From the crusaders on, contempt for the Arabs is written in stone

What was it that bestowed upon our ancestors such ill-will towards the Arabs?

By Robert Fisk

"Not long ago, the owner of a Majorcan palace found 13th-century graffiti on his basement wall. It was scrawled there by a knight en route to the Crusades. Translated, it read: "Sod the Arabs.".....

Ten years later, Frederic Manning – who wrote the wonderful First World War novel of the Somme, Her Privates We – was writing a note of praise for Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom and at least tried to enter the Arab mind (as Lawrence himself had done). Manning described the wartime Arab revolt, led by Lawrence, as "so ambiguous, a racial movement striving to assume a national character, the nomad entering into possessions, arresting his own movement by prescribing a boundary to it. You took me right back to Genesis and Job ... Job, of course, was an Arab, and his present day progeny stand in the same relation to Allah as he stood in relation to Jahveh, so passionately asserting his own individuality against that engulphing [sic] one-ness..." The problem, of course, as Bell had noticed long before, was that the boundary the Arabs had in mind included all of a land called Palestine.......

But what was it that bestowed upon our recent ancestors such marked ill-humour towards the Arabs? Even Caroline Doughty (Charles' wife) would write of the painter Eric Kennington that "he is so imbued with the strange strongly marked features of the Arabs that it will be sometime before he can return to European colouring and softness of touch."......

George Bernard Shaw shrugged off Lawrence's assumed anonymity in the RAF with the exclamation that "the people have their rights too ... They want to you to appear always in glory, crying, 'This is I, Lawrence, Prince of Mecca!' To live under a cloud is to defame God."

Perhaps that is the problem. We like the Arabs if we pose at being an Arab. Otherwise, the undertow of all these remarks echoes the crusading knight who wrote so imperishably on the wall of that Majorcan palace."