In 1915, Hussein Ruhi was busily translating with profound consequences, the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. Hired by Sir Ronald Storrs, (Britain’s Oriental Secretary, spy, and later Governor of Jerusalem) as an agent and translator during the fomentation of the Arab Revolt, Ruhi plays a shadowy role, both in his capacity as an agent and as a figure in the archival record. He appears as a bit character in generally British-focused narratives of the Revolt, and intelligence during the First World War. T.E. Lawrence briefly refers to Ruhi as “more like a mandrake than a man” (perhaps in reference to his multiple wives and many children.) Ronald Storrs, who spent many more months with Ruhi gave him the code name “the Persian Mystic,” defining Ruhi as “A fair though not profound Arabist, and a better agent than scholar.” Ruhi himself, a petite spy, translator, poet and textbook author spent decades working for British officials, diplomats, spies, and educationalists, including a 15-year stint in the Department of Education in the Mandate for Palestine. The story of this extraordinary individual illustrates not only tactics of British espionage, but also the afterlife of an informant; the strange trends of government service in the Middle East during the interwar period, as well as the striking transnationalism brought to light by the division of the former Arab Provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Ruhi’s work as an agent for the British government during World War I was followed by decades in a different type of agency: as an inspector, writing reports on teachers and schools in Gaza and Jerusalem from 1920 through his retirement in 1935. His interactions with colleagues in the Mandate bureaucracy, as well as the British individuals who had hired him, point to the chameleon-like character of the man himself. They also underscore the nature of British control and strategy during the First World War and Mandate period, and the incongruity between nationality, language and citizenship in the region. This paper uses a combination of official and unofficial British sources, diaries, letters and personnel files to briefly trace the history of this extraordinary individual, and his impact on intelligence during and immediately after World War I.

During the First World War, British intelligence officers shaped Britain’s commitments to the Hashemites, France, and the Zionists. Infamous for their violent consequences, these seemingly conflicting promises represented wartime strategies to help defeat the Ottoman Empire and Germany. Intelligence records shed light upon Britain’s greatest triumphs and blunders as it reshaped the region into its current form. Since the outbreak of the war, prominent Arab nationalists and Islamists – all members of secret societies – were rebuffed after attempting to persuade British officers to support Arab independence. They sought liberation from the Ottomans, and independence. Britain only began to seriously consider its first major commitment in the Middle East in mid-1915. The gap between the first Anglo-Arab overtures in October 1914 and the beginning of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence is key to understanding the expectations of British decision makers. This paper examines why, during the first year of the war, Anglo-Arab overtures largely failed. Complicating this story, days after the Ottoman entry to the war, the Minister for War, Lord Kitchener, offered Sherif Hussein an Arab caliphate based in Hejaz, to rival that of the Ottoman sultan. Simultaneously, the Arab movements began to send emissaries to the British headquarters in Egypt in order to negotiate an Anglo-Arab alliance. Four of these overtures failed, but still influenced the McMahon-Hussein correspondence which eventually did succeed in creating a military partnership between Britain and the Hashemites, as the latter led a revolt against the Ottomans. The details of these initial negotiations help to explain why British assessments misconstrued the motivations and capabilities of their Arab interlocutors. Britain’s understanding of Arab movements, and of pan-Islam’s relationship with nationalism, was conditioned by circumstances produced by the war. The war divided friends and colleagues between pro-British and pro-Ottoman loyalties. The nationalists who approached British officers during 1914-15 exaggerated the unity of purpose across the Arab world, and misrepresented the capabilities and interests of the movement. British officers never anticipated the violent hatred which they faced in the years immediately following the First World War, and were slow to appreciate it cause. This was a consequence of their wartime assessments of the Arab movements. Conflict emerged largely because the war had created conditions which disguised the complex nationalist-Islamist networks in the region. Conditions favourable to the Anglo-Arab alliance and its particular vision for an Arab kingdom proved to be temporary.

The complicated relationship between France and Britain during and after the First World War in the Middle East manifested itself in paradoxical ways on the local level. Using English, French, and Arabic primary sources, this paper examines Anglo-French surveillance of Indian muslims and their waqf pious endowment property in the territory that became the French Mandate of Syria. The status of Indian Muslims and their waqf highlighted the confluence of Anglo-French anxieties regarding their Muslim subjects, as well as more prosaic concerns about migration and movement in the interwar Middle East. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that the intelligence services and the administrative bureaucracy in the Mandate both conducted surveillance and their focus was not limited to policing political subversion or stifling nationalist opposition. Rather, the surveillance apparatus was sensitive to any potential source of instability, such as popular frustrations over stewardship of waqf. Surveillance of Indian Muslims and their waqf properties by British and subsequently French intelligence services in Syria helped define who was and was not Syrian and what was “national” versus “foreign” in the ambiguous context of sovereignty under the Mandate system. As “others within” the French Mandate for Syria, Indian Muslims failed to conform to arbitrary French administrative categories. The quixotic status of Indian Muslims long resident in Syria made them and their pious endowments perennial subjects for surveillance by the Sûrté and the Franco-Syrian administrative staff of the Contrôle Général des Wakfs. The case this paper examines underscores how seemingly monolithic ethnic, religious, and national categories were in fact highly fluid and mutually destabilizing in the period following WWI and points to the quiet role that intelligence services and surveillance work had in defining them.