Our Israeli correspondent MC takes a look at the traditional Islamophilia of the British foreign service, and the relationship over the years between its love affair with all things Arab and various fashionable forms of socialism.
St. John (Jack) Philby in Riyadh
If you elect idiots, you get chaos
Elite Britain’s love affair with Islam
by MC
I was brought up in a culture that regarded Islam as exotic and erotic: belly dancing and handsome Sheiks in desert hideaways complete with full symphony orchestras and Oxford English accents.
My aunt lived in El Beida, close to Benghazi in Libya. Her story was different: Islam was squalid, dirty and disgusting. She was horrified when her daughter’s playmate, aged nine, was married off to a ‘rich’ fifty-year-old.
Later, in my teens, when I started to read non-fiction and history, I came across more evidence of the second scenario than of the first, but the ‘El Khobar’ idea appears to have persisted in many minds.
This was brought home to me last time I was in Riyadh, when a European acquaintance brought up the idea of how alluring a female clad in an abayah (tent-like, black female attire mandatory in KSA) complete with face mask could be. Full of the ‘Eastern’ promise no doubt. In my personal viewpoint, she is a woman imprisoned by a male pervert-dominated culture. I prefer bikinis to burkas.
We had just been to the beach at Khobar, where the little boys were splashing in the sea as children do at any beach. Their sisters, however, were sitting on the sand, attired in their abayahs, watching.
Little girls cannot play active games in an abayah; they might expose parts of themselves that could stimulate good Muslim men to lust. So their little six-year-old bodies do not see the sun (in public) and they must sit demurely watching their brothers play in the sea and the sand.
Apart from the Foreign and Colonial Office, Britain had little love for Islam in the 1890s. The Afghan wars and Khartoum had brought graphic descriptions of what happened to soldiers and civilians who fell into the hands of Islam.
By contrast, in India, the FCO training ground, it was the Hindus who caused cause major grief to the British Raj and its servants, by virtue of the ‘caste’ system which made dealings with Indian nobility fraught with problems. The British had tried to eliminate the practice of suttee (the immolation of wives in the funeral pyre of their husbands). Wives could choose suttee, or as an alternative, to become the house slave of their in-laws. Most wives chose the former — it was probably more comfortable, and certainly quicker.
With typical clumsiness, the British administration made suttee illegal, but did not deal with the alternative. Thus a low-key religious conflict began which soured relationships and eventually lead to the Indian mutiny and the Gandhi-inspired ‘non-violence’ of the 1920s during which many thousands lost their lives. Through all of this the Indian Muslims remained infinitely easier to manage and administer than their Hindu compatriots.
We thus find that many FCO officers had a soft spot for Islam, with the next generation even converting to Islam; note this piece from Wikipedia concerning Jack Philby:
According to an alarming new survey, Germany is being transformed from a racist society into an Islamophobic one. Instead of directing their hatred towards the “Turks”, Germans are now hateful of “Muslims”. Despite the best efforts of German Muslims, the overwhelming majority of whom are peaceful, more than two-thirds of Germans have a negative attitude towards Islam.
