June 29, 191O 
L A xN D & W A T E R 
II 
Significance of the Mecca Revolt 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
[The writer of this article, a distinguished American 
journalist, has travelled widely within the last five years 
through Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and the borders 
of. Arabia. His story of German -propaganda in these 
Mohammedan countries is curiously instructive] 
IT is still too early to endeavour to make any 
intelligent forecast of the probable effect upon the 
course of the war of the remarkable action of the 
(irand Sherif of Mecca, who, supported by the tribes 
of Western and Central Arabia, proclaimed his inde- 
pendence of the political and religious leadership of the 
Porte and his creation of an autonomous Arab State. 
But while the military effect of this dramatic develop- 
ment must remain more or less in obscurity for the time 
being, there need be no uncertainty regtirding the moral 
effect. 
Perhaps the most significant thing about the bold 
action of the Sherif of Mecca is that his revolt is un- 
doubtedly directed quite as much against Germany as 
against Turkey. The Arab — an Oriental himself — has 
been able to worry along for several centuries with the 
Oriental corruption and persecution of the Turk, but the 
Occidental brutality of the German has brought him to 
arms in less than two years. The manner in which tlie 
hundred million of Mohammedans under the British Hag 
have been held loyal \yhile those under the Kaliph are 
breaking into revolt is only another example, similar to 
that furnished by South Africa, of the practical wisdom 
(to say nothing of the justice) of the British humanitarian 
method of dealing with their subject people. 
Many of the most carefully laid plans of the Kaiser 
have gone " agley " since the outbreak of the war, but in 
no other instance — not even in South Africa— has there 
been so picturesque ail example of retributive justice 
as that furnished by the action of the Sherif of Mecca. 
Few impartial observers who had opportunity to note 
the pace and the course of the Germans in Asiatic Turkey 
in the two or three years previous to the outbreak of the 
w^ar but felt that they were riding for a fall, but that they 
should have come their cropper at their one most care- 
fidly prepared-for hurdle is especially fitting. 
A few words concerning what Germany planned, 
plotted, worked and, finally, fought for, in Asiatic Turkey 
will make clearer the magnitude of a failure of which 
this revolt is only a part, though an important one. 
The " Drang nach Osten," or " Drive Eastward," 
policy of Bismarck, as extended by William II, has— or 
I might better say had — for its end the physical exploita- 
tion by the Germans of the seven or eight hundred thou- 
sand square miles of Turkey-in-Asia and the practical 
political control of the twenty million people living under 
the flag of the Crescent. The absorption of the Balkans 
was incidental to linking up Berlin and Bagdad. 
Like all the rest of Germany's plans for the extension 
of territory and power, this, the most grandiose of them 
all, was also the most thoroughly prepared for. . The now 
historical visit of the Kaiser to Palestine and Syria seven 
or eight years ago was staged as carefully and prayerfully 
as the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play, and the pilgrimage 
of the War Lord to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 
Jerusalem was not allowed to obscure another little hadj 
he made down the " street that is called Straight " in 
Damascus, to bow head and bend knee before the jewel- 
studded marble sarcophagus of the mighty Saladin. To 
us in the West, perhaps, the imposing and much-pictured 
hospice erected by the Kaiser near the summit of the 
Mount of Olives was the most tangible result of this 
visit, and so it was intended that we of the Occident 
should be impressed. But, in the light of later events, 
we now know that the real motive of this spectacular 
progress through the Holy Land was for its " educational " 
effect upon the Mohammedans. 
" Is it reyiy true that the Emperor of the Germans 
is a Moslem and has made the pilgrimage to Mecca ? " 
my Arab servant asked me shortly after cur arrival at a 
Uttle hotel in Tiberias in the spring of 19 12. 
" Not that I know of, Shamu," I replied. " What 
put such an idea into your head ? " 
" This," he answered, handing me a gaudily coloured 
poster showing a towering white-robed figure saluting, by 
touching the hilt of a flaming sword to his turbaned brow, 
a host of much less heroic figures whom the artist had 
evidently endeavoured to depict as receiving the salute 
with shouts of wild acclamation. 
" This writing," explained Shamu, pointing to a couple 
of rows of " pot-hooks " running like a frieze around two 
sides of the picture, " says that the Sultan of the Germans 
is one with the Sultan of the Turks as the ' Protector of 
the Faithful ' ; and it also gives him the title of ' Hadji,' 
which means that he has crossed the Sands to Medina and 
Mecca and touched with his forehead the sacred stones of 
the tomb of the Prophet." 
Except for the " boar-tusk " moustaches and the fine 
defiance of the Potsdarn'pose of the heroic central figure, 
the poster might just as well have been captioned "The 
End of the Hegira," or " Mohammed Interpreting the 
Koran," and an Occidental might easily have passed it 
without remark among the coloured prints in a bazaar 
or mosque. 
" Roll up a sheaf of them with your rezail," I ordered 
when Shamu told me that there was a huge stack of these 
posters in the storeroom in which he had slept ; " they 
will be interesting to show my friends in London and 
New York." 
When we packed up to depart, however, Shamu came 
to report that the pictures had been removed, doubtless 
at the orders of the proprietor — an oily little Greek — 
whom we had seen eyeing us suspiciously when we were 
marvelling over the original sample. This individual was 
evidently one of the numerous Teutonic propagandists 
operating at that time in Syria, Palestine and the rest of 
Asiatic Turkey. 
These posters and similar devices for inculcating in 
the simple Mohammedan of the Near East an impression 
of the " oneness " of Teutonic and Turkish aims and 
ideals, were not without their effect, for I subsequently 
found ample evidence that the sedulously nurtured behef 
that the Kaiser was a Mussulman and a Hadji had taken 
firm root in the minds of the more ignorant followers of 
the Prophet in Syria, Palestine, and even here and there 
in Egypt. 
Even before the present revolt in Hedjaz, the Kaiser 
experienced some bad " slip-ups " in his religious. propa- 
ganda, and one of the most disastrous of these befell as 
the consequence of a poster and postcard — widely dis- 
tributed in the East and especially in Persia — claiming to 
to be the reproduction of a photograph showing Moham- 
medans being blown from the muzzles of guns in India. 
The original appeared to have been made by pasting 
the picture of a robed and bearded Mussulman upon the 
photograph of a British battery at artillery practice, and 
then rephotographing the composite. In the picture 
issued to the Persians a British " Tommy " is about to 
pull the lanyard of the gun that will blow the unlucky 
Moslem to bits, while several lines of native script warn 
the men of Iran that this will also be their own fate unless 
they arm to resist the terrible Englanders. 
Something of the effect of this poster on the Persians I 
was able to learn from an Anglo-Indian officer, invalided 
home with dysentery, with whom I talked not long ago. 
" Your true Oriental," he said,'" has little regard for 
any law save that of might, and most of the trouble we 
had with the Bedouins and Persians was due to our dis- 
regard of a truth England has been learning by bitter 
experience for a couple of centuries. The Germans, 
however, unwittingly did us a good service on this score 
by distributing postcards among the Persians calculated 
to show the ' frightfulness ' of British methods of dealing 
with Mohammedans. The worst of these — inspired by the 
Mutiny death penalty, doubtless — showed an old imam 
being blown to Gehenna from the muzzle of a British 
field gun. But no sooner did the Persians see this picture 
than they began telling each other that, if the British 
were such terrible foemen, it would never do for peaceful 
Shiahs like themselves to go to war with them. 
" I was with one of several small columns which operated 
in the interior from Persian Gulf ports, and our oidy 
