The Search for an Arab Pope (and Other Follies)

Prepping for a tourist pleasure trip to the Middle East (yeh, I know), I’ve been rereading David Fromkin’s “A Peace to End All Peace,” subtitled “The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East." I first read it when it was new in 1989, just before my own first trip to Turkey. I’m sorry to say I understand it better this time—my sorrow reflecting the fact that so much more knowledge about the Middle East has been thrust upon us all. Anyway, I thought it a good book then and I think so now, though with reservations. The most important reservation is sources: I didn’t notice him actually specifying, but it looks to me like he is dealing only with sources in English. It may be a long time before we get one writer who can work in English, German, French, Russian, Turkish and Arabic, but until then, there is more to be done. Another difficulty is sheer sprawl: Fromkin has a lot to tell, and he doesn’t always keep his material under control. On the other hand, no one could accuse him of imposing artificial order.

But here is a takeaway point: the criminal/comical ignorance—coupled with brazen arrogant indifference—of the British, about their foes. Those who cared at all—and there don’t seem to have been many—were mostly braised into a great paranoid stew, equal parts Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Lex Luthor, like something out of a John Buchan novel.

Hardly surprising when you consider that one of the chief architects of the British worldview was John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916), novels chock-full of comic-book conspiracy. Buchan capped his literary success by becoming at wartime Director of Information. The Buchan-like mind-set led the British high command completely to misunderstand the Ottoman Empire, and the Arab’s presence in it. General Wingate, the British de facto proconsul in Egypt, saw the Turkish presence in the war as the work of “a syndicate of Jews, financiers, and low-born intriguers;” Buchan himself called them “a collection of Jews and gipsies"--intriguers maybe, but Jews were almost entirely absent, and heaven knows what he meant by "gipsies." The Brits presupposed a kind of “Arab nationalism” that scarcely existed. They went looking for an “Arab pope” who did not exist at all. And they took it for granted that the Arabs would accept, or perhaps would welcome, British rule.

Time has put paid to at least the last of these misapprehensions.

Ignorance was part of the problem. But arrogance finished it off. Here is information minister Buchan, as quoted by Fromkin, in Buchan’s novel Greenmantle:

The truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples. Perhaps the Scots are better than the English, but we’re all a thousand percent better than anybody else.

These days, we have a name for that sort of thing.

Afterthought: I just noticed, but will not pursue, the irony of telling a story about British ignorance of foreigners, while using only British sources.

Suggestion: last time I looked, there were 93 Amazon reviews. Consider organizing them as “lowest rated first,” and then skimming the negative reviews as far as you feel you need to go, to get a sense of the complaints. Works for me with any Amazon book with a lot of reviews.