In Our Time: S22/12 Lawrence of Arabia (Dec 5 2019)

this is the BBC hello in 1919 huge audiences saw an American film report on the recent war with the Ottoman Empire on the Middle Eastern Front and were thrilled by its star a British officer in Arab clothes this was TE Lawrence soon known as Lawrence of Arabia and he became famous a Boyzone figure an exotic image of the British as they might want to see themselves adventuring in the Orient far from the brutal horrors of the Western Front we're discussing him today as this autumn we asked you to suggest a topic for this our listener week and he made the shortlist from over a thousand ideas now thanks to Zachary beef June L K Keith hop craft and Anthony Killeen for proposing this and to all we need to discuss Lawrence of Arabia are Hussein Omar lecturer in modern global history at University College Dublin Katrina Pennell associate professor of modern history and memory studies at the University of Exeter Anil Faulkner a director of military history live and editor of the magazine military history matters Neil Faulkner one may TE Lawrence standout as a boy well I don't know that he necessarily stood out particularly from his contemporaries I think he stands out for us when we look back at the biography because there was a strange family situation which I think was crucial to understanding the role that he comes to play and indeed the kind of biography that he has although he was brought up in a respectable upper middle-class family in North Oxford there was a family secret which was that that his father and his mother were not married and so the five boys were illegitimate and this of course is in in the context of an English upper-middle class before the First World War which is very snobbish and very judgmental so this was something that needed to be kept secret and I think that he lived in fear of exposure I think he also had a very difficult sexuality which he was becoming aware of course presumably when he was a teenager and that leads to I think a retreat from that difficult reality those difficult family circumstances in to a kind of romantic medieval fantasy world he becomes obsessed with the Middle Ages obsessed with our Furion heroes in Crusader Knights that becomes his subject at university he becomes a romantic in the kind of William Morris pre-raphaelites kind of sense and I think that that is an escape from this quite difficult family situation that he's in he went to Oxford he studied archaeology was he good at it I think he probably bought University lived notes after he went to university yes yeah yes he did he lived in Oxford and he went to university there and became an archaeologist he was trained in medieval history but becomes an archeologist and then gets shoehorned into his first job after graduation by his academic mentors which is to work as what we would nowadays call a deputy director on a big excavation in the Middle East and that's because he's already got middle-east and experience because his undergraduate dissertation had taken him to the Middle East where he did his his dissertation on Crusader castles and he done proof he done primary research there in the Middle East and was he good I think probably by the standards at the time because they did things in a certain way in that period and he was probably as good as anybody else at that time and his main job but interestingly and crucially really for the role that he subsequently plays he was managing the Arab work force because that's how excavations were done in those days you had a local work force he managed the Arab work force and that meant that by the time of the first world war he was pretty well fluent in Arabic and very very knowledgeable about the Middle East did he take to the Arabic community the first time he went to he seems to be passionate about it it was it a sudden falling for it or did it grow III think it I think it arises out of his romanticism I think this escape into a kind of mid into a kind of Middle Ages that of course never really existed I mean it's an imagined Middle Ages and I think Crusaders both know yes floorless examining exactly all of kind of thing and I think he almost sees the kind of reincarnation of people like that particularly in the Bedouins of the desert and what are you typically the Bedouin I think because well I mean if we're going to if we're going to see it through his eyes of going to use his terms I mean he talks about the desert being clean and the people of the desert being uncontaminated uncorrupted he uses those kinds of words which of course is an Orientalist as we would say there see it now an Orientalist perspective on the people of the Middle East but in particular on the people of the Middle East who who are seen to be least affected by modernity which in a sense he's trying to escape from thank you very much Katrina and what was the state of the Ottoman Empire that's a big player in this story enormous Empire hundreds of years let's get that in in the middle of the First World War okay so I could describe the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the first world war as vulnerable but I think we have to be careful to avoid describing it in some sort of form of inevitable decline certainly the term sick man of Europe had been used from the mid 19th century onwards but I think it's worth bearing in mind that this was a term that came from the great European powers themselves and it served a particular agenda of the great European powers as you say this was a massive empire it existed for the best part of 600 years it had a huge territorial expanse at its height it was it got far into Central Europe as Vienna it had around 30 million subjects from many different faiths and ethnicities the traditional historiography goes that by the late 1600 the Ottoman Empire is in decline but more recent scholarship highlights that actually what it was going through was a series of crises that led to reform and adaptation by the 18th and 19th centuries the Ottoman Empire had suffered a series of very serious military defeats and it was very aware that militarily it was lagging behind some of the other major European powers the Habsburg Empire and the Russian Empire in particular and this triggered perhaps one of the the most important series of reform periods for the empire the Tanzimat reforms which led to a very powerful centralized and organized state entity coming out of Constantinople now known as as Istanbul but so I would say on the eve of the First World War and the society and the economy was in some ways quite vibrant there were certainly more civic engagement political participation but this was all overshadowed by a very strong sense of threat both from within the Empire itself from minority groups particularly in the provinces who were becoming frustrated with rule from Constantinople and were thinking about ways that they could that they could subvert imperial power groups in particular well I'm thinking in particular of those in the arab peninsula and the families obviously of Sharif Hussein but also it been Saud and and the our Rasheed family but there was also significant external threat and that's from the the great European powers themselves who are thinking about how they can maximize Ottoman weakness to their own advantage and that includes Suez Canal and includes absolute for the British the Suez Canal was absolutely crucial I mean half of British shipping said India was going through the Suez Canal by it by the eve of the First World War and of course the Suez Canal is strategically very important for for India which is Britain's jewel in in the imperial crown but there the other European powers are very interested in what's going on so it's it's interesting to see how the Ottoman Empire ends up siding with Germany at the outbreak of the First World War because Germany is probably one of the the only European great powers that hasn't really tried to annex anything well thank you very much Hasan oh ma can we talk about the Arab influences here now when we talk about I was you talking about many different tribes and so on so we have to be careful let's start with Sharif Hussein who was he what did he want why is he important so in 1916 at the time of the abbé revolt Sharif Hussein is 63 year old man Sharif is not his name it's his title it's the title given to the descendants of the Prophet in in the Ottoman Empire he is from 1909 onwards the custodian of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina the crucial pilgrimage sites where one of the five pillars of Islam are performed every year in the Hajj and so therefore he has a hugely important role and is second only to the Calif ie the Sultan in religious authority within the Empire now what does Sharif Hussein want that's an interesting question we have evidence that Sharif Hussein before the first world war might have wanted to establish a sort of semi-autonomous dynasty within the Empire on the model that for example Muhammad Ali of Egypt had done about a hundred years earlier but from 1908 onwards there's a revolution within the Ottoman Empire constitutional revolution there's a huge amount of enthusiasm for it among many of the populations of the Ottoman Empire but it brings into power what the the group called the committee of Union and progress who eventually deposed the Sultan in 1909 and they begin to centralize the Empire there by going into Sharif Hussein's territories now can we talk about the Arab revolt and well I'd like Lawrence to come in again because they are revolt when does he start having an influence he's there he's gone he's joined up becoming the first of all means smartly sent to the Middle East because of his knowledge becomes an intelligence officer and and then it gets particularly interested in certain sections of the Arab world Sharif Hussein is sending off his two sons to Damascus on the one hand and to Cairo to try and see what support there might be for a revolt against the Empire what sort of prompts versus is the centralizing attempts of the young turks to extend the Hejaz railway into his territories but also he gets that there's a rumor that he's that he might be deposed if not assassinated and so he sends each one or what his two sons Faisal and Abdullah Abdullah goes to Cairo to sound out the British officials in Cairo over whether they might potentially support his revolt and his son Faisal goes to Damascus to talk to some of the secret societies that had sprung up so the revolt is starting in 1916 Lawrence's large desert an intelligent agent we know he's very sympathetic understanding of certain parts of the Arab culture in the Arab world let's start here him in action what does he do why she said to where he sent and by whom well he's he is sent there because he is an Arab Asst by the timer sent to Cairo initially to Cairo because he's an Arabist and they need specialists in the Middle East obviously once the Ottoman Empire comes into the war on the same side as Imperial Germany and there's a threat to the Suez Canal which we referred to earlier but Lawrence it for two years he's an intelligence officer in Cairo he's doing a desk job the revolt breaks out in June 1916 and Lawrence is not involved until October 1916 when he goes for the first time to Arabia so he sets foot in Arabia but literally for the first time in in October 1916 and it's a fact-finding mission really because the the revolt is hanging by a thread at that moment in time and what the British want to know really is what are we to do to bolster this revolt which they see as being quite useful because it ties down Ottoman military strength and it's on that occasion that Lawrence meets the the field commanders I don't think he meets Hussein on that occasion but he meets the field commanders who are Hussein's sons particularly Faisal and Abdullah as Hussein as referred to them and he's impressed by Faisal and reports back to his superiors that Faisal is a man who's worth investing in and then he goes back on a second occasion December 1916 and it's on that second occasion that a strong relationship forms between Faisal and Lawrence and Faisal requests of the British that they attach Loren to him permanently as a liaison officer that's rather unusual how did he get it through I think they're very very keen to curry favor with the Hashemite leadership of the revolt so there's no particular reason to hold on to this junior intelligence officer if one of the Arab field commanders wants him as a liaison officer why not that's quite useful and what does Laurence think he's doing by being attached if I saw what does he see his function is well this of course is hugely controversial I'm grant yeah I know people arguing or you know Park argue endlessly about Lawrence's motivation and Lawrence's role and I think we have to distinguish the two things really I think you know it's not you know you can caricature Lawrence as a kind of agent of British imperialism and of course the British are using him for their own purposes but of course he's not really on message and he's not on message I think because he's not a regular officer he's not a conventional member of the upper-middle class he's a romantic he's got this Orientalist view of the Arabs I think it's it's true to say but Lawrence is genuinely at some level rooting for the Arabs I would describe him as a liberal imperialist who imagines that in the framework provided by the British Empire and the Arab revolt some kind of Arab state might emerge at the end of the First World War I think he's in it for that he wants to help create a new nation-state really going along with that Katrina can I ask you what would have been a good outcome for Sharif Hussein if the revolt had gone as he'd hoped and well I think essentially he he had put a lot of storr by the Hussein McMullan correspondence which was a set of letters that started in July 1915 between himself and Sir Henry McMahon who was the British High Commissioner in in Cairo at the time Hussein had had tried to get the attention of the British before the First World War but it wasn't really until I would say you know Gallipoli the landings at Gallipoli had had were appearing to be you know disastrous that the British then began to take seriously the idea of a Muslim ally who could act as some kind of counterweight to the the Sultan Khalifa's as Hussein as outlined and so in this series of letters it's about ten letters it goes back and forth in quite ambiguous terms about what it is that Hussein once in return for for the revolt and effectively what Hussein wants is some kind of independent Arab Kingdom the precise geographical boundaries of that territory are are not defined and there are a number of moments in the correspondence when Mourne says you know what that's going to have to wait until after the war is over and Hussein is accepting of that and I think and by the end of the correspondence he's very aware that he's asking for more than he's necessarily going to get but at the root of it he understands that in return for mounting this revolt and in return for putting his allegiances with the British they are going to get some kind of territory in in return so it's very important for this program he thought that the British that he was helping the British and they would give him a great deal of what he wanted which is what he wanted in the end was to be a king of Arabia but they give him a great deal of that do you find that I say no mind you find that as a did you find that a plausible opposition on his part absolutely I mean what happens is he's unsure what kind of Kingdom he wants to begin with so is it going to be limited to the Hejaz ie the province of Northwest Arabia that his family has held this office in fur for a very long time but when he when his son Faisal makes contact with the secret societies in Damascus they draw up what's called the Damascus protocol which which which provides a kind of blueprint for a much more ambitious version of what that Arab kingdom might look like and the assurances that he gets suggests that he will get the Kingdom after the end of the war and Lawrence holds that holds that in his heart I mean this magister Lawrence this is something that he thinks he's fighting for is that right I think that's probably right I think that's right and that government's a great deal of what he does not only for the rest of the war but sort of for the rest of his life in one way or another yes yes absolutely yeah Neil no Porter so he enters into this river this British intelligence officer a fairly low rank as you said earlier on but he's taken in by the brother Faisal the cleverest brother he thinks and they have a friendship what does he do when the revolt starts well I think I think initially he is he is indeed a liaison officer and an advisor in the background and his role throughout is to be a kind of conduit funneling gold guns munitions supplies and so on to the Arab revolt he always has that role right up until the end but it seems pretty clear to me that what is happening increasingly it is is that he is becoming actively a competent that he is involved in many of the guerilla operations some of which I think he's actually planning and I think he has a loud voice in the inner councils of the Hashemite air of leadership of the revolt when decisions are being taken about how to conduct it given that he was a junior officer as you say and given that he was thought to be working with the British how did he have such a loud voice in those inner councils I think because he's won a close personal relationship he secured a close personal relationship with Faisal and I think because you know the Bedouin culture is very much it's not particularly concerned necessarily with British military rank it's concerned with whether or not there is what is considered to be an effective personal relationship establish but I think probably also part of that in relation to Lawrence and Faisal is that Lawrence was genuinely on the Arab side as he understood it in his kind of liberal imperialist Orientalists way he is rooting for the Arabs and I think that means there's a trust which perhaps wouldn't have existed without their offices Katrina Vidal what were the british objectives in this part of the world and was this sense in which he was contradict he was obstructing them in any way i think it's helpful to think about sort of long term and short term objectives and we've already mentioned the suez canal and and that is absolutely person to the British but they have to protect that ship shipping route that they have to make sure that no one else gets their their hands on that shipping route because of its importance to India the British weren't satisfied just occupying an entire subcontinent they wanted to dominate the entire route between Britain and that subcontinent and it became something of an obsession really for the British to make sure that that they that they maintain that control so there were a number of coaling stations that the British are set up in Gibraltar Malta Cyprus but they also set up sort of treaties of mutual convenience with with with with dynasties that occupied parts of Oman and Aden and and Bahrain with the outbreak of the war that the short term objective was win the war I mean you know it's as simple as that but there are a number of sort of sub objectives within that first of all making sure that the British Navy had access to oil in the years leading up to the outbreak of the first world war the British Navy had been increasingly moving from coal to oil and the British wanted to make sure that they protected the anglo-persian oil pipeline so that's one of the reasons why on the 6th of November 1914 a British and Indian Indian Expeditionary Forces landed in southern Iraq in in Basra and and then the mission sort of takes on a sort of life of its own and moves up moves up the territory was there any sense in which the British objectives were hindered by what Lawrence was doing in the Arab revolt certainly the the British government by the time of the revolt in 1916 having experienced significant disasters in their in their campaign in in that part of the world and I'm thinking of not only the the amphibious landings at Gallipoli that had ended in effectively a defeat and and a retreat in early 1916 but also the siege of cut al Amara in the spring of 1916 the British I think were very inclined to winning the war effort in the Ottoman Empire through local means that they had realized that an invading foreign army wasn't necessarily going to get them the objectives that they wanted so in that sense yes I think it did tally absolutely one things we are told that he did was to help instigate or develop a guerrilla warfare is there any truth in that well I think that is true well I see I I think what he's doing is his he's taking the way of war which is already established in the desert which is not very very different indeed from the kind of warfare that's being fought conventionally in the trenches in Europe it's much more about ambush and hit-and-run and raiding and that kind of thing and he's inflating that into a guerrilla insurgency or certainly he's in reinforcing those voices in the Arab high command who take the view that what we need to do is to mount a guerrilla war first and foremost against the railway line the Hejaz railway which runs from Damascus down to Medina and which is the key Ottoman Turkish supply line east of the River Jordan they've got a garrison of 10,000 men at Medina and a series of pinprick attacks coming unexpectedly hitting different places at different times mean that huge numbers of Ottoman soldiers end up getting tied down trying to defend 800 miles of railway line from Damascus to Medina thank you very much saying what did he Arabs engaging in this rebuild what did they set out to do there are multiple objectives there's there's the kind of dynastic ambition of the Hashemites but they're joined by Arabs from other places from Egypt from Syria who are simply concerned with trying to overthrow the Ottomans and there's a huge debate as to why that develops as a feeling because in 1913 in the first Arab Congress in Paris most Arabs who were participants in this conference did not express any separatist sentiment but by 1915 1916 there seems to be a growing discontent across the Arab world in very different sorts of places and those very different participants the revolt sort of brings them all together was Lawrence known to be very supportive of this I think he was it's interesting I mean if you think about the story from the Arab side Lawrence doesn't Noom as largely as he does in our own imaginary Zinn and and that's quite interesting because Lawrence is certainly part of the story it's not that people are trying to write him out but he doesn't he doesn't seem to have the kind of stomach significance that he does in the version of the story as it's told in Anglo American writing near foreigner what can you put your finger on and say Lawrence made a difference here that was important well there are probably different ways in which one could answer that but I I think one thing that is worth worth saying in response to that is what happens in relation to Aqaba because being well Aqaba is the is the is the forward-most base which can be supplied by sea that is by the british who have naval supremacy where you could potentially base an arab force in order to carry operations forwards into up to as far as Damascus now it's quite clear that the British didn't particularly want the Arabs to take acabar in particular the French didn't want the British didn't want the Arabs to take acabou because they had their designs very much on Syria and Lebanon the idea was that the Arabs were to be bottled up really in Arabia where they could tie down Ottoman soldiers but they wouldn't become players in the postwar struggle for power I think Lawrence goes off message in a very serious way in may well he'd ghost absolutely literally off message in the sense that nobody can communicate with him and nobody knows where he's gone and what he's actually for a considerable period for two months he sets off in May 1917 he's the only Brit with a group of about 50 Arab fighters they go on a 600 mile march through the desert to raze the desert tribes and then to descend into what is nowadays southern Jordan and to take a kerb at Aqaba today is a port in southern Jordan by taking acaba as an Arab force what they've done is they've created a situation where the Arabs can now begin to project military power towards Damascus now that is immediately calling into question the secret arrangements which have already been made by the British and the French to carve up the Middle East in their interests Lawrence has gone completely as I say off message in doing this so what to do disrupted the plan well he's disrupted the plans because he knows what the plans are and he's rooting for the Arabs he wants the Arabs to be players in the postwar settlement of the Middle East he tries to put the Arabs into a position where they might be able to challenge the secret Sykes be to agree yes which is the anti French Russian originally yes indeed Katrina those in Britain who are trying to keep up with these affairs in bewilderment about the Middle Eastern one messages were they getting back about what was happening there the concentration really was on the fighting in the Western Front for the most part and really it wasn't until 1917 that the British government realized that they needed to be explaining better to their populations at home what was going on in the Ottoman Empire and why that fight was taking place so you see quite a concerted propaganda effort appearing in 1917 through 1918 where the British are explaining the fighting in the near East in terms of Britain being the kind of promoter of nationality that they are trying to free the embryonic nations within the Ottoman Empire from from the chains of imperial rule I mean that message it's hard to tell how far it percolated and certainly the British Home Front tended to view the fighting in the Ottoman Empire in a very and as Neel describes orientalist way in terms of this kind of romantic chivalrous mysteriously charming effort that contrasted starkly with the brutal bloody attrition of the Western Front and and it's really there that you see that the seeds that becomes the flower of the Lawrence of Arabia myth growing now of course you know if you do have family members fighting in that part of the world it becomes very very important and I think you know for people living in Australia and New Zealand the the those battle zones of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War are are extremely important obviously the the Anzacs as they were known formed part of a multi-national landing force in April 1915 and it was written about in you know euphoric terms by war correspondents like Ellis ash Meade Bartlett and and Charles Bean who you know within weeks were describing the guillotine Gallipoli landings as the birth of the Australian nation you know and that's as much a myth as the the Lawrence of Arabia myth but it goes to the heart of a very sort of crude Australian nationalism that depicts itself in contrast to to Britain Thank You cinema how did the conflict in the Ottoman Empire and or not end in 1918 um so I think as people have argued first Central and Eastern Europe the war doesn't really end in 1918 1918 is really the starting point of these extraordinary anti-colonial movements that break out across the region so in Libya in Egypt in Iraq in Tunisia in Palestine in Syria and Sudan in Somaliland and these are all movements that are popular movements much more popular than the Arab revolt itself but which aren't as remembered quite so vividly and I think part of the reason they're not remembered so vividly is that there isn't a kind of white savior granting these peoples a kind of freedom as you have in the case of Lawrence right so so these are actually in effect much more important in terms of outcomes they produce sovereign states in Egypt Iraq Syria et cetera unlike the Arab Kingdom which which never which net well it lasted for a very short time but they're not we don't talk about them quite as much but they you know they go on right into the 1930s you know how did Lawrence react to the way this was resolved he went to conferences in up to 1922 today and what was he saying at those conferences and what is how was his voice heard is it two particularly important conferences he's an advisor to Faisal at Versailles in 1919 and then again he's an advisor to Churchill when Churchill was colonial secretary in Cairo in 1921 and I think what Lawrence is doing is he's he's operating in post-war diplomacy in an attempt to get what he considers to be the best possible outcome for the Arabs now I don't think that he had a clear conception of what that would look like and just to pick up the point that Hussein has just made I mean I've already described him as a liberal imperialist and I think his conception was but the as he saw it the more benevolent British Empire would provide the framework for the for the growing to nationhood of these new and Arab states and yet of course in reality there was a wave of revolt from below where ordinary people were beginning to create their own future and those attempts were generally speaking suppressed by the British Empire with which Lawrence is closely associated in this post-war diplomacy so it's quite a limited view I think that he has of what of what might happen there's the famous 1918 map where Lawrence sort of lays out his vision of what the region would look like and it involves a Kurdish state in Armenian state an Arab state but this is I mean to realize that kind of map would have involved what we now would call ethnic cleansing right because it wouldn't necessarily call for the removal of populations into single ethnic states which of course the Middle East could never could never be because all of these regions were multi religious multilingual multi-ethnic quite early on really just a few years after all launched became began to began his global fame and down to an American reporter and cinematographer who made a report on him showed it on in Broadway then in London and we told hundreds of thousands million people saw it and then wanted more dub Laurence not a ballon beer and walking with his army and and he he grew from that can you take that on yes I mean he wasn't a famous man at the end of the first world war he as a famous man because of the Lowell Thomas show in 1919 where which changes actually it evolves I mean initially there wasn't that much emphasis on Lawrence because he can you tell this is what the Lord show was what it was the kind it was a weird kind of thing and we don't do this kind of thing anymore but it was a sort of it was described as a travelogue and I understand that it consisted of a series of what were then called lantern slides old-fashioned slides some moving images certain amount of music some dancing and a very racy commentary on the part of Lowell Thomas himself the American journalist who becomes a kind of impresario now what seems to happen as the show evolves is that the Lawrence element is is ramped up because audiences respond with more enthusiasm to the Lawrence character than they do to the general Allenby and the traditional British military operations and that turns Lawrence into what he himself describes as a matinee idol he becomes an early example of 20th century celebrity culture and then he moves away into this strange 15 13 15 years of being in the ranks in the RAF in the tank regiment back in the RAF and some one of you described as a slow mental mental breakdown in the Seven Pillars of wisdom came out hmm his some people think great book you think great book and very accurate recording of reporting or on what was happening there is there anything more anybody wants to say about those last year's easy has he abandoned the Arab causes that abandoned him where are we well what I would say is is is that he's he's abandoned the attempt to make a difference in 1921-22 because he's got as far as he thinks he can with the Cairo conference and I think at the same time as he's involved in that post-war diplomatic effort he's suffering a kind of mental breakdown and I think you can you can read that in the pages of Seven Pillars of wisdom and I see him as a kind of permanent convalescent after that gun because the prison should betray the oh yes I think so I mean there are there are many different that we now talk about post-traumatic stress disorder but that's the kind of portmanteau term anyway it covers many different things but I think specifically in his case he was riddled with guilt about what he saw as the betrayal of the Arabs by British and French imperialism saying what happened to the idea of an Arab Kingdom seen a Sharif Hussein declares himself caliph when the Ottoman Empire is formally abolished and the Caliphate is formally abolished in 1924 and but the but by that point he's already been abandoned by his British allies who allow their other allies the illness alludes to enter into Mecca and Medina and wrest it from the hands of Sharif Hussein who dies and in the early 30s in entrace Jordan the newly established state of Transjordan where his son Abdullah is now King so it's a very sad story but that's not really the end of of the kind of dream of a United Arab Kingdom that lives on right into the 1960s with the establishment of the United Arab Republic under Nasser which unites Egypt and Syria in attempts to unite more and more States what's interesting is that the British conceived of the Arab Kingdom as being primarily a religious entity they understand it as a counterweight to the idea of the caliphate but the appeal of the Arab Kingdom to many Arabs were to the Arab Republic subsequently is precisely the opposite that it's a secular republic that allows them to escape the Caliphate as an institution and that's why many non-muslims become very early adherents to the idea of the Arab Kingdom and continue to be very important within the ranks of Arab nationalism right into the 60s Katrina Pennell do you think that the way that the land was divided up lines drawn across a map was became an obstruction to unities which persists I think it's quite simplistic to just look at where borders are drawn and to extrapolate from there or you know a century's worth of of problems I think it's worth bearing in mind that there are several different iterations of the perceived future of the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire as the war is unfolding Neels already mentioned the sykes-picot agreement which is often held up as you know the strawman of everything that is that is wrong with the Middle East today and I think we have to be really careful there because sykes-picot agreement was drawn up but two years before the end of the war and and many things changed from that agreement - to the final settlement not least the fact that Insights picot at France was originally going to have significant portions of Iraq that then ended up under under British control and also as we've mentioned already Russia was part of sykes-picot inand then drops out of the war and thus out of that agreement I think it's worth bearing in mind that you know all defeated parties in the first world war are subjected to some kind of reorganization and dismemberment the Ottoman Empire is not unique in that sense what is interesting about the peace process and the Ottoman Empire is what a protracted apheresis you know it starts in 1919 but it doesn't end until 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne on the whole the European powers I think are able to draw the lines that most meet their interest and advantage but there are moments where there is resistance to that the 1920 Treaty of Sevres is is resisted by a Turkish nationalist movement led by Mustafa Kemal who was obviously a key officer at Gallipoli kamek Ali who is then able to expand the original Anatolian heartland that's that's outlined in the Treaty of severa to the eventual Turkish Republic that we that we know today that was defined in the Treaty of Lausanne but the Europeans I think on the most part in the Arab lands were able to draw the lines where they wanted them to be briefly I just I just we should be careful about the lines drawn in the Sun because this often allows to talk about the Middle East as being made up of uniquely artificial States and the idea of the artificial state has often been used to justify a lot of violence and repression within those states so they the the RAF bombings in Iraq etc faisal himself when he becomes king of iraq talks about the iraqi people needing to be made but claiming that they're an artificial entity but that's a political statement that that that allows a certain specific kind of government within those states which is often very violent and repressive so add to that that you know it's not necessarily where the lines that are drawn that necessarily causes the problems it's how those states are then managed you know both by the British and the French and the divide and rule tactics the colonial oppression the violence the manipulation of particular minority groups that are preference over others so I think to reduce it all down to lines is is is overly simplistic finally nil we all know about why I suppose we all know about Lawrence of Arabia and Peter O'Toole the revival of the global meet if you want mentioned if you want Lawrence of Arabia do you think that had any truth in it as far as you're concerned as a military historian well I I mean what I would say about the movie is as a piece of cinema it is magnificent it's also of its time it's riddled with sort of orientalist stereotypes does it tell an essential truth about Lawrence I think it does I think it's when I watch the film it's almost like a Greek tragedy playing out where this hero goes into an exotic location to do deeds of derring-do full of idealism and enthusiasm and is slowly destroyed by the contradictions of war and wartime diplomacy and the betrayal of the people that he is fighting with and in that sense it works for me as a piece of drama in the old-fashioned Greek manner so I think the film is is great does it help us to understand the modern Middle East no not really well you can't say better than that for the end of the program thank you very much thank you Katrina Pennell Hassan Omar and Neil Faulkner next week it's a history of copy from its origins in Ethiopia to the coffee houses at the 18th century and is linked to slavery as it became a global commodity thank you very much for listening and the inner time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests I think for me what I find hard is that I've worked so hard to move away from just focusing on Laura you know my sort of early introduction to this history in this part of the world from as a British school child was through those ideas of Lawrence of Arabia and I feel like I've made a concerted effort to not understand that history through the prism of one white man so yeah and for me that that that's really important why do you know what I mean I can understand why you know but will you tell this is no you didn't want to because for me it is everything that's problematic about the way that British people tell themselves stories about British imperial history and it's I mean I think you used the term white colonial Savior it's a rather romantic idea it's this idea of chivalry this idea of the mysterious East which is just hugely hugely problematic and you know I think we have a duty to tell a much more complex and varied and multi-perspective story than just the experience of one white man I agree but it isn't forbidden to tell the stories I'm not saying it's forbidden but for me I find it more interesting to hear the stories of other people yes I mean I think it's worth doing in order to dismantle right I mean because because we're it's obviously speaking to a concern that people have and so we should build on that concern to ask different sorts of questions and and and to redirect the way in which we think we think about this figure from my perspective he simply doesn't loom very largely in the Arab Imagineer in the Arab ofone imaginary in his head because he doesn't know because they don't want him to know I think it's just because he doesn't because actually the much more momentous events are happening outside the Arab revolt the amber vault is very important but but also I mean the film is quite important I mean the later film is quite important but it's but it's seen it's seen as a kind of you know as something kind of exotic and distancing it's it's it's not it's not it's not and people don't watch it and see themselves in it in Egypt it's important because I'm a Sharif is in it and you know his his he is Egypt's greatest celebrity and so that that kind of has a different meaning but it's not it's not that people see themselves in the story when it when it's told in that way and it's not I don't think it's a question of denial it's just that the more momentous events happening elsewhere yeah no I I go with that completely I go with what both Katrina and Hussein are saying and it seems to me that we need to separate out out two things which is that there is a cultural phenomenon and it is the Lawrence of Arabia legend and it's constantly evolving and one investigates that with one set of if you like academic spectacles on and there's a whole other issue which one examines with a different set of academic spectacles which is the history of the Middle East since the time of the first world war and the connection between the two is a very very limited one and I think probably the former the legend has not contributed to a high level of popular understanding of what's really gone on in the Middle East over the last century so it's not terribly helpful in that sense and we should separate out those two things the cultural phenomenon and the real history of the Middle East I think a number of cultural outputs that have come from the first world where I'm thinking of Peter Weir's 1981 Gallipoli I'm just going back to the earlier point about you know the Anzac legend and the idea of Australian birth on the on the battlefields of camaçari Gallipoli but it is interesting the way cinema in particular as well as novels and fiction has has contributed to certain ideas being implanted in the public imaginary that have retained such persons and such strength even when there are you know vast numbers of very interesting scholarly books that that challenge some of the ideas within them why do you think that is though that's what's interesting as well isn't it it's interesting that they have such a sustaining strength I mean let's agree with everything you say it isn't accurate didn't happen like that it wasn't most significant as you say neurons wasn't in that greater scheme of things but why has it got such these just to do with the Brits wanting their own heroes I was thinking well not just the British isn't it so think if the heart of it is is there is actually the claim that freedom in the colonial world comes from the colonizers right so so that that's something that people like to hear the command there's a version of it that gets told with Woodrow Wilson right that the that the anti-colonial movements that happen Egypt Iraq etc are inspired by Wilson's words in the same way and so those those together have been very persistent because then freedom is a gift to the colonized man on the white horse riding in and saving the know yeah yeah yeah and Hussein's work on on those popular movements that were there in the Middle East in the sort of you know at the end of the First World War into the early nineteen twenties that is actually for most of the court of general popular audience in the in in in in the english-speaking world that's hidden history there's a history of Middle Eastern people people in the region actually creating their own history rather than having it imposed upon them by people coming in from the outside as well these you know these cultural ideas often have sustaining power for as long as they serve a particular purpose you know and I think in the case of the Lawrence myth it's it's serving a particular purpose that makes colonial history palatable it makes it it makes it comfortable it makes it relatively easy to understand I think in the case of Peter Weir's Gallipoli it's serving a particular purpose about Australian conservative politics and relationship to to the military that still has a sustaining power to this day is there's no way in which I mean I'm interested in the individual against the rest as it were there's no way to balance it as there I think there is I think you know there there are some fantastic examples of historical biography that allow the individual to be used as a prism through which more complex ideas and structures in in this context of our Empire can can be understood I think if we if we just obsess around the individual though without that additional context that's when it becomes very productive and and unlimited and it might be worth saying and as well I mean it occurs to me that Lawrence is able to play quite a significant role in the revolt for the reasons that I've indicated in a way that would not have been true in relation to any genuinely pop mass movement why is he able to play that role he's able to play that role because this is a very reactionary social group actually the these are these are tribal leaders from Arabia they are not progressive in any sense at all they are not the same as the middle-class nationalists in Damascus and Beirut in places like that I mean if Florence had been put in inserted into a real popular movement for self emancipation he couldn't have he couldn't have played the role that that that he does so he's he's anomalous partly because he is this weird romantic who identifies with a certain type of Arab or what he imagines a certain type of Arab to be like I think that's right I mean I'm a little bit more cautious about sort of saying some movements are more real than others but it's certainly of a kind of scale that makes it possible for him to participate in that way yeah if you think about the hundreds of thousands of people that take to the streets in Egypt or Iraq within a few years of that it's simply it's it's simply not a movement that can be controlled by any one individual it's it doesn't have any top-down I mean there there is no leadership these are leaderless popular movements and I think perhaps I wouldn't say necessarily that this one is reactionary but it's definitely a movement with a leader and with a leadership and and it's it's it's it's a planned movement whereas these other uprisings which are much much larger are quite spontaneous actually well thank you all very much indeed thank you here's the man cup of tea would be very nice please if we're doing copy next week I better start now

Channel: In Our Time

Views: 4,049

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: BBC, Radio, Four

Id: qlv8yOCtd-M

Length: 50min 39sec (3039 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019