Lawrence’s conversion to the quintessentially conservative dogma that Arab society and customs should remain inviolate from external influences was emotional rather than intellectual. During the first digging season at Karkamis, he developed close ties with Selim Ahmed, an Arab boy of about fourteen or fifteen, whom he called by his nickname ‘Dahoum’ or the dark one. The name was a local joke since Dahoum was rather light-skinned and Lawrence thought he might have had a dash of Armenian blood. He first met Dahoum when he was employed carrying water to the labourers, but once his aptitude was apparent he graduated to houseboy. By June 1911, when Lawrence set off for Urfa, Dahoum had become his servant. He attended Lawrence when he took a holiday on the coast in the summer of 1912 (he was ‘cheaper than local labour’), was with him when he was in Beirut arranging the shipment to England of Karkamis finds in January 1913. Then, Lawrence got a lift to Alexandretta on board the cruiser Duke of Edinburgh, whose officers were so impressed by Dahoum’s qualities that they ‘made him offers to come with them permanently’. Perhaps as a reward for his loyalty and to satisfy his curiosity, Lawrence took Dahoum together with Haroun, the site foreman, to England in the summer of 1913. Dahoum was also Lawrence’s servant during part of the Sinai expedition in 1914.
A good-looking, intellectually curious but, by reason of his upbringing, naive young Arab, Dahoum was to Lawrence as a squire was to a knight. The boy had first come to Lawrence’s attention because, unlike the other villagers, he could read and write a little and was keen to go to school in Aleppo. The boy had a natural wit and ingenuousness which appealed to Lawrence. He also presented his patron with a dilemma. The fulfilment of Dahoum’s ambitions for self-improvement would mean the corruption of his endearing innocence which Lawrence found so refreshing. Dahoum’s education would have to be carefully controlled, even censored. In July 1911, Lawrence asked Mrs Rieder for some books for Dahoum, but he insisted that ‘Nothing with a taste of Frangi [that is, French influence] was to enter Jerablus by my means.’ Not long after, Lawrence played with setting up his own school in the village and for a time was running classes for Arab youths in multiplication tables, local history and geography. Dahoum was also given instruction in photography.
Dahoum’s attentions were very flattering. Although Woolley considered that the boy’s gifts were limited, Lawrence could record some intellectual progress. Dahoum ‘is beginning to use his reason as well as his instinct’, Lawrence told his parents in July 1911. Of course, Lawrence did not dissent from the common view expressed by another traveller in the region that ‘All Orientals are children, and the average native of Anatolia and Kurdistan is not only a child, but one with very limited intellectual capacity.’ Once, as part of a trick to deter a Turkish gendarme from scrounging brandy under guise of sickness, Lawrence had forced Dahoum and another boy to drink water aerated by aperient Seidlitz powder. The fizziness terrified Dahoum, who went about saying, ‘I drank some of that sorcery, it is very dangerous, since by it men are turned suddenly into the forms of animals.’ Lawrence was amused, as he was by Dahoum’s wonderment at the gadgetry on the British man-of-war and the London Underground, on which he travelled during his holiday in England. His and his master’s reactions were a reminder of the vast gulf of experience and understanding which separated them.16
Yet Lawrence could find much in common with him. He was deeply grateful to him for opening his mind to the peerless solitude of the desert. The memory of the moment was recalled in the Seven Pillars:
But at last Dahoum drew me: ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all,’ and we went to the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past.
This revelation came to a man already converted to a belief that the ideal environment was silent and empty and that absolute simplicity was the highest virtue.
Not only could Dahoum teach Lawrence, they could share in boyish amusements. They exchanged clothes and, for the first time, Lawrence began to dress in Arab costume. Once, during 1912 when the archaeologists’ house was being built, Lawrence persuaded Dahoum to pose naked for him for a sculpture which was eventually set on the roof. The villagers were scandalised; any representation of the human form was forbidden to Muslim artists and the Quran condemned homosexuality. There was a whiff of the Uranian about the companions and Woolley, in his memoir of Lawrence, felt obliged to say that he was in ‘no sense a pervert’. Woolley added that ‘He liked to shock,’ which is in all likelihood the most accurate explanation of Lawrence’s careless disregard of local prejudices.
Lawrence and Dahoum also shared a frightening adventure. The story was told by Lawrence to Graves and Liddell Hart, who were given no dates. Alerted by reports that a large, possibly Hittite carving had been unearthed in a region north of Birecik, Lawrence set off to investigate, accompanied by Dahoum. The pair were arrested at Halfati as suspected draft dodgers and thrown into a noisome dungeon from which they escaped the next morning by means of a bribe. In one version, Lawrence was manhandled, possibly whipped, but not robbed since he had cash on him for a douceur.17
During October 1912, Turkish police and soldiers were sweeping the country around Aleppo for reluctant reservists and Woolley and Lawrence had to use their letters of protection to get immunity for their labourers. The countryside was scoured again in September 1913. If Lawrence had been unlucky enough to get ensnared in one of these nets, he never mentioned his mishap to his family, Woolley or the British Consulate. This reticence seems strange considering his zeal in making full use of all the official privileges to which he was entitled. Stranger still was his utter folly, since he went off unarmed and in native dress into a region where brigandage was commonplace. Even if Lawrence followed a reckless impulse, it is hard to believe that Turkish officials mistook him for a native, even a light-skinned Circassian. According to an American who met him in 1914 he was ‘a clean–cut blonde with peaches and cream complexion which the dry heat of the Euphrates Valley seemed powerless to spoil’. Much later and in the context of the desert war, Lawrence felt sure that ‘No easterner could have taken me for an Arab, for a moment,’ and in September 1912 he had admitted that he was still a long way from fluency in Arabic. As in earlier tales of hairbreadth escapes, it is impossible to distinguish invention from reality. Nor were there any bounds to his capacity for expanding a tale. In September 1918, he pointed out to Private Rolls a cellar in the ruined castle at el Azraq (far to the south of Karkamis) and said, ‘Once I was kept prisoner in that dungeon for months,’ and showed him scratchings on the wall which represented his efforts to break free.18
Whether or not Lawrence shared the perils of imprisonment and rough usage with Dahoum, his passion for the Arab boy had far-reaching consequences. The intensity of Lawrence’s feelings and their eventual expression in action were reflected in the dedicatory poem to the Seven Pillars, ‘To S[elim]. A[hmed].’:
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven–pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.
This emotion was deeply felt and sincere. When, in 1919, George Kidston, a professional diplomat, asked Lawrence to explain why he had become so closely involved in the Arab national movement, he was given four reasons. The first was personal, ‘I liked a particular Arab very much, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present.’19
Lawrence’s answer begs many questions. Leaving aside his assessment of his motives during the war, what were the ingredients of his ‘freedom’ and why did he think an unsophisticated Arab youth would want it? Between 1911 and 1914 Lawrence had developed a powerful attachment to Dahoum and may have been conscious of a wish to do something for the Arabs, an ambition which at the time would have seemed beyond fulfilment. Dahoum embodied what Lawrence liked b
est about the Arabs and illustrated their present predicament. He was the heir to values and traditions which Lawrence believed should be preserved from outside interference. He cherished ambitions of self-improvement which, by their very nature, involved opening his mind to ideas from the West, and these, Lawrence thought, were ultimately destructive. Scepticism, which lay at the heart of so much Western thinking, had no place in Dahoum’s world. The Arabs ‘were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns’, he later wrote in the Seven Pillars.
Emancipation of the Arab mind was, for Lawrence, dangerous. Its consequence would be the extension of European ideologies and the uprooting of tradition. Yet, to judge from what he had to say on the matter, Lawrence found the Arabs’ helplessness in the face of sheiks, landlords, officials, policemen and moneylenders repugnant. He hoped to achieve a well–nigh impossible balancing act, liberating the Arabs from their everyday tyrannies but preserving the integrity of their culture. That one was perhaps a part of the other did not strike him. Furthermore, Lawrence never cared to ask Dahoum or any other Arab whether they wanted his or any other form of deliverance. There seemed no point, for, as he remarked in the Seven Pillars, ‘They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation.’
Beyond Lawrence’s Arcadia at Karkamis were small groups of Arabs who were stumbling towards national self-realisation. They largely belonged to that Western–educated class which Lawrence despised, and drew on European liberal philosophers for some of their ideals. Like him, many were apprehensive about European political and economic imperialism, which they believed could only be kept at arm’s length as long as the Arabs stayed under Ottoman rule.
Arab nationalists had been exultant at the news of the Young Turk coup in 1908 and threw themselves wholeheartedly into the subsequent constitutional experiment. When the first Ottoman parliament assembled at Constantinople in December 1908, 72 of its 260 members were Arabs. In the years which followed, Arab cultural and political societies sprang up in Constantinople, Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad and Basra, drawing members from the professional classes. The largest, al Fatat, looked on Europe as a source of ideas, but stayed firm to the principle that the best interests of Arabs would be served by a partnership with the Turks. The Jammiyyat al Nahda al Arabiyya (Arab Renaissance Society) founded in 1907 concurred, but saw the creation of an educated, enlightened middle class as the Arabs’ most pressing need. This elite would be the dynamic force which would regenerate their people from above.
Other Arabs, who knew little of and cared less for Western political thought, were taking tentative steps towards independence. Since 1902, Ibn Saud of Riyadh had been making approaches to the Indian government which he hoped would back him as he established himself as a semi–independent ruler in central Arabia. Early in 1914, Abdullah, one of the sons of Hussain, the Sharif of Mecca, had called on Lord Kitchener in Cairo. He was seeking more than British patronage for he directly requested machine-guns which, the British rightly guessed, were intended for use in tribal wars and against Turkish garrisons in western Arabia.20 He was following the example set by el Idrissi, the Yemeni rebel, who had courted the Italians in 1912 and received arms and naval assistance in his campaign against the Turks.21 These were straws in the wind, but together they indicated the willingness of traditionalist Arab rulers to make secret deals with the imperial powers and to beg for material help with which to defy their overlord, the Sultan.
Like the Kurdish chieftains whom Lawrence knew in Syria, these Arab rulers were nervous about the policies of the government in Constantinople. A resurgent and confident Ottoman government would, in time, strip them of their feudal powers and local authority. Moreover, as deeply conservative Muslims, they were offended by the secular principles which the Young Turks were embracing.
Between 1911 and 1914 the government inaugurated by the Young Turk revolution drifted into dictatorship. The democratic ideal first proclaimed in 1908 failed to survive the buffets of external war and the pressures of minority nationalism. Control of the empire passed into the hands of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). It comprised the more radical Young Turks and was dominated by such ‘new men’ as Mehmed Talaat Bey, a former postal clerk, and the pro–German Enver Pasha, a junior officer who had become Minister of War. They were faced with an immediate need to preserve Ottoman unity and to instil a sense of imperial pride in the Sultan’s subjects. Their fumbling approach and contradictory policies succeeded in making matters worse. Radicals, Muslim conservatives and religious and ethnic minorities were even more apprehensive and confused than before.
Minority nationalism was countered by the encouragement of purely Turkish nationalism. Genghis Khan was actively promoted as a Turanian [i.e. Turkish] hero and the teaching of the Turkish language was enforced in schools throughout the empire. In 1916 Turkish became the official language for all business transactions. This upsurge in aggressive Turanian nationalism dismayed educated Arabs who, with good reason, feared that their own, embryonic national identity would be stifled. Conservatives were indignant at plans to translate the Quran into Turkish even though, as Muslims believed, Allah had spoken to Muhammad in Arabic. The orthodox interpreted Turkish defeats in Libya and the Balkans as indications of Allah’s displeasure with their impiety. Untroubled, the CUP pressed on with the imposition of secular legal codes throughout the empire (civil marriage was instituted in 1917) in place of the traditional Muslim sharia.22
While with one hand the CUP broadcast Turanian propaganda and insisted on secularisation, with the other it promoted Islamic unity. Whatever their political differences, Turks and Arabs were brothers in the faith and their secular ruler, the Sultan Medmed V, was also Caliph, the spiritual head of Islam and successor to the Prophet. The CUP appreciated that religion was still a powerful cement which could bind together the two largest racial groups in the empire. At its Salonika Conference in 1911, the CUP resolved to harness and exploit Pan-Islamic forces not only within the empire but beyond. Muslims under Russian rule in the Caucasus and Central Asia and under British rule in India were publicly reminded that the last-remaining Islamic power, the Ottoman empire, was their natural protector. The message was understood by Arabs. Severed from Turkey, they would fall prey to France, Britain and Russia, the acquisitive Christian imperial powers which over the past hundred years had overrun North Africa, Egypt, the Sudan, Central Asia, and northern India. ‘The Arab Umma [nation] does not want to separate itself from the Ottoman empire,’ insisted Iskaner Amman, al Fatat’s Vice-President. Other nationalists concurred. If the Turks would make concessions and allow them a fair share in the government, the loyalty of the Arab people was assured.23
Lawrence would review these developments from a post-war perspective. In the Seven Pillars he wrote dismissively of the educated Arab elites of Syria and the Lebanon who were ‘full of Herbert Spencer and Alexander Hamilton’ and wanted ‘freedom to come by entreaty, not by sacrifice’. Since some were already, by 1914, making clandestine approaches to the French, his contempt is understandable. Likewise his irritation with those Arabs who throughout the war were unwilling to sever ties with the Ottoman empire. Their caution and backsliding contrasted with the determination and courage of Lawrence’s Arabs, the armies of the ultra-conservative Sharif Hussain, who was prepared to shed his allegiance to the Sultan and ally himself with Britain and France.
For the Turks, Lawrence had nothing but vilification. Three years in Syria had left him convinced that what he called the ‘blight’ of the Turkish government had to be removed from the province. He had, however, in 1913 been prepared to be employed by the Turkish government as an excavator at Rakka. Four years of war transformed him into an implacable hater of Turks. An intemperate and bitter hatred of the Turks runs through the Seven Pillars which is unequalled in any other account of the war on this front. While he could have found abundant support for his views from the well-known evidence of the Armenian massacres, Lawr
ence chose instead to base his vituperation on a bogus assertion that half the Turkish army was infected with venereal diseases transmitted by sodomy.
There is little to support such a distasteful contention. Venereal infection increased in Turkey as it did in other countries whose moral codes were upset by the war. The Ottoman army’s medical system had all but collapsed by 1917 and records are therefore incomplete. Those available suggest that out of a total of 446,000 recorded Turkish casualties, 27,000 died as a result of venereal infection. British medical records, drawn from examinations of Turkish prisoners taken during the 1917 and 1918 campaigns in Palestine, recorded an epidemic of pellagra and large amounts of malaria, dysentery and influenza. Prisoners taken on the Iraq front suffered from cholera and relapsing fever. All these maladies were the obvious consequence of dietary deficiencies and lack of basic medicines. Turkish logistics, not Turkish morals, had fallen apart.24
The passion with which Lawrence blackguarded the Turks after the war probably owed little to his experience of them before. He would have got to know very few and most whom he encountered would have been from the official classes. Such men, another traveller in Syria observed, tended to treat the English as equals, which would not have recommended them to Lawrence. Furthermore Lawrence’s attachment to what he regarded as the Arab cause made him look on the Turks as an alien, occupying power in Syria.
Three years in that country, admittedly as a foreigner hedged by official privileges which placed him above the law, taught Lawrence much. His experiences in Karkamis led him to believe that he possessed a facility to command the affections of the ordinary Arabs. In England, he had established no close personal ties with anyone outside his family, but in Syria he had become attached to an Arab boy who reciprocated his devotion. Hogarth had guided Lawrence towards the Middle East in order that he could learn to become an archaeologist. He may also have been aware that Lawrence, whose birth and unconventional behaviour made it hard for him to fit into English society, might find himself more at home in a world whose values were different. Certainly Syria gave him an opportunity to behave flamboyantly; and paradoxically his extravagance, which had been frowned on in England, delighted the Arabs.
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