Since Lawrence was more intent on such extra-curricular activities, or on escape into Morris country, than on his lectures, he was amazingly fortunate that in 1908 the History Examiners introduced the option of presenting a thesis on any question connected with a special subject. Lawrence realized that if he chose ‘Military History and Strategy’ as his special subject, he could present a thesis on crusader castles which would deploy all his hard-earned knowledge of medieval defensive warfare. In summer 1907 he had made his second cycling tour of France with Beeson, and now, in summer 1908, he decided to make a third tour to look at the crusader castles he had missed, and to glimpse some of the cathedrals which had so inspired William Morris in the 1850s. This would be his most ambitious expedition yet: he would ride all the way across France to the Mediterranean, and this time he would do it alone.
He arrived at Le Havre in mid-July, and battled in violent hailstorms through Gisors to Compiègne, and from there to Provins, near Paris, where he discovered a unique twelfth-century keep and ruined town walls, which almost defied his cerebral game of attack-defence. He wandered around them for hours trying to puzzle out what the designer had intended, and came to the conclusion that they had been built as an experiment: ‘… the keep would have been almost incapable of defence,’ he decided, ‘yet in spirit it is half a century ahead of its time.’31 Living on bread, milk, peaches and apricots, he rode into Champagne, where the weather became ‘fearfully hot’. His days followed a strict regime: up at dawn, he would reach his castle usually by midday, and investigate it for a couple of hours. In the afternoon he would ride on, reaching his hotel by seven or eight in the evening. The sheer imperative of the journey soon eclipsed even his joy in reaching the castles, though he would occupy his mind in composing whole pages of his projected thesis as he pedalled. The Champagne country was stunningly beautiful and he felt himself filling with energy as he cycled, through cherry-orchards and across sparkling streams, past fields of ripe golden barley and wheat. He watched peasants advancing to the harvest in cohorts, their sickles flashing like swords in the sun, the great wains of hay being drawn by bilious-white oxen. Steadily he made his way south, and by late July he was steering a course beneath the austere volcanic plugs of the Auvergne, past gardens enclosed with massive dry-stone walls, toiling up thousands of feet and consoling himself with the thought that such agony as his was undreamed of in classical times – a combination of the tortures of Sisyphus, who had to roll a great stone endlessly uphill, of Tantalus, who was condemned to grasp at fruit just beyond his reach, and of Theseus, who was forced to remain forever sitting. His reward was a 4,000 foot free-wheel descent into the Rhône valley, so perilous and exciting that he felt sick when he reached the bottom. He rode on through Provence and the lovely but mosquito-infested marshlands of the Camargue, where he contracted his first dose of the malaria which would plague much of his life. At last, he arrived at the lonely, olive-covered mountain of Les Baux, from where he looked down a precipice and far across a plain. Suddenly, as he watched, the sun leapt from behind a cloud, illuminating a silvery shimmer. It was one of the most thrilling moments of his life, and he celebrated it in a way that only an Oxford man of that era would have done, screaming out the words of Xenophon, so loudly that it disturbed the nearby tourists: ‘Thalassa! Thalassa! The Sea! The Sea!’
4. The Sultan Drank Tea as Usual
Young Turks’ Revolution 1908
As Lawrence had cycled southwards to the Mediterranean that July, news of a coup d’état in Turkey seemed to leap at him out of the headlines. One day the newspapers would confirm that a revolution was taking place, and another they would assure their readers that all was calm, and ‘the Sultan drank tea as usual’. On 23 July he wrote to his mother asking desperately for clarification: ‘it might well be important,’ he said.1 What was actually taking place was the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire, the tottering giant which had dominated the Middle East and eastern Europe for nearly 500 years. On 22 July, a handful of young Turkish officers had taken control of the Ottoman 3rd Army in Europe. On 24 July they offered the Padishah Sultan, Abd al-Hamid II, an ultimatum: either grant a constitution or step down. Whichever path he chose, the tyrant’s power was effectively at an end.
They called him ‘Abdul the Damned’, ‘The Red Sultan’, ‘Abdul the Bloody’, and for years he had presided over a corrupt and oppressive empire that stretched from the sands of the Sahara to the Persian hills. Behind the grim walls of his Yildiz Palace, surrounded always by a horde of eunuchs, dwarfs, deaf-mute chamberlains and Circassian dancing-girls, the Padishah had run his domain through a vast network of spies and spies-upon-spies connected to him by thousands of miles of telegraph wires. The palace was itself a dark icon of his monumental paranoia, for he rarely ventured beyond its limits, and even within them had constructed a warren of secret passageways whose plan was known only to himself. So unpredictable were Abd al-Hamid’s rages that even seasoned courtiers were seen to quake in his presence. His food was tasted by a corps of professional poison-snoopers, his cigarettes puffed first by a eunuch, his milk brought in sealed bottles from specially guarded cows. He had secreted thousands of revolvers about the palace, a brace of them above the Imperial bath, and had twice shot dead innocent bystanders who had startled him – one of them rumoured to have been his own daughter. His administration had become such a travesty that his chosen advisers included a circus clown, a bootblack, a Punch and Judy man, the son of one of his cooks, and a slave he had bought on the open market. ‘Abdul the Damned’ had lost all touch with reality: the Ottoman Empire was rotten to the core, and only the slightest push was required to set it rocking. That push was provided by the keen young firebrands of the CUP – the ‘Committee of Union and Progress’ – who were mostly army officers trained in the Sultan’s own military academies. Their aim was to reduce the Padishah to a figurehead. Abd al-Hamid, who believed he could strike back later, decided to granted a constitution, and for almost the first time in living memory, the streets of Stamboul were filled with cheering crowds.
Among those celebrating the Padishah’s reduction was the Sharif Hussain ibn Ali, a senior member of the Hashemite family of the Hejaz in western Arabia – the Holy Land of Islam. Exiled in Stamboul under close surveillance by the tyrant’s spies, the Sharif had never forgiven the Sultan for having ordered the murder of his uncle, who had been stabbed to death brutally in a Jeddah street in 1880. Hussain had continued to scheme and plot against the government, until, in 1893, the Sultan had finally ordered him to Stamboul with all his family – which had then included three small sons. He must have disembarked from his ship with some trepidation, for he was well aware that critics of the Red Sultan were in the habit of finding themselves stitched into a sack and dropped into the Bosphorus on moonless nights. The Sultan had even had his own brother confined to a cell for twenty years. To his surprise, perhaps, Hussain had been allowed to live quietly, and for fifteen years he had wisely bided his time, never losing sight of his determination to return to Arabia as Emir of Mecca. He was much respected by those who met him – opinionated, domineering, determined, but extremely polite. In 1908 he was about fifty-five, a small, hard man with a bushy beard and eyes as wide and cold as a vulture’s. He had delicate hands and fine-drawn features which lent him an exquisite air of grace, and he wore his black jubba cloak and tight Meccan turban with the simple dignity appropriate to his patrician status. A conservative of the old school who spoke Turkish more readily than he spoke Arabic, he was renowned for his religious scholarship, his knowledge of international affairs, his love of poetry and his encyclopedic knowledge of natural history. His people, the Hashemites, were the most revered family in Islam, able to trace their descent back over thirty-seven generations to the Prophet Mohammad himself, through his daughter Fatima. They were the traditional stewards of Mecca and Medina, the sacred cities of Islam – cities whose possession was of crucial symbolic value to the Sublime Porte. Though Ottoman Sultans had been co
nsidered Caliphs or ‘Successors’ of the Prophet for 200 years, Abd al-Hamid had been the first to use the tide officially. His empire was crumbling, and he had played the Islamic card in a last desperate attempt to rally the disparate peoples within its borders. He was terrified of internal revolt. In 1888, unrest among the Armenians had provoked a knee-jerk reaction. His armies had moved in and butchered them systematically, men, women and children, village by village, in a resolute attempt to wipe them out. While the Armenians were a Christian minority, however, the Arabs were not only brother Muslims, but comprised almost half the Empire’s population – 10½ million out of 22 million, actually outnumbering the 7½ million ethnic Turks. The Sultan decided to court them. He invoked Islamic sentiment, built mosques, endowed Islamic schools, and promoted Arabs to high office. In 1901 he had inaugurated construction of the Hejaz railway, ostensibly to facilitate the Haj – the sacred pilgrimage to the two Holy Cities, which every Muslim was enjoined to take at least once in his life. It was not coincidental, of course, that the railway also strengthened his control over these cities, which were a vital part of his Islamic façade. Officially, the Hejaz was run by the senior member of the Hashemite family, who was appointed Emir or Prince of Mecca. By manipulating the rivalries between the three branches of the family whose menfolk were eligible to be Emir – a game so Byzantine in its wheels within wheels as to be almost incomprehensible to anyone outside it – the Sultan had successfully managed to gain hegemony over the post. On taking power, the CUP dismissed the incumbent Emir as corrupt and, after some deliberation, appointed Hussain in his place. The Young Turks wanted in the Hejaz someone who would bow to his masters and preserve the status quo, and Hussain’s prudence and respectability over the past decade and a half had convinced the government that he was such a man. It must have struck the Sharif as something of an irony that he, who had been exiled for fifteen years as a dangerous subversive, should now be chosen for his conservatism.
On 3 December 1908, the steamer Tanta dropped anchor in Jeddah harbour with Hussain and all his family aboard. The crystal-white tenement houses of the port with their baroque latticework and hidden balconies peeped over the half-ruined sea-gate, where, on the wharf, a crowd of officials and local Arabs had gathered to meet him. From the deck of the Tanta, piled high with sea-chests, boxes and furled carpets – the gleanings of fifteen years of exile – the Sharif watched the sunlight flashing off the sails of scores of dhows cutting through the sea towards the ship. They were packed with cheering people from stem to stern: Bedu chieftains, merchant traders, minor dignitaries, court plaintiffs, distant relatives of the Hashemite family – all come to look over their new Emir and ingratiate themselves if possible. Hussain cannot but have suppressed a wry smile. His predecessor had been virtually the toy of the Ottoman Governor – the Vali – who controlled the cities, the army and the courts, and was responsible for budget, taxation, security and defence. In theory, the Emir had responsibility only for the unruly Bedu tribes, who answered to no one. In practice, though, the position was very different. The Turkish administration was regarded as an alien force by most of the indigenous Hejazis, five-sixths of whom were nomadic or semi-nomadic Bedu. That there were ways and means of manipulating the tribes, Hussain had learned almost as a child, for he had been brought up in the court of his uncle – the Emir – in daily contact with Bedu chiefs, and had been well schooled in the art of playing off tribes and factions, of navigating the endless maze of vituperation, vacillation and discussion which had filled the Emir’s days. The Turks controlled the cities, but between the cities lay the desert, and there the Bedu ruled. Only the Hejaz railway effectively connected the Ottoman garrisons with the outside world. Hussain had thought a great deal about rebellion as a youth: he had been a party to his uncle’s conspiracy to foment a revolt in the Assir – the province immediately to the south of the Hejaz – which had led directly to the Emir’s assassination. He was astute enough to be aware of the advantages of courting the British: the Hejaz depended on grain from British India, and the Royal Navy controlled the Red Sea. He admired the British for their straight-dealing and honesty – a refreshing contrast to the Sultan’s forked tongue – and his pro-British tendency was well known to the Porte. When Hussain made a visit to the British Embassy in Istanbul not long after his uncle’s murder, the Sultan had warned him sharply that he should ‘fish in healthier waters’. A secret report made at the same time by a government spy described him as ‘wilful and recalcitrant … with a dangerous capacity for independent thought’; it was just such a capacity which he intended to exercise now to restore the office of Emir of Mecca to its rightful glory.2 As he stepped upon his native soil on that day in December 1908, the Sharif’s dreams ran far beyond the borders of the Hejaz.
When the Prophet Mohammad died in AD 632, he left no male heirs and had made no provision for a ‘Successor’ or ‘Caliph’. For a moment the whole future of Islam hung in the balance. Mohammad had made it clear in his lifetime that he was ‘the Seal of the Prophets’ – the last in the line of God’s apostles which had begun with Father Adam and included Jesus Christ. For some of his followers the very idea of a ‘Successor’ was thus questionable. Finally, the Muslims had declared in favour of the Prophet’s oldest companion, Abu Bakr, initiating a period of rule by the so-called ‘Rightly Minded Caliphs’, all of whom had been early converts to Islam, none of them related closely to the Prophet. Westerners saw the Caliph as a kind of Muslim ‘Pope’ – a misconception which continued to be held up to the twentieth century. In fact, the Caliph was not responsible for religious doctrine, which was determined by the ‘ulama – a consensus of learned elders. His function was always that of defensor fidei – a role almost parallel to the one played in the Catholic Church by the Holy Roman Emperor in medieval times. In 661 the Caliphate had returned to the Prophet’s own line, and the centre of power had shifted from the Hejaz to Damascus in Syria, under the ‘Umayyads. Centuries later, the capital was moved again, this time to Baghdad, under the Abbasids, whose most famous scion was Hirun ar-Rashid. The Abbasids were much influenced by Persia, and had long since forsaken their Bedu levies in favour of the Mamluks, a caste of military slaves drawn mainly from the Caucasus. In doing so they had sown the seeds of their own downfall. Inevitably slaves had become masters, and the Caliph had been reduced to a mere puppet whose function was to lend credibility to the Mamluk regime. When the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim broke the Mamluk army in Syria in 1516, he found among the prisoners an unimpressive personage called Mutawakkil, who turned out to be the last in the line of Caliphs of direct descent from the Prophet. Though Selim the Grim never adopted the title Caliph, it was taken informally by his son, Sulayman the Magnificent, whose empire stretched from Baghdad to Budapest. The Caliphate had remained in Turkish hands ever since.
If the Caliphate featured in Hussain’s thoughts, though, it was subordinate to the furtherance of his own family, in particular his four sons, ‘Ali, ‘Abdallah, Feisal and Zayd. The last, born in Stamboul to the Sharif’s second wife, the Circassian beauty Adlah Hanum, was still a boy. The others were in their twenties, born in the Hejaz but brought up in Turkey as young patricians of the Empire. They had been well educated, spoke Turkish more fluently than Arabic, and knew French and some English. Sophisticated townsmen, to some extent cosmopolitan, multilingual, religious, they were very much Turkish in outlook, and though well versed in court intrigue, they knew little except by hearsay of the desert, the Bedu, black tents and camel-raids. Despite the driving ambitions of the Sharif, it is unlikely that as the young Sharaifs went ashore that December they imagined that two of them would end their lives as kings, or that the instrument of their elevation would be a young Oxford undergraduate who had yet to step on Arabian soil, and who had but weeks before stood on a hill at Les Baux thrilling at his first sight of the Mediterranean sea.
5. A Rather Remarkable Young Man
Oxford and Syria 1908-9
Lawrence returned from his tour of F
rance with his head full of the East, Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades. He had even photographed an Arabic inscription on the castle at Montreuil Bellayn – supposed to have been built by Richard – which he believed had never been translated. He had cycled 2,400 miles, lived on milk and fruit, and had come home ‘brown as a jap and as thin as paper’, enraptured by the idea for his thesis on military architecture: ‘Eureka!’ he wrote to Scroggs Beeson. ‘I’ve got it at last for a thesis: the transition from the square keep form: really, it is too great for words.’1
He had also had a vision of the real Middle Ages as opposed to the Morrisian romantic image of them. In Chartres cathedral, he had been overwhelmed by a sense of space and light – just as William Morris had been fifty years earlier. It was, he wrote, ‘a feeling I had never had before … as though I had found a path … as far as the gates of heaven and had caught a glimpse of the inside, the door being ajar’.2 Throwing off his Ruskinesque mannerism, Lawrence’s genuine ecstasy shines through in this, the most moving of all his pre-war letters, as for the first time he realized that not freedom – as Ruskin believed – but absolute faith had enabled medieval craftsmen to create a masterpiece like Chartres. The world of the medieval mason had been a narrow one, indeed, but he had had certainty: a certain connection with God, a certain knowledge of his place in the cosmos. It was not freedom which the industrial era had lost – for technology was ultimately a liberating force – but certainty. While the Renaissance, which Lawrence so much despised, had introduced rational enlightenment, it had also introduced doubt, which he would later call ‘our modern crown of thorns’: ‘Certainly Chartres is the sight of a lifetime,’ he concluded, ‘a place truly in which to worship God. The Middle Ages were truer that way than ourselves, in spite of their narrowness and hardness and ignorance of the truth as we complacently put it: but the truth doesn’t matter a straw, if men only believe what they say or are willing to show that they believe something.’3 It is another of the great paradoxes of Lawrence’s life that as a thinking man par excellence he was able to see that faith was everything, but was too rational to believe in anything himself. His condemnation of himself as ‘insanely rational’ was the perfect expression of this paradox. He would come to envy the Arabs, who humbled him by their simple faith. They were, he saw, a people who still inhabited the spiritual certainties of the Middle Ages: ‘a people of primary colours’, as he put it, ‘or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour’.4 By 1908 Lawrence had already begun to lose his faith in Christianity and, according to one story, had lost his job as a Sunday School teacher for reading ‘his boys’ a story by the disgraced Oscar Wilde. It was Sarah who destroyed his faith for him, just as she destroyed almost everything else in his life: ‘she begs us to love her … he wrote to Charlotte Shaw, ‘and points us to Christ, in whom, she says, is the only happiness and truth. Not that she finds happiness herself … she makes Arnie and me profoundly unhappy. We are so helpless; we feel that we would never give any other human being the pain she gives us, by her impossible demands … we cannot turn on love to her … like a water-tap; and Christ is not a symbol but a personality, spoiled by the accretions of such believers as herself.’5 Any vestige of faith he might have had at twenty was certainly gone by the time he wrote: ‘I haven’t any convictions or disbeliefs – except the one that there is no “is”.’6 His admission later that though he had ‘fenced his life with scaffolding of more or less speculative hypotheses’ one could ‘really know nothing’7 was entirely in keeping with the Lawrence who told Robert Graves: ‘I fall … into the nihilism which cannot find, in being, even a false God in which to believe.’8
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