Wilfred Thesiger: Among the Arabs
- Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger, London: Penguin, 1991 [1959]. pp347;
- The Marsh Arabs, Wilfred Thesiger, London: Penguin, 1967 and reprints [1964]. pp233
Wilfred Thesiger, the British writer and explorer best known for two books in which he described his travels in Arab countries, Arabian Sands (1959) and The Marsh Arabs (1964), died in August aged 93.
Some writers in the British press have since expressed surprise that Thesiger had still been alive, and for those familiar with his work it did appear to have come from a different era, as, indeed, did Thesiger himself. Born in 1910, educated at Eton and Oxford, and, as he tells us in Arabian Sands and elsewhere, a personal guest of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Sellassie at his coronation in 1930, Thesiger's work is characterised by a marked distaste for the society from which he came, as well as a certain patrician dottiness (an uncle, Lord Chelmsford, had been viceroy of India).
However, his books, concentrating on the relationships Thesiger felt he was able to construct with the Arab tribesmen among whom he lived and traveled, are never less than engaging, and very often they record the life of societies that at the time were disappearing and have since disappeared. They come at the end of a line of works by "British travelers among the Arabs", as Sir John Glubb (Glubb Pasha) noted at the time.
Probably it was in part Thesiger's aristocratic background that allowed him to defy convention in the way that he did, but it was also in part his inability to conform to the kind of life that that convention governed: underlying both Arabian Sands, a narrative of Thesiger's travels in the 1940s in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman, and The Marsh Arabs, a record of time spent among the tribal peoples of the southern Iraqi marshlands before the 1958 Revolution, is Thesiger's oft-repeated desire to share the "harshness" of these peoples' lives, rather in the way that some men might join the army in a search for authentic, because physically demanding, experience.
The need for masculine companionship, the sense of a shared mission, and a desire for an uncomplicated relationship with the natural world characterise Thesiger's books, as does a horror of technology. The books' great weakness is that Thesiger himself came very much from the officer class, explaining both his sentimentality regarding the tribesmen among whom he traveled, as well as his barely veiled contempt for the urban middle classes, a source of what he came to feel was those tribesmen's corruption. Their great strength is Thesiger's uncalculating generosity of spirit, together with his genuine interest in those among whom he lived and traveled.
Of the two books, Arabian Sands has the stronger narrative line. Beginning with a note on his childhood and youthful experiences in Ethiopia and the Sudan, Thesiger explains how, having despaired of finding the Africa he dreamed of in his job as a British political officer, he had eagerly accepted a proposal that he investigate locust movements in the "Empty Quarter" of the Arabian peninsula, a vast area of desert stretching across Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This would involve tracking locusts in unmapped areas, and, while doing so, exploring areas that few, if any, non-Bedouin had seen before.
However, the main attraction of the job seems to have been the opportunity it provided to travel with the Bedouin. "In the desert," wrote Thesiger, "I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found, too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquility was to be found there."
There was also the reassurance of an apparently uncomplicated moral code, Thesiger writing that the Bedouin "are merciless critics of those who fall short in patience, good humour, generosity, loyalty, or courage. They make no allowance for the stranger. Whoever lives with the Bedu [Bedouin] must accept Bedu conventions, and conform to Bedu standards." Life in London, or Cairo, was flat and uninteresting in comparison, and life in Khartoum seemed to involve unacceptable moral compromise: "like the suburbs of North Oxford dumped down in the middle of the Sudan... I resented the trim villas, the tarmac roads, the meticulously aligned streets... the signposts, the public conveniences."
Arriving in Salala on the fringes of the Empty Quarter, Thesiger discovered the Rashid, one of the hardiest of the local tribes. Numbering only about 300 men, the Rashid "were among the most authentic of the Bedu, the least affected by the outside world," and "I knew that among the Rashid I had found the Arabs for whom I was looking." Over the next few years, Thesiger was to be accompanied by members of this tribe on his travels across the Empty Quarter, occasionally getting into scrapes with other tribes not on good terms with the Rashid, such as the Yam.
Throughout, his presence among them is a source of wonderment and paradox, not least for Thesiger himself, who is keenly aware of what his official mission and his personal search for experience portends: "I realize that the maps I made helped others, with more material aims, to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame." Those others included the oil companies that began prospecting the areas in which Thesiger traveled at about this time, in time transforming them.
The growth of Thesiger's friendship with Salama bin Kabina and then with Salim bin Ghabaisha of the Rashid structures Arabian Sands in much the same way as his friendship with Amara bin Thuqub of the Madan in The Marsh Arabs provides the narrative thread of the later book. "He was about sixteen years old," Thesiger writes of bin Kabina, "about five foot five in height and loosely built. He moved with a long raking stride, like a camel, unusual among Bedu... He was very poor, and the hardships of life had marked him, so that his frame was gaunt and his face hollow."
Bin Kabina was among Thesiger's companions in the two crossings of the Empty Quarter described in the book, the second, longer one of which nearly ended in disaster when the party was arrested on the orders of King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, "absolutely furious... [at] unauthorised Europeans entering his country". Fortunately, Abdullah [Harry St. John] Philby, the noted orientalist and father of the British spy Kim Philby, living at the time in Riyadh and a confidant of the king's, was able to intercede on Thesiger's behalf.
Arabian Sands ends on a characteristically valedictory note, with Thesiger feeling that he is "going into exile" as his plane leaves what was then the Trucial Coast, now the UAE, and bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha, their traditional way of life threatened by economic and social change, being driven "into the towns to hang around street corners as 'unskilled labour'". This, Thesiger feels, is an inevitable result of the modernisation of tribal society, linked to the insertion of previously isolated areas into the world economy, and with it he thinks will come a moral coarsening associated with technology: for Thesiger, the Bedu, when modernised, will be corrupted, "leading their lives at second hand, dependent on cinemas and wireless".
"I lived in the Marshes of Southern Iraq from the end of 1951 until June 1958," Thesiger explains at the beginning of The Marsh Arabs. "I spent these years in the Marshes because I enjoyed being there...Soon the Marshes will probably be drained; when this happens, a way of life that has lasted for thousands of years will disappear."
Thesiger's memoir of the Iraqi marshlands does not describe a series of journeys in the manner of Arabian Sands, instead focussing on his life and relationships with the Madan. "Memories of that first visit to the Marshes have never left me," he writes. "Firelight on a half-turned face, the crying of geese, duck flying in to feed, a boy's voice singing somewhere in the dark, canoes moving in procession down a waterway, the setting sun seen crimson through the smoke of burning reedbeds, narrow waterways that wound still deeper into the Marshes." The book contains fascinating detail regarding the construction of the Madan's traditional houses and guesthouses, or mudhif, built of bundles of giant reeds, "the peeled stems bound so tightly together that the surface was smooth and polished," and of canoe construction, an essential skill for building the slim, canoe-like boats used to navigate the marshland waterways.
Most of the canoes are mashuf, but Thesiger is presented with a magnificent tarada, or sheikh's canoe, 35 feet long and used on trips across the marshes with his guides and long-term travel companion Amara bin Thuqub.
There are also many intriguing observations of Madan culture. For example, "many of the tribesmen had wildly improbable names" Thesiger writes, such as "Jaraizi (little rat), Wawai (jackal), Dhauba (hyena), Kausaj (shark), Afrit (Jinn)...In order to avert the evil eye unattractive names like these were often given to boys whose brothers had died in infancy." Later, he is asked whether he has heard of Hufaidh, an island in the marshes bearing "palaces, and palm trees and gardens of pomegranates" hidden by the Jinn from human eyes. Thesiger takes part in several pig- hunts, the wild boar living in the marshes being a menace both to crops and livestock, and he is soon in demand as a doctor.
The pigs made life in the marshes particularly hazardous: "their nests, sometimes six feet across, were great heaps of rushes which they must have bitten off and carried in their mouths," and the pigs were highly aggressive if disturbed. But there are also many pastoral moments: "I had seen buffaloes grazing belly-deep among these plants [water lilies], thrusting their heads under water to pluck the trailing sprays. From a distance, they looked like cattle feeding in a meadow of buttercups."
However, life in the marshes was under threat even at the time of Thesiger's visit, though that threat was different from the one that eventually destroyed the marshlands in the 1990s. "When I first went to Iraq in 1950," Thesiger writes, "the Basra oil fields had not yet opened, but by 1955 they were in full production and money was pouring into the country. In Baghdad whole quarters of the town were being pulled down and rebuilt, new roads were being made everywhere and bridges constructed." Such economic expansion caused many of the Madan to desert the marshes for the towns, attracted by the good rates of pay that could be earned as labourers. At the same time, there was growing pressure to modernise agriculture, and that would mean draining at least part of the marshes.
Thesiger writes of the new slum districts that were beginning to appear around the larger Iraqi towns, and especially around Baghdad, as a result of the ensuing scramble. "It is easy enough to leave tribal life and go to a city," he notes, "but it is almost impossible for the down-and-out to return to his tribe." Unfortunately, for many of the Madan the streets of Baghdad were not paved with gold, and the economic change that revealed new horizons for some, dissolving traditional society as it did so, meant a rootless, urban existence for others, leaving them with few resources to fall back on when the inevitable crash came. Revolution in Iraq in 1958 meant the end of Thesiger's life with the Madan, but there is already a sense in The Marsh Arabs that even this last wilderness was disappearing as a result of environmental pressures and social and economic change.
Finally, Thesiger imagined that he had learned important lessons through his sojourns with the Rashid and the Madan, and he was serious in wanting to convey those to his readers. In this, he was quite unlike the authors of contemporary "travel literature", whose primary concern can seem to be "fine writing". While there are purple passages in Thesiger, on the whole the style is as ascetic as the man himself, having something of the puritan quality of Orwell.
The first of these lessons concerns the consequences of the break-up of traditional societies under the pressures of economic change and the second the tragic and on-going destruction of irreplaceable environments and ecosystems. Both are also very present concerns, and if for these reasons alone, it seems likely that Thesiger's writings will continue to be read.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
