Arab portrait
Jan Morris
The Oil Sheikhs Linda Blandford (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £5.25) The Arabs Peter Mansfield (Allen Lane E8.50)
Dr Kissinger calls a sheikh a sheek, or did last time I heard him say the word, and the mispronunciation adequately expresses, I think, the Arab place in the western consciousness —still a stagy and ambiguous Place, half-fictional almost, coloured by folkmemories of T. E. Lawrence and Rudolph Valentino, wogs and Suez, and not much affected by the indefatigable propaganda of the World Festival of Islam. The Arabs remain curiously unreal. Once they were unreal in a comic kind, now the absurdity of their ostentation is tinged with a suggestion of the ominous. It is said that in the 1980s Saudi Arabian financial reserves will be greater than those of the United States and Japan put together: if we laugh at that sort of statistic we do so, do we not, a trifle nervously.
Certainly there is a blackness to the comedy of the first of these two books, Linda tilandford's spirited and indeed reckless foray into the high society of the Arabian Peninsula. Its gossip-column journalese, relentlessly entertaining, masks a serious investigative purpose. Miss Blandtord is a Jew, a fact she concealed in order to get a Saudi visa, and she is also a much better reporter than she allows. This combination Of deceit gives to the whole book an un"Peeled frisson, and serves too as an alleg,°rY of its subject—for just as Miss Blandlord is only tittle-tattle on the surface, so behind the ludicrous excesses of the oil Sheikhs stands a formidable new power, a new society, groping towards maturity. . I expected to detest The Oil Sheikhs, and In some ways I did. The idea at first seemed to me vulgar—to visit a society during its greatest historical upheaval since the Middle Ages, under false pretences at that, and report upon it as one might describe some gigantic race meeting, house party or fancy dress ball! Miss Blandford's Sunday-paper fierninism is tiresomely self-conscious, and
er prose, by Frederick Forsyth out of
Londoner's Diary', gets perilously close to self-parody.' . .13ot the morel read of the book, the more 1,..t Interested me. For one thing, Linda Bland!ord has a really stunning ear for dialogue-4 eattY ear perhaps, as befits her trade, but a onderfully compelling one. Nothing I have oead before so convincingly echoes the extra,rdmary social condition of modern Arabia as do some of these brittle exchanges—sad co•°nversations generally, of confused men r frustrated women, their anxieties and
self-doubts audible through the conceit and the braggadocio.
For another thing, the reportage is elevated by a gift of empathy. Miss Blandford thinks that she is especially fitted to understand the Arabs, and particularly the Arabs in a family context, because of her Jewish upbringing. I believe it, and though I have no means of checking her accuracy, or judging her contacts, still something about the work tells me that in the general, in the mass, it is true. I think she is one of those reporters who feel themselves towards the truth, however tawdry their expression of it, and I think future historians of Arab progress, if they can stomach the manner of the book, may find its matter of true historic value.
For it is an extraordinary portrait that Miss Blandford presents of the Arabian peninsula. She visited, besides Saudi Arabia, Bahrein, Kuwait and four constituent States ot the United Arab Emirates, and everywhere she shows us, through encounters with the plutocracy of those countries, the tumultuous, sometimes ridiculous, but undeniably impressive movement of a people towards modernity. I suspect the Arabs will ban this book, and excoriate Miss Blandford, but they will be wrong: it says many unflattering things about the Arabs of the peninsula, but it left me with a new sympathy for their problems of adjustment, and a new understanding of their behaviour.
At least one Arab supposed, Miss Blandford tells us, that Israel had financed her project : some Israelis will doubtless assume thatArabs have sponsored Mr Mansfield's. As it happens, I agree with most of its judgments on recent events in the Arab world, but I can see that, read from another side of a fence, it might seem unduly sycophantic. Mr Mansfield is a former diplomat, and has not quite grown out of the diplomatic idiom. Nor is writing perhaps his proper métier even now—'Unlike the Suez war in 1956, world opinion was not on Egypt's side' is a sentence that racy Miss Blandford would never have perpetrated.
Never mind, if he is not divinely gifted as a writer he is scrupulously learned as a historian. He has written three books about Egypt, Napoleon's 'most important country,' and his view of Arab affairs is emphatically Cairo-centric. Thirty or forty years ago this might have been unorthodox, the impulses of Arab nationalism arising so evi dently from Arabia and the Fertile Crescent. but by now it is perfectly justified, and Mr Mansfield's examination of the tortuous sequence of events since 1948 seems to me masterly in its order and clarity.
The Arabs covers the whole span of Arab history, to the present day. It is an odd book in some ways—part historical narrative, part political analysis, in its last chapters part philosophical speculation—and would be the brighter for a few pictures and a less elementary map. But I would think it the best available primer for foreign businessmen working in the Arab countries: and read side by side with Miss Blandford's pyrotechnics, its scholarly chapters reflect, too, another, less appreciated characteristic of Arab life—its perennial sense of paradox and irony, in a part of the world where half of everything seems immutable, and the other half never stays the same.
Previous page
