Behind the Lines of the Great Arab Revolt
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, the hajj—the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that all able Muslims are to undertake at least once in their lives—was an act of both great faith and great hardship: a 40-day march through the desert region known as al-Hijaz, or the Hejaz. Traveling south from Damascus along the western side of the Arabian Peninsula, pilgrims might move in groups of 5,000 or more, in columns two miles long. They went by night, fearing Bedouin raids, past Ma’an in what is now southern Jordan, to the Ras en-Naqb escarpment. There they descended 500 feet through a narrow pass called Batn al-Ghoul, the Belly of the Beast, where a shape-shifting djinn was said to lure people to their death in the desert. From there, it was still 750 miles to Mecca.
The journey changed in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II authorized construction of the Hejaz Railroad, 820 miles of narrow-gauge track connecting Damascus to Medina. Muslim-financed and built by German engineers, the railroad demanded mobilization of labor and capital on an imperial scale. Upon its completion in 1908, the 40-day journey became as few as two or three. By 1914, 300,000 people, along with supplies for the 10,000-strong Ottoman garrison in Medina, traveled the rails each year. The railroad was a grand symbol of modernity for a multicultural empire that stretched from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf and was meant to strengthen its claim as the caretaker of Islam, even as it strained to keep up with a changing world.
Just a few years later, the railroad would be all but defunct, the Ottoman Empire dissolved, the Arab world failed by its leadership and betrayed and fragmented by its allies in World War I. By some accounts, the Ottomans’ dedication to the Hejaz Railroad helped contribute to their defeat in the war, which in turn led to the unmaking of their empire. At least one narrative
