Between such oases, the wilderness was trawled by the desert and hill folk – the Bedu – a people in endless movement, endlessly changing, endlessly adapting to the whims of the land: now staying in one place long enough to plant seeds, now furling their black tents and setting their camels’ heads towards some distant pasture. The changes came slowly, generation by generation, and the Bedu, who had virtually no history, could not remember that things had ever been different, and believed their ways immutable and hallowed by time. Their records, enshrined in verse and handed down from mouth to mouth, were endless tales of war upon war, or clan against clan and tribe against tribe, of interminable raids and skirmishes. Such wars were fought with ‘white weapons’ – the swordblade and the spear. Fighting with these arms, a man could scarcely be slain without his killer being known to the entire world. Vengeance would be certain. It was the absolute law of lex talionis– an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – that prevailed, and the Bedu had a saying which underlined the slow inevitability of the vendetta: ‘Forty years on, the Bedui took his revenge.’ By Bedu tradition, vengeance might fall on any adult male relative of the killer within five generations – which was as far back as anyone could recall his own true ancestry. Beyond one’s great-great-great grandfather, genealogy passed into the nebula of myth. The tribe itself was something of an abstract entity, consisting of a number of five-generation families who simply felt they belonged together while not necessarily being related by blood. Yet this tribe was the refuge and sanctuary of every individual. Though the tribes were violently independent and quite often in a state of hostility with one another, within them there was a feeling of passionate unity and solidarity known as ‘ asabiyya,and in it lay the true strength of Arabia. Individuals owed no personal allegiance to any other: they owed their loyalty eternally to the tribe.
In the Hejaz, the Bedu lived on the milk of their she-camels, on dates and grain from their own oasis gardens, for here there was no transition from the desert to the sown. The great tribes of western Arabia – the ‘Utayba, the Harb, the Juhayna, the Billi, the Muttar and the Bani ‘Atiya – consisted of families who lived in a continuum of lifestyles, from fully nomadic, to semi-nomadic, to villagers who scarcely moved at all. Yet while the more mobile tended to sneer at the more settled, they were kinsmen, and all were considered honourable, and derived honour from the reputation of the tribe. For though the individual members of a tribe were equals, and the Sheikhs simply primes inter pares, the tribes themselves were not. The tribes which were most powerful at any given moment were considered the most ‘noble’, and altered their genealogies accordingly. There were certain outcast tribes, such as the Shararat, the ‘Awazim and the Hutaym, who were not accepted as warriors, and with whom no one would marry, and an anomalous folk called the Solayb, who were tinkers, hunters and medicine-men. Another group, the ‘Agayl, fitted none of these categories. Mostly settled villagers from the Qasim oases of Najd, the ‘Agayl were not a tribe but a brotherhood of camel-dealers and caravan guides known everywhere in Arabia as honest brokers and superb camel-handlers, and a force of mercenaries respected as brave fighters, who would remain loyal to those they had undertaken to protect. Though the ‘Agayl were not Bedu, they were considered honourable in every part of the land. Bedu life was hard, but the idea that it was a ‘death in life’, as Lawrence later claimed, shows more about his own character than the nature of the Bedu. In fact, their culture was so perfectly adapted to the desert that they felt at home there. Their herds of camels, goats and sheep were their survival machines: much that they used could be garnered from their own materials – the rest they could trade for in the towns. They lived not by material wealth – a transient thing in such desolation – but by the cult of reputation. A man gained honour by displaying courage, endurance, hospitality, generosity and loyalty, and while no strange caravan, nor traveller, nor rival tent was free from his depredations, there was no more honourable travelling companion nor host once he had shared bread and salt. Raiding for camels was the spice of his life, and a means of acquiring reputation, and his hand was turned against every man, unless it suited him. His services could be bought with gold, but his soul could not.
The hardest facet of Bedu life for a stranger to grasp was not its physical aspect, but its spiritual one. The Bedu lived in a different space-time continuum from the European – a world which was flat, a world in which the sun crossed the sky, a world in which the stars were merely lights in the heavens, a world which could not be measured by kilometres or miles. They inhabited a world in which everything – every tree, stone or pool – had its individual spirit, but in which everything was related in God: in which a man must accept what befell him because it was the will of God. The Bedu had no lust to explain, no thought to solve, no notion to improve – the answer to every question lay not in reason but in faith. They lived in a world without physical security, where death – from raiders, thirst, hunger, accident or disease – might strike at any moment. Yet they possessed existential security – like the medieval European, they had an absolute knowledge of who they were, a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, a sense that God moved everything for the best, a sense of belonging to the earth and to the universe, which modern Europeans had lost.
Johan Lutwig Burckhardt and Richard Burton had penetrated Mecca and Medina disguised as Muslims in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Charles Doughty had travelled in forma pauperisin Arabia in the 1870s. Yet of the land itself, little was known to the outside world: ‘Up to 1914,’ David Hogarth would tell the Royal Geographical Society in 1920, ‘our best knowledge of the Peninsula of Arabia was everywhere sketchy, and of more than half of its great area… it scarcely amounted to anything worth mention. The virtually unknown regions lay in the centre – especially on its western half … The greater part of this last region had been barred as a Holy Land to European explorers unless they would risk themselves in furtive disguise which hindered, if it did not absolutely preclude, them from observing and recording facts and features of geographical interest.’ 1The Tihama, or Red Sea coast of the Hejaz, was still as little mapped as the Antarctic. The British had no reliable map of the interior, could not say for certain how far the Hejaz railway lay from the coast, and could not even enumerate its stations south of al-‘Ula. For the 200-mile stretch between there and Mecca, they could not fix the longitude of any given point, and indeed, did not know exactly where Medina lay nor what it looked like. The only plan they had of the town was a sketch made by Burton seventy years previously. When Lawrence stepped ashore at Jeddah on 19 October 1916, he was aware that he was entering terra incognita.
The revolt was then four months old, and dangerously near crisis. The initiative had been regained by the Turks. It seemed to the British that the Sharif had acted precipitately, though Hussain himself had seen no other choice. In January 1916 he had sent his son Feisal to Damascus, accompanied by a bodyguard of forty tribesmen, to foment mutiny among Arab Divisions of the Ottoman army in Syria and Mesopotamia. To his dismay, Feisal had found that there were no longer any Arab Divisions inSyria, for the resourceful Jamal Pasha – the Military Governor – had sent them off to other fronts and replaced them with Osmanli Divisions. Jamal’s new policy was repressive. In April, he had ordered the public hanging of twenty-one Arab nationalists – including prominent magistrates, writers and intellectuals – in Damascus and Beirut. He was also on the point of dispatching Khairy Bey with an additional 3,500 specially picked and trained soldiers to the Hejaz, ostensibly on their way to the Yemen, to escort a German field mission under Baron Othmar von Stotzingen, but actually to strengthen his hold on the Hejaz. Hussain recognized that the executions symbolized a new confidence on the part of the Turks, encouraged by their successes in Gallipoli and Kut, and suspected that the true purpose of the Khairy Bey mission was to depose him. He knew that he must act before the fresh troops reached Medina. He had already taken the Sheikhs of the Harb, the ‘Utayba, the Juhayna and others into his confidence, and knew he could count on Bedu levies. He had his own trained and blooded camelry of ‘Agayl mercenaries and his Bishah tribal police – highlanders from the hills of the fertile Assir – but virtually no regular troops and no modern equipment, particularly machine-guns or artillery. Nevertheless, Hussain felt confident of his Bedu troops, and only one factor stayed his hand: his son Feisal was still in Syria, and would be seized by jamal as soon as word of hostilities leaked out. Feisal solved the problem cleverly by gulling Jamal into believing that he was returning to the Hejaz only to bring back a force of volunteers for the Turkish army. On 16 May he left Damascus, putting his forty men under the command of his friend Nasib al-Bakri of al-Fatat, with instructions to flee as soon as they received a coded password. By the third week in May he was back in Medina, and the Sharif was free to strike.