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Medina is the city to which Mohammed made his hegira or flight from Mecca in July, 622 a. d., to save himself from the daggers of assassins hired by his religious enemies. All Mohammedans count time not from the birth of Christ but from the date of that flight. Mohammed was buried in Medina, and on one side of him rests his favorite daughter, Fatima, and on the other side the second of the great Arabian rulers, Calif Omar. But between the graves of Mohammed and Omar a space was left, so the Moslem’s say, that Christ upon His second coming and death may be buried by the side of the Prophet. So Medina, in addition to being a city of considerable commercial importance, is a great pilgrimage center.

Shortly after the war, the Turks, in order to facilitate the movement of troops to quell possible uprisings in Arabia, but ostensibly to make it easier for pilgrims to reach Medina from the north, built a single-track railway line all the way down from Damascus. One of the first acts that the attacking Bedouin hordes committed when they approached Medina was to tear up several miles of rails with their bare hands, in order to isolate the garrison. After surrounding the town the Arabs sat down to await its surrender; but the Turks, encouraged by their inactivity, slipped out of the gates at dawn, surprised some of the Arabs who were camping in the suburb of Awali, and set fire to all the houses. Large numbers of women and children were shot down by machine-guns, and scores of others were burned alive in their homes. This so enraged the Bedouins and the thousands of Arab townsmen who came out of Medina to join Feisal and Ali that they immediately assaulted the great Turkish fort just outside the walls of the city. But the Turks opened fire with their heavy artillery and mowed great gaps in the tightly packed whirling mass of frenzied Arabians. Never having encountered artillery fire before in their lives, the frenzy soon turned to panic, and the mob fled to the shelter of a near-by hill. Seeing this, the Turkish commander sent out a force of picked men to cut them to pieces. Shereef Feisal saw the plight of his men and dashed up on his horse, utterly regardless of the bursting shrapnel and machine-gun fire from the fort which raked the intervening open ground. The Bedouins whom he had brought up to help him rescue the broken and panic-stricken forces that had made the original attack on the fort held back, reluctant to face the enemy fire that formed such a deadly barrage between them and their comrades. But Feisal laughed and rode on alone. To give his followers confidence he even made his horse walk across the open space. Unwilling to be put to shame by their fearless commander, the relieving force gave a wild desert cry and charged, the name of Allah on the lips of every warrior. The two forces then combined and made a second attempt to storm the fort. Their ammunition was nearly exhausted. Night, which comes in Arabia with a suddenness suggestive of an electrician switching off the sun’s light, dropped down like a black curtain just in time to save them from annihilation. On the morrow, Feisal and Ali called all the tribal chieftains to a conference at their pavilion, and it was agreed that for the present it was futile to continue the attack; so they retired into the hills fifty miles to the south and camped astride the pilgrim road to prevent any Turkish forces from attempting to retake Mecca. The Turks at once repaired the railway line connecting them with Damascus, drove the thirty thousand civilian Arabs living in Medina out into the desert, brought down reinforcements from Syria, and fortified the city to resist all future attacks. After the war refugees from Medina were found all over the Turkish Empire, in Jerusalem, Konia, Damascus, Aleppo, and Constantinople.