Have You Seen a Queen Travelling?

Gertrude Bell is a particular heroine of mine: the first woman down from Oxford with a First in Modern History; an independent scholar, an archaeologist, and expert in several Middle Eastern languages, a writer, a political specialist, a traveller; a friend of sheiks and kings-the female Lawrence of Arabia! In 1900 she dressed herself as a Bedouin man, riding alone into the dangerous Hauran Plain, still under the control of the Ottomans, in search of the Druze, a militant Muslim sect, which had been fighting the Turks for two hundred years. She made contact with Yahya Beg, king of the Druze, and conversed with him in his own language. Some weeks after he was to ask another visitor to his domain 'Have you seen a queen travelling?'

Bell's knowledge of the Arab peoples was later to be used by the British authorities after the outbeak of the First World War. When the British Army captured Baghdad in March 1917, she took up a position in the city as Oriental Secretary. There she remained in Iraq, or Mesopotamia, as it was known at the time, until after the conclusion of the war. Like her friend, Lawrence of Arabia, she became keen advocate of an independent Arab state. In 1919 she complied a report on the subject, in which she wrote;

An Arab State in Mesopotamia...within a short period of years is a possibility, and...the recognition or creation of a logical scheme on those lines, in supercession of those on which we are now working on Mesopotamia, would be practical and popular.

Her advice was effectively ignored, and the tribes of the Euphrates, angered that one form of imperialism gave every appearance of being replaced by another, rose in revolt, an event that cost the lives of 10,000 Arabs and several hundred Britons. Bell wrote:

We have made an immense failure here. The system must have been far more at fault than anyone suspected...I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an incohate mass of tribes which can't as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn't govern and we have tried to govern...and failed.

For Bell the one way out was to give the people a distinct political identity, which she believed could be focused in a monarchy, in the particular person of Faisal bin Hussein, recently deposed by the French as King of Syria. At the Cairo Conference of 1921, she and T. E. Lawrence worked assiduously for the creation of Iraq and Transjordan, and Bell persuaded Winston Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, to endorse Fisal as King of Iraq. Bell was also in favour of Sunni dominance in the new nation: "Otherwise", as she put it, "you will have a... theocratic state, which is the very devil."

With her help and guidance Fisal came to his new kingdom, and was crowned king in August 1921. For Arab and Briton alike Bell was the uncrowned 'Queen of the Sands.' With the King's approval she went on to found Iraq's great Archaeological Museum, whose unparalleled collection was so sadly looted in 2003. This leads me on to some final words from 'Queen Gertrude', which may serve to sum up the present position of the Western powers in the region;

If Mesopotamia goes, Persia [Iran] goes inevitably...And the place which we leave empty will be occupied by seven devils a good deal worse than any which existed before we came.

I've always believed that an understanding of history should be an essential basis for the formation of policy. But historians will always be cast in the role of Cassandra. Even so, Gertrude Bell's book, The Desert and the Snow, is still worth reading, all these years later.

Edward Gibbon on Muhammad

Edward Gibbon was first and foremost a historian, one that engages too closely with his subject, perhaps, for contemporary taste, but a remarkable one nontheless. He could be highly critical of the impact of forms of religious belief on civil society, and the contribution they made to the corruption of the perfect ideal of the Roman state, so much so that The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was placed on the list of banned books by the Catholic Church.

He says many things about the Prophet Muhammad, which I dare say that Muslim scholars would object to; but it is not all accusation, and he looks at Muhammed's life from the point of view of a historian, not a Christian polemicist. I have a copy of the Decline and Fall in front of me, in the 1978 reprint of the six volume Everyman edition, first published in 1910. Gibbon's remarks are too lengthy to quote in full, but here is some of his summation of Muhammad's life from volume five, pages 273-4:

The author of a mighty revolution appears to have been endowed with a pious and contemplative disposition: so soon as marriage had raised him above the pressure of want, he avoided the paths of ambition and avarice; and till the age of forty he lived in innocence, and would have died withut a name. The unity of God was an idea most congenial to nature and reason; and a slight conversation with the Jews and the Christians would teach him to despise and detest the idolatry of Mecca. It was the duty of a man and a citizen to impart the doctrine of salvation, and to rescue his country from the dominion of sin and error. The energy of a mind incessantly bent on the same object would convert a general obligation into a particular call; the warm suggestions of the understanding or the fancy would be felt as he inspiration of Heaven; the labour of the thought would expire in rapture and vision; and the inward sensation, the invisible monitor, would be described with the forms and the attributes of an angel of God...Charity may believe that the original motives of Mohammed were those of pure and genuine benevolence; but the human misssionary is incapable of cherising the obstinate unbelievers who reject his claims, despise his arguments, and persecute his life; he might forgive his personal adversaries, he may lawfully hate the enemies of God; the stern passions of pride and revenge were kindled in the bosom of Muhammed, and he sighed, like the prophet of Nineveh, for the destruction of the rebels whom he had condemned.

This is fairly typical of Gibbon, and there are indeed more critical passages; but there is nothing that bears any similarity to 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman...' There may be much in Gibbon with which Muslims would take issue; but he makes a sincere attempt to be honest in his judgements and scrupulous in his facts.

A Doll's House

Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House is a wonderful play, cutting, with great economy of words, through the lies and hypocrisy of a Victorian marriage. I saw it performed in London last autumn and made some notes afterwards;

a) Christina and Nils were forced apart by circumstances, chiefly economic circumstances, although the never ceased to be attracted one to the other. In order to support her mother and brothers, Christina entered into a loveless marriage. Now her husband is dead she has come to town, not just to look for employment, but to make contact with the lover of her youth. Here one needs to pay particular attention to their conversation in Act Three, where she tells Nils that they are both castaways clinging to the wreck of their lives, and they should join forces because they need each other. For Nils this turns into a moment of recognition and reformation. His former absence of morals, his opportunism and his cynicism, were all born out of disappointment and anger at having lost Christina in the first place.

b) Christina has come to understand that that the Helmers' marriage cannot continue on the basis of lies and deception, and that Nils' letter will provide the necessary catharsis. Remember what she says to Nils: "...it's quite incredible the things I've witnessed in this house in the last twenty-four hours. Helmer must know everything. This unhappy secret must come out. Those two must have the whole thing out between them. All this secrecy and deception, it just can't go on."

c) Christina's epiphany, her moment of revelation, is the key dramatic moment in the whole play. She has been considering killing herself to avoid bringing disgrace on her husband, though all of her sacrifices and her deceptions, the way in which she obtained the loan in the first place, were solely for his benefit. She is convinced that Torvald loves her enough to be prepared to make his own sacrifice; to reject Nils attempts at blackmail; to make things public and take the whole blame on himself. After all, did he not just say before reading the letter "...I wish you were threatened by some terrible danger so I could risk everything, body and soul, for your sake." But he does not; he proposes to give in, while continuing to blame Nora, even saying that she will not be allowed to bring up her own children.

Now she knows the truth. At that point she begins to stop loving Torvald. Any residual feeling is killed by his feelings of relief when Nils returns the IOU; his assumption that things can now return as they were; that Nora will once again become his 'little song bird.' She tells him that is impossible, that she has been treated for too long as a plaything, living in a Doll's House. In those crucial moments she growns up and beyond Nils and their sham marriage, breaking the confines and restrictions of her Doll's House forever. She is free.

Edward III-Father of the English Nation

I've been reading Ian Mortimer's book, The Perfect King: the Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation. Yes, there is much in Mortimer's thesis that stands up to scrutiny. Perhaps the most common perception of Edward's reign is one that brought England success in war, from the Halidon Hill and Neville's Cross against Scotland, to the even greater victories against France at Crecy and Poitiers. In 1356 England had two enemy kings in captivity: David II of Scotland and John II of France. In some ways the country had reached the high point in its Medieval history. But success in war brought two more innovations: the enhanced role of ordinary people in attaining military success, and the rise of Parliament as a unique English political institution.

Before Edward England had continued to rely on the feudal levy for its military arm, which meant, in essence, dependency on the great feudal nobility and the armed knight. But Edward's wars saw the recruitment of professional armies, where the decisive arm was not the knight but the plebeian archer.

It was through Edward's wars that the ordinary people of England (and Wales!) acquired a direct interest in the course and the outcome of the nation's foreign adventures, which did much to forge a common sense of nationhood, distinctly lacking at earlier periods. Even more important, the wars demanded money, and money meant Parliamentary grants, and Parliamentary grants meant detailed scrutiny of expenditure, as well as the granting of petitions. By the end of Edward's reign the Commons were able not only able to introduce legislation, but also to hold officials to account. His successor, Richard II was to discover just how assertive Parliament could be.

It was Edward who raised England from the nadir of the reign of his father, and created a sense of common identity and purpose. More than that, it was his patronage that turned St. George into a national saint, and he was the first king to give first place to the English language, as opposed to the Norman-French favoured by his predecessors. Not only did he use English himself in everyday discourse, but also in 1362 he passed legislation recognising English as 'the tongue of the nation.' Where he led the great nobility followed. So, the answer has to be, yes: Edward has every justified right to be considered as the father of the English nation.

Caspar David Friedrich

I adore the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the nineteenth century German romantic. They have a mystery and Gothic intensity to them which seem to invest nature with a sense of power and foreboding. When people are depicted they appear diminished and unimportant, almost as if civliization and the created world itself were equally unimportant.

Arnold Böcklin, Mythology and Death

Arnold Böcklin, the nineteenth century Swiss symbolist, is another of my favourite painters, though he is not quite as technically proficient and awe-inspiring as Casper David Friedrich. Böcklin specialised in subjects with a mythological theme in the main. He also had an obsession with death, nowhere better expressed, perhaps, than in The Isle of the Dead, possibly his most famous painting, and his self-portrait with a skeleton in the background playing the violin.

Out of the Ashes

In May 1933, under the guidance of Goebbels, Nazi students consigned ‘degenerate books to the flames. What came after; what was left of German literature? What is usually left after a bonfire? Why, ashes.

Speaking at the burning of the books Goebbels announced that "The soul of the German people can express itself again. The flames not only illuminate the end of the old era, they also light up the new." The 'old era' consisted of some 2,500 writers, many of international renown. To fill the gap Goebbels delegated control of literature to Department VIII of his own Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. The Department quickly set up a set of standards, to which all aspiring writers were obliged to conform. Work had to be produced in any one of four categories: Fronterlebnis, stressing the camaraderie of war; Weltanschauung, reflecting the Nazis world view; Heimatroman, stressing the national mystique of the German localities; Rassenkunde, reflecting Nazi views on race.

I am sure it will come as no surprise for you to learn that those who operated within this straight-jacket were distinguished by their mediocrity; people like Werner Bumelburg, who wrote mawkishly sentimental novels about comradeship in the Great War; Rudolf Binding and Bōrries von Münchausen, who wrote tiresome pseudo-Medieval epics.

The few writers who stood out against this apotheosis of the second-rate included Hans Grimm and Gottfried Benn, who though initially supportive of National Socialism, later turned hostile. Others like Ernst Jünger, though a hero of the German right, had always maintained a sense of personal distance. Goebbels' phoenix was nothing more than a turkey.