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Robert Fisk's World: From the crusaders on, contempt for the Arabs is
written in stone
What was it that bestowed upon our ancestors such ill-will towards the
Arabs?
Saturday, 22 August 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comment ators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-from-the-crusad ers-on-contempt-for-the-arabs-is-written-in-stone- 1775845.html
Not long ago, the owner of a Majorcan palace found 13th-century
graffiti on his basement wall. It was scrawled there by a knight en
route to the Crusades. Translated, it read: "Sod the Arabs."
I owe this sublime quotation to last Saturday's Financial Times
property section - the only FT worth reading during the week, only to
be perused, of course, after purchasing Saturday's Independent - but
it coincided with a whole series of bons mots on the Arab world which
I've been hoovering up from a collection of letters and books of the
1920s and 1930s.
Many turn up in letters to Lawrence of Arabia after the 1914-18 war -
although my favourite is a remark by Charles Doughty (of Arabia
Deserta fame) to Lawrence himself. According to Robert Graves (Goodbye
to All That), Lawrence told him that he had once asked Doughty why he
had undertaken his Arabian adventure. "His answer," Lawrence told
Graves, "was that he had gone there 'to redeem the English language
from the slough into which it had fallen since the time of Spencer'."
Poor old Arabs, it's as well that Gertrude Bell had some sympathy with
them, albeit heavy with cynicism. Here she is, writing to Lawrence in
1920, advocating the creation of Arab governments before signing a
peace with the Turks. "I took the example of Syria; Palestine is even
better but we hadn't appointed a King of the Jews when I first began
the campaign here. We've paid for our failure to make good our
promises. We had a terrific Ramadhan [sic] with big religio-political
meetings in the mosques 3 or 4 times a week, Sunnis and Shiahs [sic]
falling into one another's arms & swearing eternal alliance (against
us of course) & finally a serious outbreak in Diwaniyah ..."
And here's the governor of Bombay, Sir George Lloyd, writing to
Lawrence of the same region and in the same year. "Was there ever so
fatal and disastrous a muddle over Egypt, Syria, Palestine and
Mesopotamia ... If we had taken and kept the Basra-Kurna bit, & taken
& kept Alexandretta and told the Franks that it was not Syria & stuck
to that and let the rest rip we should have had the peoples inside all
on our side against everyone outside - Now what?" The same cynicism
again. Tell the French to get stuffed (Syria came under the post-Great
War French mandate, which then included the Turkish - once Armenian -
port of Alexandretta) and sod the Arabs.
Ten years later, Frederic Manning - who wrote the wonderful First
World War novel of the Somme, Her Privates We - was writing a note of
praise for Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom and at least tried to
enter the Arab mind (as Lawrence himself had done). Manning described
the wartime Arab revolt, led by Lawrence, as "so ambiguous, a racial
movement striving to assume a national character, the nomad entering
into possessions, arresting his own movement by prescribing a boundary
to it. You took me right back to Genesis and Job ... Job, of course,
was an Arab, and his present day progeny stand in the same relation to
Allah as he stood in relation to Jahveh, so passionately asserting his
own individuality against that engulphing [sic] one-ness..." The
problem, of course, as Bell had noticed long before, was that the
boundary the Arabs had in mind included all of a land called
Palestine.
Many of these quotations come from the long out-of-print Letters to
T. E. Lawrence, which also includes a wonderful 1922 description by
Doughty of King Abdullah (father of the future King Hussain), who was
"not much pleased with anything he saw here in England. He could not
approve of the endless movement & rush of human life in these
parts. He esteemed himself a great personage..." Then suddenly we come
across a letter of infinite politeness from an Arab, to Lawrence from
King Feisal I of Iraq. "I cannot but send to you my cordial thanks for
the interest you have had of our affairs despite your being at far
distant [sic] from us ... I wish you pleasant long life ... I close by
reiterating my wishes for your everlasting prosperity and happy
days. Your friend Feisal." This is the same Feisal earlier described
by Cunninghame Graham as "a charming man and the only Oriental I ever
saw, who looks really well in European clothes..."
Some references to the Arabs are an attempt at humour. Ezra Pound
addressed Lawrence as "My Dear Hadji ben Abt el Bakshish, Prince de
Mecque," and Winston Churchill, whose early work on the Sudanese
campaign contains plenty of anti-Arab racism, would address Lawrence
as "My dear 'Lurens'," because that's how Arabs pronounced Lawrence's
name.
No one, I hastily add, could ever beat Noel Coward's wonderful opening
to a letter to Lawrence when our hero was posing as an anonymous
aircraftsman with a mere service number for a name. "Dear 338171,"
Coward begins. "May I call you 338?"
That's almost as good as the Second World War cartoon by Pont of an
English gentleman lifting the phone in 1940 and telling the operator:
"Get me Messerschmitt 109."
But what was it that bestowed upon our recent ancestors such marked
ill-humour towards the Arabs? Even Caroline Doughty (Charles' wife)
would write of the painter Eric Kennington that "he is so imbued with
the strange strongly marked features of the Arabs that it will be
sometime before he can return to European colouring and softness of
touch."
At least this doesn't match David Garnett's remark that he was afraid
Lawrence had joined the RAF "as returned Crusaders used to go into
monasteries ... Holy Men are anathema to me; I hate Fakirs ..."
Siegfried Sassoon, who served in Palestine as well as the Western
Front in the Great War, wrote of Seven Pillars that "I have savoured
your Hejaz hardships. Have, in fact, enjoyed all the fun without so
much as a grain of sand in my cup or the least touch of dysentery!"
George Bernard Shaw shrugged off Lawrence's assumed anonymity in the
RAF with the exclamation that "the people have their rights too
... They want to you to appear always in glory, crying, 'This is I,
Lawrence, Prince of Mecca!' To live under a cloud is to defame God."
Perhaps that is the problem. We like the Arabs if we pose at being an
Arab. Otherwise, the undertow of all these remarks echoes the
crusading knight who wrote so imperishably on the wall of that
Majorcan palace.
Robert Fisk's World: From the crusaders on, contempt for the Arabs is
written in stone
What was it that bestowed upon our ancestors such ill-will towards the
Arabs?
Saturday, 22 August 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comment ators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-from-the-crusad ers-on-contempt-for-the-arabs-is-written-in-stone- 1775845.html
Not long ago, the owner of a Majorcan palace found 13th-century
graffiti on his basement wall. It was scrawled there by a knight en
route to the Crusades. Translated, it read: "Sod the Arabs."
I owe this sublime quotation to last Saturday's Financial Times
property section - the only FT worth reading during the week, only to
be perused, of course, after purchasing Saturday's Independent - but
it coincided with a whole series of bons mots on the Arab world which
I've been hoovering up from a collection of letters and books of the
1920s and 1930s.
Many turn up in letters to Lawrence of Arabia after the 1914-18 war -
although my favourite is a remark by Charles Doughty (of Arabia
Deserta fame) to Lawrence himself. According to Robert Graves (Goodbye
to All That), Lawrence told him that he had once asked Doughty why he
had undertaken his Arabian adventure. "His answer," Lawrence told
Graves, "was that he had gone there 'to redeem the English language
from the slough into which it had fallen since the time of Spencer'."
Poor old Arabs, it's as well that Gertrude Bell had some sympathy with
them, albeit heavy with cynicism. Here she is, writing to Lawrence in
1920, advocating the creation of Arab governments before signing a
peace with the Turks. "I took the example of Syria; Palestine is even
better but we hadn't appointed a King of the Jews when I first began
the campaign here. We've paid for our failure to make good our
promises. We had a terrific Ramadhan [sic] with big religio-political
meetings in the mosques 3 or 4 times a week, Sunnis and Shiahs [sic]
falling into one another's arms & swearing eternal alliance (against
us of course) & finally a serious outbreak in Diwaniyah ..."
And here's the governor of Bombay, Sir George Lloyd, writing to
Lawrence of the same region and in the same year. "Was there ever so
fatal and disastrous a muddle over Egypt, Syria, Palestine and
Mesopotamia ... If we had taken and kept the Basra-Kurna bit, & taken
& kept Alexandretta and told the Franks that it was not Syria & stuck
to that and let the rest rip we should have had the peoples inside all
on our side against everyone outside - Now what?" The same cynicism
again. Tell the French to get stuffed (Syria came under the post-Great
War French mandate, which then included the Turkish - once Armenian -
port of Alexandretta) and sod the Arabs.
Ten years later, Frederic Manning - who wrote the wonderful First
World War novel of the Somme, Her Privates We - was writing a note of
praise for Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom and at least tried to
enter the Arab mind (as Lawrence himself had done). Manning described
the wartime Arab revolt, led by Lawrence, as "so ambiguous, a racial
movement striving to assume a national character, the nomad entering
into possessions, arresting his own movement by prescribing a boundary
to it. You took me right back to Genesis and Job ... Job, of course,
was an Arab, and his present day progeny stand in the same relation to
Allah as he stood in relation to Jahveh, so passionately asserting his
own individuality against that engulphing [sic] one-ness..." The
problem, of course, as Bell had noticed long before, was that the
boundary the Arabs had in mind included all of a land called
Palestine.
Many of these quotations come from the long out-of-print Letters to
T. E. Lawrence, which also includes a wonderful 1922 description by
Doughty of King Abdullah (father of the future King Hussain), who was
"not much pleased with anything he saw here in England. He could not
approve of the endless movement & rush of human life in these
parts. He esteemed himself a great personage..." Then suddenly we come
across a letter of infinite politeness from an Arab, to Lawrence from
King Feisal I of Iraq. "I cannot but send to you my cordial thanks for
the interest you have had of our affairs despite your being at far
distant [sic] from us ... I wish you pleasant long life ... I close by
reiterating my wishes for your everlasting prosperity and happy
days. Your friend Feisal." This is the same Feisal earlier described
by Cunninghame Graham as "a charming man and the only Oriental I ever
saw, who looks really well in European clothes..."
Some references to the Arabs are an attempt at humour. Ezra Pound
addressed Lawrence as "My Dear Hadji ben Abt el Bakshish, Prince de
Mecque," and Winston Churchill, whose early work on the Sudanese
campaign contains plenty of anti-Arab racism, would address Lawrence
as "My dear 'Lurens'," because that's how Arabs pronounced Lawrence's
name.
No one, I hastily add, could ever beat Noel Coward's wonderful opening
to a letter to Lawrence when our hero was posing as an anonymous
aircraftsman with a mere service number for a name. "Dear 338171,"
Coward begins. "May I call you 338?"
That's almost as good as the Second World War cartoon by Pont of an
English gentleman lifting the phone in 1940 and telling the operator:
"Get me Messerschmitt 109."
But what was it that bestowed upon our recent ancestors such marked
ill-humour towards the Arabs? Even Caroline Doughty (Charles' wife)
would write of the painter Eric Kennington that "he is so imbued with
the strange strongly marked features of the Arabs that it will be
sometime before he can return to European colouring and softness of
touch."
At least this doesn't match David Garnett's remark that he was afraid
Lawrence had joined the RAF "as returned Crusaders used to go into
monasteries ... Holy Men are anathema to me; I hate Fakirs ..."
Siegfried Sassoon, who served in Palestine as well as the Western
Front in the Great War, wrote of Seven Pillars that "I have savoured
your Hejaz hardships. Have, in fact, enjoyed all the fun without so
much as a grain of sand in my cup or the least touch of dysentery!"
George Bernard Shaw shrugged off Lawrence's assumed anonymity in the
RAF with the exclamation that "the people have their rights too
... They want to you to appear always in glory, crying, 'This is I,
Lawrence, Prince of Mecca!' To live under a cloud is to defame God."
Perhaps that is the problem. We like the Arabs if we pose at being an
Arab. Otherwise, the undertow of all these remarks echoes the
crusading knight who wrote so imperishably on the wall of that
Majorcan palace.