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There is probably no more potent a myth in the annals of the modern Middle East than the so-called `Great Arab Revolt' of the First World War. In Arab historiography, parroted by generations of unquestioning Western students, the revolt signifies the culmination of an `Arab Awakening' which had long been in the making.1 Even those few critical observers who reckon the nonexistence of such a national awakening prior to the war do not question the revolt's nationalist credentials, viewing it as an offspring of Sharif Hussein's sudden conversion from 'Ottomanism' to 'Arabism'.2 No wonder that the desert revolt has given rise to a litany of Arab recriminations against the then imperial powers, Britain and France, for allegedly talking a naive and wellintentioned national movement into an uprising, only to cheat it of its fruits once it had outlived its utility for great-power interests. Replicated by such guilt-ridden intellectual imperialists as T.E. Lawrence and Arnold Toynbee, this claim, too, has become an accepted orthodoxy of Western historiography of the modern Middle East, challenged only by a handful of critical scholars.3
However intriguing, such views are totally misconceived. This was no `Great Arab Revolt': it was Hussein's personal bid for an empire. The sharif was no champion of national liberation seeking to unshackle the `Arab Nation' from the chains of Ottoman captivity: he was an imperialist aspirant anxious to exploit a unique window of opportunity for substituting his own empire for that of the Ottomans. If he had ever truly subscribed to the notion of 'Ottomanism', which he certainly had not, he discarded it for the selfserving cause of 'Hashemism' - not 'Arabism'.
Nor did Hussein represent the wishes of the 8-10 million Arabicspeaking subjects of the Ottoman Empire, most of whom remained loyal to their suzerain virtually to the end of the war and viewed the desert revolt with total indifference or even hostility. Even in his own home town of Mecca, not to speak of his Arabian homeland, the sharif's authority was far from accepted; not least, the rebel forces themselves lacked a corporate identity and were saddled with schisms and enmities: among the Arabian tribes, among Arabians and non-Arabians, most of whom were prisoners of war supplied by Britain, and among the non-Arabian participants...