Bennett Letters from Arabia

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-3-99146-880-6
Verlag: novum publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 202 Seiten

Arabia is a land of cardamom-flavoured coffee and camel trains, frankincense and fanatics, pirates and pearl fishers, a land where slights are sometimes forgiven but never forgotten and where friendships last forever. Letters from Arabia explores these subjects and more by taking one word from each of the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet as a chapter heading. Each chapter weaves its way through the colourful and complex history of Arabia, illustrating the origins of words used in everyday conversation and providing a Western perspective with the author's account of periods of his life and career spent on Arabian soil. Letters from Arabia is a welcome addition to anyone with even a passing interest in the Middle East and an invaluable addition to any traveller's library.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bennett, Stephen

Leseproben

Chapter 1 ‘alif ‘aa’raab Bedouin My father, Lieutenant Colonel John Bennett MBE Royal Engineers, was posted to the Arab Legion in 1955. His boss, the commander of the Arab Legion since 1939 and King Hussein’s miliary advisor, was Lieutenant General Sir John Bagot Glubb (Glubb Pasha as he was known – Pasha being the title accorded to miliary leaders in the Ottoman Empire1). My father never liked Glubb much, rather overbearing and stiff, he thought. King Hussein shared this view, and Glubb was asked to leave the following year but not before my father had supervised the construction of the lowest bridge in the world, four hundred metres below sea level, across the River Jordan. When he went to brief King Hussein, I was scooped up by the King to sit on the royal knee. I was six. This was my second introduction to the Arab world, having lived in the Canal Zone with my sister and twin brother, Andrew, since late 1950. The Author with his twin brother and sister in Jordan 1956 It might have been my last introduction had not a burly army ‘Sapper’ intervened to prevent Andy from dragging me into the Red Sea at al-‘Ain al-Sokhna, fifty-five kilometres south of Suez, a place I would return to thirty-three years later as a Royal Naval Lieutenant Commander during OPERATION HARLING (Chapter 15). I understandably became fascinated by the peoples who lived and had lived in this ‘rough parallelogram’ of land (as T. E. Lawrence described it) almost as large as India, the centre of ish-sharq al-awsat (sharq – East; wast – middle) – The Middle East. C. M. Doughty, in his lyrical Arabia Deserta, said of it, ‘Here is a dead land, whence, if a man die not, he shall bring home nothing but a perpetual weariness in his bones.’ I could not disagree more. I brought home silver daggers unearthed from the deep recesses of the is-suq (market) in the desert border town of Sinaw in Oman, and pots hot from the kilns at Bahla, the ancient capital of Oman, dominated by a huge citadel protected by a crumbling twelve-kilometre-long wall. The character of those who have occupied this land is not always easy to emulate or quantify. The same person who pushes past you in a queue for free food will, when returning, suddenly recognise you, seize you by the hand and, smiling broadly, lead you to share his feast. It is this complex and contrasting character which we examine in this chapter. South of the Fertile Crescent down the western and southern sides of the peninsula, from Syria (which the early Arabs called sham) to the Hadhramaut in Eastern Yemen, ran a series of well-watered mountainous regions which were able to support considerable populations. Because of its fertile nature, the Romans called it ‘Arabia Felix’ – the fortunate land. Pliny thought it fortunate because it was the source of ‘the heaps of odours (frankincense) that are piled up in honour of the dead.’ (See Chapter 23.) But it was regular rainfall, rather than frankincense, which made this the Lucky Land. Rain falling for centuries on the western limestone mountains drained northwards and eastwards to disappear into the desolate wastes to recharge vast subterranean aquifers of fossil water, thousands of years old. Towards the rising sun lay great expanses of waterless desert including the vast sands of ar-rubh’ al-khali – the Empty Quarter – wherein lay the fabled ‘ubar – the so-called ‘Atlantis of the Sands’. The Empty Quarter’s tamarisk-bush fringe fluctuates with unpredictable rainfall, but its heart is virtually waterless and totally silent, one of the few places on earth where no birds sing. The Empty Quarter (Arabs simply call it ar-rimal – the Sands) was crossed by Bertram Thomas and John Philby in the early 1930s and most famously by Wilfred Thesiger in the three years before I was born. His eyes still twinkled at the memory of those journeys when I lunched with him in Dubai in the late nineties. Yemn means ‘good luck, prosperity’ in Arabic. The concept of auspicious good fortune and happiness in Arabic is always associated with the right-hand side (Chapter 28), the left (yassar) side with being small and easy. The Arabs, for whom the rising sun in the east was their reference point, not the European Pole Star, named the lucky well-watered land on their right- hand side yameen, hence Yemen. From the fifteenth century BCE onwards, the population of Yemen grew steadily, and weaker tribes were forced eastwards towards the edge of the desert, where settled agriculture became impossible. Progressively they were pushed into the desert itself, where hardy tribes developed a precarious living breeding goats and camels. They became nomadic, exploiting what scarce resources there were. The al-‘aa’raab2, or Bedouin (plural of the Arab bedu), were born. In time their tribes gained control over 6.5 million hectares of grazing territories (d’ar) and their wells (biir), which they guarded fiercely, as anyone who has seen David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia will be able to testify. Before oil revenues made them less significant, tribal d’ar would contract, expand or move depending on the availability of ground water or grass generated from sporadic and unpredictable rain patterns and by the necessity to escape from rival stronger and greedier tribes. Insults by such tribes could not be tolerated and were avenged by vendetta. If a tribal member was murdered by another tribe, then any member of the offending tribe had to die in compensation. This non-specific eye-for-an-eye retribution gained acceptance in a world without any form of political law enforcement. In very dry years, tribes were forced to move into the d’ar of friendly neighbouring tribes, which led to an overlap in grazing areas. To minimise conflict over this essential resource, tribes were bound together in loose confederations (suff). The fact that a tribe might be in more than one confederation added a cohesive structure to bedu life known as ‘asabiyya’, or ‘group spirit’. This allowed a tribe to cross the d’ar of other tribes in the same confederation when necessary, for example during the annual journey to local trading centres, where herded animals were exchanged for cooking utensils, weapons and those other commodities which the desert could not supply. What property there was and responsibility for its protection belonged to the male members of the tribe and was bequeathed from father to eldest son. At the heart of this territory, so Lawrence wrote, was an archipelago of watered and populous oases called Kasim and Aridh, ‘where lay the true centre of Arabia, the preserve of its native spirit, and its most conscious individuality. The desert lapped round and kept it pure of contact.’ ‘Oasis’ and ‘Bedouin’ are English words. Arabs name the former waha. Herdsmen and warriors speak of themselves as either badu or al-‘aa’raab – the inhabitants of the wastelands (badia). They do not consider settled Arabs as being in their class, referring to them witheringly as fellahin (peasants or farmers) or hadari (urbanites). The ‘settled ones’, those who created and tended the gardens and terraces, the irrigation systems and the water cisterns, were considered to be inferior – a resource to be exploited. The wali (local governor) of Salalah told Wilfred Thesiger in 1945 not to trust the settled men from the mountains – ‘They are treacherous and thievish; altogether without honour.’ One of my heroes, Captain Haines, Indian Navy, noted in the mid-nineteenth century that town-bred Arabs were ‘timorous, indolent and much addicted to the use of tobacco’. By contrast, the Byzantine people found their bedu neighbours a significant irritation and were said to have imported, then loosed, lions from Africa to harry them! The bedu lived by an ethical code – muruwah – which embodied not only a concept of manliness (courage, patience and fortitude) but a disregard of material wealth. Lawrence noted that ‘only by having nothing can luxury be enjoyed, and long may it remain, however if luxury is taken away, what of it!’ Glubb cautioned that although the Arab was regarded as being fickle, turbulent and insubordinate, he ‘possesses another quality more rarely appreciated – that of total loyalty to a respected leader, a shaykh figure, whose hand they had shaken and whose word was law.’ In the Arabic mind, peace and the exercise of justice are inextricably linked. The three radicals which form the verb salaha – to...