Britain and the Arab Middle East

by Cooper, Lisa;

  Knowledge, Authority and Ownership of the Past

  It is important to emphasize yet one final aspect of Bell's attitude towards the past, and that concerns the importance she placed on having an expert knowledge of a place and its antiquity, and the authority that such knowledge accorded. To Bell, a passing acquaintance with the history and culture of a particular place or people did not suffice; her own travel books, such as Amurath to Amurath, or her study of Ukhaidir demonstrate her requirement for a comprehensive investigation of the ancient textual sources, artefacts and architecture of a particular site, and her feeling that only after all of this exertion had she truly come to ‘know’ that place. Her admiration for others, particularly for the excavators Walter Andrae and Robert Koldewey, is largely on account of the expertise with which they commanded the past. They had the authority to speak eloquently and evocatively of the past because of their prodigious efforts to understand the histories of Assur and Babylon through their years of investigations and careful, detailed probes. Moreover, her own appreciation for these sites could only be effected if she too gained a solid command of their long histories. As has been noted, at both Babylon and Assur, Bell crept tirelessly with their excavators ‘into every hole and corner of the excavation’,40 asking a myriad of questions and taking extensive notes. With this full command of the past, she deemed permissible any romantic musings on historical figures such as Alexander the Great; they merely provided a colourful narrative to empirically acquired historical facts. Bell could in the same way justifiably romanticize her beloved Ukhaidir, given the exertion she had applied to know all of its form and function. Her informed knowledge of the past gave authenticity to the recreations and augmented their truthfulness.

  Given the physical and mental efforts required to achieve a comprehensive knowledge of the past, it is not surprising that Bell developed a kind of proprietary attitude towards archaeological sites and their antiquities. The site of Assur, although founded by the Assyrians, became very much bound to Andrae and his German excavators, just as Ukhaidir had become ‘her castle’. Further, all of the information acquired through the study of that ancient site – its political history, its inhabitants, the general time period in which it existed – also became linked to the scholars who had endeavoured to obtain it in the first place. In a sense, these researchers of ancient Mesopotamia, and by extension the countries from which they hailed, became owners of the past and had just as much a stake in their sites’ antiquities and ancient heritage as the country within whose borders they were acquired. It is not difficult to see the implications of this kind of proprietary attitude playing out in Bell's political career, and also in her later work as Iraq's honorary Director of Antiquities.

  Mesopotamia and Iraq: Past and Present Entwined

  Having reviewed a number of significant attitudes which Bell had towards the past, particularly the ancient Near East, let us now see in particular how such attitudes may have impacted her political activities and views about the current state of Mesopotamia, and its future governance.

  In British-occupied Mesopotamia both during and immediately after the Great War, one of the key issues confronting Bell as a political officer, as well as the other members of the colonial administration, was the form of Mesopotamia's future governance. Was it possible for Mesopotamia ever to achieve self-rule, or must it remain mandated to a European power, namely Britain? There were a number of conflicting opinions about this question in the wake of the war. While some clung tenaciously to the pre-war notions of empire, others now had increasingly cynical notions about empire's advantages and effectiveness and were becoming beguiled by the liberalizing notion of Woodrow Wilson's self-determination, which was sweeping like wildfire across many of the world's nations.41 Bell's own opinions seem to have fluctuated greatly. As a member of the British colonial enterprise herself, she believed in the positive effects of Britain on the governance of Mesopotamia,42 but as her experience with Mesopotamia grew and she too embraced the notion of autonomy, she began to express a more conflicted position, seeing less the advantages of foreign rule and more an optimism for it as an ultimately self-governing Arab state.43 There were numerous complexities involved in uniting the present inhabitants of Mesopotamia – a truly disparate mix of tribes, towns, Sunnis, Shi‘as, Kurds, Jews and Christians – and many saw this as an unrealistic vision. And yet Bell was often optimistic that such a country could eventually become stable and self-governing. While this objective was probably the product of Bell's extensive first-hand experience with the modern issues of the country and its people – her being ‘on the spot’, as it were – one can also argue that part of this optimism seems to have been informed by her knowledge of Mesopotamia's history, and her awareness that in many periods of antiquity, the country had been brought together under a single, indigenous political administration. Strong rulers had governed justly, and with their energies and charisma had succeeded in uniting the disparate ethnic groups and peoples into a single state.

  Through her knowledge of Mesopotamia's history, Bell knew that the Assyrians and Babylonians had, for example, achieved large empires that covered all of northern and southern Mesopotamia during the first millennium BCE. She also knew that the Abbasids of the early Islamic Period had created a remarkably long-lived empire. In 750 CE, the Abbasid caliphs, who claimed descent from the Islamic prophet Muhammad's youngest uncle, had replaced their Umayyad predecessors and had moved the imperial capital from Damascus eastwards to the old Sasanian heartland in Mesopotamia, where they constructed the city of Baghdad.44 Mesopotamia, with Baghdad at its heart, quickly emerged as the centre of an empire that spread, for a time, all the way from Spain to Afghanistan. The civilization of the Abbasids drew inspiration from the earlier cultures of Greece, Byzantium and Persia.45 The Abbasid caliphs themselves promoted a cosmopolitan and inclusive society, welcoming at their court ‘not only Muslim scholars, poets and artists but also Nestorian Christian and Jewish physicians, astrologers of all faiths, and pagan philosophers’.46 And this flowering of Islamic civilization was not confined to the halls of the caliphs’ palaces; it spread to all Muslims, who now conceived of themselves as members of a single community. Their feelings of common identity and solidarity ‘were reinforced by the presence of Quran reciters, storytellers and poets who repeated the tale of Muhammad's life and doings and sang of the feats of the Arabs in the new lingua franca of Arabic in mosques, marketplaces and military camps’ across the vast empire.47 This had indeed been a glorious era in which political and cultural unification had spread far and wide, and it was, too, an imperial power that had developed from within Mesopotamia itself, not as part of a conquering force from the outside. The Abbasid Empire was, in many ways, the perfect metaphor for Bell's own vision of the new Iraq, and to her it was not beyond the realm of possibility to resurrect that empire's past glory.

  Along with her vision of self-government, so easily imagined because of her knowledge of Mesopotamia's past, Bell was also quite receptive to the idea that the new nation should be ruled by a king. She first began to support this idea of kingship around the time of the 1919 Paris peace talks, when she travelled to Paris and met for the first time the charismatic Faisal, the Hashemite prince of Central Arabia who had helped the British defeat the Turks during the war and now expected to be compensated for his wartime efforts by being given territories over which to rule. Bell also attended the Cairo conference in March 1921, when it was decided that Faisal should be made the first king of Iraq. And she was most visibly present in Baghdad later that year, when Faisal entered the city and was crowned as the country's ruler. Thenceforward, Bell became a close advisor to Faisal.

  Bell's support for Faisal was certainly influenced by her realistic understanding that he was the best candidate on the scene, and that his pro-British leanings made him an ideal Arab leader for Mesopotamia, which would remain mandated to the British until 1932. At the same time, one can also argue that Bell's support was affected by her roman
tic ideal of Arab unification in the Middle East, and her vision that part – or all – of the region should be governed by a magnetic Arab prince of ancient noble blood. In Faisal's case, it helped that by belonging to the Hashemite family, he could trace his ancestry back to the house of Muhammad himself.48 Ever historically minded, Bell also knew that the Abbasid rulers presented themselves as representatives of the Hashemites, since they claimed descent from the uncle of Muhammad, who had been the chief of the Hashemites. To Bell, Faisal's links with the founder of Islam and the caliphs of the Abbasids fully legitimated him as the new king of Iraq, and raised the possibility that the nascent Iraq could reach the same glorious heights through its new ruler as the Islamic caliphs had achieved in the country several centuries before. Bell's writings during the year of Faisal's arrival and coronation in Iraq are replete with images which offer this positive vision of a newly regenerated Arab kingship. Her description of Faisal's reception at Falluja by the desert Bedouin tribes of the Dulaim and Anazeh typifies her romantic imagining of the kingly Faisal, inspired as she was by the ‘converging images of traditional and modern Iraq’.49 On this occasion, masses of individuals on horses and camels showed up to catch a glimpse of Faisal, who looked splendid in his white robes, black mantle, gold belt and dagger, and flowing white headdress bound with a silver rope. He spoke like a ‘chieftain of tribesmen in the sonorous language of the desert, with command and injunction and question to which his audience gave deep-tongued answer. So it has been in such gatherings since the earliest days of Arab civilization.’50 She also observed that it had been ‘700 years since an Arab king walked among his Mesopotamian subjects, a longer interval even here where we reckon history by millenniums’.51

  One event in particular emphasizes most strongly Bell's vision of Mesopotamia's glorious past and its link to the present, as well as her desire to impress upon the new king of Iraq his own rightful place in this magnificent history. This was Bell's organization of a trip with Faisal to the ancient site of Ctesiphon, taking place in August 1921, only shortly after he had been crowned king (Fig. 6.1). As noted already, Bell knew well the history and architecture of Ctesiphon. She had first visited the site back in 1909 and had taken notes on the architectural elements of the façade, arch and side chambers of the Taq-i Kisra, the massive surviving arched iwan of the impressive palace of the Sasanian king Khosrow I, which had been a byword for imperial splendour throughout the Middle East back in the sixth century CE. Bell had been fascinated at the time of her first visit to Ctesiphon by Sasanian traditions and their possible influence on the architecture of her prized discovery, the Palace of Ukhaidir. Significantly, some of the features of the Taq-i Kisra – notably, its method of brick vaulting, which is paralleled at Ukhaidir – influenced Bell's choice of an early date for the latter structure's construction.

  Several pages of Amurath to Amurath are devoted to describing Ctesiphon and its history, much of the information deriving from the writings of the famous al-Tabari, a late ninth- to early tenth-century Persian historian and exegete of the Qur'an who wrote a multivolume history of the Muslim world and the Middle East. From al-Tabari's account, Bell fashioned her own evocative image of Ctesiphon during its heyday, with its king and his dazzling throne room, which has already been quoted. Bell also recounts al-Tabari's description of the Arabs’ taking of Ctesiphon under the banner of Islam, led by Sa‘d ibn Abi Waqqas, and in particular of the first fording of the Tigris by 600 volunteers, who successfully crossed the river on horseback despite resistance by Sasanian horsemen.52

  When Bell brought King Faisal to Ctesiphon in 1921, the history that she presented to him must have been quite similar to what she related in Amurath to Amurath. Describing the occasion to her father in a letter, she wrote:

  It was wonderfully interesting showing that splendid place to Faisal. He is an inspiring tourist. After we had reconstructed the palace and seen Chosroes sitting in it, I took him into the high mounds to the south, whence we could see the Tigris, and told him the story of the Arab conquest as Tabari records it, the fording of the river and the rest of that magnificent tale. It was the tale of his own people – you can imagine what it was like reciting it to him. I don't know which of us was the more thrilled.53

  The purpose of Bell's visit to Ctesiphon with Faisal was not only to present to him one of the country's most magnificent testimonies to ancient royal authority, but also to impress upon him that these were his monuments as an Arab king, and that the events that had unfolded among them were his to possess and by which to feel empowered. When Bell related that ‘it was tale of his own people’, she was reminding Faisal that he was descended from the Arabs who had conquered this site. Just as they had taken it from the Persian Sasanians, Faisal, as the new king, was taking his country back from the Ottoman Turks.

  Bell's potent act cogently reflects many of her attitudes to Mesopotamia's history. It especially highlights her propensity for summoning the past to give meaning and purpose to the present. Her romantic evocation of al-Tabari's account of Arabs conquering the most powerful, glittering symbol of the Persian occupation – the great palace at Ctesiphon – was done carefully and consciously to parallel Faisal's own authority to rule Iraq after centuries of the foreign Turkish occupation of Mesopotamia, emphasizing that what had once taken place in history was being repeated. It is further significant that Bell's choice of this particular chapter from Ctesiphon's history involved kings and conquerors hailing entirely from the Near East; her appreciation for the Near East's venerable history in and of itself, devoid of Western influence or imposition, was evoked through this example in an effort to augment its potency for the new king of Iraq.

  It is difficult, however, to ignore the fact that it was Bell herself telling this vital historical tale to Faisal, and we doubt that the king would have been unaffected by her presence. On one level, Bell's presence symbolized Britain's powerful influence and, indeed, authority over the newly created nation of Iraq. On another level, what emerges is Bell's own authority and power, not simply as a voice for Britain but in her own person and forceful identity. After all, no other officer of the British colonial service in the new Iraq, and few among the country's indigenous inhabitants, had a greater command of Ctesiphon's glorious history. She had acquired this knowledge prodigiously through her own intensive research of the art, architecture and cultural history of the Sasanian and Early Islamic periods. It was this learning and the feeling of authority that it accorded to her personally that justified her reporting this event to the new king of Iraq. One might even suggest that on a subconscious level, given Bell's sense of proprietorship over the past, she felt that she was conferring her own personal ownership of Mesopotamia's past onto Faisal. If we accept all of these motivations, a more spectacular act of hubris is difficult to summon in Bell's political career, and yet its timing was favourable. Bell was at her most politically potent when she staged Faisal's visit to Ctesiphon in 1921. In her entire lifetime, her influence over the events and individuals of the new Iraq would never be as formidable as when she was standing with Faisal on that hill at Ctesiphon, describing to him that impressive story of Iraq's past imperial splendour.

  Fig. 6.1 Gertrude Bell with Faisal, King of Iraq (second from the right), at a picnic at Ctesiphon in 1921, shortly after Faisal’s coronation.

  Iraq's Antiquities Director and Museum Founder

  As a final example of the impact which Bell's experience and achievements in the history and archaeology of Mesopotamia had upon her later career, we can turn to her position as honorary Director of Antiquities for Iraq and her role in establishing the country's first museum. King Faisal asked Bell to head up the antiquities directorate in 1922 because of her extensive knowledge of Iraq's archaeology.54 In that capacity, she drew up the country's first legislation regarding its antiquities, which passed in June 1924. The new law followed standard antiquities legislation then prevalent in most countries, particularly in Europe, except that it still permitted a large s
hare of the excavated objects to be rewarded to the permit holders.55 Thus, the Director of Antiquities in Iraq was given the authority to select objects that were necessary ‘for the scientific completeness of the Iraq Museum’,56 but the remainder of the objects could be freely exported back to their sponsoring institutions outside of the country rather than remaining the property of the state of Iraq.57 This particular aspect of the antiquities legislation clearly was formulated by Bell to benefit the Western archaeological establishment, encouraging their continued archaeological activities and research in Iraq and promoting the development of their own national collections, such as the British Museum.58

  One can also see Bell's personal imprint in a few other articles of the Iraq antiquities legislation – for example, Article 19(i), which states that excavation work must be accompanied by adequate equipment for making photographic records as well as architectural plans of the remains.59 These stipulations especially reflect Bell's earlier archaeological background, namely her personal penchant for taking an abundance of photographs at archaeological sites and her realization that such images capture freshly cleared artistic and architectural details most effectively. Her recognition of the importance of making architectural plans of the excavated remains no doubt derives from her exposure to some of the most comprehensive, detailed plans of any archaeological projects in Mesopotamia before the war: those of Robert Koldewey at Babylon and Walter Andrae at Assur.