INDUSTRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NATIONALISM 295
To break the deadlock, the British decide to attack the Axis powers
from behind, by coming at them through Asia Minor. Doing this required
first crippling the Ottomans. The Allies landed troops on the peninsula of
Gallipoli, from which they hoped to storm Istanbul, but this assault failed
and Allied troops were massacred.
Meanwhile, the British were already busy trying to exploit another Ot-
toman weakness: rebellion was percolating throughout the empire's Arab
provinces, stemming from many sources. Nationalist movements sought
Arab independence from Turks. Ancient tribal alignments chaffed at Ot-
toman administrative rules. Various powerful Arab families sought to es-
tablish themselves as sovereign local dynasties. In all this discontent, the
British smelled an opportunity.
Among the dynastic contenders, two families stood out: the house of
Ibn Saud, which was still allied with Wahhabi clerics, and the Hashimite
family, which ruled Mecca, the spiritual center oflslam.
The Saudi-Wahhabi realm had shrunk down to a Bedouin tribal state in
central Arabia but was still headed by a direct descendant of that ancestral
eighteenth-century Saudi chieftain Mohammed Ibn Saud, the one who had
struck a deal with the radically conservative cleric Ibn Wahhab. Over the
decades, the two men's families had intermarried extensively; the Saudi sheikh
was now the religious head of the Wahhabi establishment, and Ibn Wahhab's
descendents still constituted the leading ulama of Saudi-ruled territories.
British agents dispatched by the Anglo-Indian foreign office visited the Saudi
chief, looking to cut a deal. They did what they could to excite his ambitions
and offered him money and arms to attack the Ottomans. Ibn Saud re-
sponded cautiously but the interaction gave him good reason to believe that
he would be rewarded after the war for any damage he could do to the Turks.
The Hashimite patriarch was named Hussein Ibn Ali. He was caretaker
of the Ka'ba, Islam's holiest shrine, and he was known by the title of Sharif,
which meant he was descended from the Prophet's own clan, the Banu
Hashim. Remember that the ninth-century revolutionaries who had
brought the Abbasids to power called themselves the Hashimites: the
name had an ancient and revered lineage and now a family by this name
was ruling again in Mecca.
But Mecca was not enough for Sharif Hussein. He dreamed of an Arab
kingdom stretching from Mesopotamia to the Arabian Sea, and he thought