There was a moment of anxious concern—would they go, or would they respond as they did in Czechoslovakia and Hungary—move in and take over? The Soviets decided not to risk it and went peacefully. The way was open for a radical change in Egyptian policy.
Passing as a Turk in Algeria
I got to know a Turkish diplomat when he was vice-consul in London and I was assistant lecturer at the university. We were about the same age with similar problems such as career inexperience and young children. We achieved an immediate understanding and developed a friendship which lasted for the rest of his life. At one stage, while I was still in London, I received a letter from him saying that he was now the ambassador in Algiers and would like me to come for a visit and stay with him as his houseguest.
The result was a fascinating visit. I was naturally there when he had guests and the guests usually got the message to include me when they reciprocated. By now, my Turkish had improved. I normally spoke Turkish with him and the embassy staff and I had the impression that I was regarded by the Algerians as just another Turkish official. This meant that people felt free to express opinions and attitudes as they would not have done in the presence of a Western European. It was most enlightening. One example was a conversation I had about the time of the 1967 war. My neighbor at a dinner party noted that in most Arab capitals they had to bring troops in to protect the British and American embassies but Algeria had to protect the Egyptian Embassy. I asked why. He then explained that after their long and bitter struggle for independence, when Algeria had established an independent state, a series of missions, both civil and military, had been sent by the Egyptian government. Their members came with an air of lordly superiority and tried to tell their hosts how to run things. They absolutely infuriated the Algerians—the Egyptians with their undistinguished military record trying to teach the Algerians, who had just won a striking victory over the French. The level of anger was quite remarkable. I was also told that they supported the Palestinian cause because it was a Third World cause against imperialism, not for any other reason. I didn’t quite know what to make of that.
At an early stage in my visit I did what I always do when visiting a country for the first time: explore the bookshops to see what is being published and what people are reading. To my surprise, I found that the bookshops had only French books, none in Arabic. I searched and searched in shop after shop and could find none. Eventually I asked a shopkeeper why he had no Arabic books and he replied with a dismissive wave of the hand, “If you want Arabic books, go to the Kasbah. You’ll find them there.” I went to the Kasbah, the old citadel and covered markets, and I did find bookshops and they did have Arabic books. The problem was that the only Arabic books they had were textbooks.
Sometime later, at a dinner party in Algiers, I found myself sitting next to a librarian. I told him about my unsuccessful attempts to find Arabic books and I asked him why this was. He explained, “When the French were here, we had only French books, no Arabic books and no Arabic culture. When we became independent, we tried to import Arabic books, and a mission came from Egypt bringing books and trying to initiate us into modern Arabic literature and culture. We found it deeply disappointing; after all, under the French, we had become accustomed to a certain cultural and intellectual level.”
Turkey
There was in the sixties, and for all I know still may be, a full treaty regulating cultural relations between England and Turkey. Under the terms of this treaty, a six-person commission, three British, three Turkish, met in alternate years in London and Ankara. For a long time the three British members consisted of the representative of the British Council in Ankara, the head of the relevant government department in London, and me. The three Turkish members consisted of the member of the Foreign Ministry concerned with cultural relations, the member of the Ministry of Education concerned with foreign relations, and the professor of English at Ankara University. The four officials were constantly changing; hardly ever were the same ones at two consecutive meetings. The two professors, as is the way of professors, went on forever.
I particularly cherish the memory of one meeting. Meetings were normally conducted in English, but on this occasion one of the two Turkish officials didn’t know any English, so we had to use interpreters. We could have used French, because he knew French, but that was against the rules. We were concerned with cultural relations between England and Turkey, so if we couldn’t use English, we had to use interpreters. So we had an interpreter who translated what they said in Turkish into English for us and they had an interpreter who translated what we said in English into Turkish for them. As I understood Turkish fairly well, I found this a very interesting experience, listening to what happens to something in translation.
At that time we were giving a number of state-funded, competitive, scholarships to Turkish students to study at British universities. The leader of the Turkish delegation made an eloquent speech in which he was effusive in saying how much he and his country appreciated our making these scholarships available. He elaborated on that for quite a while and went on to say that there were always many more candidates than places and it would greatly help matters if Her Majesty’s government could see a way to increase the number of scholarship places made available to Turkish students.
This was all carefully translated into English by our translator and I could say, accurately translated. The leader of our delegation made an equally eloquent reply, saying that we were delighted to hear that these scholarships were appreciated and were valuable, and we were sure that they were of enormous importance in developing the cultural relations between our two countries. We were particularly touched by their feeling that there was a need to increase the number, and although at the present time, for various budgetary reasons, we couldn’t make any immediate promises, we would do our best to increase the number in future years. To render all of this, the Turkish translator simply used the one-word negative, “Yok.”
It was of course a perfectly accurate translation.
Foreign Students and Their Embassies
There are many satisfactions in being a scholar. The most obvious one is that you can earn a living by doing what you would want to do anyway. For the scholar, scholarship is not only a profession and a livelihood; it is a commitment, one might even say a passion. That is probably why many retired scholars live so long after retirement—unlike most other professions, there’s very little change in your way of life. You have the possibility of working independently and following your own inclinations and beliefs. You also have the pleasure of having not just students but, shall we say, disciples. One of the great satisfactions of my profession is watching the success of former students becoming themselves independent scholars and teachers and researchers of renown. I have been a “proud papa” many times over.
Though by now many of them are retired, I have had former students teaching in Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Basra, Riyad, Tehran, Tabriz and several places in Pakistan. Students came of their own free will and they enjoyed complete freedom of research and expression. Even when the colonial presence was still powerful we had students coming from those areas to do research denouncing the evils of British imperialism. And they did so with British scholarships and got British Ph.D.’s for this. It’s what you might call democratic imperialism.
A high percentage of the undergraduate students and the overwhelming majority of the graduate students went into teaching as a career. In the course of time I developed a network of former students all over the Middle East. This provided a useful system of communication. As far as possible, I remained in contact with my former students and used to see them occasionally when I visited their countries.
Their situation generally was very bad. Apart from the wealthy oil states, which had few academic institutions, university teachers were underpaid and overworked. Their teaching load was vastly in excess of anything that would be normal or even acceptable in Western
countries. Their salaries were barely enough to keep them and their families for the first ten days of the month. This meant that they had to seek other ways of earning money, and to find time to do so. The result was catastrophic. Time and time again I was devastated when talented and promising students who produced excellent theses went home and never published anything of significance again. Some of them managed to publish their theses, as submitted or revised; many did not even find time for that. I can only describe this waste of talent as tragic.
Of the Middle Eastern officials in London with whom I had to deal it was, generally speaking, the Egyptian officials who were the most concerned and the most sympathetic. They were personally acquainted with their students, aware of their problems, and eager to help in whatever way they could. Some of the others seemed to have regarded students as a nuisance. True, they were responsible for them, more particularly for those, the majority at that time, who held government scholarships and were therefore on the embassy payroll. Many of the students sent to England for higher education were paid by their governments and were looked after by the embassies. The majority of these embassies had an educational attaché whose sole task was to look after the students. Most were fairly decent people with whom one could get on. But not all.
If I had a problem with an Egyptian student I could telephone the educational attaché in the Egyptian Embassy. He would know immediately who the student was, what his problems were and we could have a sensible discussion on how to help the student.
In my entire time at SOAS, I could never do that with the Iraqi Embassy. First of all, they didn’t know their students. They were just files, and they would have to send for the file. And second, I would never dare to suggest that there was the slightest difficulty with a student, because their immediate remedy for all problems was to send him back to Baghdad. They had no compassion at all and treated the students like dirt. They were government students, and were entitled to government allowances when they needed to make a trip or needed to get a manuscript copied. They always insisted on a certificate from me that this was for what they needed the money. I once expostulated to the educational attaché that these were scholars and gentlemen, not petty criminals who had to be watched in this way. It didn’t have the slightest effect.
There was a problem once with a transfer of registration. All our higher-degree students were registered in the first instance for a master’s degree. Nobody could be registered directly for a Ph.D. Depending on their rate of progress they were either examined for an M.A. or allowed to bypass the M.A. and go straight on to a Ph.D. But this took time. There had to be written work and reports, and the transfer had to be approved by various committees.
I remember one extremely good Iraqi student whose transfer, because of some administrative delay in the university which was not his fault, missed the last meeting of the academic year and nothing could be done until the beginning of the new academic year in October. I had a call from the Iraqi Embassy telling me that they had decided to discontinue his scholarship. I asked why. They said because he had not been transferred to Ph.D. registration. They sent him to London for a Ph.D., and if he was not going to get a Ph.D. they had no interest in keeping him there. I said, but he is, and explained the situation to them. They said that was not their affair and as he’d not been transferred they would send him home. We argued and argued, but they were absolutely adamant. I pointed out that this was in no way the student’s fault. This was May, and nothing could be done until October. Finally, they recanted to a limited extent and said, “We won’t send him back, but we’ll discontinue his fellowship.” I said, “You mean you’ll just leave him stranded, without any funds?” “That’s right.” I said, “I don’t think you’ll get good results from students by holding a pistol to their heads.” He said, “I resent that expression.” “Good, I’ll write you a letter containing it,” which I did. In the end, they didn’t send him back but they did cut off his scholarship. I found some money in the university’s coffers to keep him for a few months and his fellow students got together and donated funds from their pittances to help him until October. Actually, more than October, because though in October his registration was changed it took a few weeks to get his fellowship restored.
It’s not just that the embassies sent them back, but when they sent them back they held the students liable for all the money that had been spent on them so far. They were sold into a sort of slavery. They and their families were held responsible. This particular student had already been in London for two years, and it had cost the Iraqi government a fair amount. If he had been sent back at that stage, he would have been liable for all the money they had spent on him, fares, fellowship, etc. Everything was refundable. It was very difficult, and often put the school administration in a difficult position. We never dared to fail an Iraqi student in any examination, however trivial, because if we did they were sent back and sold into bondage. We had one Iraqi student who committed suicide. He was not neurotic; he was perfectly normal and a good student, but he failed an examination. It happens. When I say failed an examination what I mean is he didn’t reach the required level. He didn’t do too badly, but he didn’t reach the level needed and was informed by the embassy that his scholarship was terminated. He was to return to Iraq immediately and repay everything. The poor devil shot himself.
Not all my students chose an academic career when they returned home. Some chose government, through either politics or the civil service. But these were definitely a minority. One Palestinian deserves special mention. Musa Abdullah al-Husseini was a member of the famous Husseini family of Jerusalem and, to the best of my recollection, a nephew of the notorious Grand Mufti. He was a member of my first graduating class and received his B.A. with honors in Middle Eastern history in 1940. After graduation he went to neutral Spain allegedly for a holiday before returning to Jerusalem. In fact he proceeded from Spain to Germany where he joined his uncle the Mufti and spent the rest of the war in Germany. There he enrolled in a German university and pursued a doctorate. He was therefore in the rather remarkable position of having an English B.A. dated 1940 and a German Ph.D. dated 1943 or 1944. After the war he came to see me in London. He told me of how he had traveled to Spain, then to Germany, and how he had been arrested by the British after the defeat of the Third Reich and deported to the Seychelles Islands, where there was an internment camp for people like him. He told me that he had a very pleasant and relaxing holiday there, playing tennis and riding horseback for much of the time. Eventually he was released and went back to Jerusalem where he opened a travel bureau in the Old City, then part of the Jordanian kingdom. It was from there that he came to see me for an exchange of recollections of our very different war experiences.
He returned to Jerusalem, and I did not hear about him again until the time of the murder of King Abdullah of Jordan in Jerusalem in 1951. To my utter astonishment, I learned that Musa Abdullah al-Husseini had been arrested and charged with the murder of the King. He had confessed to the crime and had been executed.
A Memorable Interview
One of the jobs we are sometimes required to do in the academic world is interview students who are asking to be accepted for a place at the university. In London I was, for a while, on the committee to interview applicants for undergraduate admission. One of the applicants was a young lady from a school on the Welsh border who said that she wanted to learn Chinese in order to study Chinese history, a rather surprising request coming from that quarter. We asked her why and she said that as far back as she could remember she had been fascinated by China. She had read every book she could lay her hands on about China; she had studied every aspect she could of Chinese history and culture, and now that she was going to university, her dearest wish was to learn Chinese so that she could undertake the serious study of Chinese history.
My colleagues who knew something about Chinese and Chinese history asked her appropriate questions. I know nothing about Chinese or Chinese history and whe
n it was my turn, I asked a sort of routine historian’s question. “You say you are interested in Chinese history. Are you mainly interested in ancient, medieval or modern history?”—using the normal classification of Western historians. The young lady hesitated for a perceptible interval and then she said, “Sir, if you could explain to me what these words mean in relation to Chinese history, I will try to answer your question.”
This was a remarkably intelligent and, considering the circumstances, a courageous answer. We accepted her but unfortunately she didn’t come, presumably because she had a better offer elsewhere—or possibly because she didn’t want to go to a school where professors ask such stupid questions. But her answer has remained with me ever since and even helped me to reassess my own approach, not to Chinese history, but to Islamic history where the same considerations might apply.
Leaving London
During my last two years in England, before I left for the United States in 1974, my life was very difficult, perhaps “tormented” would not be too strong a word. My dissolving marriage affected me in every aspect of my daily life. I was still able to discharge my professional duties (teaching courses for undergraduates and supervising dissertations) but I could not muster the energy or the will to undertake any new historical research projects. Both the research and the writing were beyond my capacity at that time.
Salvation came in the form of a letter from an American publisher, Harper & Row, asking me if I would be willing to edit a volume on the history of the medieval Middle East, consisting of excerpts from original sources in English translation. This seemed like just the right thing for me to be doing at that time, and I readily agreed. Reading and editing seemed about as much as I could do, in that state of mind.
The idea was that my contribution, like the others in the series, would consist of excerpts from already published translations, of which a considerable quantity was available in English. There was, my publisher pointed out, a real need for such a book, to give students of history something of the flavor of the original sources. And, as the publisher also pointed out, this was merely a scissors and paste job which could be quickly and easily completed. I began my work with these two assumptions.
Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian Page 17
