Текст книги "Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia"

Автор книги: Michael Asher

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 32 страниц)

Lawrence played little part in the life of the college, and drew attention to himself by his very solitariness. His refusal to join in sport raised some eyebrows, but he was too subtle to argue the toss with college hearties, preferring to lampoon them by following them through the streets on their way to the sports field or rowing club, making fun of their physical characteristics. There were other abstentions too. He did not smoke, he did not drink, he rarely attended official meals in hall. He explained to one fellow undergraduate, A. G. Prys-Jones, that he did not sit on chairs if he could avoid it and took no breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, no tobacco or strong drink: ‘… fact,’ said Prys-Jones, ‘he did nothing which qualified him to be an ordinary member of society.’ ¹⁸Once, he burst into Midge Hall’s room with a grotesquely distorted face and began firing a revolver through a window into the Turl below. Hall realized that the shots were blanks, and concluded, probably correctly, that Lawrence was play-acting, though Lawrence claimed to be letting off steam after a marathon forty-five-hour work-session without food or sleep. In Trinity Term 1908 he took rooms in the inner quadrangle of Jesus, overlooking the covered market, and above the college kitchen whose stale cooking smells drifted miasmically through them. Late at night, when everyone else was retiring, Lawrence would come alive, ‘like a cat’, prowling the dark streets on his bicycle or merely tramping the quadrangles alone. A. T. P. Williams, an undergraduate who would later become Bishop of Winchester, recalled meeting him there often: ‘I do not know when he went to bed,’ he wrote, ‘some nights, I’m pretty sure, not at all, certainly seldom till well on in the small hours.’ ¹⁹His sleepless tramping eventually piqued the curiosity of a third-year undergraduate named Vyvyan Richards, who went to investigate the solitary freshman and immediately fell in love with him. Richards, a sharp, angular, sensitive man, was the son of a Welsh inventor and his American wife, who had spent his life gaining distinctions, and sneering at art, history and literature. His fascination with Lawrence took him abruptly into a very different dimension, a world of old things: ‘castles, churches, memorial brasses, pottery and books-books-books’. ²⁰The two young men could not have been more different: Richards, sporty, snobbish, unintellectual, critical, orthodox: Lawrence, mercurial, whimsical, unconventional, super-cerebral, wrapped up in antiquity and romance – and yet, on their first meeting, Richards would write, ‘some deep and quick affection took hold upon us whose vividness stirs me still after thirty years have passed away’. ²¹Richards became obsessed with his love for Lawrence, offering him boundless affection, subservience and sacrifice, but his passion went unrequited. Lawrence was not attracted to him, and though he enjoyed his company and was flattered by his attentions, never gave the slightest hint that he understood the nature of his friend’s interest. He recognized that Richards was a difficult and complex personality, inclined to be dismissive of what he understood poorly, and with a horror of vulgarity, which he euphemistically referred to as ‘professionalism’. He liked Richards’s latent artistic talent and enjoyed helping to nurture it, and he could not ignore the tremendous energy Richards sent his way, which he turned to their mutual advantage. He loved Richards’s directness and experienced with him an intimacy which he had never known before. Much to Richards’s disappointment, though, that intimacy remained chaste. Years later, he claimed that Lawrence was ‘sexless’, and his conviction that he had ‘neither flesh or carnality of any kind’ echoes Clare Sydney Smith’s view that ‘Lawrence’s presence was hardly a physical one’. Neither understood that Lawrence was a masochist whose sexual feelings were closely tied up with his fear of pain. Though he preferred men to women and his later writings show a fascination with the idea of homoerotic sex, he had a horror of the reality of physical intimacy, which was directly connected to his early relationship with his mother: ‘The disgust of being touched revolted me,’ he would write, ‘…perhaps because one … terrible struggle in my youth had given me an enduring fear of contact.’ ²²He would tell E. M. Forster that he was ‘funnily made up sexually’, and as regards the homosexual act, would write: ‘I couldn’t ever do it, I believe: the impulse strong enough to make me touch another creature has not yet been born in me.’ ²³

Richards later told Robert Graves that after he had moved to digs outside the college, Lawrence would frequently visit him after midnight, and once, he said, he had asked Richards to join him on a bizarre bathing trip – they would dive through the ice on the frozen Cherwell to find out whether it was thin enough to let them in and out again. Richards dismissed the idea as ridiculously dangerous, but Lawrence went off to do it alone, and repeated it several times later. Richards explained that his friend’s pleasure in these strange outings derived partly from the astonishment he saw on the faces of orthodox people such as himself. It is a key observation, for while Lawrence’s fasting, dieting, and denial of sleep were expressions of his masochistic nature, they were also aspects of his reverse exhibitionism. If he had been simply ‘hardening himself for the ordeal to come’ in the classical ‘heroic’ sense, an audience would have been unnecessary, but Lawrence had no penchant for ‘suffering in silence’: his ordeal must be witnessed. It was characteristic of him throughout his life, Richards said, to seek some private gallery for his exploits.

Together, Lawrence and Richards explored the world of William Morris, the colossus of Victorian art and design who would influence Lawrence for the rest of his life. It is not clear when Lawrence first became aware of Morris (not to be confused with the industrialist William Henry Morris – Lord Nuffield), but living in north Oxford during the 1890s he could scarcely have avoided hearing about him, since Morris’s pomegranate wallpaper designs were de rigueurin the houses of university dons. Morris was precisely the kind of polymath that Lawrence would have liked to be: a poet of distinction, novelist, master craftsman, designer, printer and painter who had pioneered the art of brass-rubbing, toured Gothic cathedrals in France in the 1850s, trekked through the cold deserts of Iceland, rediscovered Malory’s classic Morte d’Arthur,inspired the Arts and Crafts movement, espoused radical socialism, helped found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and set up the famous Kelmscott Press. Morris’s inspiration, like Lawrence’s, was the medieval period, and his objective was to revive the spirit of individual craftsmanship which he believed the industrial Victorian era had lost. This made him a giant in Lawrence’s eyes, for as a youth he was always engaged in some kind of handicraft – if not brass-rubbing, then poker-work, stone-carving, metal-work, wood-carving or even sewing. While Richards admired the diligence with which Lawrence worked at his crafts, he rarely admired the results. Lawrence once showed him an electric lamp he had hammered out of brass, modelled on a Moorish lantern in Holman Hunt’s engraving The Light of the World.Richards thought the lamp poor, but was more impressed with the griffon-figure Lawrence once carved on the bar of a table in his room. Bob Lawrence wrote that even as a child Ned had a great aptitude for improving and fixing household appliances – an ability Lawrence would later boast of as his ‘faculty for making and repairing things’. ²⁴Though Ned called himself ‘a wanderer after sensations and an artist of sorts’, Arnie thought his brother more of a craftsman than an artist, and believed he had a craftsman’s appreciation of sound work in sound material irrespective of artistic merit. ²⁵Later, in his writing career, Lawrence would behave as if there were a craftsman’s technique to literary expression, which, if it could only be learned, would enable one to create a masterpiece ‘by numbers’ as it were. He was adept at learning technique, but discovered with some bitterness that great literature lay not in mastering ‘tricks’, but in the power of creative vision. The truth was that the dominating force in Lawrence’s psyche – that supreme will he had built up against the barbarian hordes which were ever hammering and sapping at the frontier of his consciousness – was inimical to creativity. If it kept out maverick emotions it also attenuated the originality of vision those emotions entailed. Lawrence was too controlled, too mechanistic, too rational, ever to be a poet or an artist. The great tragedy of his life was the discovery that creativity was in reality the outpourings of the dark side which he had spent his life trying to suppress.

It was Morris who inspired Lawrence with the idea of setting up a hand-press, for printing seemed the ideal occupation for the kind of artistic dilettante he saw himself becoming in the future. When he thought of a career, he could not tolerate the idea of being pigeon-holed into one profession or another. Moreover, printing seemed to have a mystique about it which appealed to him: ‘Printing is not a business but a craft,’ he told his mother later. ‘We cannot sit down to it for so many hours a day, any more than a picture could be painted on that system.’ ²⁶Like Morris, Lawrence was also attracted by the sensual quality of a well-produced book, not merely the aesthetic appeal of the type-face, but the feel of the paper and the texture of the binding. His letters are full of esoteric references to the merits of vellum or the intricacies of obtaining fine purple from the Levantine murex. While rooms in Hammersmith Mall had been good enough for Morris, however, for Lawrence and Richards only a proper ‘medieval hall’ would suffice. This notion might have come to them on a pilgrimage they made to a sort of Morris shrine at Broad Campden, where a couple called the Coomeraswamis had converted a fourteenth-century chapel into a house packed with Morris memorabilia, including a copy of the exquisitely bound Kelmscott Chaucer,‘the prince of modern printing’. Here they were also privileged to see the actual press Morris had used in his Kelmscott studio, which was still functioning, and Richards took pains to record that their reaction was not merely sentimental: ‘ … it was a notable stimulus,’ he wrote, ‘to the practical enthusiasm which was taking root in our minds. We, too, would print, and would get enough by it, we hoped, to live without bowing to any form of professionalism.’ ²⁷The visit also stimulated Lawrence to read Morris’s novel The Roots of the Mountains,a fantasy about Gothic mountain tribes who lived communally in halls, slept in ‘shut-beds’, held ‘folk-moots’ and fought gallantly in battle. Rootsled him to other novels: The Well at the World’s End, The Wood Beyond the World, Sigurd the Volsung –each transporting him into a fabulous, heroic world. While his feeling for more celebrated authors waxed and waned, his taste for Morris would last all his life: ‘I suppose everybody loves one writer unreasonably,’ he would tell Charlotte Shaw. ‘I’d rather Morris than the world.’ ‘My reason tells me he isn’t a very good writer: but then, he wrote just the stuff I like.’ ²⁸Lawrence thought the idea of a medieval hall more authentically Morris than Morris’s own ‘Red House’ at Upton, and once dragged Richards over to look at a disused stone chapel near Weymouth which he considered buying. It had, said Richards, a ‘naked simplicity’ which appealed to Lawrence. The Morrisian fantasy – for Morris’s ‘medieval’ was no more truly medieval than Lawrence’s – exerted enormous power over him. There is more than a hint of the communal halls of Roots of the Mountainsin his later attachment to the life of the barrack-room, and as Richards himself pointed out, for Lawrence ‘the desert tents of black goats hair were many pillared dark halls too’. ²⁹

Lawrence’s excursions while at Jesus College were not exclusively into the intellectual and aesthetic spheres, however. In the summer of 1908 he asked Richards to join him on a peculiarly urban adventure – the running of the Trill Mill Stream. This is the first image we have of Lawrence the organizer and man of action – a persona he frequently sought to deny in later years. He had always been interested in boating and canoeing, and in his first year at Jesus had discovered references to a medieval watercourse – the Trill Mill Stream – which now passed beneath the city. After some careful local detective work he came to the conclusion that the stream began at the mouth of a sewer near Hythe Bridge, and he determined to discover whether it debouched into the Isis at Folly Bridge as he suspected. Richards was only one of a group of friends he gathered together in three canoes for the adventure, the others being Midge Hall, Theo Chaundy, A. T. P. Williams and H. E. Mather – the water enthusiast with whom Lawrence had made the unsuccessful ascent of the Cherwell in 1906. On the appointed day the canoes were lowered into the sewer at Hythe Bridge, lit with candles and acetylene lamps. The tunnel was very narrow and the young men had just enough room to crouch forward in the canoes with their arms touching the sides. It was no place for the victim of claustrophobia. Lawrence remarked that it would be interesting to see which of their light-sources would expire first as the air became foul, and wondered aloud what the attitude of the incumbent rats would be. ‘Anyway,’ he said, as the canoes slipped into the darkness, ‘there’s no room to turn back.’ ³⁰Lawrence was electrified by an exquisite thrill of fear, which had once again prompted him to bravado. Secretly, he was terrified that the water might flow through a grating, in which case the canoes might be stuck, or that a sudden shower outside might raise the water-level and drown them. Fortunately there were no obstacles or hitches of any kind, and Lawrence camouflaged his relief by firing blanks from his pistol under the gutter-gratings to attract the attention of pedestrians above. The canoes shot out into the daylight near Folly Bridge only twenty minutes after setting out.

Since Lawrence was more intent on such extra-curricular activities, or on escape into Morris country, than on his lectures, he was amazingly fortunate that in 1908 the History Examiners introduced the option of presenting a thesis on any question connected with a special subject. Lawrence realized that if he chose ‘Military History and Strategy’ as his special subject, he could present a thesis on crusader castles which would deploy all his hard-earned knowledge of medieval defensive warfare. In summer 1907 he had made his second cycling tour of France with Beeson, and now, in summer 1908, he decided to make a third tour to look at the crusader castles he had missed, and to glimpse some of the cathedrals which had so inspired William Morris in the 1850s. This would be his most ambitious expedition yet: he would ride all the way across France to the Mediterranean, and this time he would do it alone.

He arrived at Le Havre in mid-July, and battled in violent hailstorms through Gisors to Compiиgne, and from there to Provins, near Paris, where he discovered a unique twelfth-century keep and ruined town walls, which almost defied his cerebral game of attack-defence. He wandered around them for hours trying to puzzle out what the designer had intended, and came to the conclusion that they had been built as an experiment: ‘… the keep would have been almost incapable of defence,’ he decided, ‘yet in spirit it is half a century ahead of its time.’ ³¹Living on bread, milk, peaches and apricots, he rode into Champagne, where the weather became ‘fearfully hot’. His days followed a strict regime: up at dawn, he would reach his castle usually by midday, and investigate it for a couple of hours. In the afternoon he would ride on, reaching his hotel by seven or eight in the evening. The sheer imperative of the journey soon eclipsed even his joy in reaching the castles, though he would occupy his mind in composing whole pages of his projected thesis as he pedalled. The Champagne country was stunningly beautiful and he felt himself filling with energy as he cycled, through cherry-orchards and across sparkling streams, past fields of ripe golden barley and wheat. He watched peasants advancing to the harvest in cohorts, their sickles flashing like swords in the sun, the great wains of hay being drawn by bilious-white oxen. Steadily he made his way south, and by late July he was steering a course beneath the austere volcanic plugs of the Auvergne, past gardens enclosed with massive dry-stone walls, toiling up thousands of feet and consoling himself with the thought that such agony as his was undreamed of in classical times – a combination of the tortures of Sisyphus, who had to roll a great stone endlessly uphill, of Tantalus, who was condemned to grasp at fruit just beyond his reach, and of Theseus, who was forced to remain forever sitting. His reward was a 4,000 foot free-wheel descent into the Rhфne valley, so perilous and exciting that he felt sick when he reached the bottom. He rode on through Provence and the lovely but mosquito-infested marshlands of the Camargue, where he contracted his first dose of the malaria which would plague much of his life. At last, he arrived at the lonely, olive-covered mountain of Les Baux, from where he looked down a precipice and far across a plain. Suddenly, as he watched, the sun leapt from behind a cloud, illuminating a silvery shimmer. It was one of the most thrilling moments of his life, and he celebrated it in a way that only an Oxford man of that era would have done, screaming out the words of Xenophon, so loudly that it disturbed the nearby tourists: ‘Thalassa! Thalassa! TheSea! The Sea!’

4. The Sultan Drank Tea as Usual

Young Turks’ Revolution 1908

As Lawrence had cycled southwards to the Mediterranean that July, news of a coup d ’ й tat in Turkey seemed to leap at him out of the headlines. One day the newspapers would confirm that a revolution was taking place, and another they would assure their readers that all was calm, and ‘the Sultan drank tea as usual’. On 23 July he wrote to his mother asking desperately for clarification: ‘it might well be important,’ he said. ¹What was actually taking place was the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire, the tottering giant which had dominated the Middle East and eastern Europe for nearly 500 years. On 22 July, a handful of young Turkish officers had taken control of the Ottoman 3rd Army in Europe. On 24 July they offered the Padishah Sultan, Abd al-Hamid II, an ultimatum: either grant a constitution or step down. Whichever path he chose, the tyrant’s power was effectively at an end.

They called him ‘Abdul the Damned’, ‘The Red Sultan’, ‘Abdul the Bloody’, and for years he had presided over a corrupt and oppressive empire that stretched from the sands of the Sahara to the Persian hills. Behind the grim walls of his Yildiz Palace, surrounded always by a horde of eunuchs, dwarfs, deaf-mute chamberlains and Circassian dancing-girls, the Padishah had run his domain through a vast network of spies and spies-upon-spies connected to him by thousands of miles of telegraph wires. The palace was itself a dark icon of his monumental paranoia, for he rarely ventured beyond its limits, and even within them had constructed a warren of secret passageways whose plan was known only to himself. So unpredictable were Abd al-Hamid’s rages that even seasoned courtiers were seen to quake in his presence. His food was tasted by a corps of professional poison-snoopers, his cigarettes puffed first by a eunuch, his milk brought in sealed bottles from specially guarded cows. He had secreted thousands of revolvers about the palace, a brace of them above the Imperial bath, and had twice shot dead innocent bystanders who had startled him – one of them rumoured to have been his own daughter. His administration had become such a travesty that his chosen advisers included a circus clown, a bootblack, a Punch and Judy man, the son of one of his cooks, and a slave he had bought on the open market. ‘Abdul the Damned’ had lost all touch with reality: the Ottoman Empire was rotten to the core, and only the slightest push was required to set it rocking. That push was provided by the keen young firebrands of the CUP – the ‘Committee of Union and Progress’ – who were mostly army officers trained in the Sultan’s own military academies. Their aim was to reduce the Padishah to a figurehead. Abd al-Hamid, who believed he could strike back later, decided to granted a constitution, and for almost the first time in living memory, the streets of Stamboul were filled with cheering crowds.

Among those celebrating the Padishah’s reduction was the Sharif Hussain ibn Ali, a senior member of the Hashemite family of the Hejaz in western Arabia – the Holy Land of Islam. Exiled in Stamboul under close surveillance by the tyrant’s spies, the Sharif had never forgiven the Sultan for having ordered the murder of his uncle, who had been stabbed to death brutally in a Jeddah street in 1880. Hussain had continued to scheme and plot against the government, until, in 1893, the Sultan had finally ordered him to Stamboul with all his family – which had then included three small sons. He must have disembarked from his ship with some trepidation, for he was well aware that critics of the Red Sultan were in the habit of finding themselves stitched into a sack and dropped into the Bosphorus on moonless nights. The Sultan had even had his own brother confined to a cell for twenty years. To his surprise, perhaps, Hussain had been allowed to live quietly, and for fifteen years he had wisely bided his time, never losing sight of his determination to return to Arabia as Emir of Mecca. He was much respected by those who met him – opinionated, domineering, determined, but extremely polite. In 1908 he was about fifty-five, a small, hard man with a bushy beard and eyes as wide and cold as a vulture’s. He had delicate hands and fine-drawn features which lent him an exquisite air of grace, and he wore his black jubbacloak and tight Meccan turban with the simple dignity appropriate to his patrician status. A conservative of the old school who spoke Turkish more readily than he spoke Arabic, he was renowned for his religious scholarship, his knowledge of international affairs, his love of poetry and his encyclopedic knowledge of natural history. His people, the Hashemites, were the most revered family in Islam, able to trace their descent back over thirty-seven generations to the Prophet Mohammad himself, through his daughter Fatima. They were the traditional stewards of Mecca and Medina, the sacred cities of Islam – cities whose possession was of crucial symbolic value to the Sublime Porte. Though Ottoman Sultans had been considered Caliphs or ‘Successors’ of the Prophet for 200 years, Abd al-Hamid had been the first to use the tide officially. His empire was crumbling, and he had played the Islamic card in a last desperate attempt to rally the disparate peoples within its borders. He was terrified of internal revolt. In 1888, unrest among the Armenians had provoked a knee-jerk reaction. His armies had moved in and butchered them systematically, men, women and children, village by village, in a resolute attempt to wipe them out. While the Armenians were a Christian minority, however, the Arabs were not only brother Muslims, but comprised almost half the Empire’s population – 10Ѕ million out of 22 million, actually outnumbering the 7Ѕ million ethnic Turks. The Sultan decided to court them. He invoked Islamic sentiment, built mosques, endowed Islamic schools, and promoted Arabs to high office. In 1901 he had inaugurated construction of the Hejaz railway, ostensibly to facilitate the Haj –the sacred pilgrimage to the two Holy Cities, which every Muslim was enjoined to take at least once in his life. It was not coincidental, of course, that the railway also strengthened his control over these cities, which were a vital part of his Islamic faзade. Officially, the Hejaz was run by the senior member of the Hashemite family, who was appointed Emir or Prince of Mecca. By manipulating the rivalries between the three branches of the family whose menfolk were eligible to be Emir – a game so Byzantine in its wheels within wheels as to be almost incomprehensible to anyone outside it – the Sultan had successfully managed to gain hegemony over the post. On taking power, the CUP dismissed the incumbent Emir as corrupt and, after some deliberation, appointed Hussain in his place. The Young Turks wanted in the Hejaz someone who would bow to his masters and preserve the status quo, and Hussain’s prudence and respectability over the past decade and a half had convinced the government that he was such a man. It must have struck the Sharif as something of an irony that he, who had been exiled for fifteen years as a dangerous subversive, should now be chosen for his conservatism.

On 3 December 1908, the steamer Tantadropped anchor in Jeddah harbour with Hussain and all his family aboard. The crystal-white tenement houses of the port with their baroque latticework and hidden balconies peeped over the half-ruined sea-gate, where, on the wharf, a crowd of officials and local Arabs had gathered to meet him. From the deck of the Tanta,piled high with sea-chests, boxes and furled carpets – the gleanings of fifteen years of exile – the Sharif watched the sunlight flashing off the sails of scores of dhows cutting through the sea towards the ship. They were packed with cheering people from stem to stern: Bedu chieftains, merchant traders, minor dignitaries, court plaintiffs, distant relatives of the Hashemite family – all come to look over their new Emir and ingratiate themselves if possible. Hussain cannot but have suppressed a wry smile. His predecessor had been virtually the toy of the Ottoman Governor – the Vali – who controlled the cities, the army and the courts, and was responsible for budget, taxation, security and defence. In theory, the Emir had responsibility only for the unruly Bedu tribes, who answered to no one. In practice, though, the position was very different. The Turkish administration was regarded as an alien force by most of the indigenous Hejazis, five-sixths of whom were nomadic or semi-nomadic Bedu. That there were ways and means of manipulating the tribes, Hussain had learned almost as a child, for he had been brought up in the court of his uncle – the Emir – in daily contact with Bedu chiefs, and had been well schooled in the art of playing off tribes and factions, of navigating the endless maze of vituperation, vacillation and discussion which had filled the Emir’s days. The Turks controlled the cities, but between the cities lay the desert, and there the Bedu ruled. Only the Hejaz railway effectively connected the Ottoman garrisons with the outside world. Hussain had thought a great deal about rebellion as a youth: he had been a party to his uncle’s conspiracy to foment a revolt in the Assir – the province immediately to the south of the Hejaz – which had led directly to the Emir’s assassination. He was astute enough to be aware of the advantages of courting the British: the Hejaz depended on grain from British India, and the Royal Navy controlled the Red Sea. He admired the British for their straight-dealing and honesty – a refreshing contrast to the Sultan’s forked tongue – and his pro-British tendency was well known to the Porte. When Hussain made a visit to the British Embassy in Istanbul not long after his uncle’s murder, the Sultan had warned him sharply that he should ‘fish in healthier waters’. A secret report made at the same time by a government spy described him as ‘wilful and recalcitrant … with a dangerous capacity for independent thought’; it was just such a capacity which he intended to exercise now to restore the office of Emir of Mecca to its rightful glory. ²As he stepped upon his native soil on that day in December 1908, the Sharif’s dreams ran far beyond the borders of the Hejaz.

When the Prophet Mohammad died in AD 632, he left no male heirs and had made no provision for a ‘Successor’ or ‘Caliph’. For a moment the whole future of Islam hung in the balance. Mohammad had made it clear in his lifetime that he was ‘the Seal of the Prophets’ – the last in the line of God’s apostles which had begun with Father Adam and included Jesus Christ. For some of his followers the very idea of a ‘Successor’ was thus questionable. Finally, the Muslims had declared in favour of the Prophet’s oldest companion, Abu Bakr, initiating a period of rule by the so-called ‘Rightly Minded Caliphs’, all of whom had been early converts to Islam, none of them related closely to the Prophet. Westerners saw the Caliph as a kind of Muslim ‘Pope’ – a misconception which continued to be held up to the twentieth century. In fact, the Caliph was not responsible for religious doctrine, which was determined by the ‘ulama –a consensus of learned elders. His function was always that of defensor fidei –a role almost parallel to the one played in the Catholic Church by the Holy Roman Emperor in medieval times. In 661 the Caliphate had returned to the Prophet’s own line, and the centre of power had shifted from the Hejaz to Damascus in Syria, under the ‘Umayyads. Centuries later, the capital was moved again, this time to Baghdad, under the Abbasids, whose most famous scion was Hirun ar-Rashid. The Abbasids were much influenced by Persia, and had long since forsaken their Bedu levies in favour of the Mamluks, a caste of military slaves drawn mainly from the Caucasus. In doing so they had sown the seeds of their own downfall. Inevitably slaves had become masters, and the Caliph had been reduced to a mere puppet whose function was to lend credibility to the Mamluk regime. When the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim broke the Mamluk army in Syria in 1516, he found among the prisoners an unimpressive personage called Mutawakkil, who turned out to be the last in the line of Caliphs of direct descent from the Prophet. Though Selim the Grim never adopted the title Caliph, it was taken informally by his son, Sulayman the Magnificent, whose empire stretched from Baghdad to Budapest. The Caliphate had remained in Turkish hands ever since.

Назад к карточке книги "Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia"