[Jordan - Pt. 1] Prelude: Lawrence before and after Arabia

‘I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites [Arabs] the foundation on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts.’

- Excerpt from ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ (1926) by T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935) 

As an island nation, exploration is very much part of our history and tradition. Early modern explorations had little scientific value or otherwise. Men were often lured into the deserts and other inhospitable landscapes simply because of the obsessive - and often destructive urge to go beyond the boundaries of human experience.

​Others went in search for the fame and reputation they would earn by the time they have completed their almost certainly arduous journeys. London was at the heart of the planning of these expeditions and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in Kensington was the arch sponsor for plenty of them.

Former building of the Royal Geographical Society at 1 Saville Row. The Palestine Association, founded in 1805 to promote the study of Palestine would be incorporated into the RGS in 1834. It would be another 30 years before it emerged as the new Palestine Exploration Fund.

'We are obviously only meant as red herrings [...] to give an archaeological colour to a political job.'

- Excerpt from a letter by T.E. Lawrence to his parents (1914)

The Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) today at Hinde Mews in London. Notable former members included Lord Kitchener (1850-1916), Charles Warren (1840-1927) and most famously T.E. Lawrence.

But the Englishman who would most famously be associated with the deserts of Arabia didn't start off at the grand lodge of the RGS. Just before the war in 1914, Thomas Edward Lawrence walked down this narrow backstreet in London to the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). The PEF, today shadowed by a century of modern buildings, was founded in 1865 and is 'the oldest organisation in the world created specifically for the study of the Levant'.

​At the request of the British Museum, the young archaeologist was to map out the biblical Exodus route in the wilderness of Zin. He knew best however, that the real mission behind was to map out the unknown area east of the Suez Canal in case a war was to break out between Britain and Ottoman Turkey. He was transforming from an archeologist into a spy.

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My interest in T.E. Lawrence - 'Lawrence of Arabia' - began years earlier. The account of his desert exploits during WWI, in which he led Arab Bedouin tribes against the Ottoman army has fired the imagination of generations of desert travellers. Born in 1888, exactly a hundred years before I was born, the early life of Lawrence prior to his Arabia experience was something I feel I can relate to.

We both went to strict schools where young Englishmen were being brought up to run the country; and we were both indifferent to the hierarchy and conventional discipline designed to be indoctrinated into us. Whereas this would earn me a hard time at school, it would facilitate Lawrence in fitting into the almost classless Bedouin tribal society later. Coincidentally, we are both fascinated by medieval history, and especially in the military aspect of medieval warfare.

A photo of Lawrence in his iconic Arab robes (1919)

A photo of my old school in Britain, where one out of five students who fought in the First World War would perish in the conflict. Its alumni includes the celebrated war poet Robert Graves, whose common experience at school and at the battlefields of WWI made him Lawrence's personal friend. He would become the only person ever allowed by Lawrence to publish a biography of him during his lifetime. (1912)

Hogarth: 'You will want a guide and servants to carry your tent and baggage.'
Lawrence: 'I am going to walk.'
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Hogarth: 'Europeans don’t walk in Syria, it isn’t safe or pleasant.'
Lawrence: 'Well, I do.'

- Between D.G. Hogarth (British archaeologist) and T.E. Lawrence prior to his walk (1909 )

Medieval History would serve as the catalyst behind our first encounter with the Middle East. When I was still in university in 2011, I took a 3 months long journey across the Levant for the first time. Lawrence's own journey however, was a much more ambitious one: he was going to walk a 1,000 miles across Turkey to Syria to study the Crusader castles for his thesis. 

A photo I took of Krak de Chevalier during my trip in Syria (2011). Lawrence came here to study it for his thesis in 1909 and called it 'the greatest castle in the world'.

He was already showing an extraordinary feat of endurance as a reckless traveller. These were the gruelling conditions that Lawrence had to be contend with later in the Arab Revolt, as he was now: for up to thirteen hours a day he was on rough and rocky paths, he was shot at and beaten up. He was badly burnt by the hot and dry wind, covered in insect bites and often got sick with malaria and other diseases, but the young undergraduate just didn't care.

Finally in one letter the young undergraduate mentioned that he had been 'robbed and rather smashed up'. What he really meant was that a beggar had just bashed him twice in the head with a rock, tried to shoot him with his pistol but failed to operate it - had left him for dead. It was only then that he was robbed of his possession and after being severely wounded that he realised it was time to return home.

Although I didn't have to go through what Lawrence had endured, I nonetheless witnessed the brutal oppression of the Syrian people by their government and was at one point stuck in the city of Hama - by then besieged by government forces. My time in Syria would ignite my own interests in the geopolitics of the region in years to come. In Lawrence's time however it was another regime's oppression that he witnessed. He wrote that 'their [the Arabs] spirits were shrivelled under the numbing breath of a military government': he was describing the repressive Ottoman regime in Syria.

The scene outside of my hotel in Hama in 2011, of which residents of the city had desperately set up obstacles to stop the besieging Syrian army from coming in.

This would have a profound impact on him, and he was to realise that ultimately it was not the history and the ruins - but the people that he was interested in. He would later devote his life to free them from the oppression he so vividly saw. The Arab Revolt (1916-1918) during the First World War provided him with the perfect opportunity to achieve that.

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'Few people have risen so high so quickly, or have voluntarily given up not only honours but power, and done so without regret or bitterness.
Fewer still have been so famous and tried so hard to live obscurely.'

- Excerpt from 'Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia' (2010) by Michael Korda

A screenshot from the 1927 short film 'With Lawrence of Arabia' by Lowell Thomas. It is based on the footages from the original 1919 version.

Thanks to the footages shot by the American journalist Lowell Thomas, Lawrence almost instantly became a celebrity after the war. The result, a 1919 short film called 'With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia' had four million viewers.

​One could arguably say Lawrence was the most famous British celebrity just before the time of Charlie Chaplin, and so began the legend of Lawrence of Arabia.

But yet in the most curious episode, after the war and having achieved global fame - Lawrence, by then promoted to the rank of a colonel, would relinquished all his fame and power.

The headline of the British newspaper Daily Express on the 27 December 1922 - much to Lawrence's disgust as he was trying to escape from the limelight. By then, Lawrence was certainly Britain's most famous war hero.

​He had turned down knighthood and medals offered by the king and changed his name twice to sign up as the lowest ranking soldier in the armed forces. Back at home, Lawrence's mother described that he would stare at the floor for hours on end and unmoved.

Lawrence’s depression after the war could only be explained by his disappointment in the post-war political betrayal of the Arabs. The Entente had promised the Arabs the independence they deserved after the war, yet soon after Arabia was carved up amongst the British and the French into the colonies of Iraq and Syria.

Along with exploration, colonialism had created the Imperial myth that Britain knew more about Arabs than anyone else, and therefore it was only natural that Britain should interfere in Arabia. Lawrence, however, with his extensive knowledge and experience of living and fighting in the region would suggest otherwise.

A photo of Lawrence on the day of his retirement in 1935. He had by then changed his name to 'Thomas Edward Shaw' and worked as the lowest ranking aircraftman in the RAF for the past 13 years. Half a year later he would die in a fatal motorcycle accident. (Photo from Irish Times)

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'...in the distant future, if the distant future deigns to consider my insignificance, I shall be appraised rather as a man of letters than a man of action.'

- Letter from T. E. Lawrence to Edward Garnett, 23rd December 1927

Lawrence rented the attic of this house in Westminster after the war. It was in here that he wrote the epic ' Seven Pillars of Wisdom' - his account of the desert campaign during the Arab Revolt.

It was through Lawrence's writings that I have discovered he was more than just an action hero - but a visionary of modern Arabia. By 1920, nationwide rebellion against British rule in Iraq had cost the lives of more than 2,000 British soldiers. Not knowing what to do next, the British mercilessly bombarded Iraqi towns and villages to bring the people into submission, which only served to deepen their hatred.

​Lawrence had already warned that '...the people of England had been led in Iraq into a trap from which it would be hard to escape with dignity and honour. It is a disgrace to our Imperial record, we are today not far from disaster'. Yet in our own time in 2003, British soldiers would land in Basra once again to embark on yet another ultimately disastrous occupation with devastating consequences.

An RAF airplane above Baghdad and the river Tigris in the 1920s. The term 'aerial policing' was coined by Winston Churchill, in which aerial bombings would be used against rebellious tribesmen in order to lower military expenditure and casualties from a ground invasion. (Photo from the Imperial War Museum)

Amongst many other things, Lawrence also wrote about the importance of supporting a moderate Islamic regime in the Hejaz against a particularly violent branch of Islam known as Wahhabism. By 1923, Abdelaziz Ibn-Saud would harness the strength of the disciplined Wahhabi warriors and used them to conquer the rest of the Arabian Peninsula for himself. Britain turned a blind eye on the affair and as Lawrence had predicted meanwhile 'the fanaticism of Nejd [...] intensified and swollen by success.'

Lawrence’s advice fell onto deaf ears as western powers were unaware of the long-term consequences and dangers posed by the expansion of this kind of intolerant Islamic fundamentalism. A deal forged with the Saudis after WW2 had concluded our relationship with the kingdom which essentially lasted until today: the West would provide financial and technological support to the Saudis in exchange for the oil they possessed. The West would also promise not to intervene in the kingdom's religious affairs.

US President Roosevelt and the founder of Saudi Arabia, Abdalaziz Ibn-Saud onboard USS Quincy in 1945. The meeting would conclude the political relationship between the Saudis and the West which last until this very day.

The Saudi rulers however were unable to control the fanatical Wahhabists who had helped found their very own dynasty. They would therefore buy them off with their new oil wealth on condition that they redirect their jihadist activities abroad to places such as Afghanistan. Eventually these battle-hardened jihadists, with their activities indirectly funded by the oil money from the West - would reorganised themselves into Al-Qaeda and ISIS, militant groups which we are familiar with today.

In his time, Lawrence was one of the few who saw how a vast, powerful and independent Arab nation would not only have been beneficial to the Arabs - but also to the rest of the world. On the contrary, he also understood how foreign attempts to meddle in the Middle East could only lead to disasters.

And yet, the carving up of the Middle East in the 1920s  - which Lawrence felt so passionately against - would leave behind a number of unstable states deliberately sabotaged by an inefficient colonial administration. These state were vulnerable to military coups, and coupled with a population tired of insecurity they would eventually gave rise to young army officers such as Saddam Hussein and Hefaz Al-Assad - paving the way for the present conflicts in both Iraq and Syria.

Map from the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement which shows future plans to carve up Arabia into British and French colonies and zones of influence. At the bottom right corner are the signatures by both Sykes and Picot.

So after almost a decade of travelling and reading about the Middle East, I have wanted to conclude my travels around the region and go back to the roots of modern Arabia. I am convinced that it was during Lawrence's time that the opportunity to create a stable Arabia was missed, and today we are witnessing the consequences and the tragedies that followed.


In my next journey, I want to go back to the places related to the creation of modern Arab states and followed the footsteps of some of the key people involved. The Hashemite leaders, who were supposed to rule a vast and independent Arab kingdom, today had only survived as the ruling dynasty in the small country of Jordan. Fittingly therefore, Jordan should be the core of my travel.

Since my first travels in the Levant I have continued to visit other parts of Arabia in the years that followed. This is a photo of a Yemeni friend and myself at the capital Sana'a back in 2012. I was partly following the footsteps of my uncle who was serving in the country back in the 1960s during the time of the 'Aden Emergency'.

In my next journey, I want to go back to the places related to the creation of modern Arab states and followed the footsteps of some of the key people involved. The Hashemite leaders, who were supposed to rule a vast and independent Arab kingdom, today had only survived as the ruling dynasty in the small country of Jordan. Fittingly therefore, Jordan should be the core of my travel.

By the end of this year, as church bells ring across Europe, with minutes of silence we shall mark that it was exactly a hundred years ago when four years of killings on an industrial-scale was finally over. Countries like Poland would celebrate their hundredth anniversary of reappearance on the world map. But yet it is in the Middle East - more than any other part in the world - that the legacies of the Great War continue to be felt down to the present day.

Myself at the stone effigy of T.E. Lawrence in the Church of St. Martin in Wareham, Dorset. (2015)