Book Review : MIddle East Muddle

Review

Christopher Simon Sykes. The Man who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. London: William Collins, 2016. 368 pp. + many black and white drawings.

Written by Sir Mark Sykes’ grandson, Christopher Simon Sykes, this biography is somewhat mistitled, as its focus is not so much on the geopolitical and historical events associated with the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916. It is much more about the man than the diplomatic fall-out of this document. Just flipping through the pages, we see dozens of caricatures drawn by the eponymous character and some old family photographs, all pointing towards an eccentric personality rather than a cold, steely statesman of the old school. As it turns out, it is precisely this selection of drawings, mostly in letters home to family and friends, which may the clue to his personality, the real object of this book.

But since the Sykes in the hyphenated Sykes-Picot Agreement represents an important stage in the developments of political Zionism and the eventual founding of the modern State of Israel we find ourselves drawn to parallel and intersecting texts that fill out what the grandson has to say about his grandfather. For instance, we will have to look in at Theodor Herzl and George Eliot, none of whom make it into the book’s index (but then, neither does Picot). Baron Rothschild and Walter Balfour and his Declaration get brief mentions, but not much more than that. To be sure, T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) is there in three or four paragraphs, but many other minor and eccentric characters of the period, like Salomon Reinach and his brothers and their work for the Alliance israélite universelle and the Jewish Colonization Society are also overlooked, and so the whole bizarre history—or shall we say, psychohistory—of early Zionism fails to come across. Why the events and the personages are so bizarre has a lot to do with the psychohistorical aspects of this history, as well, we must add, to the way they are made to sally forth in the political ideologies of the present, particularly in the post-modernist propaganda and agitation against Israel. Nothing is ever simple or straightforward; the people involved, if they were conscious at all of what they were doing, were motivated by complex, changing and conflicting purposes. The place where we now stand to view their behaviour did not exist then and they probably would have found it impossible to imagine. Yet this more mature vision seems to be where Sykes found himself on the eve of his premature demise.

Mark Sykes seems at first to be the least likely person to undertake the complex diplomatic mission to unscramble the mess of the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Though he had travelled much in the region and became familiar with local languages, customs and politics, he was not well-trained in dealing with the French, the German and even British politicians and diplomats he would have to negotiate with. Like T.E. Lawrence he had a romantic and adventurous notion of the Arab and other tribes in the region, and his approach to the Jewish Question was anything but encouraging to the incipient Zionist movement. His feelings towards Jewish people and their aspirations for nationhood seemingly were those of a British snob, of which there were many littering English literary history.

Yet after the Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed and blundered along, the situation on the gerund—in the battlefields and in the Middle East where Arab rebellions and resistance picked up considerably when that “sick man of Europe,” the Turkish Empire floundered towards dissolution, Sykes started to have a change of heart and, from his last trips and discussions, a change of mind. He worked to find a better solution to the emergent mess, one which would hone close to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and would seek some sort of just balance between the Zionists, the Arab nationalists and the Western Powers. But he never achieved that goal, and died too soon to make his more mature thinking and influence felt. But all of this is much too complicated for the last two chapters of the book under review, particularly as Christopher Simon Sykes’ main focus on the biography of his grandfather. As husband, father and friend, the life that emerges goes beyond the tomfoolery and adolescent cockiness we see in his early years. He cannot be reduced to that single hyphenated document by which he seems to be remembered.

Not only did his treaty with his French colleague Georges Picot fade away from negotiations at Versailles, but Sir Mark Sykes did not live long enough to become the great statesman of the twentieth century he might have done. The author tries very hard to show that it is precisely the youthful rebelliousness and diversity of the Mark’s development, and his intelligent, creative and witty mind that may well have been able to cope with the great problems that arose in the “making of the Middle East,” something dramatically and ironically sketched out in the rise of Islamic State in the last chapter, where fanatical Islamic jihadists see themselves at war with the legacy of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.