For the past 15 years or so I have been trying to read as many books and articles as I can stomach about the Middle East and central Asia, where so many US, Russian and European swords have been broken in vain, arrogant attempts to “conquer” or control that huge area. I want to understand, as best I can, what it is our Fearless Leaders insist we are up against, especially since the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon back in 2001.
I probably started with the 10,000-year history of The Black Sea by Neil Ascherson. It is a fabulous book telling the story of that area, a bit north of the present-day concerns. I then read The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk at the urging of another friend, which tells the fascinating story of the 100-year-long struggle between Great Britain and Russia in the 1800’s, vying for control of central Asia (in the vicinity of present-day Afghanistan), pushing back and forth as the “tribal chieftains” of the day (now likely the designated “warlords” of today) shifted their allegiances back and forth, depending on which side was paying the most baksheesh! I then read Saladin by P. H. Newby, also given to me by the same friend, about the 13th-Century devout and enlightened Muslim Kurdish warrior who resisted the Christian Crusades in Palestine, but who had as much deadly threat to fear from his Muslim “allies” as he did from the Christians. I have probably read other such books, too, but these are the ones that made the biggest impressions on me.
I am now slogging through Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”), loaned to me by a friend who has read it (and who I suspect wishes to drive me insane). It has been a tough book to read, but I finally got to some serious “red meat” this April morning in Chapter 58, about halfway through. Lawrence had just come off his improbable but successful drive across the desert to attack and take Akaba at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba on the eastern side of the Sinai peninsula, where the Jordan River probably once flowed through what is now the usually dry “Wadi Araba” south from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea. Having taken Akaba by land, Lawrence and his Arab allies would now join up with British Gen. Allenby, and the forces of Prince Feisal, the likely ruler over an eventually unified Arab people, would be placed under Allenby’s direct command in their drive to purge the Turks out of Palestine. (The drive across the desert to Akaba is, perhaps, the main event in the wonderful movie, “Lawrence of Arabia,” which I just watched again this past weekend.)
The following summarizes what Lawrence thought they were up against back in the early 1900’s to try to unify the Arabs and to “settle” a place like Syria once they reached Damascus, their target. I doubt that very much has changed since. The cultural complexity of what is real there is stunning. It’s not simply “Sunni” vs. “Shiite.” Note the textual variations, whereby Lawrence refers to Muslims variably as Moslems or Mohammedans, Beyrout for Beirut, Akaba for Aqaba, etc. Note also that there are two Tripoli’s, one of course, in Libya, and the other being at the extremely northern end of the Mediterranean's eastern shoreline just north of Beirut.
Now, these are merely the observations of one British person, and some of them are obviously subjective. Some may even be offensive by today’s standards, but the core issue is not necessarily the precise truth of each statement but is instead the complexity of the whole. (I confess I was especially amused by the following observation: They [certain Christian Arabs] seemed very sturdy Christians, quite unlike their snivelling brethren in the hills.)
I have believed for some time, without a hint of irony, that we should get the Hell out of the Middle East and central Asia and stay out! Afghanistan is NOT much of a “country,” whatever that word really means, and despite our best intentions. It is arguably a geographic space BETWEEN countries and will likely always remain so! There are horrible, brutal things happening in that part of the world that offend me, but we simply cannot stop what has been going on there for thousands of years, LONG BEFORE Islam or Christianity or even Judaism ever became a reality. I believe that what has been happening over there is only incidentally related to religion. I believe the cultural aspects are much, much more influential and indelible. It is incumbent upon each of us to try to understand the dominant culture of a place before we try to “own” it or even to control it. We should stop fulfilling the definition of insanity as doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting a different result each time.
After reading the following complexity, ask yourself: what would YOU do to straighten out that mess?
I am indebted to the “Project Gutenberg Australia” for the following. Lawrence's entire book is online there:
CHAPTER LVIII
Again there fell a pause in my work and again my thoughts built themselves up. Till Feisal and Jaafar and Joyce and the army came we could do little but think: yet that, for our own credit, was the essential process. So far our war had had but the one studied operation--the march on Akaba. Such haphazard playing with the men and movements of which we had assumed the leadership disgraced our minds. I vowed to know henceforward, before I moved, where I was going and by what roads.
At Wejh the Hejaz war was won: after Akaba it was ended. Feisal's army had cleared off its Arabian liabilities and now, under General Allenby the joint Commander-in-Chief, its role was to take part in the military deliverance of Syria.
The difference between Hejaz and Syria was the difference between the desert and the sown. The problem which faced us was one of character--the learning to become civil. Wadi Musa village was our first peasant recruit. Unless we became peasants too, the independence movement would get no further.
It was good for the Arab Revolt that so early in its growth this change imposed itself. We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God, that upas certainty which forbade all hope. Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass--a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day's heat, fell dusty. Aims and ideas must be translated into tangibility by material expression. The desert men were too detached to express the one; too poor in goods, too remote from complexity, to carry the other. If we would prolong our life, we must win into the ornamented lands; to the villages where roofs or fields held men's eyes downward and near; and begin our campaign as we had begun that in Wadi Ais, by a study of the map, and a recollection of the nature of this our battleground of Syria.
Our feet were upon its southern boundary. To the east stretched the nomadic desert. To the west Syria was limited by the Mediterranean, from Gaza to Alexandretta. On the north the Turkish populations of Anatolia gave it an end. Within these limits the land was much parcelled up by natural divisions. Of them the first and greatest was longitudinal; the rugged spine of mountains which, from north to south, divided a coast strip from a wide inland plain.
These areas had climatic differences so marked that they made two countries, two races almost, with their respective populations. The shore Syrians lived in different houses, fed and worked differently, used an Arabic differing by inflection and in tone from that of the inlanders. They spoke of the interior unwillingly, as of a wild land of blood and terror.
The inland plain was sub-divided geographically into strips by rivers. These valleys were the most stable and prosperous tillages of the country. Their inhabitants reflected them: contrasting, on the desert side, with the strange, shifting populations of the borderland, wavering eastward or westward with the season, living by their wits, wasted by drought and locusts, by Beduin raids; or, if these failed them, by their own incurable blood feuds.
Nature had so divided the country into zones. Man, elaborating nature, had given to her compartments an additional complexity. Each of these main north-and-south strip divisions was crossed and walled off artificially into communities at odds. We had to gather them into our hands for offensive action against the Turks. Feisal's opportunities and difficulties lay in these political complications of Syria which we mentally arranged in order, like a social map.
In the very north, furthest from us, the language-boundary followed, not inaptly, the coach road from Alexandretta to Aleppo, until it met the Baghdad Railway, up which it went to the Euphrates valley; but enclaves of Turkish speech lay to the south of this general line in the Turkoman villages north and south of Antioch, and in the Armenians who were sifted in among them.
Otherwise, a main component of the coast population was the community of Ansariya, those disciples of a cult of fertility, sheer pagan, anti-foreign, distrustful of Islam, drawn at moments towards Christians by common persecution. The sect, vital in itself, was clannish in feeling and politics. One Nosairi would not betray another, and would hardly not betray an unbeliever. Their villages lay in patches down the main hills to the Tripoli gap. They spoke Arabic, but had lived there since the beginning of Greek letters in Syria. Usually they stood aside from affairs, and left the Turkish Government alone in hope of reciprocity.
Mixed among the Ansariyeh were colonies of Syrian Christians; and in the bend of the Orontes had been some firm blocks of Armenians, inimical to Turkey. Inland, near Harim were Druses, Arabic in origin; and some Circassians from the Caucasus. These had their hand against all. North-east of them were Kurds, settlers of some generations back, who were marrying Arabs and adopting their politics. They hated native Christians most; and, after them, they hated Turks and Europeans.
Just beyond the Kurds existed a few Yezidis, Arabic-speaking, but in thought affected by the dualism of Iran, and prone to placate the spirit of evil. Christians, Mohammedans, and Jews, peoples who placed revelation before reason, united to spit upon Yezid. Inland of them stood Aleppo, a town of two hundred thousand people, an epitome of all Turkey's races and religions. Eastward of Aleppo, for sixty miles, were settled Arabs whose colour and manner became more and more tribal as they neared the fringe of cultivation where the semi-nomad ended and the Bedawi began.
A section across Syria from sea to desert, a degree further south, began in colonies of Moslem Circassians near the coast. In the new generation they spoke Arabic and were an ingenious race, but quarrelsome, much opposed by their Arab neighbours. Inland of them were Ismailiya. These Persian immigrants had turned Arab in the course of centuries, but revered among themselves one Mohammed, who in the flesh, was the Agha Khan. They believed him to be a great and wonderful sovereign, honouring the English with his friendship. They shunned Moslems, but feebly hid their beastly opinions under a veneer of orthodoxy.
Beyond them were the strange sights of villages of Christian tribal Arabs, under sheikhs. They seemed very sturdy Christians, quite unlike their snivelling brethren in the hills. They lived as the Sunni about them, dressed like them, and were on the best terms with them.
East of the Christians lay semi-pastoral Moslem communities; and on the last edge of cultivation, some villages of Ismailia outcasts, in search of the peace men would not grant. Beyond were Beduin.
A third section through Syria, another degree lower, fell between Tripoli and Beyrout. First, near the coast, were Lebanon Christians; for the most part Maronites or Greeks. It was hard to disentangle the politics of the two Churches. Superficially, one should have been French and one Russian; but a part of the population, to earn a living, had been in the United States, and there developed an Anglo-Saxon vein, not the less vigorous for being spurious.
The Greek Church prided itself on being Old Syrian, autochthonous, of an intense localism which might ally it with Turkey rather than endure irretrievable domination by a Roman Power.
The adherents of the two sects were at one in unmeasured slander, when they dared, of Mohammedans. Such verbal scorn seemed to salve their consciousness of inbred inferiority. Families of Moslems lived among them, identical in race and habit, except for a less mincing dialect, and less parade of emigration and its results.
On the higher slopes of the hills clustered settlements of Metawala, Shia Mohammedans from Persia generations ago. They were dirty, ignorant, surly and fanatical, refusing to eat or drink with infidels; holding the Sunni as bad as Christians; following only their own priests and notables. Strength of character was their virtue: a rare one in garrulous Syria. Over the hill-crest lay villages of Christian yeomen living in free peace with their Moslem neighbours as though they had never heard the grumbles of Lebanon. East of them were semi-nomad Arab peasantry; and then the open desert.
A fourth section, a degree southward, would have fallen near Acre, where the inhabitants, from the seashore, were first Sunni Arabs, then Druses, then Metawala. On the banks of the Jordan valley lived bitterly-suspicious colonies of Algerian refugees, facing villages of Jews.
The Jews were of varied sorts. Some, Hebrew scholars of the traditionalist pattern, had developed a standard and style of living befitting the country: while the later comers, many of whom were German-inspired, had introduced strange manners, and strange crops, and European houses (erected out of charitable funds) into this land of Palestine, which seemed too small and too poor to repay in kind their efforts: but the land tolerated them. Galilee did not show the deep-seated antipathy to its Jewish colonists which was an unlovely feature of the neighbouring Judea.
Across the eastern plains (thick with Arabs) lay a labyrinth of crackled lava, the Leja, where the loose and broken men of Syria had foregathered for unnumbered generations. Their descendants lived there in lawless villages, secure from Turk and Beduin, and worked out their internecine feuds at leisure. South and south-west of them opened the Hauran, a huge fertile land; populous with warlike, self-reliant' and prosperous Arab peasantry.
East of them were the Druses, heterodox Moslem followers of a mad and dead Sultan of Egypt. They hated Maronites with a bitter hatred; which, when encouraged by the Government and the fanatics of Damascus, found expression in great periodic killings. None the less the Druses were disliked by the Moslem Arabs and despised them in return. They were at feud with the Beduins, and preserved in their mountain a show of the chivalrous semi-feudalism of Lebanon in the days of their autonomous Emirs.
A fifth section in the latitude of Jerusalem would have begun with Germans and with German Jews, speaking German or German-Yiddish, more intractable even than the Jews of the Roman era, unable to endure contact with others not of their race, some of them farmers, most of them shopkeepers, the most foreign, uncharitable part of the whole population of Syria. Around them glowered their enemies, the sullen Palestine peasants, more stupid than the yeomen of North Syria, material as the Egyptians, and bankrupt.
East of them lay the Jordan depth, inhabited by charred serfs; and across it group upon group of self-respecting village Christians who were, after their agricultural co-religionists of the Orontes valley, the least timid examples of our original faith in the country. Among them and east of them were tens of thousands of semi-nomad Arabs, holding the creed of the desert, living on the fear and bounty of their Christian neighbours. Down this debatable land the Ottoman Government had planted a line of Circassian immigrants from the Russian Caucasus. These held their ground only by the sword and the favour of the Turks, to whom they were, of necessity, devoted.
(I added the underlining.)
