The Desert
Queen
By Dr. Syed Amir
Bethesda, MD
In her day, she was often dubbed
as the “Desert Queen” and the Bedouins
called her “Khatun”, an honorific
title. Although few in the Middle East or elsewhere
would readily recognize her name today, Gertrude
Bell, the most influential woman in the British
Empire in her time, is considered largely responsible
for the creation of the modern state of Iraq and
delineating its boundaries. Her lasting legacy
is the Iraqi National Museum, which she established
in 1926 just before her death. An avid explorer,
famed archeologist and a highly skillful British
intelligence operative, Bell had developed a fascination
with Arab culture and lifestyle at an early age.
She spoke fluent Arabic and Farsi and her facility
with language enabled her to move freely among
ordinary folks and powerful tribal Sheikhs. She
is regarded as an intriguing and mystifying character
who, while serving the colonial interests of her
country, also supported the rights of Arabs living
under occupation.
For nearly a century, Bell and her exploits were
completely forgotten. However, the devastation
of Iraq, following the Anglo-American invasion
in 2003, has rekindled interest in the work and
character of this remarkable woman who lived in
Iraq during a tumultuous period, not dissimilar
to the present. Her life has been romanticized
in several books and recent newspaper articles.
The popular biography, Desert Queen, by
Janet Wallach, originally published in 1996 in
the aftermath of first Gulf War in 1991, was reprinted
in 2005.
It exquisitely narrates her life story, her adventures
on camel trains in the Arabian Desert, and later
the crucial role she played in stitching together
a new state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
Her biographers were greatly helped by her habit
of keeping meticulous records of all significant
events she observed or participated in. Many of
these details were narrated in her numerous letters
to her father in England. Her letters were sorted,
edited and published in 1927 after her death by
her stepmother. Similarly, her diaries published
under the title, Arabian Diaries, in 2001, provide
an extraordinary window into events that were
unfolding at the time and were to shape the Middle
East for decades to come.
Gertrude Bell was born in an affluent family in
England some 130 years ago and was the first woman
to obtain a degree from Oxford, achieving the
highest honors. She loved traveling, and in 1909
set out on a grand tour of archeological sites
in the region then known as Mesopotamia, accompanied
by a little army of servants, camels, horses,
and a large stock of books. Traveling towards
Baghdad, she came upon the ruins of the ancient
Abbasid palace, Ukhaider, considered architecture
marvel of the eight century Islamic era. She performed
a careful exploration, and later authored the
first scholarly research paper about the site
based on her findings. This was one of a number
of trips she undertook to study the people and
places of the Middle East.
While Bell is recognized as an intrepid explorer
and a noted archeologist, her reputation does
not rest on these accomplishments. Her claim to
fame resides in the historic role she played in
redrawing the map of the Middle East after the
First World War (1914-1918). It was a time of
major upheavals. The Ottoman Empire had aligned
itself with Germany against the British. The British
Command centered at Cairo was busy hatching covert
plans to instigate an Arab revolt against the
Ottomans. They had developed clandestine contacts
with Sharif Hussein, the hereditary ruler of Hijaz,
with false promises of an Arab kingdom to be established
over domains under the Turkish rule.
Sir Henry McMahon, who as the foreign secretary
of India had negotiated the boundary between India
and Tibet in 1914, was now the British Resident
in Cairo. He promptly recognized that Bell with
her unparallel knowledge of the geography, and
familiarity with the tribal customs would be the
ideal person to help. She was soon recruited as
the intelligence agent, the only woman in the
international spying business at the time. In
Cairo, to her surprise, Bell found a metropolis,
largely unaffected by the war, where the British
were having a fun time, with dinners and dance
parties held every night in the fashionable Shepherd
and Savoy Hotels. Although nominally the Khedive
reigned, the real power in Egypt rested with the
British.
The British planners soon found themselves at
odds with the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge,
whose support was essential for the success of
any covert operation to gain control of Mesopotamia.
British India had traditionally provided material
and manpower for all military campaigns in the
region. The Viceroy was particularly opposed to
plans to incite an Arab revolt against the Turks.
He was deeply worried that tens of millions of
Indian Muslims who had strong sympathy for the
Ottoman Caliphate would be enraged by such mischievous
plots. He also did not like the promise, however
vague, of transferring the port of Basra to the
Arab control, since it was vital for guarding
the sealanes to India and the oil refineries located
at Abadan. The Gulf sheikhdoms and Emirates were
at the time overseen by the Indian Government.
Ideally, Lord Hardinge would have liked the future
Iraq to be administered by the Indian Government.
Bell who had been acquainted with Hardinge in
England was dispatched to India with the mission
to persuade him to support the Arab insurrection
plan. She took a steamer from Suez and, after
five days of sailing, disembarked at Karachi,
at the time a quaint, sleepy port of a few millions
on the Arabian Sea, in January 1916 on her way
to New Delhi. Apparently, her embassy was successful
and the Viceroy was finally won over.
The Arab insurrection led by Sherif Hussein’s
two sons, Faisal and Abdullah, and directed by
T. E. Lawrence was launched and succeeded in overwhelming
the Turkish forces in Hijaz and Syria. Meanwhile,
the British army, consisting largely of Indian
soldiers and British officers, established a foothold
in Basra, and then advanced further north to capture
Baghdad. In their first attempt, the British met
with a crushing defeat; however, Baghdad fell
a year later in 1917. Thus, the three former Ottoman
provinces of Basra, Mosul and Baghdad came under
British occupation, areas that were destined to
constitute the country of Iraq. The League of
Nations in 1920 awarded a mandate to Britain to
administer Iraq for a limited period.
Following the fall of Baghdad, Bell settled there
and became the Chief Political Advisor to the
British High Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox. She
was given the responsibility of conducting a study
of the political situation in Iraq, recommending
a model for the future Government and delineating
the boundaries of the new country. Her task was
comparable to that assigned to Lord Mountbatten
and Sir Cyril Radcliff, before the partition of
the Indian subcontinent in 1947. She spent the
next ten months developing her recommendations,
which became the basis for drawing the final boundaries
of Iraq.
In 1920, while Bell was busy demarcating the borders,
the British administration in Iraq came under
assault as both Shia and Sunni communities together
rose against it; the uprising was brutally suppressed
by the military, resulting in the loss of thousands
of lives. The incident, nevertheless, unsettled
the British sufficiently and soon they started
to look for ways to set up a local Government
in Iraq and extricate themselves from the mess.
In the Cairo Conference called by Winston Churchill,
the then Colonial Secretary, Bell pressed the
proposal that Prince Faisal, who had been a leader
of the Arab revolt, be crowned the King of Iraq.
She succeeded and, in August 1921, Faisal was
proclaimed the King, Bell becoming his close advisor
and confidante. Faisal who had never set foot
in Iraq before his coronation and was not an Iraqi,
proved to be an enlightened leader. At his coronation
he exhorted, “There is no meaning in the
words Jews, Muslims and Christians in the terminology
of patriotism. There is simply one country called
Iraq, and we all are Iraqis.” His words
were to be echoed some quarter century later in
the historic speech the Qaid-i-Azam gave before
the Pakistan Constituent Assembly in Karachi.
The Hashemite dynasty and the British influence
in Iraq were to last for only 37 years, when in
July 1958 a military coup overthrew the monarchy
and the royal family was brutally massacred.
Gertrude Bell made Baghdad her home, only leaving
it briefly for a visit to England a year before
her death. She once commented, “I don’t
care to be in London much. I like Iraq. It is
the real East.” However, her last years
of life were not happy. She was mostly ill and
depressed, and took her own life with an overdose
of sleeping pills on a hot summer night; she was
only 58 years old. A curious American reporter
who recently went looking for her grave in the
British cemetery at Baghdad failed to locate it.
Presumably, undergrowth, shrubs and wild bushes
have completely shrouded the grave of Gertrude
Bell, the woman once considered one of the most
powerful persons in the Middle East.
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