CHARLES GLASS
The Tribes Triumphant
RETURN JOURNEY
TO THE MIDDLE EAST
‘When the government is unable to provide for their safety, they will band themselves into tribes.’
SIR JOHN BAGOT GLUBB,
Britain and the Arabs: A Study of Fifty Years, 1908–1950
The author dedicates this book
to his friend Noam Chomsky and to the memory of another friend, Edward Saïd.
‘Between the Arabian Desert and the eastern coast of the Levant there stretches – along almost the full extent of the latter, or for nearly 400 miles – a tract of fertile land varying from 70 to 100 miles in breadth. This is so broken up by mountain range and valley that it has never all been brought under one native government; yet its well-defined boundaries – the sea on the west, Mount Taurus on the north, and the desert to east and south – give it unity, and separate it from the rest of the world. It has rightly, therefore, been covered by one name, Syria.’
REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH
The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894)
CONTENTS
‘It is the atmosphere in which seers, martyrs, and
fanatics are bred.’
REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH
The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894)
11 September 2001
IT WAS NOT ENOUGH to sail or drive to Aqaba. I had to take it by force, galloping with Arab tribal warriors to the gates of its ancient fortress, storming the citadel and raising the colours above the battlements. The Ottoman Red Sea garrison would surrender, as it had to Captain T. E. Lawrence in the summer of 1917, or my sword would taste the defender’s flesh. All Syria – its sandy plains and snowy summits, oases and castles, nomad camps and ancient cities, fractious and competing believers in the One God – would lie open to my advance.
Years later, of course, I might regret it. Lawrence of Arabia certainly did. Was Johnny Turk any worse to the Levant than his successors – Britain, France, America and the advocates of Zionist colonization? A region that had remained united for four centuries within the Ottoman Empire – and for many more Hellenized centuries before that – was divided, abused and rendered impotent. Lawrence himself acknowledged his betrayal of the Arabs, as America’s Lawrences later confessed their treachery to the brave Afghan tribesmen who had beaten back the Soviet empire. Foreign adventurers promising freedom to the earth’s wretched – among them the Arabs of 1917 and the Afghans of the 1980s – knew in their souls that what they offered the native warrior was so much dust. Empires employed the indigenes to destroy rival empires: the British vanquished the Ottomans, as America did the Soviets, with local trackers, guides and killers.
I was halfway from London to Aqaba, by train and ship, when massacres of my countrymen in the United States altered the nature of a journey I had been contemplating for fourteen years. My intention was to complete a Levantine adventure. In 1987, while on my way from Alexandretta in southern Turkey to Aqaba in Jordan, politics stopped me dead. In Beirut, a Shiite Muslim militia, the Hizballah, cast me into chains. After my escape, I returned home to my family in London rather than resume the journey south. The Hizballah had kidnapped many other foreigners for political ends; and it had nurtured the suicide bomber, that mysterious and sometimes anonymous figure who expelled the US Marine Corps and the Israeli occupation forces from Lebanon. The tactic of the human delivery mechanism reached its horrible fruition in the wilful murder of thousands of innocent human beings in New York, Washington and western Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001. I was in Florence when it happened.