During our week in Cyprus, while the US assembled its forces around Afghanistan, George played tennis in the mornings with Colin and I made calls to Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. The US was not bombing any Arab countries, and no harm had come to Americans in the Arab world. I could leave Cyprus for Aqaba, having kept my promise to my daughter. George flew back to London and his final year of history at SOAS. I read some Somerset Maugham short stories and came across the dictum ‘The wise traveller travels only in imagination’. I should have heeded him on my first journey through Greater Syria in 1987.
If not for Britain’s invasion and division of the Ottomans’ Arab provinces, I might not have made this journey or the one that was curtailed in 1987. T. E. Lawrence and his masters had created the conditions for the wars that I had come again and again as a journalist to report: not only the many between Israel’s Jewish colonists and the Arab natives, but between Arabs and Kurds, Christians and Muslims, Iranians and Iraqis. The empires brought border wars, where there had been no borders; tribal wars, where tribes had always lived; anti-colonial wars, where empires had always ruled over colonies.
I was a dual citizen: of the vibrant American empire and of its British predecessor, now a mere kingdom of northern Europe. Two passports and many allegiances. My ancestors had originated from subject peoples in Ireland long before its independence and from Mount Lebanon under the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul. Both families were Catholic, one of their many legacies to me and another claim on my loyalty. Part native, part double imperialist, I would enter Aqaba from the Red Sea. Lawrence’s route had been, like the man himself, more circumspect. He had led a detachment of Arab irregulars from the Hejaz north through the desert to Wadi Roum, the rosy-rocked Greeks’ Valley in what became Jordan. Disabling Turkish batteries along the way, they struck south to surprise the Ottomans from the rear.
I could have gone that way, but that was not where the real war was fought, not where decisions were made. Lawrence’s five-hundred-mile march and the capture of Aqaba were episodes in the Arab myth of self-liberation. Reality was the British army, preparing to assault Gaza from Egypt. Reality was the Royal Navy, cutting Turkey’s communications between Aqaba and the Ottoman troops concentrated in the holy city of Medina. The naval guns of Great Britain had reduced the seaward walls of Aqaba’s Mamluke fortress, where a few hundred Turkish imperial troops sheltered for safety. Lawrence wrote of Aqaba in 1917: ‘Through the swirling dust we perceived that Aqaba was all a ruin. Repeated bombardments by French and British warships had degraded the place to its original rubbish. The poor houses stood about in a litter, dirty and contemptible, lacking entirely that dignity which the durability of their time-challenging bones conferred on ancient remains.’ By the time Lawrence reached Aqaba, it was as a walkover.
The capture of Aqaba transformed Britain’s eastern war. Captain Basil Liddell Hart wrote, in his biography Colonel Lawrence: The Man Behind the Legend, ‘Strategically, the capture of Aqaba removed all danger of a Turkish raid through Sinai against the Suez Canal or the communications of the British army in Palestine.’ In Hart’s words, it also inserted an ‘Arab ulcer’ in the Turkish flank.
Aqaba perched at the crux of two thighs – African Sinai in the west and Asian Arabia to the east. The penetration of Aqaba from above by Lawrence and below by the Royal Navy created the breach that would subordinate the Arab world to Great Britain and its French ally. The Ottoman loss of Aqaba presaged the novel division of Turkey’s Syrian Arab provinces into what became Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and, until 1948, Palestine, thereafter Israel. Another British campaign against Turkey in Mesopotamia would forge Arabs and Kurds against their will into a new country the British would call Iraq. The region has had no peace since.
I chose the way of the warships – the gods of the story, the powers that granted Lawrence and the Arab tribes the illusion of independent action. By the time of my journey, the United States Navy had succeeded Britain’s fleet in the Red Sea and just about every other wet region of the globe. America’s warplanes would soon send thunder and lightning from the heavens over Afghanistan to give heart to Afghan warriors assaulting their tribal enemies. Alliances with some of the natives had the same rationale in Arabia as in Afghanistan: to reduce the dangers to imperial forces. If giving guns to the Arabs saved British lives in 1917 and 1918, using Afghan against Afghan would achieve the same for Americans nearly a century later. It was the cheapest way to fight an imperial war.
‘From time immemorial it has served as both the ingress
and egress between sea and land, between Arabia and the highlands of Sinai and Palestine, “The Gateway of Arabia”.’
REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH
The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894)
Port of Entry
THE AFTERNOON SHIP from Sinai carried four tourists: an old Australian woman, her grown son, a Japanese man with a red backpack and me. The rest of the passengers were Egyptian workers, a few with wives and children, bound for Jordan, Iraq or Saudi Arabia. They were the Arab world’s gleaners, who collected the leavings of oil potentates, gun sellers and concrete spreaders. They washed Saudi dishes, painted monuments to dictators and provided the muscle to erect alien forms on Oriental landscapes. After a few years, or a lifetime, working in the Arabian sun, they returned home to Egypt with enough Iraqi dinars or Saudi riyals to open a shop selling Coca-Cola beside the Nile. They smelled of happiness, these moneyless but smiling young men. They waited hours without complaint for the ship to embark. Before that, they had stood in long queues at embassies for work permits and visas. In the dingy embarkation hall, a warehouse with a coffee stall and some broken benches, Egyptian policemen made them wait before taking their passports, stamping them and, at the quay, returning them in confusion. Aboard a bus that carried us from the departure building to the dock, the workers jumped up to offer their seats to the Australian matron.
Neither the heat nor the prospect of near-slavery in the desert suppressed their laughter. The Egyptian fellaheen, the peasants, had laughed at Pharaoh. They built his pyramids to quell his terror of death, and they got the joke that he did not. Two things mocked Pharaoh’s dogma of eternal life: real, undeniable death without end, without immortal soul, without reincarnation; and the fellaheen’s laughter. When Pharaoh’s mummified corpse lay dormant within gilded chambers, they robbed his grave and laughed. They laughed at Egypt’s conquerors – Alexander the Great, the Vandals, the Caliphs and the British – and still they laughed at its modern dictator, Hosni Mubarak. They called him, for his resemblance to a processed cheese logo, ‘la vache qui rit’. They laughed even more at fat Saudi princes whose vanity required them to waste their countries’ fortunes on drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, palaces and physicians to deny their mortality. If the fellaheen had known why I sailed with them to Aqaba, they would have laughed at me too.
Our ship cruised out of Egypt’s Nuweiba harbour past vacant beach chairs, umbrellas and thatched bars. This would be another year without tourists. North of the luxury beaches that Israel had occupied in 1967 and tried to keep until 1988 lay the apartment blocks, many-storeyed and unlike anything an Egyptian had ever conceived or wanted. The six- and seven-storey boxes might have blended into an American federal housing project in a cold urban ghetto, but they