A young adventurer wants an Empire for himself not just to expand the empire of his father. To get it he double and triple deals with Ottomans, British, and Jews. Awarded an empire in Iraq, where he was a stranger, could the adventurer become a statesman? So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Todays stamp show the period after Iraq became a self governing Kingdom. However notice that the state service overprint is in English. Notice that the King to whom loyalty was due was not Iraqi, but rather one of Lawrence of Arabia cronies, the one played by Alec Guinness in the movie. Not shown is Gertrude Bell, a British women who pulled his strings only to die mysteriously. Or Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader with whom he made deals. Who was this man working for. Iraq was too rough a place to leave open questions like this.
Todays stamp was issue A12 a 2 Fills, new currency that year, stamp issued by the Kingdom of Iraq on May 9th, 1932. It was part of a 17 stamp issue displaying King Faisal I. There are earlier versions of this stamp with the earlier Indian currency. The overprint means the stamp was meant for government service. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.
King Faisal was the son of the Sharif of Mecca who was later the King of Hejaz after leading a rebellion against the Ottomans. The Sharif is to be the protector of the Islamic holy cities but Medina was looted after being taken from the Ottomans. The British then recruited an Arab Legion including Faisal to rid the middle east of the Ottomans. The British were conflicted because at the same time they were trying to stake out a Jewish homeland in then Palestine. Very complex and the deals made would forever haunt the Arabs participating. Arabs like Faisal foresaw a large Arab Empire of the whole Fertile Crescent with the sons of the Shariff of Mecca ruling. Oil would fund it, the British would protect it and the new Jews in Palestine would get some autonomy in return for payments and accepting Arab sovereignty. Probably not the best of a bad list of alternatives but what they were going with.
Faisal himself was iffy on these goals and early in 1918 offered to change sides if the Turks would name him ruler of Syria. They refused but soon lost the war. Faisal declared himself King of Syria but the French weren’t going to have that and threw him out militarily a month later. In consolation, the British then gave Faisal Iraq. A quick, violent uprising had convinced them that direct rule in Iraq was a bad idea. The had adventuress and archeologist Gertrude Bell move to Baghdad to keep Faisal on the path of right.
Faisal found the Iraqi people less than worthy of him. The Shiites hated him. Most of his fellow Sunnis were backward. The Kurds to the north were both backward and of a different ethnicity, so their hatred was also racial. The dealings that the King made to get where he was meant that no one could ever trust him. Gertrude Bell died mysteriously in a death labeled an overdose. After that the King spent more time in Switzerland. That may have seemed a safer idea and of course allowed the leader to be closer to his money where he could enjoy it. It was in Bern in 1933 where his deals caught up to him in the form of fatal arsenic poisoning. His death was labeled a heart attack. This doomed the Kingdom as for the next 25 years there was a series of child Kings that did not live into maturity when they might have built a coherent country.
Well my drink is empty and every time I write a stamp from Iraq the image of what a sad place it is comes through. Perhaps people will eventually learn to leave them alone to their misery, Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.