Arabian Sands: Revised Edition

A truly magnificent book, such an easy pleasure to read in comparison to Doughty's great but exhausting work, Travels in Arabia Deserta. The author is a man in the fine tradition of T.E. Lawrence, a man who resigned from the British Political Service in the Sudan to rejoin the service as a contract officer not eligible for pension on the understanding that he would only be asked to serve in the wilderness. He served in the S.A.S. in the Western Desert, but makes only one oblique mention of that mission in this text. See Thesiger's autobiography "The Life of My Choice" for the broader picture of this unique life. Wilfred Thesiger writes, "I went there with a belief in my own racial superiority, but in their tents I felt like an uncouth, inarticulate barbarian, an intruder from a shoddy and materialistic world." I wonder how many men among us today would agree with Thesiger's deep belief that "even today there are experiences that do not need to be justified in terms of material profit." One passage, if even remotely true, bodes ill for our crusade to spread democracy. "Arabs rule, but do not administer. Their government is intensely individualistic, and is successful or unsuccessful according to the degree of fear and respect which the ruler commands ... Focused on an individual life, their government is impermanent and liable to end in chaos at any moment ... To these tribesmen security can be bought too dearly by loss of individual freedom ... Here the evil that comes with sudden change far outweighs the good." Wilfred Thesiger closes by writing that leaving the remote Bedu world with which he was obsessed, The Empty Quarter, was to him an exile. It was in the stimulating harshness of an empty land that he found satisfaction. When he began to lose courage in an "intolerable" state of thirst, hunger, and fear for his life, he asked himself, "Is there really anywhere else I would rather be?" I have met one solitary Beduwi in my life, a man imprisoned, caught up in a great tragedy. I regret that I had not read Arabian Sands before that meeting. Not that I could have helped, but I would have understood that in his eyes I was a more pitiful creature than he, "for he was Bedu and Muslim, and I was neither." I highly recommend "Fire and Sword in the Sudan" to anyone interested in anything Wilfred Thesiger has written. I sought out that memoir, written by an officer held captive in Sudan for 12 years, because of the new world which "Arabian Sands" opened to me.

Having traversed the Antarctic with Shackleton, Scott, and Mawson, the Himalayas with Maurice Herzog and others, and the high seas on the doomed whaling ship, Essex, I can say that for non-fiction adventure, nothing beats Thesiger in the deserts of Arabia, before they were tamed by oil money.Each page is gripping, whether Thesiger describes the desert environment itself, his own adventures, or the Bedu camel herders with whom he lives and travels. This last theme is the most important in the book, and Thesiger's 1940s travels uncover the ways and even the mind of these most Arab of Arabs as well as anyone can. Thesiger understands and praises the Bedu's better aspects, but is not blinded to their faults. He points out the differences among the ways, thought and even religious practices and tolerance of the desert tribes, and their even greater differences with Arab townsfolk.Read it to understand the places we are sending our troops, or read it to be taken away completely from whatever troubles your urban or susburban psyche, but read Arabian Sands.

The deserts of Arabia cover more than a million square miles. The southern desert occupies nearly half of the total area. It stretches nine hundred miles from the frontier of the Yemen to the foothills of Oman and five hundred miles from the southern coast of Arabia to the Persian Gulf. It is a wilderness of sand, a desert within a desert, an area so enormous and so desolate that even Arabs call it the "Empty Quarter."Wilfred Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and educated at Eton and Oxford. Though British, he was repulsed by the softness and rigidity of Western life, "the machines, the calling cards, the meticulously aligned streets, etc." In the spirit of T.E. Lawrence, Thesiger spent five years exploring and wandering the deserts of Arabia. With vivid descriptions and colorful anecdotes he narrates his stories, including two crossings of the Empty Quarter, among peoples who had never seen a European and considered it their duty to kill Christian infidels.Thesiger greatly illuminates our understanding of the nomadic bedouins of Arabia. He loved, admired, respected and was humbled by a people who lived desparately hard lives in the harshest conditions with only a few possessions that might include saddles, ropes, bowls, goatskins, rifles and daggers and traveled days without food and water. Yet these people were unflappably cheerful, welcoming, generous, self-reliant, loyal and dignified. Thesiger explains why the Bedu with whom he traveled refused to forecast the weather (blasphemy against God)or could discern where to find a hare in the sand (only one set of tracks into the buried hole). As a reader I could almost sense I was traveling with Thesiger, could not help but mourn the passing of the way of life he described, and, as he, pondered the meaning of the word "civilized" as we Westerners conceive the term.

A book about "the spirit of the land and the greatness of the Arabs." This is a must read for anyone interested in the tribal Arabs of the desert (southern Arabia). I had this book for many months until I got around to reading it and then I absolutely couldn't put it down. The excursions of Wilfred Thesiger (Umbarak) take place during the 1940s. Thesiger loved the Bedu tribes (Rashid)and he writes from the heart, which is why I think the text is so readable. You relive this phenominal experience with him. Thesiger never fit in with his own people of England. He couldn't bare to live amongst the materialistic culture he found in the western world and felt more akin with his Arab friends yet as a "Christian" he could never be one of them. His relationships with two of the Rashid in particular, bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha and the love, admiration and loyalty he had for these two young men was very moving. Amazingly Thesiger survives many dangerous encounters while traveling in the desert with his Arab companions. How he ever survived some of these excursions is astonishing; between the lack of food, water, heat and cold exposure but mostly other hostile Arab tribes. His companions and he escape being killed by mere hours. By our western standards many people would think Thesiger's companions to ultimately be murderous and barbaric yet I have met very few westerners that held the same unbreakable code of honor that many of Thesiger's Arab companions lived by. Their generosity, faith in god, honor, dignity, strength and endurance is nothing short of amazing. They would give a stranger who stumbles upon their camp the last scrap of food and final cup of water even when starving in the desert for days. As a "westerner" reading this book I realized the immense differences in what we as a culture think is barbaric and immoral compared to these tribes of Arabia. Of course the ease at which they would kill between tribes to settle blood feuds and their "habit" of stealing camels was truly mind boggling when contrasted with their overwhelming personal ethics. As a female reader I didn't miss the lack of discussions about Arab women although I would have been very interested in the various tribal Arab woman's role as mother, wife and sister. What little I did find in the book about women sent chills up my spine. I do feel that female readers would enjoy this book none the less. Many readers will empathize with the author's sentiment as he writes about his dismay and disgust in the way the Western world has invaded the lands of these nomadic people with new mechanical inventions and infiltrated and ruined the unique beauty of this desert tribe (as well as many other indigenous tribes) which are now completely lost and irreplaceable.

Besides being a wonderful book, as other reviewers have remarked, 'Arabian Sands' is important reading for anyone who wants to understand the culture and history of the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa.The Bedu are, and always have been, a small fraction of the Arabs; historically, they have been disliked, mistrusted and often hated by the settled Arabs of the Middle East. In North Africa, the Berbers (a completely different people, with non-Arabic languages) have sometimes been confused with the Bedu. The Bedu way of life is now nearly extinct; Thesiger's book, which describes his travels with the Yamani Bedu of Southern Arabia, is the only careful account of Bedu culture and Bedu peoples I have ever come across. I know of no similarly illuminating study of the Qaysi Bedu of Northern Arabia, not even the works of T. E. Lawrence.The historical importance of the Bedu in the Arab world is that on several occasions from the 8th century to the 20th century, Bedu tribesmen formed the core of armies that swept across the Middle East and/or North Africa. Invading Bedu armies overthrew decadent regimes in North Africa in the 13th century, and effectively destroyed Berber power on the North African coast. Bedu formed the core of the Arab armies that defeated the Turks in the First World War, and were the core of the army which Ibn Saud created that turned him from being a refugee into being the founder of Saudi Arabia as it is today. How did the small number of people who comprised the various Bedu tribes exercise such military power throughout the Arab World? Read "Arabian Sands" to understand this.