Daughter of the Desert

 

  And how did this  Iraq happen?

 

A woman did it?

 

Even the name 'Iraq' had referred only to a province of the Ottoman Empire, the separate villayets  administered from Mosul, Baghdad and Al Basra. Out of these centuries of separateness, this Turkish confederation, how  did a  "unified" country  of  Kurd, Sunni and Shia happen?

 

A woman did it?

 

After Turkey's defeat  in WW I, a  woman drew lines in the sand. Yes, an Englishwoman. And lo, the "country" of Iraq happened, borders loosely based on ancient Mesopotamia, the land which  knew Sumerians, Persians, Babylonians and Alexander the Great long before Arab muslims came  with their swords and their Korans.

 

She drew lines in the sand.... This is historical fact, not a jest of the gods playing Cherchez La Femme?

 

But Gertrude Bell  fit no  typical resume, or portfolio, or Gender Studies Program, or even a Bob Dylan song: She was 'Not Just Like a Woman.'   Her one true mate in life may have been the British Lion. Yet, today's politically correct  definitions of "imperialism" don't begin to unravel her. Two authors have made notable attempts--Janet Wallach (Desert Queen) and HVF Winstone (Gertrude Bell)                  

 

After traveling around the world twice, and climbing icy peaks in the Swiss Alps, she came to love Arabia. It was her great escape from Victorian England. She learned its language and its ways, engaged its sheikhs and tribes, sat cross-legged with them in town, village or wilderness (even argued with them), rode  its camels intrepidly in the desert, without armed escort (but a full wardrobe and fine dinnerware)--- the fearless in search of the fabulous.   A prolific writer, she described  getting up in desert sunrise as like "waking in an opal."  Hopelessly romantic? Wallach quotes a sample of how she put it:

 

"I don't care to be in London much. I like Baghdad, and I like Iraq. It's the real East, and it is stirring; things are happening here, and the romance of it all touches me and absorbs me."

 

 

They returned her feelings.  They called her "Daughter of the Desert,' 'the White Queen,'  Al Khatoun (The Lady.) Later, after drawing its borders,  she was  known as the 'Uncrowned Queen of Iraq.' She became an official,  a king-maker, in her way a "British ruler."  When she was called the most powerful woman in the Empire, it  had nothing to do with breast measurements or Hollywood promos or tabloid hi-jinx or the late-night "celeb" circuit.

 

How did Iraq happen? What about, How did Getrude Bell happen, i.e. something which today is not and probably cannot be: an authentic adventuress in the grand style?

 

The ironies and paradox began early. This Arabist extraordinaire was born heiress to a lord of industry in ironworks (or as the Left would say, 'a capitalist who exploits the workers'). After home schooling, she  was the first woman to graduate from Oxford with first-class honors  in history.That didn't mean she could visit the British Museum without a chaperone. She could not, in the  late 19th century. After three seasons as a debutante, when a young lady seeks a gentleman husband, she gave it up. There was no one who she and her formidable parent  could agree on, and she would not rebuff "my dear father."

 

Ready  for another  pc study in "female liberation," where author, producer, director or politico applauds the heroine who breaks free from  shackles of male chauvinism?

 

Not so fast.... Gertrude Bell, it's true,  expected the world to treat her as a person, and it did. Meaning  she was a "progressive," ahead of her time?  No. Not really.  She was never that. Feminist? Sorry, not at all.  Women, she believed, should not even vote. She would not suffer the suffragettes. In this sense she was way behind the agitprop times, and proud of it, never flinching. She was not  "down with the sisters." She never believed that merit can be legislated.  She escaped her English routine  because she felt the old "call of the East," not to blaze a trail that few could hope to follow anyway. She was privileged, yes, but she was also high-spirited, edgy, slender, chain-smoking and red-haired. She understood an Arab friend who said to her, "Real freedom cannot be given. It can only be taken."

 

Obviously her upper class access to "ruling circles" helped (as the Left will point out), but most others--male or female-- with similar "connections" did not travel to Persia, learn the language and do a widely acclaimed translation of the 14th century classical poet Hafiz.

 

Sooner or later the London Home Office, with so many  interests in the Middle East, was going to hear about a camel-riding  compatriot who had learned Farsi, Turkish and Arabic and  even knew the  tribes and sheikhs and bedouins. . A woman? Yes, by Jove, and maybe only a woman could have dared and gotten away with it...Well, so be it.

 

Born with a silver spoon in her mouth? Yes, and she adored that spoon, despite the envious. She crossed the sands of Arabia with servants, cooks, bed linen, china, crystal, a caravan of mules, a folding leather tub, and her fur coat served well for those damp winter nights in a tent. Try and guilt-trip her about it.

 

She bumped into fellow Arabist and archaeologist T.E. Lawrence in the Syrian frontier when he was 19,  before either had become British agents allied with Arabs against the Turks. She taught him much. He called her "Gerty" and she called him "The Little One" long before he became famous as "Lawrence of Arabia" when he worked with muslim guerillas to drive out the Turks, (as Americans decades later worked with muslim guerillas to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan.)

 

Winston Churchill appreciated her. In 1920, after the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the Great War, she was named Oriental Secretary to the British High Command in Iraq. Not everyone had been amused, including Sir Mark Sykes, pre-WW I British Foreign Office Arabist. He thought her "a damned fool," creating an "uproar" everywhere she went in the Middle East, "a terror of the desert."

 

But there was other terror on the desert horizon. What about the Islamic and ethnic passions unleashed in this ominous power vaccuum with the old Turkish rulers gone? Communists, socialists and other "progressives" said empires are out of date.  Americans called for self-determination, no colonies. The League of Nations authorized a 'British Mandate' here. In 1921 Winston Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, summoned  his top Middle East experts to Egypt for a "conference on Mesopotamia." That is, he invited 39 men and Gertrude Bell. There is a group foto, showing the most prominent.  She is  next to Churchill and T.E. Lawrence, all high atop their camels, in the background the Sphinx and Pyramid.

 

The Daughter of the Desert  was asked to assist with drawing the border lines. She got out her tracing paper. What are now called Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia came into being. She also backed Prince Feisal from Mecca for ruler of Iraq. He was a Hashemite, not one of those Wahabbi  who would encourage the religious fanatics.

 

And so, was it all Gertrude Bell's doing---the entity now called Iraq?

 

Certainly not. Well, very likely not. Everyone had to know that Kurds, Sunni and Shia had never been a unified "nation" and that Turks had ruled and administered them separately, in villayets, for centuries. London, for its reasons, wanted a "unified" Iraq under British Mandate. Churchill supported this. Gertrude Bell acquiesced, and agreed to draw lines in the sand.  In her voluminous journals there are entries about Shia from Basra, pleading with her for autonomy separate from Kurd and Sunni. She told them she could do nothing. The Home Office had decided. She said it was out of her hands, and it probably was.

 

Her fall from grace may have begun in 1922  Although she was British Empire to the bone, she sided with the Iraqi government when it refused to accept the British Mandate. London reacted. They phased her out of the Iraqi administration.

 

Now she, who had been in everything,  was no longer in the thick of it. Even her protege Prince Feisal, the Hashemite from Mecca who the French expelled from Syria,  was increasingly confident as King of Iraq. He no longer seemed to need her. She still worked as Director of Antiquities with  the National Museum she founded, and could be seen riding her camel at sunrise. She had always been child-less and un-married. With her fifty-eighth birthday approaching she was alone and her health was deteriorating after the broil of ten Iraqi summers. One night she took too many sleeping pills. She died in Baghdad on July 12, 1926.

 

Between 1900-1918 she took about 7000 photographs. including many of archaeological sites since damaged or destroyed. The Gertrude Bell papers include 16 travel journals and 1600 letters to her parents.

 

Gertrude Bell had lived a life. She was buried in Baghdad.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Trevor]

Roots. So very, very important. I wonder why so many bureaucrats tend to be arrogant and repeat the mistakes of their predecessors?

[Dan Cameron Rodill]

One guess: They're well insulated, like tenured professors. A camel-riding Gertrude Bell is unlikely to run over them.

[scott edwards]

The propogandists craft rests in the ability of presenting fact, stripped of context, and calculated to create the wrong impression.
Here the gringomans guile is to inflate the subject, Bell, well beyond historical fact in an effort to sanitize the reality of imperial subjegation:
First, the strategic "mapping" credited to Bell by Gringoman,predated Bell in The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 and also by the subsequent strategic decision of Whitehall to INTENTIONALLY "unleash in the power vacuum" the "passions" of arab nationalism by creating and arming arabs against the Ottoman Empire during WWI just at a moment when Britan was sustaining heavy losses on all fronts. What Bell did (like TE Lawrence) was promise more independance than London was prepared to give...and her photography, mapmaking under the guise of archeology, was, like for Lawrence, the functional equivlant of the NSA. She was used as a spy.
On a personal note- HVF Winstone (Victor) was a collegue of mine at Cambridge some years back. His oeuvre on the british betrayalin arabia amply mirrors the fix the west now finds itself in with the illegal invasion of Iraq for oil.
Victor has written extensivly on Washington's lack of historical prescience with regard to the Iraq folly, much of which is avalible for review online. (I forwarded to him the Gringoman piece)
Further, the Irish poet laurate Nick Laird, his poem 'Imperialism',features Gertrude Bell as being duped by Britian by dangling independence while intending to allow only a raj to maintain colonial order.
Statists like Gringoman admire the "white man's burden" of empire, unwittingly carried out by a feckless woman, in attempt to snow half-wits with no sense of history.
No wonder.
If your President can't find Iraq on a map, how much less is expected of his vassels?
Kudos, gringoman, in this case for omission. Goebbels himself could not have pulled this off as well as you.

[Dan Cameron Rodill]

Comrade Eduardos:

As a venerator of a Stalin-venerated writer, you probably have some grasp of the art of propoganda that may even have eluded Goebbels. Is the Left still more "subtle" and "scholastic" than the Right? Still, once more, I urge you to read with comprehension. (It's good for you and might even improve your usual slander n' slur technique.)

Getrude Bell's "mapping" is not "attributed to her" by gringoman. It's done by authors like J. Wallach. If a scholar like HVWinstone has found precedents for what she did, fine, but so what? Try listening to early Beethoven and you can hear some Mozart or Haydn, the minueto of it, the strict thematic development, in a word, the "Home Office" etc (Well maybe not you, but lovers of "imperialist" music can)

Oh, and thanks for mentioning Mr. Winstone's membership in the Hate Bush Club. Others have pointed out his diatribe in the new introduction of the re-issue of his exceptional study of Getrude Bell. He's certainly earned the right to vent, (probably more so than the typical tenured LeftProf in U.S. academia today) and I might agree that Bush has made mistakes, just like anyone else would have who dared to invade Iraq. He might even agree that a tsunami is coming from the East, only he thinks it folly to go out and meet it--with arrows OR olive branch-- instead of staying home, like well-behaved little "sensitives," ready to "dialogue" with it, meanwhile enjoying "gay cowboy" culture and "Pinch" Sulzberger's NY Times advisories on how to deal with the nuclear mullahs.

Since you are up to LeftyWorld's old tricks again, reducing complex individuals to shabby pejoratives--"she was a spy," her archaeology and photography was nothing but map-making and spooking, it's surprising that you didn't assign her learning Arabic to a desire to oppress the Arabs.(Didn't you even notice that my post made clear that both Bell and T.E. Lawrence also functioned as British agents--another of the things they did in life?) Do you resent the fact of her learning Farsi and translating Hafiz to wide acclaim? Can you forgive it for not being something that could win the Stalin Peace Prize? In fact, can a "progressive" of your stripe forgive " a feckless
woman" from the haute bourgeoisie for storming the desert as "the fearless in search of the fabulous"?(to quote gringoVision)

Comrade Eduardos, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreampt of in your Materialist Conception of History.

[scott edwards]

Alas, poor Gringoman...

Perhaps if you had actually read the works you wee reviewing you'd understand the democratic sentiments of Bell and Lawrence towards Arabia were both exploited and overulled by London.
My words were " She was USED as a spy" not 'she was a spy' as you misquoted. An important distinction for Winstone, Laird, and myself have told you that Britian never had any intention of granting soverignty in return for the arabs creating a fifth column against the Ottoman Empire during WWI. The aim was to instal a pliant local ruler who would grant exclusive access to imperial commercial interests.
Winstone has no particular annimus for Bush (your "Hate Bush Club" remaks) however he compares the illusory democratic gov't in present day Iraq as formed along same lines as the Sykes=Picot agreement of 1916.
Your snow job of the dittos who read you consists of conflating the idealism and capability of Bell and Lawrence and ascribing naive nobility that to the sordid imperial enterprise. You do so because you subsribe the notion of the white man's burden.

To those readers puzzled by the Gringoman remarks of "Stalinism" I offer this yardstick:
I had done some work for the Pablo Neruda Foundation in Chile (which serves to protect the paers and legacy of the 1971 Nobel Prize recipient) on his centennial in '04. One of the exhibits arranged by me occured in Dallas Texas.... at the DFW International Airport.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:S0fZstu0rk4J:www.wordspacetexas.org/unbound.php+pablo+neruda+centennial+houston+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

You let your passions trump your reason with vituprative remarks about the New York Times and current cinamatic films which are not relavant or at issue. What is important is the diliberate mischarecterization of Winstones work.

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