A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War

Abstract

The centennial of World War I saw an abundance of books, articles, monographs, and conferences dealing with the history of the Great War, its memory and legacy, in its different fronts. The scholarship on the European experience of the war traditionally discussed both the “war front” and the “home front” of the war, while making the connection between the two “fronts” and the combined political, diplomatic, cultural, and social histories of this pivotal event. However, the historiography of the Middle Eastern theaters of war focused for many years on specific aspects of the Great War, with a clear preference for its political, diplomatic, and military dimensions, while neglecting many other crucial questions and themes. Those included, for example, the experience of civilians, everyday life during the war, the effects of the war on women and children, the ways the war had changed the urban environment, as well as the war's social and cultural manifestations, to mention just a few. In recent years, with the publication of various original studies that examine the war through other lenses, while looking at the different theaters of war in the Middle East, the state of research on the Great War is beginning to change in Middle Eastern studies as well. Leila Tarazi Fawaz's fascinating book, A Land of Aching Hearts, serves as an important contribution to this new and exciting avenue of research.With this book, Fawaz embarked on a challenging project: to write a social history of mainly (but not only) Greater Syria during World War I, while focusing on the experience of the men and women who lived through the war. In Fawaz's words, “This book stands, in many ways, as a tribute to the everyday heroes who faced adversity as best as they could. To them (…) World War I was not only a global event, but also a personal story that varied across the broad Middle Eastern landscape” (p. 2). The everyday heroes that Fawaz discusses in the book vary. Among others, the book delves into the experiences of ordinary men and women who faced the challenges and hardship of war in different locations around the Mediterranean; refugees of all kinds, including Armenian survivors of the Genocide; businessmen and entrepreneurs who benefited from the war and managed to make some profit out of it; soldiers who fought in the different theaters of war and their experiences; as well as a unique focus on the experience and special challenges facing the South Asian (mainly Indian) soldiers, a story that has not been told in relation to the Great War.Indeed, the multiplicity of voices and experiences brought up in this book turn it into a fascinating portrayal of World War I from a more personal, intimate perspective, and expose the readers to the human experience of war and warfare. Among other things, Fawaz discusses different acts of resistance to the war, looks at how social class affected one's experience of the war, and highlights the multiplicity of social, national, religious, and ethnic identities as folding and unfolding throughout the war years. This is especially impressive due to the relative difficulty in acquiring archival sources for this period. In order to overcome this challenge, Fawaz used many memoirs, autobiographies, letters, and diaries, many of which have not been previously published, as well as some newspapers and archival materials. This body of sources helped to uncover the social history of the war.Considering the book's possible audiences, it seems that Fawaz aimed at the specialized academic reader, but at the same time makes an effort to present her work to the nonacademic, less-specialized audience. This is especially clear in the style of writing and the flow of the text, the lack of an exhaustive bibliography (although there are still around 80 pages of notes at the end of the book), and mainly with the organization of the book and its first two chapters. These chapters are more general in nature and provide a clear and interesting introduction to the history of the Ottoman Empire, with an emphasis on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as to the historical and geographical context of World War I and the different theaters of war in the Middle East. The book, then, does not assume any prior knowledge and is hence more accessible to nonexperts. This is especially important with respect to Fawaz's emphasis on the role of the Ottoman Empire and the multiplicity of identities during this formative and crucial time in the history of the Middle East.The first out of seven chapters of the book, then, provides an overview and a general introduction to the transformations and transitions that the Ottoman Empire went through as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the various social, economic, and political transformations from the mid-eighteenth century until the eve of World War I. The chapter pays special attention to the diverse links between the Ottoman Empire and the “Great Powers,” examines processes of urbanization, modernization, the challenges facing the empire as a result of nationalism and sectarianism, and the social and economic struggles that characterized the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the century. This chapter puts a special emphasis on religious tensions and the question of relative pluralism within the Ottoman Empire, and for this purpose also introduces the religious divisions that existed within the Empire, including a brief presentation of the different sects in Islam.The second chapter introduces the reader to the context of the Great War in the Middle East, by discussing the Ottoman motivations for its alliance with Germany and by providing an overview of the military activity on the main fronts: Eastern Anatolia, Gallipoli, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant. In many ways, this chapter is somewhat disconnected from the core of the book and from its main focus on social history, as it really provides a military and political overview of the main theaters of war. As with the first chapter, the notion is that the purpose of this chapter is to provide a geopolitical context to the period and themes discussed in the following chapters.And indeed, the next five chapters each focus on a different perspective of the war, examining them through the eyes of various actors—civilians and soldiers alike. The third chapter discusses the destitution of war as experienced by civilians mainly in the Levant and Egypt. Using unpublished diaries, letters, memoirs, novels, and newspaper articles, Fawaz portrays the challenges facing civilians as a result of the war, famine, refugees, conscription, diseases, and locusts. The chapter pays special attention to the two most vulnerable groups on the home front, women and children, and describes, among other things, the spread of crime, prostitution, and suicide as some of the effects of the war on civil society. Particularly horrible and heartbreaking are descriptions of the rare reports and extreme cases of cannibalism, of mothers eating their own children as a result of their desperation and hunger. This chapter brings to life the war from the perspective of the home front, of those who suffered from the war and were trying to survive it.Chapter 4 shows the complex experience of civilians during war time, and brings to the fore the important factor of class as differentiating between the experiences of civilians during the war. Indeed, the chasm between rich and poor, between people from different social groups and status, became very dramatic during the war. In the context of the Great War in the Middle East too, there were some people who actually benefited and profited from the suffering and needs of their fellow civilians during the war. This fascinating chapter, one of the most interesting and original in the book, brings to light the stories of different middlemen, such as the Beiruti Sursock (Sursuq) family, who profited from the war by taking advantage of their economic status and the system of monopolies, as well as by cooperating with top Ottoman officials. On the other hand, these upper-class families also assisted the needy by distributing food and performing acts of philanthropy. The microanalysis of these families, their links to the Ottoman authorities, and their experience of the war, which was so different from that of the civilians described in the previous chapter, is very illuminating and original.As part of the economic analysis that Fawaz employs in this chapter, she also pays close attention to the Armenian refugees, and to the ways by which they were not only victims of the war, but also agents for social change and transformation, and how there were cases of entrepreneurship even among refugees, of the mainly non-Muslim middle classes, Armenians and others. Fawaz also provides an interesting discussion of how the worlds of espionage and collaboration were additional arenas for making money and profiting from the war.Chapters 5 and 6 both focus on the experience of soldiers during the war. Chapter 5 examines the war from the soldiers' perspective, looking at the mobilization process, as well as the ways soldiers could have been exempted from service. The phenomenon of defectors and deserters is also discussed in this chapter, as well as the challenges facing both the soldiers and their commanders: food shortages, lack of equipment for the soldiers, difficulties shipping equipment and food, and receiving medical treatment on the front lines. The next chapter discusses the soldier's experience from a different perspective. This chapter focuses on the South Asian, mainly Indian, soldiers, and looks at their unique experiences and challenges as Muslim soldiers who were fighting as part of the British forces against the Ottoman Empire. Indian soldiers were mobilized in very large numbers (nearly 60,000 Indian soldiers died in Mesopotamia and France during the war), and their stories present a unique dimension that has not been thoroughly studied yet. Among other interesting questions, the way the British dealt with the religious and ethnic differences of the soldiers, and the large number of Muslim soldiers who fought against their Ottoman co-religionists, is of particular interest. The religious question was especially sensitive in light of the Ottoman declaration of jihad at an early stage of the war, and their constant attempts to encourage defections among the Muslim Indian soldiers. As Fawaz suggests, the Indian Muslims separated political duty from religious beliefs, and in this way managed the apparent tension between religious and political loyalty. Unlike the many studies dedicated to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps soldiers, the existing scholarship does not pay much attention to the impressive contribution of the South Asian soldiers during the war. This chapter, then, aims at filling an important gap and suggests some interesting questions for further research.The last chapter of the book, Chapter 7, is somewhat eclectic and confusing. It moves between a discussion of the postwar realities in the region and the effects of the war on the political and social situation, to the prewar situation and the political tensions in the Ottoman Empire between Centralists and de-Centralists. The discussion on the prewar situation is related in many ways to the effects that the war had on questions of identity and loyalty, and to the development of local identities within different parts of the Middle East. The trauma of war of course affected the political identities that developed in the post-Ottoman world, and toward the end of this chapter, Fawaz indeed discusses the multiplicity of identities and the impact of the colonial powers on the postwar arrangements in the region. This chapter is hard to follow at times, and parts of it could have been included in the Epilogue, which presents the legacies of the Great War on the Middle East. The epilogue discusses some important issues, such as the sense of “Ottoman Nostalgia” for a precolonial empire, as well as the effects of colonialism on the natural ethnic, religious, and national divisions in the Middle East, effects that are still being felt today. The epilogue also discusses the way the war was remembered and commemorated, and distinguishes (following Elizabeth Thompson's work) between the memory of men and women, and between public and private memory.To sum up, A Land of Aching Hearts offers a unique and important contribution to the growing scholarship that uncovers the social history of the Great War in the Middle East. Parts of the book, especially Chapters 4 and 6, focus on dimensions that are less known, whereas other parts add to our growing knowledge of the remarkable impact that the war had on people's lives, memories, and experiences, both during and after the war.