Churchill and the Islamic World: Orientalism, Empire and Diplomacy in the Middle East

"I’ve chosen it because it relates to the point I was making earlier about some of the complexities of Churchill’s views. It is quite easy to say that Churchill was anti-Indian, but actually, you need to refine this. Churchill was in many respects violently anti-Hindu and was influenced by a key book by Katherine Mayo called Mother India that came out in the 1920s and perpetuated various fairly unpleasant stereotypes about Hindus. There was a degree to which Churchill was somewhat concerned about the fate of the so-called Untouchables. It wasn’t that he was purely unpleasant but, at the same time, he was more favourable towards Muslims in India. Now, of course, there’s a famous quotation from The River War , his book about the Sudan war in the 1890s, where he says something along the lines that ‘Islam is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia is in a dog.’ Again, he’s got this image of being totally anti-Islam. “He commented that the Hindu-Muslim divide was the bulwark of British rule in India; in other words, divide and rule” Warren’s book explores this in interesting ways. He shows the complexities of it. Everybody who attempted to govern the British Empire had to take account of the fact that the British Empire was—to put it one way—the world’s largest Muslim power. I remain a bit sceptical about how sincere any of Churchill’s efforts to cultivate Muslims were, and particularly his contacts among the princes. I think he was in theory willing to work with them. But he also made a comment in 1939 in the cabinet that the Hindu-Muslim divide was the bulwark of British rule in India; in other words, divide and rule. You can’t look at all these contacts with Muslims, see him being polite to them and conclude that he must have been a really nice, open-minded, progressive guy. There were deeper things going on. But I think it is an important story. It shows the complexity of the Islamic world, containing Sunni and Shia, and people of various different ethnicities. It’s a very large part of the world. One would be hard pushed to describe Churchill as pro-Arab. He made various unpleasant comments about them, particularly in relation to the Arabs of Palestine. At the same time, he was somebody who was prey to rather romantic visions of the Middle East. He was friendly with T.E. Lawrence, which was obviously crucial in that respect. As Warren shows in his book, Churchill was quite prone to dressing-up games, getting into Arab clothing and hanging about with people like Lawrence and Wilfred Blunt. There was an orientalist appeal that this had for him. I’d be a little bit cautious and I think that Warren would hold back from saying that Churchill was ‘progressive’ as such. I think he’s trying to show, rightly, a more complex picture. And I do think that—partly through Churchill’s own fault—he gets it in the neck for decisions that were taken in the Middle East in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Churchill gets the blame for having drawn these lines in the sand and created supposedly unsustainable states at the Cairo Conference of 1921. But there are a lot of things that have gone wrong in the Middle East over the past hundred years, only some of which can be blamed on Churchill. Part of the reason why he gets blamed so much is because he was such a showman that he wanted to associate himself with these decisions, whatever they were, even if he wasn’t really the driving force. Decisions had to be made. Churchill said, ‘Let’s have a conference in Cairo’. So, everybody made their way out to Cairo. This became a famous episode. But if he’d just let the experts get on with it and sign a few memos, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. He’s paid the price for something which he himself wanted to do. He wanted to be a celebrity politician. He wanted to get the credit for decisions. In some ways that’s been positive for his reputation and in some ways it’s been negative. Some people believe he’s responsible for every good thing that happened and single-handedly responsible for everything that happened in 1940; other people turn that around and, going to extremes, portray him as the root of all evil. The reality is that his role in decision-making, whether it was on the Bengal famine or in the Middle East, was sometimes rather less than is popularly suggested."