IRAK: Kingdom Freed

(See map)

Not a strong, lone warrior like Arabian King Ibn Saud (see col. I) is his neighbor on the north, pliant King Feisal of Irak who leans like an unsteady reed on sturdy Britons.

Irak was “planted” in more senses than one when the League of Nations slipped it like an egg into the British nest in 1921 with the status of a Mandate. Probably Britons will always control most of the Kingdom’s Mosul oil through their ably drawn contracts. Last week. however, Mother Briton clucked loudly at Geneva, announced that Irak has officially hatched into an “Independent Kingdom.” To certify Irak’s independence Irak was made a member state of the League of Nations and batches of League statesmen made speeches.

“It is pleasant to recall,” said British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon, “that the new League member encloses within its boundaries the place which was once the Garden of Eden* as well as Bagdad of the immortal ‘Arabian Nights.'” Sir John did not mention oil.

“The example just given by the greatest Empire in the world,” cried Premier Nuri Pasha, representing King Feisal of Irak, “deserves, and richly deserves to be studied and followed…. Our hearts are full, brimming with gratitude!”

“After long centuries of foreign dominations Irak has finally recovered her liberty,'” said Greek Delegate Nicholas Politis, presiding last week over the League Assembly. “A new state has come peacefully into existence, whereas in past centuries that state could probably only have come into existence by revolution….As we see the League of Nations doing its regular work so successfully,I think we realize that the crisis from which the League is supposed to be suffering is apparent, rather than real.”

Actually it was Great Britain, not the League of Nations, which permitted Irak to achieve last week a status thus far denied to Syria (French Mandate) and Palestine & Transjordania (British Mandates). Dryly Turkish Foreign Minister Tewfik Rushdi Bey remarked: “I trust we soon will be able to welcome Syria.”

Polite but noncommittal, French Delegate Henry Berenger at once murmured, “I wish to unreservedly associate myself with this [Turkish] declaration and to extend the hope expressed to both Palestine and Transjordania.”

Striking Contrasts between the realms of leaning King Feisal and fighting King Ibn Saud:

1) Bagdad, capital of the Kingdom of Irak, is a thriving beehive of 250.000 busy, haggling souls. Mecca, one of the two capitals of the Land of Saud, is a Moslem “show place” of only 60.000 which receives and scandalously mulcts each year some 70,000 pious pilgrims.

Cultured Arabians consider Bagdad’s so-called “Arabian Nights” a mere mess of dirty stories of no literary merit. First collected by a Frenchman, they were chaperoned into English literature by Sir Richard Burton, explore-translator who, like many a member of the Explorer’s Club, had a taste for zestful tales.

2) Commercially the small, oily Kingdom of Irak completely eclipses the large, arid Land of Saud. Irak exports were $27,600,000 for 1930 and imports $15,000,000, as against insignificant exports and imports for Ibn Saud’s Kingdom which makes most of its money on pilgrims. Lackadaisical Moslem tribes in Malaysia are becoming markedly more energetic as their pious women constantly return from Holy Mecca and give birth to fighting half-breeds–an “invisible export” of the Land of Saud.

3) The World War ended Hohenzollern dreams of an all-German Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway. But today one can go by rail to Bagdad from Berlin (or Paris) with only two breaks, the ferryboat ride across Turkey’s Bosphorus and the bus ride over a 125-mi. stretch of uncompleted Irak railway.

Completed as far as Medina in the Land of Saud is the “Holy Railway,” paid for by Moslem pilgrims. From Medina they bus to Mecca.

*Authorities dispute the exact location but most agree that “Eden” was somewhere in what is now Irak.