The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Almost a hundred years ago an Englishman spent twenty-two months in the desert. He commandeered a simple mission given to him by his masters, united dozens of bickering native tribes, defeated a well-armed and well-positioned enemy force, survived intense and humiliating torture, severely disciplined his body, grew overtly egotistical and, perhaps, megalomaniacal, became famous throughout the West, returned to his homeland a stranger in a strange land, wrote a book, and was killed in a motorcycle accident.

The book Thomas Edward Lawrence wrote is called The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and describes his efforts in Arabia during the First World War.



In 1917, England thought it would be in her wartime interest to align and promote an Arab uprising in the Middle East against the German-allied Turkish empire. Lawrence was one of a handful of British soldiers working in the Arab Intelligence division at Cairo tasked with making contact with potential leaders of such a revolt across the Red Sea.

Ostensibly, the revolt was led by King Hussein; however, the king spent most of the war holed up in Mecca and left the fighting to his four children: Ali, Abdullah, Feisal, and Zeid. Eventually Lawrence zeroed in on Feisal, determining him to be the supremely important physical presence necessary for the Revolt. Seven Pillars details their efforts defeating the Turkish army from Mecca and Medina up the coast of Arabia, taking the strategic port of Akaba, liberating the Holy Land, and, finally, conquering Damascus, a city which had spent the last four hundred years under Turkish rule.

On a continuum with strict objective truthfulness on one side and fanciful, self-serving subjectivity on the other, Seven Pillars lies somewhere in the muddled middle. Precisely where is highly debatable and the subject of many a book on Lawrence’s life. As a non-partisan non-specialist in the man and his times, I don’t feel cheated or intellectually comprised placing it in the exact center of this continuum. I could tell when he’s boasting, I think, but I also believe he tells the uncomfortable truth at certain times when it might serve him best to gloss it over.

Seven Pillars is, by my unofficial calculation:

- 5 percent groundbreaking theory in guerilla warfare
- 5 percent Lawrence’s ascetical disciplines
- 10 percent World War I Arabian politics
- 10 percent Bedouin anthropology
- 70 percent camel-jumping from one watering hole to the next and all the minutiae that such traveling entails

It was a difficult read, for a couple of superficial reasons. Specifically:

There’s just too many names: You may know Feisal, King Hussein, Auda, Daud and Farraj from the movie. But there are at least three Abdullas, a handful of Alis, a Nasir, Nasib, Nesib, Zeid, Zaal, Nuri, Maulaud, Hamid, the nefarious Abd el Kader, a bunch of Pashas, a Sharraf, a Sherif, Eshref, a few Mohammeds, a Hamza, Fauzan, Gasim, Rahail, Aziz, Dakhil, Mirzuk, Trad, Khalid, ad infinitum.

There’s a whole group of Englishmen to keep track of, too: Allenby, Clayton, Murray, Vickery, Lewis, Stokes, Rolls, Bols, Dawnay, Wood, Joyce, Campbell, Bartholomew, Young, Wilson, plus about fifty in the Appendix who I don’t even think make an obligatory cameo in the text.

Then there are the numerous tribes, each with their own prejudices and neuroses: the Beni Sakhr, Beni Hassan, Serahin, Howeitat, Harith, the Abu Tayi, the Druses, the Zaagi … just to name the ones I consciously remembered at the book’s conclusion.

Too many towns: You all know Jerusalem, Damascus, Medina, and Mecca. You may be aware of Beersheba, Jericho, Amman, Akaba, and, maybe, Deraa. After completing this book, you’ll be in possession of (for at least a hour or two) the locations, populations, and politics of: Rabegh, Jidda, Yenbo, Wejh, Mudawara, Rumm, Semna, Maan, Faraifra, Shobek, Guweira, Aba el Lissan, Jurf, Muaggar, Tafas, Kiswe, Azrak, Amruh, and Zerga, and about twenty or thirty other locales I’ve already forgotten.

To make it all much more fun Lawrence never subscribes to a consistency in spelling (claiming that this is fair, since the Arabic language has only three or four vowels, and he wants to stress dialect). I see his point, but I was more than a little frustrated, and often had to thumb back to previously-read chapters to see if he was talking about who or what I thought he was.

My suggestion: Keep the variations in spelling throughout the text, but include a massive, Tolkien-ish glossary of people, places, and things in the back of future editions of the book. Petty problems solved!

But aside from that, is the book worth reading?

Yes.

Why?

There are, perhaps, a half-dozen scenes which will stick with me for the rest of my life. The book is, after all, a book about war, and war often is, at its worst, hell on earth. Some of the descriptions of desolation and destruction, and the acts of desperate men, are truly horrifying. I pray that neither you nor me nor our children will ever have to face such situations.

For example, according to Lawrence, the Turks set fire to captured Arab wounded who could not move on their own. Why? Why the extreme barbarity? I don’t know – and I don’t think Lawrence answers it, but he does tell us that, in mercy, the Arabs would shoot their own to spare them this torture at the hands of their enemy. One of the truly wrenching scenes occurs when it falls to Lawrence to dispatch a certain wounded Arab.

Seven Pillars does indeed transport you into an entirely different world, and I imagine some readers might not mind all the strange and evocative names and places proliferate in the book. Would that I had the time and energy, a second reading of this work could easily be better than the first go-through. In fact, now that I’m thinking of it, one should really only approach Lawrence’s book with the intention of two or three readings.

Sometime after finishing the book, I came across a suggestion that, possibly, it might be viewed as something greater than a memoir of a long-ago forgotten war. Might it be viewed as a philosophical novel, a cousin to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra? Intriguing, very intriguing. I’m not sure I can agree wholeheartedly, but a second reading with a mind seeking the abstract as opposed to the grim desert realities, might yield a different conclusion.

But the best reason to read through these pages is Lawrence himself. A fascinating man, he who is put on display for us. How much is romanticized and idealized, and how much is dirty and gutter is, as I mentioned earlier, up for debate. I think Lawrence would see no problem at all mixing the romantic with the filthy; in his arguably twisted ascetical personality the two might be inextricably intertwined. I think that may be a point a lot of biographers and debunkers may miss.

It is undeniable, though, that the man rose from humble beginnings, followed his own star, and allowed himself be used by Fate, by powers that normally never even deign to notice our little ant selves as we live out our little ant lives. Lawrence demanded notice, demanded more than pawnhood on a chessboard; he wanted to be a piece, a piece which moved independent of the will of the chess master. Am I making any sense here?

Perhaps this little bit of silliness will make it clear. With a hundred men like Lawrence, I – even I – could conquer the globe. I believe that with every bit of my being. After reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I wonder if you won’t, too.