[citation needed] On 23 October 1916 at Hamra in Wadi Safra, Faisal met Captain T. E. Lawrence, a junior British intelligence officer from Cairo.

Lawrence, who envisioned an independent post-war Arabian state, sought the right man to lead the Hashemite forces and achieve this.

In 1916–18, Faisal headed the Northern Army of the rebellion that confronted the Ottomans in what was to later become western Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria.

[8] In December 1917 Faisal contacted General Djemal Pasha declaring his willingness to defect to the Ottoman side provided they would give him an empire to rule, saying the Sykes–Picot agreement had disillusioned him in the Allies and he now wanted to work with his fellow Muslims.

[11] In the spring of 1918, after Germany launched Operation Michael on 21 March 1918, which appeared for a time to foreordain the defeat of the Allies, Faisal again contacted Djemal Pasha asking for peace provided that he be allowed to rule Syria as an Ottoman vassal, which Djemal, confident of victory, declined to consider.

Emir Faisal also worked with the Allies during World War I in their conquest of the region of Syria and the capture of Damascus in October 1918.

On 4 January 1919, Emir Faisal and Chaim Weizmann, President of the Zionist Organization,[12] signed the Faisal–Weizmann Agreement for Arab-Jewish Cooperation, in which Faisal conditionally accepted the Balfour Declaration, an official declaration on behalf of the British government by Arthur Balfour, promising British support to the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Following the decisions taken by the San Remo conference in April 1920, on 13 May 1920, Lord Allenby forwarded to the British War Cabinet a letter from Faisal which stated his opposition to the Balfour proposal to establish a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

In April 1920, the San Remo conference gave France the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, which led to the Franco-Syrian War.

[19] The idea was to set up a native leader who would be popular among the Iraqi people while still maintaining close relations with the British government.

With help of British officials, including Gertrude Bell, he successfully campaigned among the Arabs of Iraq and won over the popular support of the minority Sunni.

[20] From 23 April to 8 May 1921, Iraqis including most notably Nuri Pasha al-Sa'id would send telegrams to Faisal, inviting him to Iraq as its prospective king.

[10] Rather than risk the wrath of the Ottomans on behalf of an outsider like Hussein, the Shi'i Muslims of Iraq had ignored the Great Arab Revolt.

[citation needed]Faisal himself was a tolerant man, proclaiming himself a friend of the Shi'i Muslim, Kurdish and Jewish communities in his realm, and in 1928 criticized the policy of some of his ministers of seeking to fire all Jewish Iraqis from the civil service, but his policy of promoting pan-Arab nationalism to further his personal and dynastic ambitions proved to be a disruptive force in Iraq as it drew a wedge between the Arab and Kurdish communities.

This led to a great interest in the Mosul oilfield and eventually to his plan to build an oil pipeline to a Mediterranean port, which would help Iraq economically.

Faisal's schemes for a greater Iraqi-Syrian state under his leadership attracted much opposition from Turkey, which preferred to deal with two weak neighbors instead of one strong one, and from King Fuad I of Egypt and Ibn Saud of Hejaz and Nejd, who both saw themselves as the rightful leaders of the Arab world.

A few weeks after he arrived in Iraq, he was greeted by the respected Islamic scholar Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi, and met with several educated Iraqis to learn of their perspectives and conditions.

Accompanied by Rustam Haidar, he regularly toured Baghdadi schools, including Christian and Jewish, and inspected their conditions as part of his agenda.

In response during the opening occasions, al-Jawahiri, who was a Najafi himself, wrote scathing lines criticizing the conservative nature of the city's people in his poem named "The Reactionaries" which was published in several newspapers.

[32] Faisal was noticeably unaffected by sectarian considerations, and was noted by al-Rihani to have a faith that reflected all Islamic dominations, which made him respect, and be tolerant to all world religions.

[33] Faisal's main link with the community was the Sayyid Muhammad al-Sadr, who was one of the only people who could enter the king's prescience without further notice.

Due to this, his coronation took place on 18 Dhu al-Hijja according to the Islamic Calendar, which coincided with Eid al-Ghadir.

Example being the hiring of Tawfiq al-Suwaidi in the Baghdadi Law College, accepting qualifications of Shi'i Muslim-based schools, help fund the commemorating of Muharram,[39] working with Ayatollah Medhi al-Khalissi who was a friend of Sharif Hussein, and visiting Najaf and Karbala to strengthen his position.

Reportedly, Faisal once told Sir Percy Cox that the Iraqi Shi'i Muslim Mujtahideen were prepared to back him up.

In March 1932, just months before independence, Faisal wrote a memorandum where he criticized the Iraqi people's lack of Iraqi national identity in the newly established country, writing: Iraq is a kingdom ruled by a Sunni Arab government founded on the wreckage of Ottoman rule.

Unfortunately, all of this made this majority, or the persons who harbor special aspirations, the religious among them, the seekers of posts without qualification, and those who did not benefit materially from the new rule, to pretend that they are still being persecuted because they are Shiites.

[42] The tendency of the Syrian emigres in the education ministry to write and issue school textbooks glorying the Umayyad Caliphate as the "golden age" of the Arabs together with the highly dismissive remarks about Ali gave great offense in the Shi'i Muslim community in Iraq, prompting protests and leading Faisal to withdraw the offending textbooks in 1927 and again in 1933 when they were reissued.

[30] Faisal argued that the best solution was for Britain to grant independence to Palestine, which would be united in a federation led by his brother, the Emir Abdullah of Trans-Jordan, which would allow for a Jewish "national home" under his sovereignty.

Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald ordered High Commissioner Francis Humphrys to Iraq immediately upon hearing of the killing of Assyrian Christians.

In response, Faisal cabled to the Iraqi Legation in London: "Although everything is normal now in Iraq, and in spite of my broken health, I shall await the arrival of Sir Francis Humphrys in Bagdad, but there is no reason for further anxiety.