(MENAFN- Jordan Times) Looked at from today's perspective, the immediate answer to the question whether the Great Arab Revolt was a success or a failure must look simple: the Arabian Peninsula and its inhabitants, which Sharif Hussein Bin Ali hoped to liberate from Turkish rule and unite, is a bloody scene of destruction and conflict.
If history were confined to 100 years, failure would be the obvious answer. But the story did not begin in 1916, and does not end in 2016.
I will look at the question from a different perspective: What was the reality of the political and social scene in Istanbul in 1916 and what were the ideas and policies of the major European powers in the Middle East?
The answers explain many things about today's situations in these regions.
In 1910, an insightful British resident ambassador in Baghdad, J.G. Lorimer, wrote in his Political Diary: 'Iraq is not an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, but a foreign dependency.'
The same could have been said about Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and most of the Arabian Peninsula.
The so-called Ottoman Empire, even when truncated of most of its European branches, was a commonwealth of peoples and lands.
Sovereignty remained in Istanbul, but was exercised in the name of the padishah and caliph by the local governors.
This duality of polity was embodied in two Arabic words: watan and ummah. Watan is a shared space, ummah is a community that shares belief, language or whatever defines it.
Watan belongs to all who live on it, but not all these belong to the same ummah.
In the mid-19th century, the Ottoman government introduced a series of laws that gave equality to all its citizens, of whatever community, so that although Islam was the official religion and Muslims the majority of its population, the Ottoman state became an alliance of religious and ethnic communities with one accepted but nominal head of state, the caliph.
It was a first step from multi-confessionalism to secularism.
The Ottoman polity did not fit into the definition of nation state as it had developed in the 19th century and which identified the state with one nation – British, French, German or whatever myth was chosen.
The right to citizenship did not belong to all who lived on its territory, so the watan, the territorial space, was not shared, but only inhabited.
From that narrow definition of statehood sprang all the racial and other extremist movements that still raise their ugly heads around the world.
Added to the notion of nation state, the 19th century also gave rise to the notion of empire.
The demographic, commercial and financial expansion of Europe into the Americas, the Far East, Africa and the southern hemisphere flourished on the distinction between the 'civilised' and the 'native', between the master and the subject.
The Ottomans could not be categorised as either. Their empire became an irritant to Europe, and its territories a desirable trophy to add to its empires.
The loss of its Balkan and Libyan territories in the years before 1914 weakened both the power and the prestige of the Ottoman regime, and strengthened a movement to reform and reinvigorate it as a nation state.
The idea of a Turkish people as the 'reality' or the 'essence' of Ottomanism implied the exclusion from its legitimacy of the non-Turkish populations.
Under the influence of this idea, Istanbul entered the war of 1914 on the side of the Central Powers, principally Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Turkification of its government naturally raised among its Greek, Armenian, Arab and other ethnic peoples the question of where they will stand if Istanbul's adventure wins or loses the war.
It was a difficult question, and for the Arabs, a painful one.
They were not all of one religion, or even the same ethnicity, but they shared a common language and culture, and all that these two implied in terms of their historical memories and sentimental attachments.
For the Arab Muslims, the memory of a past greatness of power and civilisation was crystallised in the now titular but merely symbolic title of caliphate.
It was with a heavy heart that Sharif Hussein stepped foot on the British ship that would take him away from the land of the faithful. How ironic that the same faithfulness would take him on a second exile, in 1924, because he would not accept the alienation of Palestine to a Jewish 'homeland'.
When he fired that first shot on June 6, 1916, from the terrace of his house in Mecca, I do not think he was renouncing history and its Ottoman legacy: he believed it was legitimate to liberate the holy places in the Hijaz and Palestine, and he had been led to believe that the defeat of Turkey would lead to an Arab regime which would replicate and reinvigorate the Ottoman legacy of a multinational and multicultural polity.
In taking this first step, he was taking an enormous responsibility.
Many Arab and non-Arab Muslim communities did not agree with this move, but I do not believe it was made lightly, or that he was motivated by aspirations to power and fame.
He based his claim to legitimacy in acting in the name of the Arab peoples on the history of his family, which had assumed a leadership role before its unity had been split by a rivalry for power; when one was not Sunni or Shiite, but one of the faithful, prayed in the same mosques and were buried in the same cemeteries.
The story of how the vision of Sharif Hussein and his family was frustrated has been told many times and in many versions, and I do not wish to add one more, or to attach blame to so-and-so in London or Paris or Washington, or to the Arabs themselves.
It is my opinion that a fair judgement of Sharif Hussein's decision is not that he failed, but that he had the merit of the attempt, and that the motives which inspired him are still valid, and still await a new effort.
The family of Sharif Hussein is still present on the Middle Eastern scene. Its members have not renounced his vision or abandoned their role.
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan safeguards the eastern province of truncated Palestine, and shelters half of its exiled people. Its doors are open to all who seek safety from the chaos in the Fertile Crescent.
It retains its custodianship over the holy places of Islam and Christianity in Jerusalem.
Jordan and Lebanon, alone in the region, respect and protect the human rights of all their citizens and displaced persons, of whatever gender, ethnicity, religion or culture.
When peace finally happens, these two countries will provide the nucleus around which perhaps a new political configuration of the lands and peoples of the Arab Peninsula will take shape.
The British and French peoples have succeeded in transforming their empires into commonwealths; their former 'subjects' have become 'masters' of their own destinies and no one is a 'native' anymore.
The Ottoman and commonwealth formula of the primacy of the land and its peoples over race or religion as the principle legitimacy and responsibility of government is the best, and perhaps the only, answer to the present chaos in the lands of the Arabs; a formula which could save both their Turkish and Iranian neighbours from a similar fate.
Bound together as they are by a shared culture and a shared history of unnecessary and outdated conflicts, is it unrealistic to imagine a trio of commonwealths which would restore that lost conviviality of culture and commerce from the Atlantic Ocean to the heartlands of China?
I do not believe it is a dream, but a star in the sky.
The writer was adviser to former Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.
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