Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. xxii-7
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
World War ◽  
Long Tail ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study ◽  
First World

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP). GARP was an interdisciplinary study of forgotten war places—the first archaeological-anthropological investigation of a modern guerrilla landscape whose physical traces belonged to the First World War and the Arab Revolt, but also to the long tail of twentieth- and twenty-first-century guerrilla warfare. It was an archaeology which had not been attempted before, and which took place against the background of the American-led Coalition which was occupying Iraq—a nation itself created in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, in which the Arab Revolt had played such a prominent role. The archaeology of the Arab Revolt sites reflects the apparent randomness of the surprise attacks launched on the railway by the Arabs and British. While some sites were created by such raids, more often they were a response to the threat of them. Ultimately, this was an investigation of what asymmetrical warfare looked like on the ground—the archaeology of a desert insurgency and of Ottoman Turkish counter-insurgency measures.

THE RUSSIAN CONSUL IN DAMASCUS PRINCE BORIS N. SHAKHOVSKOY’S ROLE IN INTERFAITH PEACE ON THE EVE OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-178
Author(s):  
Aleksei V. Sarabiev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Interfaith Relations ◽  
Balkan Wars ◽  
Sharia Law ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Common ◽  
Foreign Ministry ◽  
First World

Prince Boris N. Shakhovskoy (1870–1926), the Russian consul in Damascus from 1907 until the First World War, left to his descendants a legacy of attentive and balanced diplomacy. His reports to the Russian Embassy in Constantinople and to the 1st Division of the Foreign Ministry contain invaluable information shedding light on interfaith relations in the Syrian regions of the Ottoman Empire on the eve and after of the Young Turk Revolution, as well as on the early months of the so-called Great War (WWI). The article analyzes the messages of the diplomat on various aspects of the religious situation in the region. He considered the activities of the Islamist organization Muslim League in Damascus, which aimed at enforcing Sharia law throughout Syrian society and countering non-Muslim and European influence in the region. An anxious change in interfaith relations is being evaluated, when Muslim suspicion towards Christians grew, aggravated by the common conscription in the context of the Tripolitan and two Balkan wars. The consul attentively followed the problems of the participation of the Orthodox Arabs in the Ottoman institutions, as well as the attempts to join the English Old-Catholics to Orthodoxy, acting through Metropolitan of Beirut. Of historical interest is also the information about the transition of the Syrian Jacobites to Catholicism, as well as notes on the Catholic missions activities in the region. All these issues in the Syrian soil are viewed by the diplomat through the prism of competition between European powers, especially France and Italy.

THE BRITISH MANDATE AND THE UPRISING OF 1920 IN IRAQ

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (73) (1) ◽  
pp. 140-153
Author(s):  
S. S. Shchevelev
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Initial Period ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
British Mandate ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

The article examines the initial period of the mandate administration of Iraq by Great Britain, the anti-British uprising of 1920. The chronological framework covers the period from May 1916 to October 1921 and includes an analysis of events in the Middle East from May 1916, when the secret agreement on the division of the territories of the Ottoman Empire after the end of World War I (the Sykes-Picot agreement) was concluded before the proclamation of Faisal as king of Iraq and from the formation of the country՚s government. This period is a key one in the Iraqi-British relations at the turn of the 10-20s of the ХХ century. The author focuses on the Anglo-French negotiations during the First World War, on the eve and during the Paris Peace Conference on the division of the territory of the Ottoman Empire and the ownership of the territories in the Arab zone. During these negotiations, it was decided to transfer the mandates for Syria (with Lebanon) to the France, and Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Great Britain. The British in Iraq immediately faced strong opposition from both Sunnis and Shiites, resulting in an anti-English uprising in 1920. The author describes the causes, course and consequences of this uprising.

Beyond the Railway

2020 ◽  
pp. 215-244
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
World War ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

This concluding chapter provides a summary of the discoveries of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP) from the conflict landscape of the Hejaz Railway. A decade in the desert revealed the anthropological archaeology of the Arab Revolt of 1916–18 to be more than the excavation of historically recent places or the survey of ruinous station buildings. It was rather an interdisciplinary study of the railway’s heritage from 1900 to the present, its role as a catalyst in creating a unique conflict landscape, and its intriguing relationships with earlier Hajj routes. The railway was also entangled with the beginnings of modern guerrilla warfare, the creation of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and a complex and sometimes volatile mix of traditional Bedouin culture, modernity, religion, and local and national politics. Furthermore, the Revolt itself was embedded in the wider regional and geo-political framework of the First World War and its many aftermaths: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; the creation of the modern Middle East; the rise of Arab Nationalism; the Second World War; the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq; the destructive legacy of the Islamic State’s short-lived Caliphate announced in 2014; and Syria’s descent into a tortuous and tragic civil war.

Introduction

2012 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Separate Identity ◽  
First World

This introductory chapter describes the unique aspects of the yeshivas of nineteenth-century Lithuania. These yeshivas represented a major attempt on the part of traditional Jewry to cope with the challenges of modernity. The Jews of nineteenth-century Lithuania thus defined had several distinguishing characteristics. In religious terms, most were traditional, in the sense that they had withstood the innovations of hasidism; in fact, the strength of the opposition to that movement in Lithuania was such that they came collectively to be known as mitnagedim (opponents) — that is, opponents of hasidism. Economically, they were mostly poorer than Jews in other major areas of Jewish settlement, such as Poland or Bukovina, and lived in more crowded conditions. Until 1764, they benefited from self-government under the Va'ad Medinat Lita (Council of the Land of Lithuania). By the beginning of the eighteenth century this body had ceased to function, but the distinction between the Jews of Lithuania and those of the neighbouring regions continued to exist — not least because the Lithuanian Jews spoke a distinctive dialect of Yiddish. These and other factors ensured that they continued to maintain a separate identity among the Jews of eastern Europe until the First World War.

Ensemble Intercontemporain at 40, Philharmonie de Paris

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (282) ◽  
pp. 80-81
Author(s):  
Stephanie Jones
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
First Century ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
World War ◽  
Life Worth Living ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Bernard Stiegler ◽  
First World

In response to Paul Valéry's words after the First World War in La Crise de l'esprit – ‘We later civilisations … we too now know that we are mortal’ – the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler remarks, in his own chapter entitled ‘Apocalypse Without God’ in his What Makes Life Worth Living, We too, earthlings of the twenty-first century know that we are capable of self-destruction. And if in the past the possibility of such an extinction of our kind was inconceivable other than as the consequence of God's anger – of original sin – today there is no longer any religious reference at the origin of this extreme global pessimism’ (p. 9).

The East’s Eastern Front: The Ottoman–Russian Clash in the Great War and Its Legacies

2019 ◽  
pp. 096834451982733
Author(s):  
Michael A. Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Eastern Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

This article provides an overview of the neglected Caucasian front of the First World War and explores its impact on the overall course of the war and its legacy for the Middle East and Eurasia. By unexpectedly prolonging hostilities and leading the Russian empire to overextend itself, the conflict with the Ottoman empire contributed critically to Russia’s revolutionary crisis and collapse and thereby altered decisively the fate of the Middle East and Eurasia. The article places the Ottoman–Russian conflict in the context of the relentless growth of Western European military and economic might from the eighteenth century onward.

Throwing Snowballs in France: Muslimsipahisof the Indian Army and Sheikh Ahmad's dream, 1915–1918

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 1024-1067 ◽  
Author(s):  
GAJENDRA SINGH
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Single Chain ◽  
World War ◽  
British Raj ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Martial Race ◽  
First World

AbstractThe arrival of Indiansipahis(or ‘sepoys’) to fight alongside soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force in France in October 1914 was both a victory and a source of concern for the British Raj. It proved to be the zenith of martial race fantasies that had been carefully codified from the 1890s, and birthed fears about the effects that Europe and the rapidly intensifying conflict on the Western Front would have upon the ‘best black troops in the world’. The situation resulted in the appointment of a special military censor to examine the letters sent to and from Indiansipahisand compile a fortnightly summary of Indian letters from France for the duration of the First World War. This paper investigates a portion of the letters contained in these reports. More particularly, it investigates the life of a single chain letter and the effect its chiliastic message had upon Muslim troops of the Indian Army during the First World War. As the letter was read, rewritten, and passed on, it served as a rejoinder to missionary efforts by theAhmadiyyaMovement, reinterpreted as a call for soldiers to purify their own bodies and oppose interracial sexual relationships, before, finally, being used as a critique of the British war effort against the Ottoman empire.

scholarly journals AN OVERVIEW OF THE ACTIVITIES OF TESKILAT-I MAHSUSA IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (48) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Core ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Military Activity ◽  
First World

The Ottoman Empire signed an alliance agreement with Germany right after the start of the First World War. After the Alliance treaty, political and military targets were determined in the meeting held among the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress to determine the policy to be followed. In this meeting, it was also decided to set up an Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa, which would carry out a guerilla war for the army. Establishment of Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa, immediately after the alliance signed with Germany, shows that Germany is also looking at this kind of initiative. It was established under the proposal of Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa Enver Pasha under the Ministry of War. Süleyman Askeri Bey, who dealt with the guerilla war, was brought to the head of the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa. The next two presidents were elected among soldiers of military origin. Unionist officers formed the core of the organization. Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa carried out activities in the Balkans, Caucasus, Morocco, Tripoli, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria during the First World War. However, during the war, the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa underwent some changes. After Ali Başhampa, a civilian, became the president, the name of Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa became Umur-ı Şarkiyye Dairesi, and Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa became more central and civil. Following this change, Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa started to conduct propaganda rather than military activity. In this article, the activities carried out by Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa during the First World War will be evaluated. Keywords: Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa, Enver Pashaa, the Committee of Union and Progress, the Ottoman Empire

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