With Lawrence in Arabia

by Lowell Thomas

During his seven years’ wandering through the desert, dressing like an Arab, living with Arabs in their tents, observing their customs, talking to them in their own dialects, riding on his camel across a broad expanse of lonely country unbroken except by the long purple line of the horizon, lying down at night under a silent dome of stars, Thomas Edward Lawrence drank the cup of Arabian wisdom and absorbed the spirit of the nomad peoples. No Westerner ever acquired greater influence over an Oriental people. He had united the scattered tribes of Arabia and induced chieftains who had been bitter enemies for generations to forget their feuds and fight side by side for the same cause. From remote parts of Arabia swarthy sons of the desert had swarmed to his standard as if he had been a new prophet. Largely by reason of his genius, Feisal and his followers had freed Arabia from Turkish oppression. Lawrence had contributed new life and soul to the movement for Arabian independence. The far-reaching results of his spectacular and successful campaign were destined to play an important part in the final adjustment of Near Eastern affairs, and half-way measures made no more appeal to Colonel Lawrence in time of peace than in time of war.

In another of his communications to the press, when he was trying to mold public opinion in favor of the Arabs, we catch a further glimpse of his views.

“The Arabs rebelled against the Turks,” said Lawrence in a letter to “The Times,” “not because the Turk Government was notably bad, but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters, to become British subjects or French citizens, but to win a show of their own.

“Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for freedom. Bulgars, Afghans, and Tahitians have it. Freedom is enjoyed when you are so well armed, or so turbulent, or inhabit a country so thorny that the expense of your neighbour’s occupying you is greater than the profit.”

But Colonel Lawrence has no illusions as to the capacity of the Arabs for organization and administration. He fully appreciates that these are not their strong points. But he has faith in them and believes they have a message to give the West.

“History is against the probability of the creation of an Arabic empire,” he once said to me in Arabia. “The Semitic mind does not lean toward system or organization. It is practically impossible to fuse the diverse elements among the Semites into a modern, closely knit state. On the other hand, the Semites have been more fertile in ideas than any other people. The Arabian movement has presented itself to me as the latest expression of the influence of the desert upon the settled peoples; the Semitic spirit has again exercised its influence over the Mediterranean basin. Emir Feisal is the last of the line of Semitic prophets. His campaign for Arabian independence, which made some five million converts among the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Near East, is by no means the least of those revelations by which the the Semites have so profoundly affected the Western world.

“The Semites are represented by very little art, architecture, philosophy. There have been few Jewish artists or philosophers. But we find an amazing fertility among the Semites in the creation of creeds and religions. Three of these creeds—Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism—have become great world movements. The broken fragments of countless other religions which have failed are found to-day on the fringes of the desert.

“The desert seems to produce only one idea, the universality of God. We who have gone out to discover the meaning of the desert have found only emptiness; nothing but sand, wind, soil, and empty space. The Bedouins leave behind them every extraneous comfort and go to live in the desert, in the very arms of starvation, that they may be free. The desert exacts a price for its secret. It makes the Bedouins entirely useless to their fellow-men. There has never been a Bedouin prophet. On the other hand, there has never been a Semitic prophet who has not, before preaching his message, gone into the desert and caught from the desert-dwellers a reflection of their belief. The idea of the absolute worthlessness of the present world is a pure desert conception at the root of every Semitic religion, which must be filtered through the screen of a non-nomad prophet before it can be accepted by settled peoples.”

With his exuberant imagination and his vista down the centuries, it was an easy matter for Lawrence to throw himself heart and soul into the Arabian movement. He remembered the time when the Arab Empire controlled most of the Mediterranean world, when its philosophers, poets, and scientists enriched the culture of Europe. “There are some people who have dreams at night and wake to find them all rot. There are others who have dreams in the daytime, and occasionally they come true,” he said to me one day in London. It is Lawrence’s conviction that the Arabs still have something to give the world, something that the world, particularly the materialistic Western world, sorely needs. It has been a fortunate thing for the Arabs that he had the genius to make his dreams come true.