The National on Remembering Wilfred Thesiger: One of those "Desert-Loving English"

"I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing."

— Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness) to T.E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia

A piece in The National on remembering Wilfred Thesiger, interviewing his biographer. Thesiger, the explorer of the Empty Quarter, was one of the last (at least in the old mold) of those desert-loving Englishmen.

It's telling that apparently Thesiger didn't like Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Oman when he returned to them in the 1970s. The old breed of explorer wanted to keep the quaintness and backwardness that had attracted them in the first place.

I never met Thesiger (though I know some who did), though he didn't die until 2003, or St. John Philby, or some of the other old Arabian hands. I have Arabian Sands on some shelf somewhere, and The Marsh Arabs too I think.

By most accounts Thesiger, like other desert-loving Englishmen, was eccentric to say the least, even reclusive when in civilization. But eccentricity, besides being valued by the English more than by most cultures (see the works of the esteemed anthropologist P.G. Wodehouse), seems to go with the attraction of the desert. Have you ever read Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta, which he tried to write in Spencerian English and who otherwise is mainly known for an epic poem, The Dawn in Britain, in Spencerian English of course though no one but his biographers has read it; or Palgrave, who traveled in Muslim disguise in Arabia though he was a Jesuit at the time (he later left the order, got married, and became a British diplomat). As for Lawrence and Gordon, well, even their greatest admirers admit to their idiosyncratic behavior: Lawrence's penchant for anonymity after the war while writing books that gained him fame; Gordon's religious attitudes which were, ah, very odd indeed (don't ever try to read his theories on Jerusalem unless you're particularly fond of folks who live in alternate worlds) . . . while the one woman in Prince Feisal's quote above, Lady Hester Stanhope, was mad as a loon. Sometimes called "the mad nun of Lebanon," she survived in part because of the Arab folk tradition that someone who is majnun, "crazy," is possessed by a jinni (genie; the plural is jinn); the words have the same root.

Simpler perhaps to say that the "desert-loving English" tend to be a bit dotty (or a bit Doughty — sorry) in their own way, though their ways may differ.

But the remembrance of Thesiger is a reminder of an earlier day, and the particular sort of Brit who was drawn to the Middle East in its "unspoiled" days but regrets Dubai's skyline no end. And it's also a reminder of how recent the days of exploration were: Thesiger did most of his in the 1940s and 1950s. As late as the 1960s Oman was largely known only to explorers and seconded British officers; Yemen was still a mystery to most of the world; Dubai's main commerce was gold smuggling and Abu Dhabi was a small port town.

Of a later generation and a Brit of less eccentric nature (though still eccentric enough for the British taste), I've posted before about my one meeting with J.B. Kelly.

UPDATED: I just called J.B. Kelly a Brit. He was, as I noted correctly at the linked post, a Kiwi by birth and upbringing, but British-educated and spent most of his career (save for some US years) in the UK. My apologies to any New Zealand readers, unless they don't want to claim him.