London, October 30, 1918. A young colonel receives urgent summons to Buckingham Palace to meet the King. As he is ushered in before King George V and Queen Mary, the colonel learns that he is on the verge of realising a childhood dream, of being knighted by the age of 30. However, he informs the King that he does not want the honour and walks quietly away.
That colonel was T.E. Lawrence. Yes, the very same Lawrence of Arabia immortalised on the big screen by David Lean. He was one of the most enigmatic personalities of the 20th Century, and his war time exploits in the Middle East have been the subject of many books.
Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East is an attempt to get past the myths to the truth about Lawrence's role in the Arab uprising and the defeat of the Turks at Damascus. It is also the story of how a low-level officer like Lawrence and 3 other adventurers, a German attaché, Curt Pruefer, Aaron Aaronson, an Agronomist committed to the Zionist cause, and American oilman William Yale plotted and conspired their way through the war, resulting in the redrawing of the borders of the Middle East. It is also the story of the deceit and sheer incompetence of the Imperial powers, which resulted in more than 16 million deaths during the Great War and sowed the seeds of today's conflicts in the Arab world.
Anderson, wisely, does not attempt to explain all of Lawrence's eccentricities. However, he does effectively document the methods he used to manipulate the British administration to support the Arab uprising, and the conflicts he faced between his genuine empathy for the Arab cause and the dictates of British interest in the region. He also tears away the romantic sheen from the battle exploits of Lawrence as portrayed in Lean's film to expose the true nature of war. A testament of Lawrence's influence even today is the fact that in 2006, the U.S Commander-in-Chief ordered his senior officers to read Lawrence's articles originally written for the British army to gain insights into winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Though they ignored Lawrence's opening admonition that his advice applied strictly to the Bedouin and that interacting with Arab townspeople "requires totally different treatment". The Bedouin comprise only 2 percent of Iraq's population!
Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is the largest city on the Caspian Sea. At the turn of the 20th Century, it was responsible for half of the world's oil production and with investors from all over Europe coming there, the city became a melting pot of the West and the East. Baku is also the setting for Azerbaijan's most famous novel Ali and Nino, which was first published in the 1930s and enjoyed a world- wide revival in the 1970s. There has always been a controversy about the true identity of its author Kurban Said with several claimants for the honour. In The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, Tom Reiss makes a compelling case for Lev Nussimbaum who spent his childhood in Baku and who was forced to flee the city along with his father during the Bolshevik revolution.
Whatever the truth, the life of Lev Nussimbaum is a fascinating story of a Jewish boy who converted to Islam, changing his name to Essad Bey, and becoming a famous journalist and bestselling biographer of Stalin and Czar Nicholas II, in a Germany that was fast coming under the influence of the Nazis
To understand the backdrop of Nussimbaum's life, Reiss gives the reader a tour of the tumultuous events of the early 20th Century as a fallout of World War-I, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Czarist Russia, and the rise of Fascism, which was seen as an effective counter to Communism. Reiss links the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany to the influx of White Russians who made Berlin their base in exile. In fact, during the war, Germany and Britain were competing with each other to garner support from the Zionists with the promise of setting up an Independent state in Palestine! As to Lev's fascination with Islam, Reiss traces this to a tradition of Jewish Orientalism that believed in a shared culture and harmony between the Semitic religions that was to be sadly lost later in the Century.
After fleeing Baku, Lev passed through Istanbul which had a profound impact on him as he discovered "the capital of Muslim modernism, Orientalist enlightenment and an exiled empire of refugees." It is a city that also fascinates Charles King who, in Midnight at the Pera Palace, narrates the history of Istanbul in the first half of the 20th century through the story of a hotel that was built for passengers alighting from the Orient Express. It was period that saw the decline of the Ottoman Empire and a city that once shaped the West's image of the Islamic world "became the world's greatest experiment in purposeful reinvention in the Western mould." The title refers to the midnight celebration on December 31, 1925, at the hotel, when the new Turkish republic began following a unified calendar and clock. This is a story that is peopled by fascinating cameos -- from the famous to the not-so, including Leon Trotsky, the future Pope John XXIII, Ernest Hemingway, White Russian exiles, a plethora of spies, beauty queens, Armenian musicians and, of course, Mustafa Kemal, the first President of Turkey, who was given the surname Ataturk in 1935 when he brought in a new law making family names mandatory!
