Arabian Sands

"This is an older book and an unusual choice. I contracted malaria when I was in Yemen doing fieldwork. Between bouts of feverish hallucination, I read this book. It’s the authority on the Arabian Desert. He ventures into The Empty Quarter, one of the great deserts of the world. Arabia was an incredibly harsh place for human beings to live. Thesiger shows how Arabs, especially nomadic Arabs, were in tune with this ecology. They developed a culture that enabled them to survive. He shows the humanity of the Bedouin, otherwise thought to be savages. This concept of survival affords us an understanding of modern Arabia. The Yemeni tribes and the ostentatious wealth of the Gulf countries reflect a dramatic and sometimes obscene form of consumption. This wealth is very recent. The underlying culture in Arabia is one rooted in poverty and the memory of this tough ecology. Arabian culture is steeped in a relationship to the pre-modern ecology of the peninsula. Cars, oil wells and modernity severed this relationship. The rupture is more dramatic than anywhere in the world. This explains a number of pathologies that are on display. It all happened so quickly. Thesiger was writing in the late 1940s and 50s. I met him several times at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was quite disappointed with modern Arabs because of this lost connection with the ecology, their camels and their past. His book is an important reminder of what Arabia was like until relatively recently."

"This was written in the 1950s after Thesiger returned from five years of Arabian travel. He was one of the few non-indigenous people to cross “the Empty Quarter”, the desert that occupies a huge part of what is now Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It’s almost a million square kilometres of billowing amber dunes – and more terrifying than an ocean. Usually, people travelled around the peninsula by sea, hugging the coast to get from town to town. A group travelling from Qatar to Mecca would make their way around the southern part of the peninsula. But there were ways of crossing it and, after World War II, Thesiger was offered a role mapping out the patters of locusts travelling across the desert. He jumped at the chance and joined the Rashid, a Bedu tribe, who lived in the old way, unsullied by the modernity that would soon accompany the arrival of oil prospectors. Thesiger relished the intimacy of the desert brotherhood. His passion for their simple way of life grew ever greater as he spent time with them. They cared for each other, knowing their lives depended upon it. And it had to be so; if one is cast out in the wilderness like that, it isn’t possible to survive alone. The camaraderie he describes is exclusively male; but he appreciated the regimen of the desert’s “barbaric splendour”. He valued the austerity of the lifestyle and the keen hardness of the people he declared most noble, pure in thought and deed. In a later addition, after a return visit in the mid-70s, Thesiger writes of his horror at the changes. He found the people lazy and indulgent, their finest qualities replaced by cars and oil. A final visit in the 1990s brought acceptance – and a retraction of this bitter earlier response to progress. He could not expect other people to freeze themselves in time – why should they prefer a flea-ridden goat-hair tent to a house with modern amenities?"