FOREWORD
ALL those interested in Mohammedan affairs were much surprised to learn, through a despatch from Cairo on June 22, 1916, that the Emir of Mecca had revolted from Turkish overlordship. Much speculation was indulged in regarding the causes for such an uprising and its probable or possible outcome; for there are few parts of the habitable globe about which the ordinary student of international affairs knows so little as he does about Arabia. Life there has remained in much of its mediæval primitiveness; and even scholars who are specially concerned about Mohammedanism, and about the several hundred millions of its devotees, are little better situated in receiving accurate information of that which is occurring in the "Holy Land" of Arabia.
No one living knows its history better than does Professor Snouck Hurgronje of the University of Leiden. To his vast knowledge upon all subjects connected with Mohammedanism and gained from an extensive reading of its literature, he has added personal observation during the year that he spent in Mecca and Jiddah. He has been able to get an insight into the various questions involved in its tangled history at the present day, and to learn at first hand of the parties which are rivals for leadership there. In the Dutch newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, July 14, 1916, Professor Snouck Hurgronje gave a lucid explanation of the situation created as he saw it, by the proclamation of the Emir. The following pages contain a translation of these articles. I have added, as an appendix, the official proclamation of the Shereef to the whole Moslem world as it appeared translated into English in The Near East for August 25, 1916.
Since these articles were published in Holland we have heard very little as to what is happening in and around Mecca. News has come that an attempt at administrative reconstruction has been made at Jiddah; that the new Shereef has appointed a special agent at Cairo in the person of Omar Bey al-Faruki; and that the new government has decided to publish a weekly paper called Elkiblah, which is to be edited by Fuad Effendi Khatib of Gordon College, Assuan. What is of greater importance is the alleged assistance offered to the Emir Husain by the Emir Abd al-Aziz ibn Saʿud, the head of the Wahhabites in the Nejd—the district east of Medinah—and by the Zaidite Imam Yahyah in the Yemen against the Turkish troops stationed there.
Dec. 23, 1916.
Columbia University.