7 - 13 February 2002
Issue No.572
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 February 2002 Issue No.572 |
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Plain talk
The title of Galal Amin's book Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? provides a model for asking whatever happened to the Arabs? Most forcefully, the question concerns one aspect of the change: what is it that happened to the Arabs' image? For in Western media discources, particularly in the wake of terrorism and the war against it, the word Arab has become synonymous with Muslim; and when Western leaders talk of terrorism and such, they use "Arab" and "Islamic" as a kind of shorthand, as if the terms were infinitely exchangeable. The image of the Arabs has changed significantly, and to ask what happened to it now is to wonder what it was like in the past.
I went back to a number of books written about Arabs by a variety of travellers over the last three centuries. Many names are associated with the Arabs: Niebuhr, Burckhardt, Burton, Palgrave, Blunt, Doughty, Lawrence, the inimitable Lady Hester Stanhope and, in more recent times, Gertrude Bell, Cromer Philby, Glubb and the delightful Freya Stark...
How did these people regard Arabs? According to Albert Hourani, two ideas were current in certain strata of British society in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. The first was that the Arabs constituted "a pure race," possessed of all the qualities that go with this adjunct: independence, simplicity, nobility, honour. The second was that there exists a natural affinity between the English, and the Arabs. English and Arab were thought of as being able to understand each other, to possess, in some way, a special kind of empathy. This latter idea, according to Hourani, sprang partly from the belief in innate national characteristics, a commonplace of Victorian thought. Races with similar characteristics can be expected to understand each other to a greater extent than races with divergent characters.
These travellers' visits to the Arab world gave birth to some interesting ideas. Burckhardt, for one, found similarities between the Arab aristocracy and the English gentleman.
"The concept of a gentleman in England at that time," writes Kathryn Tidrick in her book, Hear Beguiling Arabia, "did, indeed, bear a remarkable resemblance to the Arab manner, described by Burckhardt: frankness, naturalness, self-assurance and elaborate manners. One Englishwoman living in the Persian Gulf wrote that the Imam of Muscat was "the only man I ever saw who gave me the idea of what is conveyed by the English term gentleman." And it was this feeling, that the Arabs were gentlemen, that made the literate Englishman begin to feel a sense of affinity with them. When after the First World War the British assumed responsibilities in the Arab lands, indeed, "the perception of a common gentlemanliness contributed a distinctive flavour to their relations with the Arabs." This feeling was partly responsible, writes Tidrick, "for the confidence with which they could rely on a native aristocracy." This cooperation, it can be convincingly argued, was largely governed by the unwritten code of the "gentleman's agreements."
Travellers and explorers aside, a number of English writers and poets were enthusiastic about the Arabs and the desert. In Childe Harold (1812-18), Byron established the East as a setting for the Romantic experience:
Oh! that the desert were my dwelling place
With one fair spirit as my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Shelley wrote: "I went into the desert of dim sleep..." Tennyson composed Reflections of the Arabian Nights. And Thomas Carlyle was an admirer of the Arab empire which, he thought, expressed the spiritual greatness of the Arab race.
"Before Mohamed," he wrote, "the Arabs were a people of great qualities, held together by the inward, indissoluble bond of common blood and language: yet the Arabs had been unknown to the world but through the genius of Mohamed they had become great."
But that, it is worth noting, was in the 1850s.
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