ABSTRACT
The War was won, and for the first time in its history the Arab national movement stood abreast of its destiny. Victory had carried its standard as far north as it had dreamed, to the very confines of its kingdom. Syria had been freed, from Sinai to the Taurus; so had Iraq, up to Mosul; while in the Peninsula itself all that remained of the Turkish power were a few helpless garrisons doomed to surrender. All the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire in Asia were at last rid of the alien yoke that had lain on them for four stifling centuries. It seemed as though the war-god himself, in homage to the role of the language in the history of the Movement, had stayed the northward advance on the very watershed of speech, just where Arabic ceased and Turkish began. The area of the Turk’s defeat was precisely the area of Arab aspirations, and its frontiers coincided exactly with those defined by the Sharif Husain as the natural limits of Arab independence.
