Just Finished Reading: Heart Beguiling Araby – The English Romance with Arabia by Kathryn Tidrick (FP: 1990) [219pp] 

The British have long been fascinated and focused on the Arab peninsula, long before the oil and long before the area became the political nightmare it is today.  It was, according to this deeply interesting slim volume, however based on a delusion if a persistent one. That delusion resided deep with the psyche of the British imperial imagination – that the desert Arabs and particularly the Bedouin were just like them, not noble savages but noble gentlemen in desert garb. This ideal, apparently highly resistant to the experience reality of travellers in the region, was founded on the works of Richard Burton (1821-1890), Gifford Palgrave (1826-1888), Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840-1922) and Charles M Doughty (1843-1926) who each in their own way added to the myth. So pervasive was this idea in the higher echelons on British society that it informed and directed British foreign policy in the region as some dreamt of expanding the Empire onto that peninsula to the exclusion of all other powers – most especially the Ottoman Empire. When the Ottoman’s sided with Germany in WW1 this was Britain’s opportunity to make the dream come true. The discovery and steadily increasing requirements for oil certainly helped and some British players, most notably a young officer known to history as Lawrence of Arabia, were all too happy to make an imperial Arabia a reality. 

I have long wondered at the British fascination and romance with the desert. The Foreign Office was indeed infamous (at least until recently) for being confirmed Arabists no doubt until (or likely just after) such a position became increasingly untenable with its suspected whiff of antisemitism. Part of that fascination is the romance of desolate places much loved by British travellers and tourists from the 18th century onwards. Part of it, no doubt, was the supposed romance of wild peoples – and especially wild men – who were seemingly more ‘alive’ than their civilised counterparts in the stuffy drawing rooms of England. Part of it was the understandable rejection, at least of a psychic level, of the modern world and the increasing pace of change (laughable looking back from the 21st century but understandable all the same) and the desire to ‘escape’ back into a more idyllic and simpler time. No doubt part of it was childhood readings of the Arabian Nights and the Bible and the seeming ability to ‘drop into’ the pages of formative books. 

Told with a deep understanding of the time and region and with a great deal of knowing humour (I laughed out loud more than once at the authors comments regarding some of the major players) I derived both a great deal of knowledge and a great deal of pleasure on almost every page. If you’ve ever wondered about early European and especially British encounters with Arabia or, like me, wondered what all the fuss was about in the 19th and early 20th centuries in that region then this is definitely the book for you. Much more on that troubled zone to come. 

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