Seven Pillars of Wisdom – The Dune Messiah

#nonfiction #books #memoir #history #war

During World War I, a British archeologist singlehandedly forged a multitude of Arabian tribes into a unified army, leading them to victory over a decaying Ottoman Empire, in so doing bringing Arabia into the modern world, i.e. that of Western-style national statehood. This hero would become the legend known as Lawrence of Arabia, the white man who donned desert garb and with his Arabian comrades conquered Damascus. At least, that’s the story of the movie, as I understand. The story told by T.E. Lawrence himself in his autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom is rather more complex and ambiguous.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence’s own account of his role in the Arab Revolt, written some years after events from his notes and diaries (though most were lost) and going through several iterations before its final version. From the outset, Lawrence recognises that the Arab Revolt played only a minor part in the Allied victory in World War I, and that if it was critical to this victory, it was so in the sense that British authors tend to ascribe a sense of crucial importance to any single operation because it was part of the totality of the war effort (see also dambusters etc.). Nor does Lawrence suggest he tells his story because he was uniquely instrumental to the events of the Arab Revolt. By his own words, he tells his story because he was there. As such, he is as much, or perhaps even more, of an unreliable narrator as you might expect. Nevertheless, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is assuredly not a heroic tale or adventure novel about how good old British pluck saved the day. Instead, we accompany a profoundly emotionally conflicted man into a struggle where he is forever doomed to be an outsider to both his own and his adopted peoples. On top of which Lawrence is emblematic of so many of the pathologies of 1920s English repressedness that his memoir could double as a psychoanalytical field manual. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is now the sort of historical artefact that requires a 100 page introduction (which my copy duly has), and on the whole, the surface level war story of a few brave fighters facing overwhelming odds is the least interesting part of it.

Events, dear boy, events

Its nature as a memoir rather than a novel means that Seven Pillars of Wisdom lacks an overall plot, at least in the traditional narrative sense. There is a trajectory, starting in the deserts of the Hejaz in 1916 and terminating with the fall of Damascus in 1918. Damascus is Lawrence’s lodestar from the very beginning, but with the book written after events unfolded, it is hard not to suspect some of this is a backward projection. The narrating Lawrence at any point in the book is always a superposition of the contemporaneous Lawrence in situ and the future Lawrence telling his story with the benefit of hindsight. Combined with his literary writing style and tendency to embark on long introspective digressions, all this makes Seven Pillars of Wisdom oscillate unsteadily between being a memoir, a historical account, and a war story.

Real life is much messier than a story, with less structure, and hence Lawrence’s retelling often feels like a series of disconnected events following one after the other without much in the way of connecting tissue. Seven Pillars of Wisdom presents the reader with a constant procession of people, places and communities, many of whom are introduced with an assumed familiarity, only to never be seen again. Keeping track of the manifold characters and places isn’t made easier by Lawrence’s refusal to adhere to a single rule for transliteration from Arabic to English. With Lawrence rushing between villages, riverbeds, oases and most importantly, railway lines, always in the company of an rotating cast of comrades, there is simply too much going on, a significant part of which would be considered irrelevant digression from a narrative perspective. There is a sense in which Seven Pillars of Wisdom truly is ‘one battle after another’, with its endless sequence of skirmishes, reconnoitres, and a truly astonishing level of destruction levelled at railway lines.

War of manoeuvre

Lawrence’s account of the campaign in Arabia contrasts markedly with the common understanding of World War I as fought on the Western Front. Where the the latter is remembered as a war of stasis, the Arab Revolt is a mobile guerrilla war predicated precisely on refusing a pitched battle with the enemy. The Arabian forces use stealth and mobility, tying down the Ottomans in a futile defence of their extended supply lines. In the first chapters of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence muses on contemporary military theory and its applicability, or lack thereof, to the situation in Arabia, foreshadowing the contrast between wars of position and wars of manoeuvre that we see developed a decade later by Antonio Gramsci. Compared to the masses of forces involved elsewhere in the war, the Arab forces are pitifully limited in number, ill-equipped and riven with internal tribal rivalries. Even within the Middle Eastern theatre of war, the Arab Revolt is a side-show to the main event, which is the British and French advance against the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence himself is fully aware of this, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom never pretends the fight to be anything else.

Given Lawrence’s knowledge that the Revolt will only play a minor part on a secondary front within the Great War, his determination to claim victory is not based on the strategic value of his efforts, but a professed desire to help the Hashemite dynasty, in particular Crown Prince Faisal I, secure a truly independent Arab State. This is to be achieved through a combination of direct conquest of the lands to be incorporated into the putative Arab Kingdom, consolidating the variegated tribes into a single national body politic, and lending sufficient assistance to the British to gain standing as a reliable ally. It is this latter consideration that causes Lawrence no end of anguish, given his fears that Britain will in the end do what serves the Empire, even if it means reneging on its promises to its Arab allies. Time and again Lawrence returns to the feeling he is a traitor, engaged in a deception against the Arabian tribes whose fealty he is working to enlist for Faisal, and it is no surprise that on entering Damascus, victory tastes bitter to him.

Complex white saviour

Lawrence’s constant unease about the trustworthiness of his British superiors towards the Arab forces is only one part of the profound emotional turmoil that afflicts him, which means Seven Pillars of Wisdom is not the straightforward Orientalist white saviour narrative that I had come to expect. At a surface level, the Orientalism is definitely there, with a white man leading a motley collection of noble savages towards their destiny, i.e. a modern, European-style nation state. Below the surface however, Lawrence is aware that his leadership is less to do with the innate superiority of the white race, and more with his role as a conduit for British rifles, money and supplies for the Arab cause, as well as his status as a neutral outsider with no stake in the many inter-tribal rivalries flaring across a still divided Arabian peninsula. Significant parts of the book are devoted to Lawrence describing debilitating illnesses, fatigue and lack of endurance compared to his fellow guerrillas, even as his experience with desert warfare increases. Conversely, once he has adopted the indigenous ways of living with the desert, Lawrence can only gaze in bemusement on his compatriots who refuse to exchange their patently unsuitable khaki uniforms for the much more appropriate indigenous dress. Although he does not articulate this explicitly, one gets the sense that Lawrence is well aware that British supremacy is not due to the innate superiority of the white master race, but the result of being the ones holding the Vickers machine guns.

Not that this means the racism and Orientalism isn’t there. In keeping with Western sensibilities of the era, Lawrence cannot help but essentialise his Arab comrades, as well as every other people, including the English. It makes for a pervasive but also uncommitted and inconstant racism, with Lawrence readily pronouncing on the innate characteristics of the Arab race on one page, only to completely deviate from all of this in his detailed psychological profiles of the most prominent members of the Revolt or his most intimate companions. There is something intriguing about seeing the racist logic operate so openly on the page, with Lawrence unable to grasp how the immense diversity of personas and communities he describes directly contradicts the generalising tenets of his racist ideology. Time and again Lawrence will make sweeping pronouncements about Arabs, Turks, Indians or the French, only for these to immediately break down in his recounting of the actual people he meets. Even the Turks, who come in for most of Lawrence’s spite, are humanised when encountered as individuals, in particular the conscripts, prisoners of war, and the many casualties. His role in the Revolt makes Lawrence acutely aware of the great variety across the Arabian tribes he encounters, and while he is unable to divest himself of a belief in some inherent ‘desert culture’, the racism on display in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is of a completely different nature than our prevailing ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse, which lets Western leaders launder their realpolitik via some putative grand theory of history. The idea of unified ‘Christian’ and ‘Islamic’ cultural blocs will have seemed patently absurd to Lawrence, engaged as he was in enlisting the aid of Arab muslims against their Turkish overlords as part of a protracted European ‘civil war’.

Nor is it only his deep ambivalence over his role in the Revolt that causes Lawrence anguish. From his writing emerges a profile of a conflicted man profoundly repulsed by all things physical, most of all his own body, and hence with a deep-seated envy of people who inhabit their bodies with ease. Time and again Lawrence seems to seek bodily transcendence in the harshness of the desert, but this remains always beyond his reach. Neither is he intellectually confident, for while he is an educated man, he is not a trained soldier and therefore feels inferior to the military command in which he is embedded. If it were not for his duty to king, country and the Revolt, Lawrence might plausibly have taken the road of Frank Herbert’s [Dune Messiah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuneMessiah “Dune Messiah – Wikipedia”)_ and walked into the desert to disappear forever.

Imperial mandates

I cannot help but wonder to what degree the recurring episodes of self-loathing were retroactively amplified by the developments that followed the end of World War I. As Lawrence was writing his memoirs on return to England in the 1920s, the Arab state that he helped bring into being was destroyed in its infancy by French colonial forces, exercising their ‘mandate’ to Lebanon and Syria as agreed with Britain in the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, of which Lawrence was probably already aware when fighting with his Arab irregulars. Only a few years later, Arabia is indeed unified, but not under the Hashemite dynasty of Faisal I, but under the rival house of Saud, again with connivance and support of the British. Within a decade of the conquest of Damascus, everything that Lawrence told his Arab comrades they were fighting for has been crushed, one way or another, by the European Powers, endorsed in this by the nascent League of Nations. It is the beginning of a long series of betrayals that endures to this day, which includes Mandate for Palestine, the Nakba, the Suez Crisis, the assassination of Iran’s Mossadegh and the invasions of Iraq, Libya, and Iran, as well as the unwavering support for Israel’s military adventurism and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Seen in the light of the abject failure of the League of Nations to defend Arabian right to statehood in the 1920s, is it any wonder that the newly established Arab nations of the 1940s were disinclined to abide by a United Nations decree that the better half of Palestine was to be awarded to its recently arrived minority Jewish population?

Over a hundred years after its first publication, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is mainly interesting as a historical artefact that shows both the continuities and discontinuities of Western involvement in the Middle East. The British Empire has been eclipsed by the United States and its Israeli vassal as the primary imperial force, but the subordination of people’s right to self-determination to Western national interests remains. Direct colonial subjugation has disappeared, replaced by indirect economic control. And the racism is still there, but now grounded in Islamophobia rather than Orientalist essentialism. From the perspective of a family in Syria, Iran, or Palestine today, it must seem that everything changes so that everything can stay the same. The question is how many more white saviours they must suffer before they can take charge of their own destinies.

Notes & Suggestions

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic