Review | Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson

Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson

T.E. Lawrence has always intrigued me. Not that I know much about him, but something about him, as played by Peter O’Toole in my mind’s eye, has always seemed mysterious and exciting, though I could not have put my finger on it. I visualize a blonde, wild-eyed rebel, a man who could manipulate the greatest of world empires to his will, who crossed deserts and captured cities, ambushed armies and sabotaged trains, and laid the groundwork for the modern Middle East…and then walked away from it all. Who was this iconoclast of a man?

I first discovered him in the 1962 film “Lawrence of Arabia,” played by the already mentioned and inimitable Peter O’Toole, and I remember that I wanted to read Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (spoiler alert: I never have, though I did find a copy in a second-hand bookstore that I bought and maybe someday will even read). The movie was exciting, and Lawrence was a real-world Luke Skywalker, a lone hero leading a scrappy band of rebels against the might of the Ottoman Empire, which in turn was allied with the worst villains of history, the Nazis. In my youth, the extent of my analysis was bemoaning the tragedy of Lawrence’s untimely death, and never mind the complex threads that took the young British man to the center of the strange and convoluted politics that gripped and twisted the Middle East in the early decades of the 20th century. It left an itch in my mind, one I left unscratched for many years until this book came along, highly recommended (and, fortunate for me as I painted a room in my home, readily available in the audio version).

So let me come right to the point: Scott Anderson does not disappoint with Lawrence in Arabia. While nominally naming his book after Lawrence, he expands his story to three other scions of the age who also participated in the forces that transformed the political lines of the area. Here we have Curt Prufer, a mid-level German diplomat, Aaron Aaronsohn, an accomplished agronomist who was also a committed Zionist, and William Yale, an American and son of a down-on-its-luck upper-class family who somehow found himself looking for petroleum resources for Standard Oil on the sly. Their paths intertwine and overlap, and each becomes a protagonist in their own right as much as Lawrence, leaving me as intrigued with each as I was with him. As a rose by any other name is still a rose, each becomes in one form or another a spy for their own people, whether Prufer for Germany, Aaronsohn for Zionism, and Yale for Standard Oil, and them for the Americans.

To be sure, the underlying tragedy here is that each is really just part of a sideshow while the greater narrative—World War I—is centered elsewhere, boiling over into the Middle East in the contest of empires that caused the death and suffering of so many, not just on the frontlines of the battles, but as resources and crops and materials were gobbled up and taken for the war effort. Here we see the Turks killing the Kurds, the Jews and Arabs competing for survival, and the British and French (and to a lesser extent the Americans) competing for lines on a map for the prestige of empire.

It’s a tragedy.

And what does it do to these men? And the men and women and children that are caught up? What has it done to the people and their descendants in the intervening decades and generations that have lived with the effects of the war? Nothing but tragedy comes from the story.

Title: Lawrence in Arabia
Author: Scott Anderson
Genre: History
Publisher: Doubleday
Release Date: August 6, 2013
Pages: 592

The Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War One was, in the words of T.E. Lawrence, “a sideshow of a sideshow.” Amidst the slaughter in European trenches, the Western combatants paid scant attention to the Middle Eastern theater. As a result, the conflict was shaped to a remarkable degree by a small handful of adventurers and low-level officers far removed from the corridors of power.

Curt Prüfer was an effete academic attached to the German embassy in Cairo, whose clandestine role was to foment Islamic jihad against British rule. Aaron Aaronsohn was a renowned agronomist and committed Zionist who gained the trust of the Ottoman governor of Syria. William Yale was the fallen scion of the American aristocracy, who traveled the Ottoman Empire on behalf of Standard Oil, dissembling to the Turks in order gain valuable oil concessions. At the center of it all was Lawrence. In early 1914 he was an archaeologist excavating ruins in the sands of Syria; by 1917 he was the most romantic figure of World War One, battling both the enemy and his own government to bring about the vision he had for the Arab people.

The intertwined paths of these four men – the schemes they put in place, the battles they fought, the betrayals they endured and committed – mirror the grandeur, intrigue and tragedy of the war in the desert. Prüfer became Germany’s grand spymaster in the Middle East. Aaronsohn constructed an elaborate Jewish spy-ring in Palestine, only to have the anti-Semitic and bureaucratically-inept British first ignore and then misuse his organization, at tragic personal cost. Yale would become the only American intelligence agent in the entire Middle East – while still secretly on the payroll of Standard Oil. And the enigmatic Lawrence rode into legend at the head of an Arab army, even as he waged secret war against his own nation’s imperial ambitions.

Based on years of intensive primary document research, LAWRENCE IN ARABIA definitively overturns received wisdom on how the modern Middle East was formed. Sweeping in its action, keen in its portraiture, acid in its condemnation of the destruction wrought by European colonial plots, this is a book that brilliantly captures the way in which the folly of the past creates the anguish of the present.