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World War I Dreamscapes: Debating and Re-Imagining Religious Authority in the Arabian Peninsula
Abstract
This paper analyzes the dream narratives and the strategy of dream-sharing among key figures in the Arabian Peninsula during World War I. I argue that alongside the political negotiations, battles, and propaganda that characterized the Arab Revolt which was launched by the Amir of Mecca in 1916 with British support, dream narratives represented another “front” as enemies and allies of the Amir debated the direction and legitimacy of the region’s future. This project builds on existing scholarship that has shifted our attention away from a focus on the political consequences of the war and towards analyses of its social and ideological effects. Concerning the ideological competition, anxieties of British influence over Husayn and the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina were frequently expressed by Husayn’s critics and supporters like. These anxieties focused on debates about the future of the Caliphate if the Ottoman empire collapsed. Would the Ottoman Sultan continue to hold this globally recognized privilege, or would, as some Arab Muslim theologians advocated, an Arab claim the mantle of authority? While these questions were debated and propagandized in Arabic newspapers and journals, an unexamined dimension of this debate was the role of dream narratives by key figures in the Arabian Peninsula. Dreams, while highly personal, hint at common cultural and social turmoils; and in the history of the Islamic world, they represented a strategic rhetorical tool. This paper examines a dream premonition reported by Rashid Rida, an Islamist thinker from Cairo and supporter of the Arab Revolt while performing the 1916 pilgrimage; a recurring dream of Abdulaziz ibn Sa‘ud that he shared with British representatives in 1917; and a dream that Fahreddin Pasha, the Ottoman commander in Medina, described in 1918 as he refused to surrender the city to Husayn’s forces. By analyzing these dreams in terms of their narratives, contexts, and audiences, it becomes possible to trace the mix of religious anxieties in the region and how key actors made sense of their present to advocate for their future designs.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Arabian Peninsula
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries