Patriarch Gregorious Haddad led the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and all the East that covers archdioceses in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula from 1906-1928, fully supporting the Ottoman government and paying allegiance to its rulers. Despite what Gregorious perceived as oppressive policies and tyrannical practices during World War I from 1914-1918, he did not waver in his support to the Ottoman government so long as the Empire ruled Greater Syria. His disapproval of the Ottomans’ policies and practices only came to surface soon after Ottoman forces withdrew from Damascus to be replaced by Prince Faisal’s armies of the Hijaz in September 1918 after the victory of the Allied Forces in the war. In fact, in less than a month from the entry of Prince Faisal to Damascus, Gregorious has completely changed his discourse and sentiment regarding the Ottoman Empire. He paid allegiance to Faisal, endorsed an Arab nationalist rhetoric and praised the new Arab Hussein government. When the French overthrew Faisal, Gregorious was the only person to see him off at Damascus train station. What motivations caused the Patriarch to change his political position? Did this change represent an Arabist ideology given the Patriarch’s previous struggle to arabize the Antioch Patriarchate against the Greek influence in 1899? Or was this change a political strategy of the Patriarchate as a whole? Did Gregorious look back to the history of Greece’s independence in 1821 as precedence for supporting nationalist movement? The larger question is what had been the position of the Greek Orthodox leadership during periods of political instability? And were these policies motivated by personal ideological convictions or were they pragmatic considerations? Based on the Patriarch’s correspondence with his dioceses, this paper focuses on the political position of Gregorious towards the governments under which he led his church. This paper analyzes the Patriarch’s performance as the religious leader of the Greek Orthodox Church as well as a civil servant and political representative of his Christian minority in the Ottoman government. Identifying his political achievements and policies will help analyze the underlying motivations for his political conduct, particularly, it will help in understanding whether the stances he took were ideologically or pragmatically driven, or were they simply shaped by his obligations as a leader and representative of a non-Muslim community.

This paper will analyse Ottoman use of Islamic rhetoric during the First World War, especially in Morocco. In North Africa, “Teskilât-? Mahsusa”, the Ottoman Special Services led paramilitary activities carrying out military goals, psychological war, by propaganda (beyannâme, call for jihâd), and helped to foment uprisings against the French colonial power. At the eve of WWI, the Ottoman Empire issued a call for jihâd using “Pan-Islamic” ideas of Ittihad-i Islam to mobilize local leaders and tribes against the French authorities. At the same time, the local Moroccan sultan Mawlay Yusuf ignored the fetwa from the Ottoman sultan and remained loyal to France. In Istanbul, Enver Pasha, the War Minister, was supporting the Pan-Islamic propaganda. Tracts were composed in Istanbul, Berlin or Madrid. While Salah Sharif at-Tunisi, a North African Nationalist, wrote and published numerous pamphlets to the Moroccans published in French, Arabic or Tamazight, it was very difficult to bring all the propaganda material to Morocco. As early as in December 1914 the Ottoman Embassy in Madrid asked to receive the proclamation of the jihad in Arabic. From the Spring 1915 Amir ‘Abd el-Malek Muhy al-Din was fighting against the French in North Morocco and used the Islamic rhetoric as well. Born in Syria, Amir ‘Abd el-Malek Muhy al-Din was one of the youngest son of ’Abd el-Qader al-Jazairi. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Amir ‘Abd el-Malek Muhy al-Din was in the service of the French customs police in the port city of Tangier. However, in March 1915, he escaped to the Rif Mountains and became the main leader of the resistance against the French Protectorate. Interestingly, in the Ottoman press, articles depicted his fight within the Islamic propagande of Jihad. Amir Abd el-Malek Muhy al-Din was in contact with his brother Amir ‘Ali, the vice-president of the Ottoman Parliament, and the CUP in Istanbul. In order to threaten the French, Amir Abd el-Malek Muhy al-Din promoted a Pan-Islamic message. This paper draws from various archives and documents throughout the different areas of the conflict, such as France, Morocco, Germany, the Ottoman Empire and Great Britain.

In 1926, as the “Great Syrian Revolt” against French occupation was underway, Robert de Caix, the French delegate to the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission, suggested that Christians in Syria faced massacre if the French were to withdrawal. The Syrian delegation to the Commission angrily rebutted the claim: “We have answered this unjust and malicious allegation many times, by recalling our attitude during the Great War and our cooperation then with our Christian brothers against Jamal Pasha.” Mansour ‘Awwad’s 1939 novel al-Ragheef similarly conflated the Lebanese resistance and Amir Faysal’s Arab Revolt to narrate a joint Christian-Muslim struggle against the Turks during the Great War. The Beirut Jesuit journal al-Mashriq, on the other hand, used its coverage of the Great Syrian Revolt to describe the 1916 Arab Revolt as a “fitna” and accuse Amir Faysal of plotting attacks against Christians after his defeat by the French in 1920. Arab nationalism in Syria emerged in part as a reaction to anxiety produced among the region’s elites by European power. In response to European claims that Syrian society was backward and religiously fanatical, Syrian intellectuals and notables adopted a modernizing, secularizing ideology. World War I was commemorated by Arab nationalists as an occasion of Muslim-Christian cooperation against foreign occupation. It was logical that anti-nationalists, particularly Christian anti-nationalists, would challenge this commemoration with alternate narratives. This paper argues, using Yael Zerubavel’s model of commemoration, memory-making and countermemory, that the memory of World War I should be seen as a field of contestation between Syrian nationalists and Christian anti-nationalists in the public discourses of the French Mandate era. It will examine how this contest played out, and with what consequences, in the politics of Mandate Aleppo. Christian ecclesiastical and communal periodicals from Aleppo will be used as sources, as well as petitions addressed by Syrians to the Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva – the institutional embodiment of the war’s international legacy in the Middle East. Aleppo will be given special attention since, with a Christian population that was in the majority composed of survivors of the wartime genocide in Anatolia, and a Muslim notable class that was slower to abandon Ottomanism than the notables of Damascus, the contest there can be expected to have been more fraught, the seams in the discourse more revealing. This examination will shed new light on the memory construction process of Mandate Syria, and the narratives discarded in that process.

This project explores the ways the Hashemites portrayed Wahhabi Islam to British officials during the 1916 Arab Revolt in an attempt to undermine emerging British-Saudi relations. For Sharif Husayn ibn Ali, the Amir of Mecca and preeminent Hashemite, the Arab Revolt provided an opportunity to assert a bid for leadership over the Arab world. The British, despite backing the Hashemites, held different strategic interests. They considered the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as an opening to stake claim on strategic areas in the Middle East that would ensure their Muslim subjects’ pilgrimage to Mecca and their control over the critical waterways to India, namely, the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf. British policy had thus been divided between the Cairo-based Arab Bureau that sought to elevate Sharif Husayn, the most powerful figure in Mecca, and the India Office that had a history of bolstering different Arabian tribal leaders, including the Hashemite archrival, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. Ibn Saud headed a confederacy that included tribesmen who had adopted Wahhabism, a sect Islam that emerged in Central Arabia in the 18th century that sought to rid Islam of what its eponymous founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, considered as unlaw innovations. An alliance struck between Abdul al-Wahhab and the House of Saud established the ideological basis for Saudi expansion by and leadership over the tribes who adopted Wahhabism. Histories of the Hashemite and Saudi rivalry have focused almost entirely on the disputes between British policy makers and the tribal conflicts that resulted as Sharif Husayn and Ibn Saud sought to consolidate their respective authority over the region’s tribesmen. This project, while recognizing the role of tribal politics, analyzes the propaganda campaign the Hashemites launched against the Saudis that specifically targeted Wahhabi Islam in an attempt to convince the British to abandon support for Ibn Saud. The Hashemites claimed to represent orthodox Islam and based their religious critique of Wahhabism on a discourse of modernity and Orientalism. As such, the Hashemites portrayed themselves, and their expression of Islam, as moderate, modern, and compatible with European global interests, and they depicted the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance as a threat to not only the “civilized” Islamic world but also to the Christian world. Ultimately, Hashemite critiques against Wahhabi doctrine suggests that this rivalry was more than a tribal conflict. It was an ideological one between competing visions of Islam and those who claimed to represent it.