Churchill and the Islamic World

Orientalism, Empire and Diplomacy in the Middle East

Warren Dockter

• Verlag: I.B. Tauris
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857737144
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Storia
• Thema: Biografie in ambito storico

Winston Churchill was the greatest statesman of the twentieth century, yet he began his career as a colonial policeman in the North-West borderlands of India, and this experience was the beginning of his long relationship with the Islamic world. Overturning the widely-accepted consensus that Churchill was indifferent to, and even contemptuous of, matters concerning the Middle East, this book unravels Churchill's nuanced understanding of the edges of the British Empire. Warren Dockter analyses the future Prime Minister's experiences of the East, including his work as Colonial Under-Secretary in the early 1900s, his relations with the Ottomans and conduct during the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915-16, his arguments with David Lloyd-George over Turkey, and his pragmatic support of Syria and Saudi Arabia during World War II. Challenging the popular depiction of Churchill as an ignorant imperialist when it came to the Middle East, Dockter suggests that his policy making was often progressive when compared to the orientalist prejudices of many of his contemporaries. Above all, the book shows how Churchill left a lasting legacy in the region, which continues to be felt in Middle Eastern politics and British policy today.

CHAPTER 1

EARLY ENCOUNTERS

An analysis of Winston Churchill’s relationship with the Islamic world must begin by examining his preconceived perceptions of the Orient and his earliest encounters with it, first as a soldier along the Indian north-west frontier (present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan), then in the Sudan, and in his travels as Colonial Under-Secretary. This chapter considers those phases of Churchill’s life (and what prejudices he might have had from his Victorian, imperial education) and his early encounters with various Muslim sects and tribes to assess how these experiences affected his perception on political matters such as the possibility of a pan-Islamic uprising and Russia’s role in the ‘great game’ in central Asia. In addition, this chapter engages with the influence that abstract issues such as orientalism, frontier ethics, and cultural hierarchies had on Churchill’s thinking. While it is true that Churchill shared many Victorian prejudices (such as the belief that British culture was inherently superior to Eastern cultures), this chapter explores how his experiences informed his opinions of the Islamic world and differentiated him from many British politicians of his day.

The Malakand Expedition

It was in 1897 on the frontier of imperial India, along the Chitral road that twists through the Malakand pass, that the British ‘Forward Policy’ met resistance from Muslim tribes. ‘These clansmen – Pathans, Swatis, Waziris, Mahsuds, Afridis, Bunerwalis, Chitrals and Gilgitis – had lived in remote independence since the dawn of time’,¹ and the British Forward Policy, which dictated that imperial forces had a right to secure frontier regions in order to ensure economic stability, brought opposing civilizations into a recurring and bloody conflict. ‘Forward Policy’ was enacted by the viceregal government of India and made public by dispatch No. 49, 28 February 1897.² The tribal uprising against it was led by Mullah Sadullah, nicknamed the ‘Mad Fakir’, who Churchill described as a ‘wild enthusiast, convinced of his Divine mission and miraculous powers, [who] preached a crusade, or Jihad, against the infidel.’³ Both the British forts at Chakdara and Malakand were attacked. The British losses were severe, with over 153 casualties.⁴ A rapid retribution was thought to be required because the Islamic uprising coincided with the recent Turkish victory over the Greek army, which many feared (perhaps due to the lingering memories of the 1857 mutiny) might encourage a Muslim revival.⁵ General Bindon Blood was authorized to perform a punitive expedition, which was characterized as the ‘Butcher and Bolt Policy’ because they often resulted in ‘the destruction of tribal villages and crops and then a hasty withdrawal.’⁶

This is also where a 23-year-old Winston Churchill, only a junior officer (subaltern), embarked on his first major assignment as a war correspondent and came face to face with an Islamic adversary. Moreover, it was the first time he was confronted with the threat of a pan-Islamic movement, the fear of which would trouble his entire career in relation to the Middle East. However, it was not Churchill’s first taste of war. This came from his brief stint in Cuba as a war correspondent for the Daily Graphic during a leave of absence from his regiment, the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars.

Churchill arrived in Bangalore in October 1896 and quickly felt isolated from his family, friends, and (more importantly) from politics in Britain. By November, however, he had become somewhat fascinated with the nearby city of Hyderabad, which he explained to his mother contained ‘all the scoundrels of Asia’ and was an independent city because the Nizam of Hyderabad had remained loyal during the Indian mutiny of 1857. As a result, Churchill continued, ‘British officers were not allowed in the city without permission and escort and native customs everywhere prevail. All natives walk about armed and by their arrogance proclaim their appreciation of liberty.’⁷ Despite this blatantly imperialist and Anglo-centric perception, Churchill still wanted the adventure of going through the city, though he insisted he would do it on an elephant so that ‘natives’ could not spit at him.

Churchill’s Victorian disdain for day-to-day life in India is evident in several of his early letters from India. Shortly after his elephant ride through Hyderabad, he displayed his indifference to native Hindu culture when he wrote to his mother explaining that he ‘shall not learn Hindustani. It is quite unnecessary. All the natives speak perfect English.’⁸ When news reached Churchill that he would be able to return home for a short period of leave in April 1897, he wrote to his mother:

I am looking forward immensely to seeing civilisation again after the barbarous squalor of this country […] The eight months I have been in this country have as regards Indian information and knowledge been utterly barren. I have met no one who cared to tell my anything about the problems of the hour and if I stay her twenty years as a soldier I see no prospect of my acquiring any knowledge worth knowing of Indian affairs.⁹

These letters demonstrate the first of two cultural paradigms that were intrinsically linked and help to illustrate Churchill’s attitudes regarding his early encounters with Islamic civilization, paradigmatic forces that fed on one another and, in a way, required one another for their existence. The first cultural paradigm that greatly influenced Churchill and the British Empire was nineteenth-century British orientalism, as seen in his early letters home from India and in his early field reports from the Swat valley. (The orientalist character of these reports is also evident in Churchill’s The Story of the Malakand Field Force.) According to Edward Said, orientalism is:

A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience […] The Orient is the place of Europe’s greatest and richest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of the deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, and experience.¹⁰

Churchill’s view of the Islamic world, and indeed the entire East, was shaped by the paradigm of orientalism due to his social background and education in late nineteenth-century England. British academia at the turn of the nineteenth century was firm in its contention that eugenics combined with social Darwinism rationalized the subordination of non-European people because of their inability to use logic. These popular academic and social perceptions of Muslims are best described by Humayun Ansari:

Interactions between Muslims and British society was largely shaped by contemporary popular views regarding their position in the human hierarchy relative to degrees of civilization. These views were complicated by the juxtaposition of race with religion. As non-European races became subordinate to the British, those from Muslim lands were evaluated disparagingly.¹¹

In fact, some have argued that Churchill’s perceptions were merely a product of the Victorian England in which he spent his childhood. Historian David Jablonsky has made this argument by referring to letters that an 11-year-old Winston wrote to his mother and father regarding the death of Victorian hero Colonel Fredrick G. Burnaby who was killed in action, ‘sword in hand while resisting the desperate charge of the Arabs at the battle of Abu Klea.’¹² Jablonsky also draws on the prolific works of George Alfred Henty who wrote several books about imperial history and was very popular among young, privately educated Victorian boys like Churchill. Richard Toye reinforces this notion in Churchill’s Empire (2010) by examining the Victorian notions of empire that Churchill inherited from his education at Harrow and from his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who was briefly the secretary of state for the India Office, and was a Conservative who typically shied away from the Gladstone government’s more imperialist undertakings, such as the occupation of Egypt in 1882. Lord Randolph, like most of the Tories of his day, was typically pro-Turk, which had interesting effects on Churchill’s understanding of the Ottoman (and thus the Islamic) world.¹³ It was from such influences that Jablonsky concludes: ‘Churchill created an inner historical world in which there was only the grand and grandiose. Progress was measured through politics and war, rarely in terms of economic, intellectual, and social issues.’¹⁴

Kirk Emmert further developed this notion in Winston S. Churchill on Empire (1986). However, Emmert focuses more on Churchill’s personal experiences as a subaltern and explores Churchill’s notion of civilization and how it was intrinsically linked to his belief that the British Empire was a ‘civilizing empire’, which ‘is the political relationship […] which exists when civilized men rule over the uncivilized, without their consent for the sake of the mutual improvement of the rulers and ruled. The civilized are elevated by ruling, the uncivilized by being ruled.’¹⁵

This school of cultural and racial superiority was evident in almost all aspects of British imperial policy, and was epitomized in the ‘Forward Policy’. The wars fought in the Orient were frontier wars, where civilization was confronted with ‘militant Mohammedanism’ and where (according to Churchill): ‘The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.’¹⁶ Churchill later characterized frontier wars as ‘little wars’ and ‘a splendid game’ in which ‘nobody expected to be killed […] This kind of war was full of thrills. It was not like the great war.’¹⁷ His racist views are especially obvious after he noted the impossibility of arguing with an Afghan. Churchill repeatedly asserts the impossibility of a ‘civilized’ European understanding the Muslim thought process:

A civilized European is as little able to accomplish this, as to appreciate the feelings of those strange creatures, which when a drop of water is examined under a microscope, are revealed amiably gobbling each other up, and themselves being complacently devoured.¹⁸

However, there is evidence that even at this early stage of Churchill’s career, he was not completely dependent on the orientalist paradigm for his perception of the East, especially as it relates to the Ottoman Empire. Before departing for India after his leave, Churchill and his mother had an interesting clash. In a series of letters written during the early spring of 1897, he and his mother argued over the situation in the Balkans and the impending Greco-Turkish War.¹⁹ The Conservative government of the Marquis of Salisbury had adopted a policy of non-intervention, taking the position that Crete should remain with the Ottoman Empire. This was highly controversial and unpopular because the Ottomans had massacred nearly 10,000 Christians on Crete and it appeared as if the Salisbury government was backing ‘the cause of Moslem barbarism’.²⁰ Lady Randolph implored Winston to try to understand that the Salisbury government was acting in the interest of the British Empire in relation to the concert of Europe. However, displaying his orientalist ideas, Churchill saw this political inaction and courting of the Ottoman Empire as an illogical and unethical foreign policy.²¹ On 6 April 1897, he wrote what seemed to be his final observation on the subject:

I am sorry you do not agree with my views on Crete […] We are doing a very wicked thing […] Lord Salisbury is a strong man & a clever man. He does not want Russia to get to Constantinople and with this object he is willing to crush the Greeks or anyone else whose interests do not coincide with his. The Turkish Empire he is determined to maintain. He does not give a row of buttons for the suffering of those oppressed by that Empire. This is not only wrong it is foolish. It is wrong because it is unjustifiable to kill people who are not attacking you […] and because it is an abominable action which prolongs the servitude under the Turks of the Christians races. It is foolish because as surely as night follows day – the Russians are bound to get to Constantinople. We could never stop them even if we wished. Nor ought we wish for anything that could impede the expulsion from Europe of the filthy oriental.²²

Fourteen days later, his mother’s response came assuring Churchill that his ideas on the subject were ‘premature and wrong’ and that while ‘no one has any sympathy for the Turks’ that ‘Greece has taken too much upon herself and she will have to knock under’.²³ However, the next day Churchill completely reversed his position, declaring in a letter to his mother that ‘the declaration of war by Turkey on Greece [had] changed all [his] plans.’ He then expressed a desire to join the battle between the two Balkan powers. One of his major considerations was which side to join! Churchill goes on to say:

This […] must depend on you. Of course my sympathies are entirely with the Greeks, but on the other hand the Turks are bound to win, they are in enormous strength and will be on the offensive the whole time. If I go on this side it will be less glorious but much more safe and as I have no wish to be involved in the confusion of a defeated army, my idea is that would be more suitable. You must decide. If you can get me good letters to the Turks, to the Turks I will go. If to the Greeks – to the Greeks.²⁴

Despite all of Churchill’s musings on the ethics of foreign policy and the morality of war, it appears that he was so motivated by glory and a lust for military experience (to enhance prospects for his political career) that he was willing to fight anyone’s battles and, in doing so, would happily skirt off any negative notions regarding the Ottomans. Even at this early stage, Churchill was differentiating himself from his British Victorian contemporaries.

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Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Early Encounters
• 2. Of Oil and Ottomans
• 3. Churchill: Minister of War and Air
• 4. Churchill at the Colonial Office
• 5. The Legacy of the Cairo Conference
• 6. The Twenties and Thirties
• 7. Churchill, the Middle East, and India during World War II
• 8. The Postwar World
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plate Section
• Back cover