122 A Short History of the Middle East
autonomy as would disarm the politically-ambitious Arab notables
who were as yet the sole exponents of nationalism.
Meanwhile Aziz Ali al-Misri, a young Arab officer who had
distinguished himself in the Ottoman service, but who had re-
signed his commission feeling that his services had been unworthily
rewardedby the Young Turks, founded early in 1914 as a substitute
for the defunct Qahtaniya a society called al-'Ahd, the 'Solemn
League and Covenant'. It consisted almost entirely of Arab army-
officers and consequently contained a preponderance of Iraqis, since
they were the most numerous regional group of Arabs in the Otto-
man Army. Branches of the society were founded at Baghdad and
Mosul, and it is said to have recruited 4,000 members throughout
the Empire. It became to the Arab army-officer what al-Fatat was
to the civilian upper-class intellectual; but neither society knew as
yet of the existence of the other, and contact between them was not
established till early in 1915. In January 1914 the Young Turks had
Aziz al-Misri arrested in Istanbul on charges of trying to set up an
Arab kingdom in North Africa, of receiving bribes from the
Italians during the Tripolitanian War of 1911, etc. He received a
death-sentence, but was reprieved and finally released only on the
intervention of the British Ambassador, as a result of representa-
tions from Lord Kitchener in Egypt.
An index of the spread of intellectual, and consequently of poli-
tical, interest in the Arab world at this time is provided by the great
increase in the numbers of newspapers published between 1904 and
1914. They rose in Lebanon from twenty-nine to 168, in Syria
from three to eighty-seven, in Palestine from one to thirty-one, in
Iraq from two to seventy, in the Hijaz from none to six, a ten-fold
expansion over the entire area. In addition, nationalist newspapers
published by Arab emigres abroad were smuggled in through the
foreign post-offices which existed under the Capitulations. The
nationalist movement was, however, still confined to a very small
group of army-officers and upper-class intellectuals, and touched
the masses hardly at all; and behind the facade of the secret societies
one may without prejudice infer the interplay of 'personal rival-
ries, religious differences, and sectional animosities, arising out of
the essential individuality of the Arab character.'1 Their disunity
was of course aggravated by the lack of liaison occasioned by the
slowness of communications. Of the capitals of states and the chief
1 Ireland, op. cit., 237.