ally
directed against their Turkish rulers. We have already seen how Desert
Arabia (the Nejd) had always maintained its freedom, and we have also
seen how those Arab lands like Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Hedjaz which
fell under Turkish control nevertheless continued to feel an
ineradicable repugnance at seeing themselves, Islam's "Chosen People,"
beneath the yoke of a folk which, in Arab eyes, were mere upstart
barbarians. Despite a thousand years of Turkish domination the two races
never got on well together, their racial temperaments being too
incompatible for really cordial relations. The profound temperamental
incompatibility of Turk and Arab has been well summarized by a French
writer. Says Victor Berard: "Such are the two languages and such the two
peoples: in the latitude of Rome and in the latitude of Algiers, the
Turk of Adrianople, like the Turk of Adalia, remains a man of the north
and of the extreme north; in all climates the Arab remains a man of the
south and of the extreme south. To the Arab's suppleness, mobility,
imagination, artistic feeling, democratic tendencies, and anarchic
individualism, the Turk opposes his slowness, gravity, sense of
discipline and regularity, innate militarism. The Turkish master has
always felt disdain for the 'artistic canaille,' whose pose,
gesticulations, and indiscipline, shock him profoundly. On their side,
the Arabs see in the Turk only a blockhead; in his placidity and
taciturnity only stupidity and ignorance; in his respect for law only
slavishness; and in his love of material well-being only gross
bestiality. Especially do the Arabs jeer at the Turk's artistic
incapacity: after having gone to school to the Chinese, Persians, Arabs,
and Greeks, the Turk remains, in Arab eyes, just a big booby of barrack
and barnyard."[139]

Add to this the fact that the Arabs regard the Turks as perverters of
the Islamic faith, and we need not be surprised to find that Turkey's
Arab subjects have ever displayed symptoms of rebellious unrest. We have
seen how the Wahabi movement was specifically directed against Turkish
control of the holy cities, and despite the Wahabi defeat, Arab
discontent lived on. About 1820 the German explorer Burckhardt wrote of
Arabia: "When Turkish power in the Hedjaz declines, the Arabs will
avenge themselves for their subjection."[140] And some twenty years
later the Shereef of Mecca remarked to a French traveller: "We, the
direct descendants of the Prophe