Since the domestication of the Arabian camel, nearly 2,000 years before Muhammad’s day, Arabia had been traversible, and ideas and institutions had been seeping into the peninsula from the Fertile Crescent that adjoins it on the north. The effect of this infiltration had been cumulative, and, by Muhammad’s time, the accumulated charge of spiritual force in Arabia was ready to explode.
Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous
This is from Basil Davidson’s 1984 sweeping Channel 4 television series Africa: A Voyage of Discovery (from the third of its eight one-hour parts).
Davidson put African history on the map for laymen, including Africans. Is he still regarded highly? If not, is that because he has been superseded or because he was self-taught and a journalist and lacked any academic qualifications? Or is it a residue from a time when he must have seemed unsettlingly left-wing and when African history was not considered a real subject?
This blog should have recorded his death in 2010 at the age of ninety-five. Guardian obituary. Telegraph. Independent.
The Channel 4 series is all on YouTube, but not in one place and not in good recordings. There is no decent bibliography of him online. Many people will know his Lost Cities of Africa (1959), African Slave Trade (1961), Africa: History of a Continent (1966) and Time-Life book African Kingdoms (1966).
Swahili, or Kiswahili, is a Bantu language of the East African coast. It became the tongue of the urban class in the Great Lakes region and went on to serve as a post-colonial lingua franca in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Romans visited the coast in the first century. Arab traders had contact with the black coastal peoples from the sixth century CE or earlier. Islam reached the coast in the ninth century or earlier. There is cultural evidence of early Persian (or Arabo-Persian) settlement on Zanzibar from Shiraz. Swahili contains many Arabic and Persian loan words.
City-states – Muslim, cosmopolitan, and politically independent of each other – began to flourish along the coast and on the islands: Kilwa, Malindi, Gedi, Pate, Comoros, Zanzibar. They depended on trade from the Indian Ocean.
The Swahili acted as middlemen between Africa and the outside world. Slaves, ebony, gold, ivory and sandalwood were brought to the coasts and sold to Arab, Indian and Portuguese traders, who carried them to Arabia, Persia, Madagascar, India, China, Europe. Many slaves sold in Zanzibar ended up in Brazil.
Zanzibar grew spices: cinnamon and cardamom were introduced from Asia (when?), chilli and cacao were brought by the Portuguese from South America. When were cloves introduced? Were spices sent mainly to Europe or also to Asia?
How Arab were the ruling classes? How much of the Indian Ocean sailing was done by black Africans? Is there evidence for the arrival of black traders in China? Wikipedia on Chinese in the Indian Ocean and in Africa.
The sultanates began to decline in the sixteenth century, as Portuguese influence grew. The Portuguese in turn were threatened by Omanis, who controlled Zanzibar from 1698 until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British started to interfere. They were in turn followed by Germans.
Commerce between Africa and Asia via the Indian Ocean declined, but some of the dhow trade survived when Davidson made his film. Swahili fishermen still sell fish to their inland neighbours in exchange for products of the interior.
The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa in 1711 in the Arabic script. They were sent to the Portuguese of Mozambique and their local allies. They are preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa. Another document in Arabic script is Utendi wa Tambuka (The History of Tambuka), an epic poem from 1728, written in Pate, about wars between Byzantium and Muslims from 628 to 1453. The Latin script was used later, under the influence of European colonial powers.
“The summer’s night at end, the sun stands up as a crown of hostile flames from that huge covert of inhospitable sandstone bergs; the desert day dawns not little and little, but it is noontide in an hour. The sun, entering as a tyrant upon the waste landscape, darts upon us a torment of fiery beams, not to be remitted till the far-off evening. – No matins here of birds; not a rock partridge-cock, calling with blithesome chuckle over the extreme waterless desolation. Grave is that giddy heat upon the crown of the head; the ears tingle with a flickering shrillness, a subtle crepitation it seems, in the glassiness of this sun-stricken nature: the hot sand-blink is in the eyes, and there is little refreshment to find in the tents’ shelter; the worsted booths leak to this fiery rain of sunny light. Mountains looming like dry bones through the thin air, stand far around about us: the savage flank of Ybba Moghrair, the high spire and ruinous stacks of el-Jebâl, Chebàd, the coast of Helwàn! Herds of the weak nomad camels waver dispersedly, seeking pasture in the midst of this hollow fainting country, where but lately the swarming locusts have fretted every green thing. This silent air burning about us, we endure breathless till the assr: when the dazing Arabs in the tents revive after their heavy hours. The lingering day draws down to the sun-setting; the herdsmen, weary of the sun, come again with the cattle, to taste in their menzils the first sweetness of mirth and repose. – The day is done, and there rises the nightly freshness of this purest mountain air: and then to the cheerful song and the cup at the common fire.”
___
Charles M Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, third edition, with a Preface by Charles M Doughty, September 1921, two volumes, Philip Lee Warner, Publisher to The Medici Society, Ltd, and Jonathan Cape, London: and at Boston, USA, 1921; originally 1888.
Twin sieges. Of Constantinople by Arabs: 674-78 and 717-18. Of Vienna by Turks: 1529 and 1682-83.
The Arabs never returned to the walls of Constantinople, nor the Turks to Vienna.
The apparent triumph of our Western Political Nationalism in the Islamic World since the beginning of the twentieth century of our era – and, conspicuously, since the outbreak of the general war of A.D. 1914-18 – is a remarkable testimony to the assimilative power of our Western Civilization and to the inability of the Islamic Civilization to hold its own against it. For the Pan-Islamic Movement, which was set in motion under the patronage of the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph ʿAbd-al-Hamīd (imperabat A.D. 1876-1909) as an attempt to enable the Islamic World to repel the Western offensive, was not only good strategy on its merits (on the principle that “union is strength”); it was also in the true line of the Islamic tradition; for, from the time of the Hijrah, which was the crucial event in the career of Muhammad and in the history of the institution that he founded, Islam had been a unitary society which embraced both the two Western social fields of Church and State; and, after the founder’s death, the unity of Islam in its political aspect had been incarnated in the Arab Caliphate [...]. Thus the Pan-Islamic attempt to restore the political unity of Islam, under the historic aegis of a Caliphate, in face of a formidable external menace to the Islamic Society’s very existence, might have seemed a promising stroke of statesmanship; and the rapid rout of Pan-Islamism by an irresistible outbreak of Nationalism in the Muslim ranks is a surprising denouement.
[...]
A Study of HIstory, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)
“Welcome to Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire. This website holds detailed information on over 6000 films showing images of life in the British colonies. Over 150 films are available for viewing online. You can search or browse for films by country, date, topic, or keyword. Over 350 of the most important films in the catalogue are presented with extensive critical notes written by our academic research team.
The Colonial Film project united universities (Birkbeck and University College London) and archives (British Film Institute, Imperial War Museum and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum) to create a new catalogue of films relating to the British Empire. The ambition of this website is to allow both colonizers and colonized to understand better the truths of Empire.”
Owing to the tendency of the parochial states of a broken-down civilization in its Time of Troubles to sharpen their weapons in fratricidal conflicts with one another and to take advantage of this dearly bought increase in their military proficiency to conquer neighbouring societies with their left hands while continuing to fight one another with their right hands, most universal states have embraced not only a fringe of conquered barbarians but substantial slices of the domain of one or more alien civilizations as well. Some universal states, again, have been founded by alien empire-builders, and some have been the product of societies within whose bosoms there has already been some degree of cultural variety even on a reckoning which does not differentiate between march-men and the denizens of the interior of the same social world. [...]
No other universal state known to History appears to have been as homogeneous in culture as Japan under the Tokugawa régime. In “the Middle Empire” of Egypt, in which a fringe of barbarians on the Nubian glacis of its Theban march was one element of variation from the cultural norm of the Egyptiac Society of the age, there was another and more positive feature of cultural diversity in the Empire’s culturally Sumeric provinces and client states in Palestine and Coele Syria. As for “the New Empire”, which was a deliberate revival of the original Egyptiac universal state, it accentuated the pattern of its prototype by completing the assimilation of the barbarians of Nubia and by embracing the domain of an abortive First Syriac Civilization in Syria and North-Western Mesopotamia; and this culturally tripartite structure – in which the cultural domain of the civilization through whose disintegration the universal state has been brought into existence is flanked by culturally alien territories annexed at the expense of both barbarians and neighbouring civilizations – appears to be the standard type.
For example, in the Mauryan Empire, which was the original Indic universal state, an Indic cultural core was flanked by an alien province in the Panjab, which had been at least partially Syriacized during a previous period of Achaemenian rule after having been partially barbarized by an antecedent Völkerwanderung of Eurasian Nomads, while in other quarters the Mauryan Empire’s Indic core was flanked by ex-barbarian provinces in Southern India and possibly farther afield in both Ceylon and Khotan as well. The Guptan Empire, in which the Mauryan was eventually reintegrated, possessed an ex-barbarian fringe, with an alien Hellenic tincture, in the satrapy that had been founded by Saka war-bands in Gujerat and the North-Western Deccan, and a Hellenized fringe, with a Kushan barbarian dilution, in the territories under its suzerainty in the Panjab. In a Han Empire which was the Sinic universal state, the Sinic World proper was flanked by barbarian annexes in what was eventually to become Southern China, as well as on the Eurasian Steppe, and by an alien province in the Tarim Basin, where the Indic, Syriac, and Hellenic cultures had already met and mingled before this cultural corridor and crucible was annexed to the Han Empire for the first time in the second century B.C. and for the second time in the first century of the Christian Era. In the Roman Empire, which was the Hellenic universal state, a culturally Hellenic core in Western Anatolia, Continental European Greece, Sicily, and Italy, with outlying enclaves in Cilicia, in Syria, at Alexandria, and at Marseilles, was combined with the domain of the submerged Hittite Civilization in Eastern Anatolia, with the homelands of the Syriac and Egyptiac civilizations in Syria and in the Lower Nile Valley, with the colonial [Carthaginian] domain of the Syriac Civilization in North-West Africa, and with ex-barbarian hinterlands in North-West Africa and in Western and Central Europe as far as the left bank of the Rhine and the right bank of the Danube. [Footnote: Leaving out of account the late-acquired and early-lost Transdanubian bridgehead in Dacia.]
There are other cases in which this standard cultural pattern has been enriched by some additional element.
In the Muscovite Tsardom, a Russian Orthodox Christian core was flanked by a vast ex-barbarian annex extending northwards to the Arctic Ocean and eastwards eventually to the Pacific, and by an Iranic Muslim annex consisting of the sedentary Muslim peoples of the Volga Basin, the Urals, and Western Siberia. This pattern was afterwards complicated by Peter the Great’s deliberate substitution of a Westernized for a traditional Orthodox Christian cultural framework for the Russian Orthodox Christian universal state, and by the subsequent annexation of additional alien territories – at the expense of the Islamic World on the Eurasian Steppe and in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, and at the expense of Western Christendom in the Baltic Provinces, Lithuania, Poland, and Finland.
In the Achaemenian Empire, which was the original Syriac universal state, there was an antecedent cultural diversity, within the Syriac core itself, between the Syrian creators of the Syriac Civilization and their Iranian converts, and a geographical gap between Syria and Iran that was still occupied by the dwindling domain of the gradually disappearing Babylonic culture. The Achaemenian Empire also embraced the domain of the submerged Hittite culture in Eastern Anatolia, the best part of the domain of the Egyptiac Civilization, fringes torn from the Hellenic and Indic worlds, and pockets of partially reclaimed barbarian highlanders and Eurasian Nomads. Moreover, after its life had been prematurely cut short by Alexander the Great, its work was carried on by his political successors, and especially by the Seleucidae, whom it would be more illuminating to describe as alien Hellenic successors of Cyrus and Darius. In the Arab Caliphate, in which the Achaemenian Empire was eventually reintegrated, the Syriac core – in which the earlier diversity between Syrian creators and Iranian converts had been replaced by a cleavage, along approximately the same geographical line, between ex-subjects of the Roman and ex-subjects of the Sasanian Empire – was united politically, by Arab barbarian empire-builders, with barbarian annexes – in North-West Africa, in the fastnesses of Daylam and Tabaristan between the Elburz Mountains and the Caspian Sea, and on the fringes of the Eurasian Steppe adjoining the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin – and with fragments of alien civilizations: a slice of the new-born Hindu World in Sind; the potential domain of an abortive Far Eastern Christian Civilization in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin; an Orthodox Christian diaspora in Syria and Egypt; and a fossil of the by then elsewhere extinct Babylonic Society at Harran.
In the Mongol Empire, which was a universal state imposed by alien empire-builders on the main body of the Far Eastern Society in China, the annexes to a Chinese core were unusually extensive – including, as they did, the whole of the Eurasian Nomad World, the whole of Russian Orthodox Christendom, and the ex-Sasanian portion of a Syriac World which by that time was in extremis. The Mongols themselves were barbarians with a tincture of Far Eastern Christian culture. In the Manchu empire-builders, who subsequently repeated the Mongols’ performance on a less gigantic yet still imposing scale, there was the same tincture in a more diluted form; and the Chinese universal state in its Manchu avatar once again embraced, in addition to its Chinese core, a number of alien annexes: a “reservoir” of barbarians in the still unfelled backwoods and still virgin steppes of Manchuria, the whole of the Tantric Mahayanian Buddhist World in Tibet, Mongolia, and Zungaria, and the easternmost continental outposts of the Islamic World in the Tarim Basin, the north-western Chinese provinces of Kansu and Shansi, and the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan.
In the Ottoman Empire, which provided, or saddled, the main body of Orthodox Christendom with its universal state, the alien ʿOsmanli empire-builders united an Orthodox Christian core with a fringe of Western Christian territory in Hungary, with the whole of the Arabic Muslim World except Morocco, the Sudan, and South-Eastern Arabia, and with pockets of barbarians and semi-barbarians in Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, the Mani, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and on the Arabian Steppe. In the Mughal Empire, which was the Ottoman Empire’s counterpart in the Hindu World, the pattern was simpler, since, apart from the Iranic Muslim empire-builders and their co-religionists who had been deposited in the Hindu social environment by earlier waves of invasion from the Middle East and Central Asia [since the twelfth century], the Mughals’ only [sic] non-Hindu subjects were the Pathan barbarian highlanders on the north-western fringe of their dominions. When, however, the Mughal Rāj was replaced by a British Rāj, the pattern of the Hindu universal state became more complex; for the advent of a new band of alien empire-builders, which substituted a Western element for an Islamic at the political apex of the Hindu universal state, did not expel the Indian Muslims from the stage of Hindu history, but merely depressed their status to that of a numerically still formidable alien element in the Hindu internal proletariat, so that the Hindu universal state in its second phase combined elements drawn from two alien civilizations with a Pathan barbarian fringe and a Hindu core.
There had been other universal states in which, as in the Mughal Empire, the cultural pattern had been less complex than the standard type yet not so simple as that of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
The Empire of Sumer and Akkad, which was the Sumeric universal state, included no representatives of an alien civilization – unless Byblus and other Syrian coast-towns are to be counted as such in virtue of their tincture of Egyptiac culture. On the other hand, the Sumeric Civilization itself was represented in two varieties at least – a Sumero-Akkadian and an Elamite – and in no less than three if the domain of the Indus Culture should prove also to have been included in “the Empire of the Four Quarters of the World”. Moreover, the Babylonian Amorites, who eventually restored a polity that had been first constructed by the Sumerian Ur-Engur (alias Ur-Nammu) of Ur, were not merely marchmen but marchmen with a barbarian tinge. So, on a broader and a longer view, the cultural pattern of the Sumeric universal state proves to have been less homogeneous than might appear at first sight. “The thalassocracy of Minos”, again, which was the Minoan universal state, probably included representatives of the continental Mycenaean variety of the Minoan culture as well as the creators of that culture in its Cretan homeland, even if it did not embrace any representatives of an alien civilization.
In the Central American World, two once distinct sister societies – the Yucatec Civilization and the Mexic – had not yet lost their distinctive characteristics, though they had already been brought together by force of Toltec arms, when the task, and prize, of establishing a Central American universal state was snatched, at the eleventh hour, out of the hands of barbarian Aztec empire-builders by Spanish representatives of an utterly alien Western Christendom. In the Andean World the Empire of the Incas, which was the Andean universal state, already included representatives of the Kara variety of the Andean culture [...] before the indigenous Incan empire-builders were suddenly and violently replaced by Spanish conquistadores from Western Christendom who turned the Andean World upside-down, with a vigour reminiscent of Alexander the Great’s, by proceeding to convert the indigenous population to Christianity and to variegate the social map by studding it with immigrant Spanish landlords and self-governing municipalities.
The Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, which served as a carapace for Western Christendom against the assaults of the ʿOsmanlis, and which, seen from the south-east, wore the deceptive appearance of being a full-blown Western universal state, set itself, like the Tokugawa Shogunate, to achieve domestic cultural uniformity, but lacked both the ruthlessness and the insularity which, between them, enabled the Japanese isolationists for a time to put their policy into effect. In pursuing its aim of being totally Catholic, the Hapsburg Power did succeed, more or less, in extirpating Protestantism within its frontiers; but the very success of its stand, and eventual counter-attack, against the Ottoman embodiment of an Orthodox Christian universal state broke up the Danubian Monarchy’s hardly attained Catholic homogeneity by transferring to Hapsburg from Ottoman rule a stiff-necked minority of Hungarian Protestants and a host of Orthodox Christians of divers nationalities, most of whom proved unwilling to accept the ecclesiastical supremacy of Rome, even when the yoke was proffered in the easy form of Uniatism [union with Rome and retention of local rites], while, among those who did accept this relatively light burden, the rank and file remained nearer in heart and mind to their dissident Orthodox ex-co-religionists than they ever came to be to their fellow Catholics who were of the Latin Rite.
The [post-Assyrian] Neo-Babylonian Empire [or Chaldean Empire], which was the Babylonic universal state, similarly forfeited its cultural purity – and thereby worked unwittingly for the eventual extinction of the Babylonic Civilization itself – when Nebuchadnezzar conquered and annexed the homeland of the Syriac Civilization west of the Euphrates; and the impress of the indigenous Babylonic culture became progressively fainter as the domain which Nebuchadnezzar had bequeathed to a short line of native successors was incorporated first into the barbaro-Syriac Empire of the Achaemenids and then into the Hellenic Empire of the Seleucids.
Our survey has shown that, in the cultural composition of universal states, a high degree of diversity is the rule; and, in the light of this fact, it is evident that one effect of the “conductivity” of universal states is to carry farther, by less violent and less brutal means, that process of cultural pammixia that is started, in the antecedent Times of Troubles, by the atrocities that these bring in their train. The refugees, exiles, deportees, transported slaves, and other déracinés of the more cruel preceding age are followed up, under the milder régime of a universal state, by merchants, by professional soldiers, and by philosophic and religious missionaries and pilgrims who make their transit with less tribulation in a more genial social climate.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The military vs the militant.
I asked a Thai in Dubai whether he enjoyed living there. His answer, “Can not, can not”, reminded me of Blake.
Newish Granta-format quarterly published by the UK-based Muslim Institute.
Editors: Ziauddin Sardar and Robin Yassin-Kassab.
International advisory board: Karen Armstrong, William Dalrymple, Anwar Ibrahim, Arif Mohammad Khan, Bruce Lawrence, Ebrahim Moosa, Ashis Nandy.
I worried about the title at first, but I suppose the implication is fair.
Issue 4: forthcoming on Pakistan
“Look, I’m a little confused. Do the math for me. You are wearing an Islamic head covering, you are obviously a religious person, but you were educated in an American university and now you are bringing the Internet to Kuwait. I don’t quite see how it all adds up.”
“A Russian journalist, circling the Coke machine, under the CNN screen, speaking Russian into a cell phone, in NATO headquarters, while Kosovo burned – my mind couldn’t contain all the contradictions.”
“The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been – but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.”
Three Friedman quotations, I assume accurate, in a review at New Left Project by David Wearing of Belén Fernández, The Imperial Messenger – Thomas Friedman at Work, New York, Verso, 2012.
Risibly inane. Friedman is never deep, and he is prejudiced against Arabs even if he believes in their decency as potential Americans. But he is not always as bad as this. He is right about some things, like America’s obsession with al-Qaeda.
Other titles in Verso’s Counterblasts series: Jade Lindgaard and Xavier de la Porte, The Imposter – BHL in Wonderland, and Derrick O’Keefe, Michael Ignatieff – The Lesser Evil?
Recent posts on Friedman at Pulse.
Earlier post here.
(Now it sounds like a law firm.) Tom Holland’s reply to Glen Bowersock in the Guardian. I mentioned Holland’s new book about the Romano-Persian endgame and the origins of Islam a couple of weeks ago.
Both articles are worth reading, but severe limitations of space mean that they are skirting around questions about early Islam that really demand 7,000-word articles in the New York Review of Books, not a few inches in a daily. The arguments deserve to be outside scholarly journals, but as presented here are hardly comprehensible to ordinary readers. I don’t know who is right, but I had wondered about a few things in Bowersock’s “dyspeptic” piece. His superior phrase “with the publisher” about some early Qurʿanic manuscripts found in Sanaʿa: could there therefore already be a consensus about what they meant? His insistence that QRSh means only to congeal or clot, not to gather people: some language-instinct made me wonder whether that was so. But Bowersock is a major scholar. I just wish this discussion could be aired properly.
There is some simple background in this blog:
Since the domestication of the Arabian camel, nearly 2,000 years before Muhammad’s day, Arabia had been traversible, and ideas and institutions had been seeping into the peninsula from the Fertile Crescent that adjoins it on the north. The effect of this infiltration had been cumulative, and, by Muhammad’s time, the accumulated charge of spiritual force in Arabia was ready to explode.
Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous
Peter Brown (currently at Princeton) reviews
Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th-9th Century), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 14-July 8.
I don’t know how I have missed other pieces by him recently in the New York Review of Books, but here is a list. He is one of the few historians whose collected works I’d consider for desert island reading.
“We have been taught to see late antiquity and [the early period of Islam] in exclusively religious terms. In the words of Finbarr Flood, the period has suffered from an ‘excessive focus on religiosity.’ Anna Ballian warns us not to assume that ‘religion permeated every aspect of medieval society and in importance far outweighed secular matters.’ For this was by no means the case. There was always room for a ‘religion of the world’ – a tenacious conviction that there was more to life than piety. There was also something thrilling and almost numinous about wealth, good health, and the gift of children.”
We look at Iran this way today. If you go there, there is also sensuality, and fun to be had. In a week in Tehran in 1994 I never even heard a call to prayer.
The exhibition covers some of the ground of Holland’s new book (April 25 post).
Not a Jermyn Street shirt shop, but authors of two books I would like to read.
Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World, Little Brown, 2012 will get the same mass readership as his others: Rubicon, Persian Fire, Millennium. The Romano-Persian Endgame and the Birth of Islam could be an alternative subtitle.
Michael Scott, Telegraph: “‘Is it possible,’ [Holland] asks, ‘that Islam, far from originating outside the mainstream of ancient civilisation, was in truth a religion in the grand tradition of Judaism and Christianity – one bred of the very marrow of late antiquity?’” Well, yes. Is that controversial?
Contents of Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, Allen Lane, 2011:
Tolosa: Sojourn of the Visigoths (AD 418-507)
Alt Clud: Kingdom of the Rock (Fifth to Twelfth Centuries)
Burgundia: Five, Six or Seven Kingdoms (c. 411-1795)
Aragon: A Mediterranean Empire (1137-1714)
Litva: A Grand Duchy with Kings (1253-1795)
Byzantion: The Star-lit Golden Bough (330-1453)
Borussia: Watery Land of the Prusai (1230-1945)
Sabaudia: The House that Humbert Built (1033-1946)
Galicia: Kingdom of the Naked and Starving (1773-1918)
Etruria: French Snake in the Tuscan Grass (1801-1814)
Rosenau: The Loved and Unwanted Legacy (1826-1918)
Tsernagora: Kingdom of the Black Mountain (1910-1918)
Rusyn: The Republic of One Day (15 March 1939)
Éire: The Unconscionable Tempo of the Crown’s Retreat since 1916
CCCP: The Ultimate Vanishing Act (1924-1991)
Ben Wilson, Telegraph.
In the encounter between the world and the West that has been going on by now for four or five hundred years, the world, not the West, is the party that, up to now, has had the significant experience. It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit – and hit hard – by the West; and that is why, in the title of this book, the world has been put first.
The World and the West, OUP, 1953
The nineteenth-century diplomatists’ idea of a desert was that it was a region of no economic or political value because it was incapable of supporting life. Accordingly, while they were prepared to haggle, and, in the last resort, to go to war, over a few square metres in Alsace or Oregon, they amicably partitioned the Arabian Desert and the African Sahara by blithely drawing straight lines of enormous length across small-scale maps. In this cavalier way they disposed of the sovereignty over vast areas which, in the atlases of the day, were the “perfect and absolute blank” commended as the ideal kind of map by the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. During the late-nineteenth century partition of Africa between European states there was an occasion on which Lord Salisbury – under fire in the House of Commons at Westminster for having acquiesced in the annexation of startling numbers of African square kilometres by France – made the celebrated reply that most of this territory that he had let slip [in essence, Niger] was “very light soil”. Some of it, however, was the soil under which the French oil-prospectors have recently discovered what they believe to be rich oil-bearing strata; and the time has long ago passed when diplomatists negotiating international frontiers in either the Sahara or Arabia were carefree. The desert-girt Buraymi oasis is at this moment an object of acrimonious dispute between the governments of Saʿudi Arabia and Great Britain. The “idea formed” of a desert has in fact been transformed – in regions in which deserts overlie an oil-bearing subsoil – by the late-nineteenth century discovery of the economic value of mineral oil and the twentieth-century development of techniques for tapping it at ever greater depths below surface-level. The Arabian desert is just as inhospitable to life today as it ever was, yet it has now become a key part of the environment of the peoples of Western Europe.
In the agreement of 1890, the town of Say, in southwest Niger, was taken as the western end of an imaginary line which ran eastward to Barrua on Lake Chad. This is roughly the border between Nigeria and Niger. The “light soil” of the Sahara was recognised as French.
Niger has oil, but if you look at all the countries which once formed the colonial federation of French West Africa (1895-1960) – Mauritania, Mali (French Sudan), Niger, Senegal, Guinea (French Guinea), Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso (Upper Volta), Benin (Dahomey) – none, even today, whether of light or heavy soil, is a significant producer. In 1890, the industrialised world was getting its oil from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Azerbaijan, the US, Canada, not yet from Iran or Iraq, much less from the area now comprising the GCC.
The Buraymi oasis, or Al Buraimi, is in Oman, at the border with Abu Dhabi. The dispute arose from Saudi Arabia’s claim, first made in 1949, of sovereignty over a large part of Abu Dhabi where oil was suspected to be present and an area in a 20-mile circle around Buraymi. Both Oman and the Trucial States were British protectorates.
The Saudi claim was backed by the American oil company Aramco. In 1952 a small group of Saudi Arabian guards crossed Abu Dhabi and occupied Hamasa, one of three Omani villages in the oasis. The Sultan of Muscat and Imam of Oman gathered their forces to expel them but were persuaded by the British, who were no doubt under American pressure, to exercise restraint.
On July 30 1954, it was agreed to refer the dispute to international arbitration. Saudi Arabia began a campaign of bribery to obtain declarations of tribal loyalty. It even extended to Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahayan, the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi (he overthrew him in 1966), who is said to have turned down an offer of $20 million. In 1955 arbitration proceedings began in Geneva. They collapsed when the British abitrator, Sir Reader Bullard, objected to Saudi attempts to influence the tribunal. A few weeks later, the Saudi party was forcibly ejected from Hamasa by the Trucial Oman Levies (later known as the Trucial Oman Scouts), a British-backed force based in Sharjah (Trucial States), taken to Sharjah and dispatched to Saudi Arabia by sea. The dispute rumbled on and was settled in 1974 by an agreement, known as the Treaty of Jeddah, between Sheikh Zayed (then President of the UAE) and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia.
1961, Lance Corporal (later General) Saif Bin Mubarak sends morse code on a Trucial Oman Scouts dhow; Flickr credit: laponik
A Study of History, Vol XII: Reconsiderations, OUP, 1961
This is from the first of the 1952 BBC radio Reith Lectures, given under the title The World and the West. I posted the fourth, The Far East and the West, here. Background on Reith Lectures here.
In writing both the world and the west into my title, and writing the two words in that order, I was doing both things deliberately, because I wanted to make two points that seem to me essential for an understanding of our subject. The first point is that the west has never been all of the world that matters. The west has not been the only actor on the stage of modern history even at the peak of the west’s power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed). My second point is this: in the encounter between the world and the west that has been going on now for 400 or 500 years, the world, not the west, is the party that, up to now, has had the significant experience. It has not been the west that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit – and hit hard – by the west; and that is why, in my title, I have put the world first.
Let us try, for a few minutes, to slip out of our native western skins and look at this encounter between the world and the west through the eyes of the great non-western majority of mankind. Different though the non-western peoples of the world may be from one another in race, language, civilisation, and religion, if we ask them their opinion of the west, we shall hear them all giving us the same answer: Russians, Moslems, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, and all the rest. The west, they will tell us, has been the arch-aggressor of modern times, and each will have their own experience of western aggression to bring up against us. The Russians will remind us that their country has been invaded by western armies overland in 1941, 1915, 1812, 1709, and 1610; the peoples of Africa and Asia will remind us that western missionaries, traders, and soldiers from across the sea have been pushing into their countries from the coasts since the fifteenth century. The Asians will also remind us that, within the same period, the westerners have occupied the lion’s share of the world’s last vacant lands in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South and East Africa. The Africans will remind us that they were enslaved and deported across the Atlantic in order to serve the European colonisers of the Americas as living tools to minister to their western masters’ greed for wealth. The descendants of the aboriginal population of North America will remind us that their ancestors were swept aside to make room for the west European intruders and for their African slaves.
This indictment will surprise, shock, grieve, and perhaps even outrage most of us westerners today. Dutch westerners are conscious of having evacuated Indonesia, and British westerners of having evacuated India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon, since 1945.
That was almost all the imperial evacuation that had happened by 1952, except for the abandonment of concessions in China. Hard as it is to believe now, the British Empire handed over no territory (except the Anglo-Egyptian “condominium”, Sudan; I don’t count Palestine or the military base at Suez) between the end of the Raj on August 15 1947 and the independence of Ghana on March 6 1957. 1952 was also a year of direct British and American interference in the internal affairs of Iran.
British westerners have no aggressive war on their consciences since the South African war of 1899-1902, and American westerners none since the Spanish-American war of 1898. We forget all too easily that the Germans, who attacked their neighbours, including Russia, in the First World War and again in the Second World War, are westerners too, and that the Russians, Asians, and Africans do not draw fine distinctions between different hordes of “Franks” – which is the world’s common name for westerners in the mass. “When the world passes judgment, it can be sure of having the last word”, according to a well-known Latin proverb. And certainly the world’s judgment on the west does seem to be justified over a period of about four and a half centuries ending in 1945. In the world’s experience of the west during all that time, the west has been the aggressor on the whole; and, if the tables are being turned on the west by Russia and China today, this is a new chapter of the story which did not begin until after the end of the Second World War. The west’s alarm and anger at recent acts of Russian and Chinese aggression at the west’s expense are evidence that, for westerners, it is today still a strange experience to be suffering at the hands of the world what the world has been suffering at western hands for a number of centuries past.
The lectures introduced ideas which would be developed in the eighth volume of the Study.
In the encounter between the world and the west that has been going on now for 400 or 500 years, the world, not the west [...], has had the significant experience
is the most striking sentence. These views were shocking, as he says, to many listeners in 1952. They seemed defeatist.
I have taken this from a transcript on the BBC website, not from the printed book: there may be differences. The transcript probably shows what was printed in The Listener. I have made the use of upper case in references to world wars consistent.
The lectures were published in book form as
The World and the West, OUP, 1953
When a Judah that had just escaped falling into Assyrian hands in 700 B.C. was carried away captive in 597 and 586 B.C. by the Assyrians’ Babylonian heirs, the only provinces of the Syriac World that still remained unscathed by Babylonic militarism were the Phoenicians’ colonial domain in the Western basin of the Mediterranean, which was insulated by the Sea, and Arabia Felix (the Yaman [sic]), which was insulated by Arabian deserts (the Najd and the Hijāz).
The Assyrians had controlled Egypt, but the neo-Babylonians did not. The post-Assyrian Neo-Babylonian Empire used to be called Chaldean. Chaldea is in southern Mesopotamia, Assyria was the north. Thus “Ur of the Chaldees” (Genesis 11:28, 11:31, 15:7) in the period of Sumer.
A Study of History, Vol VIII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
Painting by Louay Kayali (1934-78) from the weblog of Imad Moustapha, who until a few days ago was the Syrian ambassador to the US. There is a lot of Syrian art on it. A Kayali site is here. Wikipedia.
Poulenc’s Figure humaine is a set of eight settings of poems by Paul Éluard. The notes to a new recording describe it as “a secret hymn to the French resistance”. The last poem is called Liberté.
The first is De tous les printemps du monde:
“Of all the spring times in the world
This is the most vile.
Of all my modes of being,
The trusting one is the best.The grass lifts the snow
Like the stone from a tomb,
But I sleep through the storm
And I wake with clear eyes.The short spell draws slowly to its close,
The roads had to pass
Through my most secret hiding-places
Before I could greet anyone.I do not hear the monsters speaking:
I know them, they have said it all.
I see only beautiful faces,
Good faces, sure of themselves.Sure of soon destroying their masters.”
My translation.
“De tous les printemps du monde,
Celui-ci est le plus laid
Entre toutes mes façons d’être
La confiante est la meillureL’herbe soulève la neige
Comme la pierre d’un tombeau
Moi je dors dans la tempête
Et je m’éveille les yeux clairsLe lent le petit temps s’achève
Où toute rue devait passer
Par mes plus intimes retraites
Pour que je rencontre quelqu’unJe n’entends pas parler les monstres
Je les connais ils ont tout dit
Je ne vois que les beaux visages
Les bons visages sûrs d’eux mêmes.Sûrs de ruiner bientôt leurs maîtres.”
BBC Symphony Chorus, All Hallows, Gospel Oak, conducted by Stephen Jackson, June 2003.
A friend who is there for six days asked me what to do. I could have said more, but this is what I emailed:
“Short answer is that all social life is in private places except for a) OK but never amazing (and of course alcohol-free) restaurants, b) shopping malls. The best mall for strolling in is Marina Mall, which has a marina. The poshest (where Harvey Nichols is about to open) is Avenues.
There are cafés at odd points along the waterfront, between, say, Kuwait City and Salmiya. Stop at random.
The only expedition to anywhere is to Falaika Island, which is a 40-minute ferry ride away. Few people bother to go. It has a dilapidated hotel run by a Yorkshireman and some Hellenistic rubble. Obese teenagers race buggies along a dusty beach. Rusting military hardware from the Iraqi invasion is strewn around. There’s a small pre-1991 ghost town. Not a bad place if you have a camera.
The ferry goes from the marina behind Marina Mall. Call ferryman on 2224 4988. Whether it runs at all depends on the tides. You can do it in a day or spend a night in a basic (but clean) room in the hotel.
Er … that’s it.”
Philip Walker, foreignpolicy.com, June 24.
Versailles, 1919.
The moving spirit of the Hashimite Hijāzī Arab delegation was Colonel T. E. Lawrence, and, when he was on his delegation’s official business, he used to make a point of wearing the highly distinctive uniform of an officer of the Hijāzī Army. One day, in a corridor of the Hotel Majestic, the present writer had the good fortune to see this picturesque and animated figure run into a weary-looking official of the British Treasury. In a flash, Lawrence had whipped out from under the folds of his robe a magnificent dagger with a head of chased gold, and was holding it under the Treasury official’s nose, saying: “Do you know what that is made of?” “No, I don’t,” said the Treasury official rather testily. “A hundred and fifty of your sovereigns,” Colonel Lawrence retorted; and the intended shock was duly registered by his victim.
Which is like a scene from the David Lean film, except that that stopped before Versailles. The Treasury had called in British gold sovereigns and half sovereigns during the war, substituting paper money (which had never existed in a denomination lower than £5). They were hoarded in Bank of England vaults and never seen again. But the Allies and the Central Powers were vying to hire Albanian and Arab mercenaries, who insisted on continuing to be paid in advance in gold (and were in reality more interested in fighting each other),
not because they foresaw a coming catastrophic depreciation of paper money with a prescience denied to the wily financiers of Lombard Street and Wall Street, but for the simpler reason that [they weren’t used to notes]. [...] During the antecedent hostilities, while Colonel Lawrence had been having the fun of carrying bags of “sovereigns” on camel-back and dispensing them to the Hijāzī allies of His Britannic Majesty’s Government, the Treasury official had been saddled with the vexatious task of trying in vain to induce these Arab recipients of “sovereigns” to part with them again in exchange for Indian piece goods [textiles], which he had dangled, like carrots, before a knowingly irresponsive donkey’s nose. The Arabs had found a better use for British sovereigns than that. So long as the gold remained in the form of minted coin, it might (they felt) slip through their fingers; so they had converted it into dagger handles, which were not only more beautiful but more secure, since they could be carried more snugly on the person and were riveted to an automatic caretaker in the shape of a formidable steel blade.
The manner of the story’s lugubrious retelling in Acquaintances, OUP, 1967 (not quoted here) suggests that he found the version here patronising to the Arabs.
Toynbee and Young Indiana Jones, post here about Toynbee and Lawrence at Versailles
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
Though, in all persecutions, there are, no doubt, always many weaker vessels who [...] fail to stand the ordeal, the followers of the higher religions have been conspicuous, on the whole, for their steadfastness and courage when put to the test.
The Christian Church was put to this test by the Roman Empire; the Mahāyāna by the Chinese Empire in its avatar in the age of the T’ang Dynasty. Both churches responded by producing martyrs; but the Christians in the Roman Empire seem to have been more steadfast than the Mahayanian Buddhists in China in standing a more severe ordeal; and this apparent preeminence of the Christians in a common heroism is, indeed, what was to be expected. We should expect both the Mahāyāna and Christianity to shine in facing persecution, since the distinguishing mark of the higher religions is, as we have seen, their voluntary acceptance of Suffering as an opportunity for active service. At the same time we should expect the persecution itself to be sharper, and the endurance of it more heroic, in the western than in the eastern half of the Old World because the temper of life in South-West Asia and in the Graeco-Roman Society was more tragic and more intransigent than the temper in either India or China. In appraising both the comparative mildness of the T’ang imperial government and the comparative softness of its Buddhist victims, we must make the allowance for this general difference in psychological climate. It would be unwarrantable to assume that the T’ang régime was more virtuous than the Roman régime was, or that the Buddhist martyrs were less heroic than the Christian martyrs were.
The same difference in temper between the two halves of the Old World comes out in other historical parallels as well. For example, Christianity and Buddhism were, each, expelled from its homeland by a rival younger religion which had derived its inspiration from the older religion that it was opposing and evicting. Christianity was expelled from South-West Asia by Islam; Buddhism was expelled from India by a post-Buddhaic Hinduism whose philosophy bears indelible marks of its Buddhist origin. But the advance of Hinduism at Buddhism’s expense in India in the age of the Gupta Dynasty was accomplished as peacefully as the previous advance of Buddhism at the expense of a pre-Buddhist Indian paganism in the age of the Maurya Emperor Açoka. By contrast with this Indian record, the supplanting of Christianity by Islam in South-West Asia and Egypt in the age of the Arab Caliphate was a story of pressure and penalization – though, by contrast with the treatment of subject Jews and Muslims in Christendom, the treatment of subject “People of the Book” in Dār-al-Islām has been honourably distinguished by its comparative tolerance.
An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956
The succession of concentric waves in which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam spread over the face of the World, one after another, from an identical centre of dispersion in a “Greater Syria” embracing Palestine and the Hijāz [...].
Faisal, a man of the Hijaz, aspired to unite the whole of this Greater Syria after 1918.
A Study of History, Vol VIII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
After 1918, in accordance with the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement signed between Britain and France in 1916, the British took control of most of Ottoman Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and the southern part of Ottoman Syria (Palestine and Jordan), while the French took the rest of Ottoman Syria (modern Syria, Lebanon, part of southeastern Turkey).
The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a betrayal of the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence of 1915-16, in which the British promised an Arab Kingdom in return for an Arab uprising against the Ottomans. Sir Henry McMahon was the British High Commissioner in Egypt. Hussein was the Hashemite Sharif of Mecca or Sharif of the Hejaz, an office which had existed since the late Abbasid era.
Hussein proclaimed himself King of the Hejaz in 1917. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and its dissolution in 1923, he declared himself Caliph. In 1924, in the face of attacks by Ibn Saud, he abdicated his secular titles to his eldest son, Ali, who became the last Sharif. At the end of 1925, Ibn Saud conquered the Hejaz and expelled the Hashemites. The House of Saud has ruled the holy cities since then.
The British granted control over Transjordan and Iraq to Hussein’s other sons Abdullah and Faisal. The Emirate of Transjordan (1921-46) was part of the British Mandate of Palestine (1923-48). In 1946 it became a kingdom, which survived after the mandate was ended. The Kingdom of Iraq (1921-58, Faisal I, Ghazi, Faisal II) continued after the British Mandate of Mesopotamia (1920-32) had ended, until the revolution of 1958. The Baathists came to power ten years later and survived until the American invasion of 2003.
But in October 1918, before he was posted to Iraq, and with the permission of Allenby, Faisal established an Arab government in Damascus. It would be an Arab kingdom based on justice and equality for all Arabs regardless of religion. The administration formed local governments in the major Syrian cities, and the Pan-Arab flag was raised all over Syria. The Arabs still hoped in 1918, with faith in British promises, that the Arab state would include all the Arab lands stretching from Aleppo in northern Syria to Aden in southern Yemen.
The French demanded full implementation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the placement of Syria under their influence. At the Paris Peace Conference the European powers decided to ignore the Arab demands.
Agreements in Europe that would turn the planned Arab Kingdom of Syria into a French mandate also stimulated Syrian nationalist societies such as al-Fatat (the Young Arab Society) to make preparations for a national congress. These societies advocated complete independence for an Arab Kingdom uniting the Arab world under Faisal. A hasty election was called, summoning representatives from all over the Arab lands, including Palestine and Lebanon, though French officials prevented many of them from arriving. The first official session of the Syrian Congress was held on June 3 1919. On July 2 it passed a number of resolutions pertaining to the formation of Syria as a completely independent constitutional monarchy with Faisal as king, and asking for assistance from the United States and the refusal of any rights claimed by the French.
The hope of Faisal that either the British or the Americans would come to his aid and intervene against the French quickly faded. On November 26 1919, the British withdrew from Damascus, leaving the Arab government face to face with the French. In January 1920 Faisal was forced into negotiations with Clemenceau. The French would uphold the existence of the Syrian (not pan-Arab) state and would not station troops in Syria as long as the French government remained the only government supplying advisers and technical experts. News of this compromise did not go down well with Faisal’s vehemently anti-French and independence-minded supporters, who persuaded him to reverse his commitment. There were violent attacks against French forces and the Syrian Congress assembled in March 1920 to declare Faisal king of Syria.
The British and French repudiated this action and the League of Nations called the San Remo Conference in April 1920 to establish an explicit mandate of the French over Syria. This was in turn repudiated by Faisal and his supporters. The commander of the French forces General Henri Gouraud gave an ultimatum to King Faisal on July 14 1920.
Faisal surrendered, but his defence minister, ignoring him, led an army to Maysalun to defend Syria from the French advance. The Battle of Maysalun resulted in a crushing Syrian defeat and the capture of Damascus on July 24. The French mandate of Syria was put into effect thereafter (1923-43). The official name was the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon.
The failure of the brief, tumultuous Arab Kingdom was a bitter disappointment to the Arabs, but it became a inspiration to other Arab liberation movements. One can’t fully understand Arab psychology after the establishment of Israel without knowing about it. It would become the often-repeated story of an Arab people breaking out from their colonial bonds only to be castigated for their revolutionary fervour. The fall of the Kingdom of Syria led to a deep mistrust of European powers, who were seen as liars and oppressors, and serves as a reminder of the overwhelming military might that can be imposed on a regime that does not serve the interests of a major power.
Extracted from Syria since the Ottomans.
This politically-debilitating belief-tendency is almost universal in the Gulf and Levant. Revisionism starts early there.
Most people (if you look at whole populations) think that forces are at work which are hidden from them. The question, most of the time, is only how incredible the conclusions are. The Princess of Wales was murdered. 9/11 was not conducted by Al Qaeda. Mubarak was not an ally of the US. The US is behind the disturbances in Syria. Osama bin Laden isn’t dead.
Egyptians are rather more realistic.
The maritime [trade route to India] was commanded by South Arabian middlemen until the first through-voyage from Egypt to India was made by Eudoxus of Cyzicus circa 120 B.C. [Cyzicus is in Mysia.] Eudoxus’s Greek successors gradually shortened the voyage – which in Eudoxus’s day was still made coastwise all the way – by cutting more and more adventurously across the open sea with the aid of the monsoons; and this process of shortening, which began circa 100-80 B.C., was completed circa A.D. 40-50 (i. e. on the eve of the precipitation of the story of Jesus in the Gospels) [the passage is about religious connections between Greece and India], when the Greek navigators of the Indian Ocean ventured at last to sail straight across the open sea from the Somali coast to the southern tip of India, without approaching Arabia at all. As a result of this Greek conquest of the Indian Ocean, pepper was obtainable in abundance at Athens in 88 B.C., and a Buddhist gravestone, erected before the end of the Ptolemaic Age, has been discovered by Sir Flinders Petrie at Alexandria (Tarn, op. cit., [ie Tarn, W. W.: The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge 1938, University Press], pp. 367-75, superseding eundem: Hellenistic Civilization (London 1927, Arnold), pp. 196-9).
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939 (footnote)
“Curing sectarianism by dictatorship is like solving emotional problems with hasheesh – it might temporarily avert a crisis but only by numbing the patient and freezing his neurosis in place. In the long term, failure to address the problem feeds it. The talking cure is the best solution – for sectarianism as for emotional problems (and sectarianism is an emotional problem).”
Hamid Dabashi, Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest.
Recommended at Marginal Revolution.
What the protestors in Bahrain want, articulated in Arabic by a journalist, Hani Al-Fardan, at manamavoice.com and given in translation in this blog.
___
“We want a genuine political life in which the people alone are the source of powers and legislation.
We want a constitution drawn up by the people, and agreed upon, which is the arbitrator and judge in the relationship of the ruler to the ruled.
We want genuine and fair elections based on fair foundations and the distribution of constituencies in which the vote of every individual Bahraini is equal.
We want genuine representation, without the accusation of treason whenever we go out to demand our rights.
We want a Council of Representatives that reflects the composition of the Bahraini people, without the majority being a minority and the minority a majority.
We want a government that is elected, based on people’s competencies rather than ‘loyalties’.
We want to fight corruption and stop the plundering of resources, and achieve a fair distribution of wealth.
We want to stop nepotism, and to prevent recruitment according to affiliation, and to open all sectors, especially the military, to all people.
We want an end to indiscriminate political naturalisation, which has increased the burden on services and oppressed people.
We want true freedom, without a law against ‘terrorism’ and ‘gatherings’.
We want true media freedom, and the door to be opened for everyone to express their opinions freely and without fear.
We want security in villages and towns, and the release of political prisoners and the reform of prisons, and the end of oppression, torture and intimidation.
We want genuine solutions to the problems of unemployment, housing, education, and health.
We want the police to ‘serve the people’, and we want the army to be of the people.
This is truly what we want; we do not want to overthrow the regime, as many imagine, and we do not want to gain control of the government, we do not want chairs and seats here or there. We want to be a people living with dignity and rights.”
___
The US will spend $110 billion this year supporting the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This post on Britain in Yemen gave some elementary background on the country, and bare facts about the Shiite north and Sunni south, up to unification in 1990.
Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose removal and trial are now being demanded, has been in power since 1990.
Sanaa is the post-1990 capital. Tahrir means Liberation. I presume that liberation here refers to the overthrow of the Imams in 1962. Other Tahrir Squares are in Alexandria and Baghdad and, of course, Cairo.
Tahrir Square, Sanaa, February 11, from detenteinternational.org; there have been similar demonstrations in Aden and Taiz
Robin Yassin-Kassab: “Arabs never really achieved independence, for a variety of reasons. Corrupt elites in authoritarian Arab states have plundered the people’s wealth, obeyed the dictates of hostile superpowers against the people’s will, and entirely failed to build reasonable education or social welfare institutions. Civil society has been stifled. Now it seems that the Arab people are entering the power equation, and true independence may be at hand.”
There is a bigger picture here. After the Abbasid Caliphate, the Arab countries were to a great extent controlled by non-Arabs: Mongols, Mamluks, Persians, Ottoman Turks, Europeans and at the end by unrepresentative elites supported by the West. Libya has been a maverick, but the Berbers, too, had come under Ottoman and European control. This is, in a way, an attempt at a return.
From orientalism to mere stereotyping.
Walking past Quinto’s bookshop in Charing Cross Road the other day, I saw a copy of a book called London Street Arabs by Mrs HM Stanley (Dorothy Tennant), Cassell, 1890.
Wikipedia, edited here:
“The term Street Arab came to the fore in the mid-19th century, first appearing in 1848, according to the OED. [Footnote: The Oxford English Dictionary locates this sense of “a homeless little wanderer, a child of the street” in a citation from 1848.] Horatio Alger’s book Tattered Tom; or, The Story of a Street Arab (1871) is an early example; it is about a homeless girl who lives by her wits on the streets of New York. Charles Dickens likewise propagated its early use in 1855 but in a more clearly derogatory sense when he declared ‘a wretched, ragged, untaught street Arab boy is ugly’. [Footnote: Charles Dickens. Household Words: Volume 10, Bradbury & Evans, 1855, page 335.] In 1890, the Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis described street children in New York in an essay titled The Street Arab. [Footnote: XVII. The Street Arab. Riis, Jacob A. 1890. How the Other Half Lives.] The Victorian association of street children with Arabs is probably reflected in the nomadic tradition of Arabs who were wanderers and the 19th century notion that non-Europeans from less civilized cultures were like children. European and American travelers saw many ‘street children’ in Arab countries during the period and there was a xenophobic tendency to scapegoat social problems.”
The response to the social problem was surely to stereotype, rather than scapegoat, a foreign group. But the main part of the response was a sentimental or patronising sympathy for the children.
The idea of the Street Arab is shown in the depiction of poor, amusingly disreputable children in popular art from mid-century illustrations to the paintings of the naturalists (from Bastien-Lepage to Norman Rockwell) to Thomas Henry’s illustrations in the William books in the twentieth century.
Bahrain is the only Arab country, apart from Iraq, with a majority Shiite population. Like the Iraqi Shiites before 2003-5, they live under a Sunni regime and are often poor and aggrieved. It was the first place in the Gulf where oil was discovered, in 1931, and is the only Gulf country where it has (practically) run out. Before 1931, oil had been exploited in Iraq and Iran. It still has natural gas and oil-related industries.
The unity shown in Tahrir Square cannot be shown in the same way here, because the root of the problem is the disaffection of a group, albeit a majority. There is a sectarian dimension to the problem which was not evident in Cairo.
The story of the Garden of Eden may be connected with Bahrain and with the eastern Arabian oases. There was an ancient society there called Dilmun. Dilmun was on the trading route between the ancient Mesopotamian civilisations and the Indus valley civilisation, which flourished from 3000 to 1500 BC. Why, with that position, was Bahrain not more important throughout its history? Because the important trade routes were overland? Because of Oman?
Bahrain was under the influence of different pre-Islamic and Islamic powers at different times, including Persia. It was the seat of an early Nestorian community, and of a major political experiment in the early Middle Ages as a stronghold of the Qarmatians. The Portuguese had a presence there between 1485 and 1602. The first treaty with Britain was in 1820. It was a British protectorate from 1880 to 1971.
For most of its history, the most lucrative industry was pearl-fishing. That was done in other places in the Gulf too, and in the Red Sea, and down to Ceylon. The lower orders were sent down 100 feet in a single breath.
The Caspian is due north: Bahrain, the Gulf, Iran, the Caspian. I don’t know whether that route to the north was ever significant in Bahrain’s trading history.
In the ’70s, after the oil shocks, Bahrain turned itself into the first modern financial centre in the middle east (perhaps the second, if you count Lebanon, but whose opportunity was ended in 1975). Now it has competition from Dubai and Qatar.
In 1986 the King Fahd causeway was opened, which connected Bahrain to the Arabian subcontinent for the first time (four years before England was connected, for the first time since the last Ice Age, to another subcontinent, via a tunnel). Every weekend, young Saudis head to Bahrain in search of alcohol and sex. Some die on the way or on the way back. One can drive from Riyad to Manama in four hours. I’ve done it. One has the impression of a litter-strewn desert.
It has been amusing to watch the discomfort of the Saudis. They must be dreading the arrival of more rogue exiles. The king of Bahrain will not be one, because the House of Saud, if no one else, will guarantee the survival of this regime. The Bahraini Crown Prince, Salman, has started a “national dialogue”.
Bahrain is the home of the American Fifth Fleet. I wandered around the Bahrain National Museum one day with what seemed like half of it. They are partly there to threaten Iran.
The lack of oil isn’t unconnected with the development of quasi-democracy. There has been more freedom of speech and behaviour in Bahrain than in other Gulf countries. The Bahraini parliamentary system was set up in 2002, when the emirate called the State of Bahrain became a kingdom. But the Al Khalifa, who liberated Bahrain from the Persians in 1783, remain a conquering regime from the mainland, presiding over a population with long-established grievances.
February 17
When you know the faces and that emphatic, staccato, vehement Egyptian way of speaking, Egypt doesn’t feel like just another place in turmoil (clashes between supporters of X and anti-government protesters).
A friend who was in Tahrir Square emailed me on January 18:
“Things are boiling even more these days in Cairo. There will be some demonstrations on Jan 25 that people say will be a revolution, may be a civil war.”
___
Revolutionary years, not only in Egypt:
1789
Egypt felt a reverberation from France. Napoleon invaded in person and was defeated by Nelson in person in the Battle of the Nile (1798). Afterwards, the reforming Ottoman viceroy Muhammad Ali (ruled 1805-48) had French military and scientific manuals and other works translated into Arabic. Much of the French infusion was managed by Rifa’a el-Tahtawi.
I have a post here (a sketchy passage by Toynbee) about French law and culture in Egypt. I can remember meeting a old Francophone Egyptian in Cairo.
1848
1848 did not, as far as I know, have an impact on Egypt (though it happened to mark the end of the reign of Muhammad Ali), but it is a parallel to 2011 (and 1989) in the way revolution spread from place to place. The January trigger then was Palermo – not two hundred miles away from Tunis.
1919
1919 had been a series of nationalist uprisings against the British, who had been in Egypt since 1882. In 1914 the British-occupied Khediviate became a British-protected Sultanate. Turkish influence was ended. In 1922, after the 1919 agitations, it became an “independent” kingdom. Even then, some British troops remained until 1936, and in the Canal Zone until 1954. It is hard, from these facts, to see how 1919 can have felt like a revolution, but it did to the Egyptians. I sketched the story of Egypt from Muhammad Ali to Nasser here.
The same year saw the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, the foundation of the Fascist party in Italy, the short-lived Bavarian and Hungarian Socialist Republics, the Amritsar massacre in India, police and other strikes in Britain, and convulsions in Ireland, eastern Europe and Russia, Turkey, Korea and China.
After the uprisings, the square, which had been called Midan Ismaileyya, after Khedive Ismail, who had commissioned the new downtown district’s plan, became popularly known as Midan al-Tahrir (Liberation Square). It was not officially renamed until the revolution of 1952. Other demonstrations have taken place there, including the bread riots in 1977 and the demonstrations against the Iraq War in 2003.
1952
1952 was the revolution led by Nasser that removed King Farouk (seventeen years before Idris was removed in Libya) and installed the present military establishment.
(The first president was not Nasser but Muhammad Naguib. Farouk was not the last king: he was briefly succeeded by Fuad II.)
Between Nasser (died 1970) and Mubarak was only Sadat. Sadat signed the peace treaty with Israel at Camp David and was assassinated.
Egyptian public morale collapsed in June 1967 (Six-Day War). It had been pumped up by Nasser and was high for good cultural reasons as well, and it was knocked back further in October 1973 (Yom Kippur War) and (though Egyptians are peaceful people) September 1978 (Camp David). Until January 25 2011 it had never quite recovered.
1979
That’s what Americans fear, but no scowling demagogue got off a plane. Unless Yusuf al-Qaradawi is that.
Some educated Egyptians have a cultural fascination with Iran, the great or forbidden Other, and the only country in what Americans call “the region” which is similar to it in size of population. But Egypt has had no diplomatic relations with Iran since 1979. Electronic alliances are being formed.
The sclerotic era of Mubarak began in October 1981.
1986
From an old post:
“[People Power in the Philippines] was a T-shirted revolution before Twitter, a colour-coded revolution before mobile phones and email, a velvet revolution practically before fax. There had been peaceful protests and non-cooperation in India, but they were surely more manipulated and orchestrated.
“Since 1986, the Philippine example has been at the back of our minds wherever there have been large-scale, mainly peaceful popular protests. Václav Havel has said that it was in the minds of European demonstrators in 1989. The days leading up to the deposition of Ceauşescu in Romania reminded one very strongly of the Philippines. Was it in the minds of the Chinese students in the same year? It was in our minds this year [2009] during the protests that began after the Iranian presidential elections.”
Before January 25 Egypt had lost its standing in the Arab world, which had been so high in the ’50s and ’60s. Qatar, as Robin Yassin-Kassab has said, counted for more.
Egyptians must be charmed now to think that at least a few young people all over the oppressed world, not only in the Middle East, are looking up to them.
1989
The obvious, though very far from exact, precedent. The chain of revolutions got going in the second half. In Russia, two years later, a system collapsed with little pressure from below.
Egypt had transferred its loyalty from the USSR to the US before this, under Sadat.
2011
Removal of Mubarak. Now the people are dealing with the military in uniform, face to face.
___
Nobody who witnessed this revolution at a distance will forget the moving words of Wael Abbas, Ahdaf Soueif, Khalid Abdalla, Wael Ghonim and many others, and nameless people.
Blair on February 2: Hosni Mubarak was “immensely courageous and a force for good”.
As always, there are those in the Middle East, the homeland of conspiracy theory, who are hinting at forces – America, Israel, other – controlling these events. Others are saying, even after February 11 (I have spoken to one of them; he was rich): “We are not ready for democracy, the West should stop lecturing us” and “Let the West dream”. But the revolution happened in spite of Obama’s ditherings and, thanks to them, Egyptians feel that Tahrir Square was their own achievement.
I had thought that the relevance of Facebook and Twitter to real politics had been exaggerated. I was utterly wrong, but I was in no doubt from January 25 that it was over for Mubarak.
“The World Bank says escalating food prices have pushed 44 million more people into poverty since last June.”
The median age in Egypt is 24. More than a quarter of males under 30 with degrees are unemployed.
Egypt had been “growing” at 6% a year. It’s said that revolutions usually happen in countries which are growing economically. Energy which had been pent up is released and destroys the system which produced the growth. Russia in 1917? That kind of growth, in any case, can make things temporarily worse, and perhaps permanently less secure, for the masses.
Real revolutions aren’t gang warfare waged at state level. They are a return to truth. Will the energy produce a later wave of expansionist Islamism or be wholly dissipated in manoeuvring, compromises and renewed corruption?
Tahrir Square became a university in which different classes and types in Egyptian society met. The best reporting was an education to the West on what living in a police state feels like. But the Egyptians, such as Waseem Wagdi, were the best exponents of their condition.
However it ends, Tahrir Square has changed the Middle East politically, geopolitically and psychologically. The revolution was not Islamist or socialist or especially anti-American or even anti-Zionist. There was no utopianism. No desire for an absolute break with the past, except in one respect. No exaggeration. Not even a leader. No “nativist romanticism, sectarian distraction or religious obscurantism” (Robin Yassin-Kassab). These facts may, perhaps, offer some grounds for hope.
Egypt has minorities, but not deep sectarian divisions. Robin Yassin-Kassab: “The answer to sectarian hatred is democracy. The answer to Arab hatred of Israel is for Israel to change itself from a violent ethnocracy to a multicultural democracy.”
On the Muslim Brotherhood: “First, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is noted for its aversion to violence. Ayman Zawahri and the al-Qa’ida types broke away from the Brothers for precisely this reason. Second, the Brotherhood by its own admission has not led the revolution, no more than Muhammad al-Barade’i or any other leader. Third, the Brotherhood is part of the revolution like almost every other segment of Egyptian society, because it is part of society, a venerable institution and a mass movement. If the revolution has an ideology, it’s one of representation and dignity, of democracy in other words. The Brotherhood, like Barade’i, has called for an interim national government with no NDP presence, followed by elections. If the Brothers win elections, they will not be in a position to establish a new dictatorship. Fourth, the most retrograde elements of Islamism, those that lead to nihilistic terrorism and sectarian hatred, are nourished by the social stagnation of dictatorship. Finally, it is not for British or American chatterers to decide whether the Egyptians are ready for freedom. The Egyptians are demanding freedom, and are making the chatterers irrelevant.”
Few people outside Egypt even know the name of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader. It is Mohammed Badie.
Many Egyptians who before January 25 did not speak in political terms nevertheless showed a pre-revolutionary mood in the way they spoke about their personal lives. But nobody predicted the certainty which they found in themselves in Tahrir Square.
A comment on this blog on February 1: “Day after day people lost the value of their own lives and now they are willing to give these lives away [...].”
Robin Yassin-Kassab: “Arabs never really achieved independence, for a variety of reasons. Corrupt elites in authoritarian Arab states have plundered the people’s wealth, obeyed the dictates of hostile superpowers against the people’s will, and entirely failed to build reasonable education or social welfare institutions. Civil society has been stifled. Now it seems that the Arab people are entering the power equation, and true independence may be at hand.”
The best foreign reporting, aside from some blogs, was from CNN. Reporting, not analysis. The Egyptians will remember it. It was less naive than some about the role of the army. Al Jazeera was good, too. I am not an expert on Egypt, but many of the Western chatterers seemed to know nothing about it at all.
___
Egypt had been bursting for some kind of freshness in its politics for many years. Cairo, too, in its planning. There is hardly a park or tree anywhere. There are little more than rough pavements by the Nile, next to noisy roads, along which people can stroll. Its physical charm has been squeezed out of it. This has happened in some degree in every old city on earth. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth, to judge from any account of the banks of the Nile, Cairo was a seductive place. But Egypt wasn’t a republic then.
Most of Tahrir Square has been a building site for as long as I can remember it and was not accessible by the demonstrators. You didn’t see it on the news. What you saw was a roundabout.
It isn’t clear what the work is intended to lead to. Paved area? Garden? The only thing that is clear is that the project has stalled because of corruption. Somebody, deserving or otherwise, has not been paid. Tahrir Square is a minor scandal of Mubarak’s Egypt.
Nearly all shots of the square show the giant Mogamma office building, a gift of the Soviet Union completed just before the 1952 revolution.
___
“[We] who were strong in love.”
(Most of this is a reposting from November.)
The oldest regimes in the world are in the middle east.
Al Sabah, Kuwait – since 1752
Al Khalifa, Bahrain – since 1783
Al Thani, Qatar – since 1825
Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi – since 1761
Al Maktoum, Dubai – since 1833
Al Qasimi, Sharjah – since 1727
Al Nuaimi, Ajman – since c 1780
Al Mu‘alla, Umm al-Qaiwain – since 1775
Al Qasimi, Ras al-Khaimah – since c 1725
Al Sharqi, Fujairah – since 1876
Al Said, Oman – since 1749
Al Saud, Nejd or central Arabia (First Saudi State) – 1744-1818
Nejd (Second Saudi State) – 1824-91
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – since 1932Kuwait and Bahrain are, to a degree, constitutional monarchies. They have parliaments. The Kuwaiti parliamentary system was set up in 1962, I believe to absorb heightened political feelings in the age of Nasser and in fear of pan-Arabism. The British had withdrawn their “protection” from Kuwait in 1961, a decade before they withdrew it from Bahrain, Qatar, the Trucial States (now UAE) and Oman. The Bahraini parliamentary system was set up in 2002.
The same years that saw the arrival of the Gulf monarchies saw the establishment of the Durrani Empire in Afghanistan (1747) and Qajar dynasty in Persia (1794).
The present Swazi monarchy was established in 1745.
The Alaouites came to power in Morocco in 1666 and still rule, in theory constitutionally. The Chakri dynasty came to power in Thailand in 1782, but this is a constitutional monarchy.
Old post: Qatar.
“The important thing for me in every case was that I should be travelling if possible in countries and among people who had had no previous contact with the outside world, and above all that I’d be travelling as they travelled, on foot or with camels or with mules in Ethiopia and so on, and a third of my life, I suppose, I’ve been in places which had never even heard an engine.”
Recording of Thesiger’s voice in Thesiger at 100.
___
Arabian Sands 1959 (Arabia 1945-50; first chapter on early years in Abyssinia, Danakil country and the Sudan; he was born in Abyssinia)
The Marsh Arabs 1964 (marshes of southern Iraq 1950-58)
Desert, Marsh and Mountain: The World of a Nomad (US title The Last Nomad) 1979 (Abyssinia, Danakil country and the Sudan 1910-45, Arabia 1945-50, Persia and Iraqi Kurdistan 1949-51, Iraqi marshes 1950-58, Chitral, Hunza, Hazarajat and Nuristan 1952-65, Yemen 1966-68, Epilogue: 1977-78, with photographs)
The Life of My Choice 1987 (autobiography)
Visions of a Nomad 1987 (photographs, all travels)
My Kenya Days 1994 (mainly 1968-94, with photographs)
The Danakil Diary: Journeys through Abyssinia, 1930-34 1996
Among the Mountains: Travels through Asia 1998 (Iraqi Kurdistan 1950-51, Chitral 1952, Hunza 1953, Hazarajat 1954, Nuristan 1956 and 1965, Epilogue: Ladakh 1983)
Crossing the Sands 2000 (photographs, Arabia)
A Vanished World 2001 (photographs, all travels)
Uncollected interviews
___
Peter Clark, Thesiger’s Return 1992 (UAE 1990)
Michael Asher, Thesiger 1994 (biography)
Alexander Maitland, editor, My Life and Travels 2003, posthumous (anthology)
Alexander Maitland, Thesiger: A Life in Pictures 2004 (photographs, all travels)
Alexander Maitland, Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer 2006 (official biography)
Christopher Morton and Philip N Grover (curators of Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford), editors, Alexander Maitland, Sir David Attenborough, Benedict Allen, Jeremy Coote, Elizabeth Edwards, Schuyler Jones, contributors, Thesiger in Africa 2010 (with photographs)
___
Some of the descriptions here reproduce chapter titles, some do not. All the books contain Thesiger’s photographs. I refer to them when you could describe the book as one of photographs, but My Kenya Days and Thesiger in Africa are equally important as texts.
Yemen, January 1965, Wikimedia Commons; enlarge
___
Aden was Britain’s most important possession on the Arabian peninsula. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the Trucial States and Oman were protectorates. Aden in Yemen was a colony, a major port and a coaling station for ships en route to India, about equidistant from the Suez Canal, Bombay and Zanzibar.
It had been ceded to the British by a local ruler in 1838 and subordinated to Bombay. It was ruled by the East India Company until the Crown took over in India in 1858. In 1932 it became a separate province of British India, but in 1937 it was detached from India to become a separate colony. It gained importance with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.
The Aden hinterland and, to the east, Hadhramaut formed the major part of what would become South Yemen and were not administered directly by Aden. (The historical Hadhramaut extends to the border of Oman. A smaller Hadhramaut is now a governorate in the Republic of Yemen.) Starting in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, Britain signed agreements with local Sunni rulers of traditional polities there that, together, became known as the Aden Protectorate.
By the late 1950s the British in Aden were being directly threatened by Nasser. Britain responded by uniting the states under its protection as the Federation of Arab Emirates of the South. Aden itself joined the federation in 1963 and it was renamed the Federation of South Arabia. (It was the age of federations.) The few remaining unfederated states formed the Protectorate of South Arabia.
The British left Aden in 1967 in the face of uncontrollable violence from both nationalist and socialist elements. The Federation of South Arabia collapsed and southern Yemen became independent as the People’s Republic of South Yemen, which became a Marxist People’s Democratic Republic in 1970.
The Royal Marines had been the first British troops to occupy Aden in 1839 and were the last to leave.
Film shot during the tour of duty of the 4th (Leicestershire) Battalion of The Royal Anglian Regiment in 1965. There is material on YouTube from the later British years. It was one of the least peaceful of Britain’s colonial withdrawals.
The history of the north was different. Before the nineteenth century, the most powerful indigenous rulers of Yemen had been Imams of the Zaydi sect of Shiite Islam. They had expelled the Ottomans from most of the Yemen early in the seventeenth century, but their history goes back much further than that. Their base was in the north.
By the nineteenth century, their power was declining. The Ottomans regained control of some of the northern cities early in the century, including Sanaa. When the Turks withdrew for the last time in 1918 the Imams continued to rule the north, which became the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen from 1918 to ’62 (capital Taiz, near the Red Sea port of Mocha). Britain never had a direct presence in this area.
In 1962 Arab nationalists took over and formed the non-communist Yemen Arab Republic (“North Yemen”). The capital was moved from Taiz to Sanaa.
The two Yemens were united in 1990.
Sanaa
Aden in 1960
BBC Radio 4 documentary, with Frank Gardner. Until December 20.
___
“I knew that I had made my last journey in the Empty Quarter [1949-50] and that a phase in my life was ended. Here in the desert I had found all that I asked; I knew that I should never find it again. But it was not only this personal sorrow that distressed me. I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed. Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world. This I do not believe. I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience, and lighthearted gallantry. Among no other people have I ever felt the same sense of personal inferiority.
“On the last evening, as bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha were tying up the few things they had bought, Codrai said, looking at the two small bundles, ‘It is rather pathetic that this is all they have.’ I understood what he meant; I had often felt the same. Yet I knew that for them the danger lay, not in the hardship of their lives, but in the boredom and frustration they would feel when they renounced it. The tragedy was that the choice would not be theirs; economic forces beyond their control would eventually drive them into the towns to hang about street-corners as ‘unskilled labour’.
“The lorry arrived after breakfast. We embraced for the last time. I said, ‘Go in peace,’ and they answered together, ‘Remain in the safe keeping of God, Umbarak.’ Then they scrambled up on to a pile of petrol drums beside a Palestinian refugee in oil-stained dungarees. A few minutes later they were out of sight round a corner. I was glad when Codrai took me to the aerodrome at Sharja. As the plane climbed over the town and swung out above the sea I knew how it felt to go into exile.”
The oldest regimes in the world are in the middle east.
Al Sabah, Kuwait – since 1752
Al Khalifa, Bahrain – since 1783
Al Thani, Qatar – since 1825
Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi – since 1761
Al Maktoum, Dubai – since 1833
Al Qasimi, Sharjah – since 1727
Al Nuaimi, Ajman – since c 1780
Al Mu‘alla, Umm al-Qaiwain – since 1775
Al Qasimi, Ras al-Khaimah – since c 1725
Al Sharqi, Fujairah – since 1876
Al Said, Oman – since 1749
Al Saud, Nejd or central Arabia (First Saudi State) – 1744-1818
Nejd (Second Saudi State) – 1824-91
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – since 1932Kuwait and Bahrain are, to a degree, constitutional monarchies.
The same formative years saw the establishment of the Durrani Empire in Afghanistan (1747) and Qajar dynasty in Persia (1794).
The present Swazi monarchy was established in 1745.
The Alaouites came to power in Morocco in 1666 and still rule, in theory constitutionally. The Chakri dynasty came to power in Thailand in 1782, but this is a constitutional monarchy.
Old post: Qatar.
Just a nod to one of my favourite magazines, published from Hong Kong since 1971. Ideal bathroom reading.
“Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories.
Now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers solidly anchored in the southern seas, when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, when shanty towns are spreading across Africa, when civil and military aircraft blight the primeval innocence of the American or Melanesian forests even before destroying their virginity, what else can the so-called escapism of travelling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history? Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”
___
John and Doreen Weightman, translators, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Jonathan Cape, 1973; first French edition Librairie Plon, 1955.
