February 1945: Roosevelt Meets "Ibn Saud"

Admiral William D. Leahy, Bill Eddy translating, the King and FDR

I've been so preoccupied with the 100th anniversary of World War I that I let slip a critical 70th anniversary: the meetings between Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Farouq, Haile Selassie, and King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa‘ud ("Ibn Saud") in the Suez Canal in February 1945. FDR was returning from the Yalta Conference on the the cruiser USS Quincy. The conference took place February 12-14, 1945, so I'm a couple of days late in noting its anniversary. Roosevelt arrived by air from Yalta and then traveled to join the Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal. The next day he met with King Farouq and Haile Selassie.

On February 14th the the destroyer USS Murphy, which had been sent to Jidda to bring the King and his party to Egypt, arrived. In the negotiations that followed, Roosevelt sought to obtain King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz' cooperation on Palestinian partition (unsuccessfully), but also negotiated the right to build an air base at Dhahran and secure access to Saudi oil supplies for the West, the beginning of the long Saudi-US security relationship. (The US was already involved through US oil companies' partnership in the Arabian American Oil Company, ARAMCO.)

The first film clip is partially in color; though the two clips show the same events there are some differences in detail.

The US Marine Corps colonel appearing in the meetings with Roosevelt and Ibn Saud is Colonel Bill Eddy, the US Minister to Saudi Arabia. You can find an account of the meeting written by Eddy here. For more about Eddy, see Tom Lippman's 2008 book, Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East.

You can find Eddy's own account of the meeting here.

 I note that both newsreels say that this is the first time Ibn Saud had left his Kingdom. I guess they mean since he became King; he spent his youth in exile in Kuwait until he led the raid on Riyadh that expelled the Rashid family and restored the Sauds, beginning the formation of the Kingdom.

Neirouz: Coptic New Year, 1730

Long before September 11, 2001, September 11 marked a less grim date: new year in the Coptic calendar. This is sometimes referred to as "Egyptian New Year" because the Coptic calendar, being solar, has long been used by Muslim Egyptians for agricultural purposes; the ancient Egyptian new year began after the height of the Nile flood, usually in August; the later Coptic calendar descends from the ancient one, and the first of the month of the Coptic month of Tut today coincides with September 11 in the Gregorian calendar. (And the month of Tut echoes the ancient Egyptian name Thoth, for the god of the same name.) Today marks the first day of the Year of the Martyrs 1730 (the Coptic calendar dates from the persecutions of Diocletian, not from the birth of Christ).

For unclear reasons, Coptic New Year is known as Neirouz, which seems to echo the Persian Nowruz which is in the spring. Some think an ancient "feast of the rivers" (Ni-Yarouou) somehow was conflated after the Arab conquest with the Persian word. Whatever the origin, a happy New Year to Copts (and those living by the Egyptian agricultural year).

It is also the Ethiopian New Year, by the way.

Egypt's Syria Break and the MB's New Anti-Shi‘a Rhetoric

Egypt's break with Syria over the weekend followed almost immediately after a meeting of senor Islamists with President Morsi in which the Islamists, particularly well-known preacher and senior Muslim Brotherhood adviser Yusuf al-Qaradawi called for "jihad" against the Asad regime. The Syrian conflict has increasingly been a subject of Qaradawi's statements; his anti-Shi‘ite rhetoric has become more pronounced lately, and on his website he has published congratulations from the Saudi Crown Prince for his stance. Once an advocate of Sunni-Shi‘i cooperation, he has become more and more confrontational; the Muslim Brotherhood as a whole has endorsed similar rhetoric, always having been rather suspicious of Shi‘ism.

The new anti-Syria rhetoric, combined with the recent tough talk about Ethiopia's dam project, may be intended to provide external enemies to rally support at a time of domestic dissent. Most recently Morsi's appointment of new governors for the provinces raised eyebrows when the new governor of Luxor turned out to be a member of al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya, the group that staged the 1997 attack on tourists at Luxor. Al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya has since renounced violence, but critics fear an impact on the already badly hit tourism sector.

But rhetoric aimed at Ethiopia and Syria at the same time could prove risky, and raises new questions about Morsi's (and the FJP Party's and its Brotherhood sponsors') foreign policy positions.

Morsi's Brinksmanship on Ethiopia: A Dangerous Game?

Egypt's President Morsi, in an address to a rally of Islamist groups yesterday, called for Egyptians to unite against an external threat, in this case the controversial Ethiopian dam.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that Morsi is using the dam project as an attempt to rally the opposition behind him prior to big anti-Morsi demonstrations scheduled for June 30 and marking one year in power. From Ahram Online:

The president also said that "all options" were on the table to respond to the current situation and insisted that Egypt would not accept infringements on its water security.

"We have said several times that Egyptians with their revolution carry a message of peace...We do not want war, but we do not accept threats to our security."

Morsi also asked opposing political forces to stand united at a time when Egypt faces hard challenges and to put aside all political rivalries. He went on to call for "national reconciliation," adding that he was certain that political figures would respond positively to his appeals.

"The country demands that we stand united," he said, issuing his call for reconciliation only weeks before planned mass demonstrations on 30 June to demand snap presidential elections.

Morsi did say Egypt is committed to dialogue with Ethiopia and praised dialogue over other approaches, but the implied threat was clearly there.

While the outreach to his domestic opponents may be welcome, the apparent escalation of an international dispute in order to rally unity at home can be risky, and is already drawing criticism. International grandstanding and brinksmanship in an escalating situation can spin out of control easily; that should be obvious in the week of the 46th anniversary of the 1967 war, when Egypt paid a huge price for just such brinksmanship. True, Ethiopia and Egypt share no common border, and threats may be seen as empty, but domestic posturing in international disputes can put diplomatic solutions at risk.

For the Annals of "Oops! Was This Microphone Live?": Egyptian Threats to Ethiopia Go Out Live on TV

Is this thing working?

I haven't posted yet about the growing dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia (and Sudan as well) over Ethiopia's plan for a big new Blue Nile dam. Egyptian President Morsi was fairly accepting initially but orher Egyptians are unhappy and fear the Ethiopian project threatens Egypt's water supply. So President Morsi called a meeting of Egyptian political and religious leaders to talk about it.

And talk they did:

The meeting, which was broadcast live on Egyptian television, was full of what some Cairo-based African diplomats described as a condescending Egyptian reflection on Africa. Some suggestions heard from participants included sabotaging the dam, interfering in internal political disputes in Ethiopia, or bribing local tribes, with the aim of prohibiting any potential reduction in Egypt’s annual share of the Nile waters.

You did notice the "which was broadcast live on Egyptian television" part, right?  Well, apparently some of the participants are now saying  they weren't told that their helpful, diplomatic suggestions about sabotage and subversion of Ethiopia were being broadcast. And apparently, that was indeed the case:

While Morsi did not respond to any of the controversial statements made at the meeting, his aide for political affairs, Pakinam El-Sharqawy, has since apologised for failing to inform attendees that the 'national dialog' meeting was being broadcast live.

"It was initially planned that the national meeting would be recorded and aired the following day as is usually the case, but due to the importance of the topic it was decided at the last minute to air the meeting live," she said via Facebook late on Monday. "I forgot to inform attendees of the changes."

Oops. Welcome to democracy, folks, where live microphones have been known to cause trouble. I don't think they've ever started a war yet, but this is in the running.

Ethiopia Elects its Jerusalem Archbishop as New Patriarch

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has elected the Ethiopian Archbishop of Jerusalem, Abune Mathias, as the church's sixth Patriarch, ironically on the same day Pope Benedict XVI stepped down as Catholic Pope.

Although Ethiopia is not generally considered a Middle Eastern country, the church has many historical links with the Middle East; until 1959, Ethiopia was a daughter church of the Coptic church of Egypt, and its heads were appointed by the Church of Alexandria. Coptic Pope Cyril VI in 1959 recognized Ethiopia as an autocephalous church that elects its own patriarch. During the years of Marxist rule in Ethiopia the church suffered considerably. Mathias spent over 30 years in exile.

Mathias had been serving as well as Archbishop of Jerusalem, where Ethiopia maintains an ancient monastery known as the Deir al-Sultan on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. A dispute with the Copts over ownership of the key has meant that the monks there who live in considerable poverty, cannot directly access the church below. The dispute remains a divisive issue between the Churches of Egypt and Ethiopia. [UPDATE: See the exchange in the Comments for more on the Ethiopian church.]

The Himyarites are in the News Again

 A piece by Spiegel Online about new archaeological work at Zafar in Yemen which has unearthed some clearly Christian depictions is worth reading. Unfortunately it lapses into the gee-whiz revelation that there were Christian and Jewish Kingdoms in South Arabia before the coming of Islam, which was breaking news 1500 years ago but pretty well known among anyone familiar with early Islamic history. I doubt that the archaeologists in question presented that part of the story as a revelation,but it was news to the journalist writing the story. We last discussed the Himyaritic kingdom and related states in this blog back in February, so you may want to read that post along with the Spiegel article,

New Work on the Jewish Himyarite Kingdom of South Arabia

The Fall 2011 publication of the Institute for Advanced Study contains this piece by Glen Bowersock called "The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Kingdom in Arabia." A quote:

Friends and colleagues alike have reacted with amazement and disbelief when I have told them about the history I have been looking at. In the southwestern part of Arabia, known in antiquity as Himyar and corresponding today approximately with Yemen, the local population converted to Judaism at some point in the late fourth century, and by about 425 a Jewish kingdom had already taken shape. For just over a century after that, its kings ruled, with one brief interruption, over a religious state that was explicitly dedicated to the observance of Judaism and the persecu­tion of its Christ­ian population

My reaction was, what, people don't know about the Himyarites? It's pretty much old news to specialists in late antiquity, early Islamic history, Byzantine history, and the history of Ethiopia. Now, the average man in the street may not fit into any of those categories, but I would have expected the "friends and colleagues" of Professor Bowersock, a distinguished expert on late antiquity, to know the basic outlines. Anyway, this blog has been stuck in the last couple of centuries lately, so the article is an excuse for a digression to provide you some weekend reading. Bowersock is working on a book on the subject, but the linked article is rather brief and introductory. Still, one of my old mentors, Irfan Shahid, did the landmark studies of pre-Islamic Arab relations with Byzantium, including one called The Martyrs of Najran, which relates directly to this subject, so I have an excuse to pontificate though I'm in no way qualified to really talk about the subject. The rest of this post is me, not Bowersock, and may not be how he interprets the period.

Arabia and Vicinity 565 AD (Wikipedia)
See Link for Creative Commons attribution

 

In the centuries immediately before the rise of Islam, the Arabian Peninsula was something of a competitive ground for the great regional powers of the day: the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, the Sassanian Empire in Iran, and the somewhat smaller Ethiopian Empire. Two of these, Byzantium and Ethiopia, were Christian (though divided by the Orthodox-"Monophysite" split), and the Sassanians were revivalist Zoroastrians.

In addition, there had long been a series of kingdoms in South Arabia, most famously Saba (as in the Queen of Sheba) and its neighbor and successor Himyar. These spoke a group of Semitic languages more closely related to the languages of Ethiopia than those of northern Arabia, and were sometimes under Ethiopian control. From the fifth century, as noted, Himyar's kings converted to Judaism. It may be that they saw this as a means of counterbalance to their Christian and Zoroastrian great power neighbors, or as a means of proclaiming neutrality; in any event, it was one of the rare instances (like the conversion of the Khazar Kingdom in western Asia centuries later) where a kingdom with no direct connection with Jewish history adopted Judaism as its official faith.

The rest of the Arabian Peninsula outside what we now call Yemen was a zone of regional power competition, with the more powerful neighboring powers cultivating local Arab tribal kingdoms as client or satellite states. Byzantium's client state was the Ghassanid Kingdom, based at Jabiya in the Golan Heights and embracing what is now parts of Syria, Jordan, and northwestern Saudi Arabia. Like their Byzantine patrons, the Ghassanids were Christians, though of the Monophysite variety. To their east, in what is today Iraq and northeastern Saudi Arabia, lay the Lakhmids, based at Hira on the Euphrates in Iraq, a client state of the Sassanians. Though mainly Christian rather than Zoroastrian, they were Nestorian Christians, like most Christians in the Sassanian sphere of influence. The Ghassanids and Lakhmids formed buffer states between Byzantium and Persia and between both of those powers and the nomadic Arab raiders of the peninsula.

The Himyarite Kingdom in South Arabia also had its own client buffer state in the northern part of the peninsula: this was Kinda, which ruled Hadramawt and the Najd, and was usually under Himyarite influemce. (Imr'ul-Qays, the great pre-Islamic poet, was a son of one of the last Kings of Kinda.) Meanwhile the Hijaz, including the caravan cities of Mecca and Yathrib (later Medina), provided the trading corridor among these rival powers, where all the competing political and religious tendencies would be in evidence.

This is the context in which the Jewish Himyarite Kingdom flourished and eventually fell. Leaving aside a lot of history (mostly known from Byzantine, Syriac, Ethiopian, and early Islamic Arab histories, though there are some Old South Arabian inscriptions and coins confirming the basic outlines), Himyar ruled the region in the fifth and sixth centuries AD; the downfall began after the accession of Joseph or Yusuf, known to history as Dhu Nuwas, as King. Some feel he was a usurper of the rightful Himyarite line. In either 518 or 523 (the chronology is confusing) he attacked the towns of Zafar and Najran, largely Christian towns in southwest Arabia under the control of the Ethiopian Kingdom of Axum, killing the Christian population. King Kaleb of Axum, the Ethiopian Negus, went to war against Dhu Nuwas, with a Byzantine Navy providing assistance in an alliance of Christian states against the Jewish Himyarites.

That was the end of the Jewish Kingdom of Himyar; Dhu Nuwas was killed and Himyar came under Axumite rule. Eventually a Christian viceroy of the Axumite King named Abraha made himself ruler; Islamic tradition speaks of a raid he made against Mecca in the "Year of the Elephant" (570 AD or somewhat earlier), said by some to be the year of the Prophet Muhammad's birth. Abraha's successors eventually lost their independence to Persian rule.

With that little glimpse into pre-Islamic late antiquity, enjoy your weekend.