The people of Aleppo, a city of over a quarter million people located to the south of Anatolia, opened the Arabic-language official gazette Halab (Aleppo) of 18 April 1919 to read under the headline of ‘al-Nahda al-carabiyya al-jadida’,‘The new Arab awakening’, the initial article in a series that would tell the history of the Arab Revolt (1916–18). 1 These articles, the first on the subject since the city had been captured by the British Army six months earlier, would explain how, and more importantly why their home, one of the pre-eminent provincial capitals of the Ottoman Empire, had ceased being an integral part of that state after four hundred years and was now to be ruled by the son of a petty notable, Faysal ibn Husayn, from the far-away Arabian peninsula.

‘Several centuries ago a great nation arose’, the series began,‘and historians have named it,‘‘the Arab [nation]’’.’2 Wherever these Arabs went, they brought with them enlightenment, the arts and sciences. However, the Arabs lost control ‘of their affairs, and had nothing left but their language... and [thus] were bereft of the tools of the nation and denuded of all the traditions of nationalism (al-wataniyya) and racial solidarity (al-cunsuriyya). This was a great disaster,’concluded the author. 3 Unlike later writers, primarily George Antonius, whose influential 1938 book The Arab Awakening located the resurrection of this nation in the mid-