Lost in Arabia

Having gone through over 350 pages, we cannot but wonder why the author and his publisher felt this personal account needed to be published

Arabia: A Journey through the Heart of the Middle East
 

Levison Wood 

Hodder and Stoughton, 2018

Pages 354, Rs 699

With this book, Levison Wood has rather self-consciously joined the galaxy of British travellers in West Asia — Charles Doughty, Richard Burton, Gertrude Bell, T E Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger. His journey of 8,000 km over five months in the autumn and winter of 2017-18 takes him around the Arabian Peninsula, where many countries are experiencing conflicts — ethnic, religious or sectarian — with historic animosities driving them to wreak extraordinary destruction on their enemies.

In Iraq, after witnessing a referendum at Erbil on Kurdish independence that many locals viewed as a sham powerplay, Mr Wood walks into the final stages of the fight against the Islamic State. He sees the destruction at Mosul after ISIS had been evicted and witnesses at first hand the ruthless violence of the clash against ISIS fighters at their last enclave at Hawija.

Mr Wood is appalled at the “normalisation of violence”, and the motley bunch of fighters seem to him as if “the cast of Mad Max had met Lawrence of Arabia and were off to party”. But this is the same Iraq where Wood also visits the Sumerian town of Eridu, where writing was invented, and the historic city of Babylon, contested between Persia and Alexander, that was painstakingly restored by Saddam Hussein.

After desultory visits to the Gulf Sheikhdoms of Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, Mr Wood’s next source of excitement is the camel ride through the Empty Quarter in Oman, largely in the footsteps of Thesiger. Thesiger had felt a unique affinity with the desert, a constant “yearning to return”, and saw in that “cruel land” a sense of purity. Sadly, Mr Wood experiences none of this allure; instead, he finds in the desert “brutality, cruelty and complexity”.

In Saudi Arabia, Mr Wood links himself first with Richard Burton and later with T E Lawrence. Burton, unorthodox soldier, adventurer and polyglot who translated the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, disguised himself as a Muslim and visited Mecca and Madinah. This feat Mr Wood is unable to repeat, though he does ask his Saudi guide why Christians should be considered non-believers.

Putting this disappointment behind him, Mr Wood then follows in the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia and is overjoyed to see the remnants of the Hejaz railway destroyed by Lawrence and his Arab allies in the First World War and an engine lying on its side. At the historic town of Al Ula, he has a rather casual chat with a local cleric on Wahhabism, Osama bin Laden and terrorism; he has misgivings about some of the cleric’s remarks distancing the kingdom from extremist doctrine but remains silent. Surprisingly, at Al Ula he does not visit the historic monuments of the Nabatean civilisation.

Mr Wood then goes to Amman, sees important biblical sites in the Holy Land, visits historic spots in Lebanon, and then goes to Palmyra in Syria, which has been recently re-taken from ISIS. He expresses the average tourist’s delight at seeing the ancient monuments at Petra. At Bethlehem on Christmas eve, he talks of the pickpockets, hawkers, drug-peddlers and shady money-changers.

He notes that Jerusalem is linked with the biblical prophets, Roman emperors, crusaders and Einstein, Montgomery and Churchill. He agrees it is impossible not to be overwhelmed and then, in the next sentence, says that, in the company of family and friends “the expedition took on a more leisurely pace” and in fact even became a “real holiday”. Extraordinary banality at a solemn moment!

The book ends with Mr Wood’s visit to the ancient Phoenician town of Byblos in Lebanon that, in his view, made Europe the “centre of the world” and “the launchpad of civilisation itself”. Does Wood really believe that Europe becoming the centre of the world marked the launch of civilisation?

Having gone through over 350 pages describing a tour through the fountainhead of human civilisation and the theatre of several visceral conflicts, ancient and modern, we cannot but wonder why the author and his publisher felt this personal account needed to be published. Though Mr Wood frequently recalls the travellers who have gone before, nowhere in this work is there the pioneering spirit of the early explorers, the profound insights and imagination of Thesiger, or the lyrical, even spiritual, prose of Colin Thubron that evocatively links the historic past of world centres with present-day circumstances.

Mr Wood says he went on his tour to learn why West Asia seems to be “the most contested and dangerous region on earth”. Even though he visits some of most significant places linked with world history and contemporary politics, at no point is he able to offer an interesting observation or a profound insight or even a deep sense of the flow of history that is fuelling modern-day contentions.

Instead, what we get is a consistent petulance and churlishness through much of the journey — largely caused by recalcitrant, rude and irritating drivers and guides.

We have here a breezy travelogue but one that fails to match Lonely Planet for knowledge and detail.

The reviewer is a former diplomat