Sharif of Mecca
The hereditary Hashemite guardianship of Mecca and Medina, whose last holder traded an Arab revolt for promises Britain did not keep.
The Sharif of Mecca was the hereditary custodian of Islam's two holiest cities, an office held from roughly the tenth century by the Hashemites, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad through his grandson Hasan. It carried enormous religious prestige and modest hard power. The sharif governed the Hijaz, the strip of western Arabia containing Mecca and Medina, managed the annual pilgrimage that brought Muslims from three continents, and after 1517 did so as a vassal of the Ottoman sultan, who held the caliphate and paid the subsidies. The arrangement suited both sides: the Ottomans borrowed the legitimacy of the holy cities, and the sharifs kept local autonomy on the empire's furthest edge.
Hussein's bargain
The office matters to modern history because of its last effective holder. Hussein bin Ali was appointed Grand Sharif in 1908 by Abdulhamid II, partly to get him out of Istanbul, where he had been kept for years under supervision. He arrived in Mecca into a collision. The Young Turk government was centralizing the empire, extending the Hijaz Railway and Turkish administration into territory the sharifs had always run themselves, and Hussein spent his first years resisting that pressure.
When the Ottomans entered the First World War in 1914 and declared a jihad, Hussein's endorsement was worth a great deal and his refusal was worth more to the other side. Between July 1915 and March 1916 he exchanged ten letters with Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt. Hussein asked for British recognition of an independent Arab state covering most of the Arabic-speaking Ottoman lands. McMahon replied with a qualified yes, excluding areas he described in terms vague enough to be argued about for a century, particularly regarding the coastal districts west of Damascus and Aleppo.
On that understanding, Hussein raised the Arab Revolt in June 1916. His sons Faisal and Abdullah led the fighting, supplied with British gold, rifles, and liaison officers including T. E. Lawrence. The revolt tied down Ottoman garrisons, broke the Hijaz Railway repeatedly, and put Faisal's forces into Damascus in October 1918.
What the promises were worth
Hussein had himself proclaimed king in 1916, claiming sovereignty over all the Arabs. Britain and France recognized him as King of the Hijaz only. They had meanwhile agreed between themselves, in the Sykes-Picot understanding of 1916, to divide the same territory into spheres, and had promised in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to support a Jewish national home in Palestine. Faisal was made king in Damascus in 1920 and thrown out by the French within months; the British installed him in Iraq instead. Abdullah was given Transjordan. The Hashemites got thrones, but not the state, and not the ones they had been led to expect.
Hussein himself refused to sign the postwar treaties that ratified the settlement, which cost him the British subsidy. In March 1924, when the Turkish republic abolished the caliphate, he claimed the title for himself, a bid that irritated Muslims elsewhere and gave his Arabian rival a pretext. Ibn Saud, master of the Nejd and champion of the Wahhabi movement, invaded the Hijaz that year. Hussein abdicated in October 1924 in favor of his son Ali, Jeddah fell at the end of 1925, and the Hashemites lost Mecca after nearly a thousand years. Hussein died in exile in Amman in 1931.
The echo
The office is gone. The consequences are not. The Saudi state that took the holy cities still derives much of its standing in the Muslim world from holding them, and its king is styled Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, a claim to exactly the prestige the sharifs once carried. The Hashemites still rule Jordan, the one branch of the family whose throne survived. And the McMahon correspondence remains a live document in Arab arguments about the origins of the modern Middle East, cited as the founding case of a Western promise made in wartime and quietly discarded at the peace.