documents: The Campaign in Mesopotamia, London, 1923.
B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War, London, 1930, p. 208.
T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Jonathan Cape, London, 1955, p. 59.
Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 152.
Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and Other Middle-Eastern Studies, University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 1984, p. 15.
David Holden and Richard Johns, The House of Saud: The Rise and Fall of the Most Powerful Dynasty in the Arab World, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1981.
Ronald Sanders, The High Walls of Jersualem: A History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1983, p. 253.
Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, Mandarin, London, 1989, p. 235.
Howard M. Sachar, The Emergence of the Middle East 1914–1924, Allen Lane, London, 1970, p. 366.
H. V. F. Winstone, Gertrude Bell, Jonathan Cape, London, 1978. p. 209.
Robert Lacey, The Kingdom, Fontana, London, 1982, pp. 161–2.
Aaron S. Klieman, Foundations of British Policy in the Arab World: The Cairo Conference of 1921, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md, 1970, p. 145.
Desmond Stewart, The Middle East: Temple of Janus, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1972, p. 272.
When Clemenceau met with Lloyd George on 1 December 1918, Clemenceau asked what changes Britain wanted to the French claims. ‘Mosul,’ Lloyd George replied. ‘You shall have it,’ said Clemenceau (quoted in Elizabeth Monroe, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East: 1914–1917, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md, 1981, pp. 50–1).
H. V. F. Winstone, Leachman: ‘OC Desert’, Quartet, London, 1982, p. 215.
From the Trenchard Papers, quoted in Philip Knightley and Colin Simpson, The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, London, 1969, p. 139.
C. Townshend, ‘Civilization and Frightfulness’, 148, Wg/Cdr to CAS, 19 February 1920, Trenchard Papers MFC 76/1/36; Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, IV, Heinemann, London, 1975, pp. 494, 810; Companion IV ii, pp. 1066–7, 1083, 1170;
quoted in David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control, The Royal Air Force 1919–1939, Manchester University Press, Manchester, England, 1990, p. 160.
The Letters of Gertrude, ed. Lady Bell, London, 1947; quoted by Stewart, op. cit., p. 279.
Violet Dickson, Forty Years in Kuwait, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1971, p. 79.
John Bagot Glubb, War in the Desert, An RAF Frontier Campaign, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1960, p. 291.
M. E. Yapp, The Near East Since the First World War, Longman, London, 1991, p. 70.
John Connell, Wavell, Scholar and Soldier, Collins, London, 1964, p. 430.
Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1985, p. 223.
Martin Gilbert, Second World War, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1989, p. 187.
Copyright information
© 1994 Geoff Simons
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Simons, G. (1994). The Western Impact. In: Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23147-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23147-8_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-23149-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-23147-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)