Desert Queen (50 page)

In the wealthy sections of town, in Giza, Zamalek, or Garden City where the British Embassy stood, upper-class Muslims, Coptic Christians and Jews lived alongside Europeans in splendid villas or elegant apartments overlooking the Nile. The men engaged in brisk business, trading cotton, commodities and stocks on the Cairo bourse, while their women shopped for fine fabrics at Cicural’s, the Jewish-owned department store, ordered their foodstuffs from Vazelakis, the oldest and best Greek grocer, and bargained over gold and jewels with established Armenian dealers. On top of Cairo’s rich Oriental tradition lay a crust of British colonalism, an anomaly of English manners and mores. English-speaking doctors, lawyers, bankers and merchants read the gossipy
Egyptian Gazette
to learn that Mr. Macan Murkar, the jeweler from Ceylon, was showing a splendid selection of set and unset gems at Shepheard’s Hotel; that Mr. and Mrs. England of Los Angeles were arranging a shooting expedition to British East Africa in order to secure some trophies for the L.A. Museum; that the Duke and Duchess of Alba had just arrived in town; and that the Crown Prince of Siam and his family had checked into the Luxor Winter Palace Hotel.

Cosmopolitan Cairenes relaxed together at the spa in Halouan, indulging in treatments of electric lights or needle baths; or they golfed at the Gezira Sporting Club, where the ladies were requested not to wear long skirts because they destroyed the surface of the greens. The putting greens, like the fairways, were composed of sand, painstakingly raked, brushed and watered into a smooth surface.

On sun-filled afternoons the smart set drove out to Mena House. Sitting on the terrace of the hotel, once the Khedive’s hunting lodge, then a guest house for special visitors to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, they took their tea enjoying the view of the Pyramids. It was after the season in 1919 when Gertrude arrived, but had it been winter or spring, she would have joined the well-dressed women in long trailing gowns and tiaras, the men in white tie and tails, for an evening at the Cairo Opera House. There, world-famous singers performed
Tosca
or
La Traviata
and British actors such as Sybil Thorndike performed the latest West End theatrical rage. Or she would have dined and danced at Shepheard’s, rubbing elbows on the ballroom floor with at least one visiting European monarch.

Yet despite the civility, a lingering stench of violence greeted Gertrude in September 1919. Rebellion had been in the air and clouds still trembled over the Nile. As a British protectorate, Egypt had been forced by Britain to provide men, supplies and four million pounds in money to fight the Turks; at the end of the war, when the Anglo-French Declaration of Arab liberation was announced, the Egyptians demanded their self-determination. But British officials in London refused to hear of it, and the Egyptians took up arms. At first the crowds turned angrily on the property of British subjects, then on the property of Egyptian Anglophiles. In the end, they not only destroyed homes and shops; they attacked British soldiers on trains, pulled them off, beat them and left their corpses behind. The overpowering British army quelled the uprising, but the insurrection gave an ugly taste of things to come. The bitter facts of nationalism and resistance, as told to Gertrude by General Gilbert Clayton, the Interior Minister, would make a significant impact on her views.

Sitting in the garden of the British Residence, a splendid Neoclassical building on the Nile, Gertrude smoked one cigarette after another while Clayton spoke. Despite the actions of the British Government in London, he confessed, he believed the Egyptians were mainly in the right. It was true that certain security positions would have to be kept by the British, but others could be turned over at once to the Arabs. If not, the situation would turn to disaster. “We must maintain control of the Suez Canal, the Nile water, the army and the police,” he explained; as for the administration itself, “leave the Egyptian Ministers without British advisers, but give the High Commissioner a British adviser in each department.” No doubt, he acknowledged, “the Egyptians will make mistakes and tie the departments into serious knots,” but they were entitled to a fair trial. If the British refused to take these bold measures, they would end up with an “Oriental Ireland.”

Gertrude asked his opinion on Iraq. He advised her to take the right steps from the start. “Begin as you intend to go on,” he suggested. Look at the mess we have here, he said, and avoid it at all costs. But she shook her head in protest. Not only were the Iraqi Arabs at odds with each other; they had little experience running a government. How could they take charge of an embryonic country, an entity just being formed? Unlike Egypt, a modern state since the early nineteenth century, Mesopotamia had no solid framework, no infrastructure to build on. Indeed, the British were trying to create a country out of three entirely separate Ottoman
vilayets
—Basrah, Baghdad and Mosul—trying to unify a population of Sunnis, Shiites, Jews, Christians and Kurds, all with different interests. But Clayton insisted that even with poor material to work with, he would create independent Arab ministries, guided by advisers to the British High Commissioner. The ministers could form a council led by an Arab president who eventually might become the head of state. Gertrude listened carefully to his ideas. Whatever seeds of Arab self-rule had been planted in her mind by Lawrence and Faisal were beginning to take root under Clayton.

There were several Iraqi nationalists he wanted her to meet. One was Sayid Talib Pasha. A former politician from an influential family in Basrah, he had led the movement for Arab nationalism even before the war and now was seen as its spokesman. Smooth and smart, he had developed a large constituency. But Talib’s methods were infamous. Robin Hood to some, blackmailer and murderer to others, he gave generously to the poor but with money taken from others; it was even rumored that he kept a dungeon in his house to hold his enemies. Gertrude viewed him with deep suspicion, but she took Clayton’s advice and went to see him. Charming, urbane and ambitious, Talib told her he wanted to go back to Basrah, to return home and cultivate his estate. “To the best of my recollection,” she later observed dryly, “he has none.” Rather, she believed, the “cunning” fellow was plotting his way to become the Emir of Iraq.

Others on Clayton’s list included Yasin Pasha, an extremist, but highly intelligent; Jafar Pasha al Askari and his brother-in-law Nuri Pasha Said, both impressive Iraqis who had fought alongside Faisal during the Arab Revolt and were now in power with him in Syria. She made a note to interview them when she reached Damascus.

The other matter on her agenda was the Arab Bureau in Cairo. Sharing information with the French and the Italians had weakened the British agency during the war, and now it was nearly destroyed. The network needed to be restored. She had been given the assignment of coordinating exchanges of information between the British posts in Egypt and Iraq. “Interchange of intelligence is a matter I have much at heart,” she remarked.

F
rom Egypt she moved on to Palestine. Of the dozens of Arabs she spoke with, one, a “remarkable Muslim woman,” railed against wearing the veil. The attractive twenty-five-year-old Nasirah Haddad, widowed once and then married to a lawyer, did charity work for the poor. But, she complained, being veiled interfered with her work at every turn; she hoped it would end with the next generation. “She is the only woman in Jerusalem who holds views so advanced,” Gertrude observed.

The issue on everyone’s minds, however, was Zionism. The Balfour Declaration and its promise of a Jewish homeland had terrified the Arabs, who saw themselves being displaced. But in the narrow alleys of the Old City, Eastern European Jews, who had fled pogroms in Poland and Russia, were already proving the need for a permanent home of their own. Gertrude spent hours discussing the situation with Ronald Storrs, now Governor of Jerusalem. To stop the newly arrived Jews from being absorbed into Palestine, Storrs informed her, the Arabs had created an anti-Zionist organization. Led by a Muslim president in Jerusalem and a Christian president in Jaffa, it was in constant touch with the British Chief Administrator. But the Arabs viewed the British as responsible for the Zionists, and with anti-Zionism as its only basis for existence, the group was becoming anti-British as well. The organization was destined to become a vociferous, violent force in the region, targeting both British and Jews.

Of the others she met, Kamil al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, stood out. The leading religious and political personality in the city, he had been appointed by the British and was strongly anti-French. An Arab nationalist, like many Palestinian Arabs he saw himself as a Syrian and aligned himself with Faisal, now ruling in Damascus.

With the situation in Palestine hopelessly divided, Gertrude summed up her observations in a letter to her family: “There is practically no question but Zionism in Jerusalem. All the Muslims are against it and furious with us for backing it and all the Jews are for it and equally furious with us for not backing it enough. Our attitude, meantime, is to halt between the two and wonder what to do for the best. Like the people in authority I feel a great deal of sympathy with both sides and I believe that if both would be responsible they would each of them have not very much to fear. But they won’t be reasonable and we are sowing the seeds of secular disturbance as far I can see.”

O
n the evening of October 7, 1919, Gertrude arrived in Damascus, annoyed to discover that the consulate had not been notified she was coming; “bad staff work,” she jotted in her diary. She settled into a room at the Damascus Palace, the same hotel that had been her headquarters before she set off for Hayil five years earlier, and the following day she walked around the city. In only three years Syria had gone from Turkish to Arab administration, and in the course of much trouble and turmoil, Damascus had changed a good deal. Near the great Umayyad Mosque, the covered bazaar had been stripped of its roof, bringing sunlight to its shops. Jafar Pasha, the Arab Governor under Faisal, had made other improvements, too, creating thoroughfares, opening up crowded streets. Overall, she observed, the people were not as friendly, the town filthier than she had ever seen it, but there was little doubt that the Arabs were capable of governing themselves.

Sadly, the war had impoverished many. Nevertheless, on a visit to her old friend Sheikh Muhammad Bassam, she smiled a little when she learned that, despite her own attempts to stop the smuggling of goods from Mesopotamia into Syria, he had grown immensely rich. The man who had helped her make arrangements for her trip to Arabia in 1914 had run supplies successfully during the war, reselling them at hugely inflated prices.

The Arab Government had been in place for a year, but the French still refused to recognize Faisal as the legitimate, independent ruler of Syria. He was away in England, lobbying for support; he had appointed his closest aides as administrators and had left his younger brother, Zaid, temporarily in charge. Gertrude went to pay him a call. Entering his house, she found it filled with khaki-clad Arab officers and a throng of black Abyssinian eunuch slaves, imported from Mecca, ready to serve the ruler. The nineteen year-old Zaid seemed to be a “nice boy” and “very friendly,” she noted, and when they conferred about Iraq, he told her that “the return of Sir Percy to Mesopotamia would be welcomed by all.”

Faisal’s government was composed of a group of self-reliant nationalists, nearly all of Mesopotamian origin, who had once served in the Turkish army and then switched to Faisal’s side. It was this strong clique of Iraqis, now living in Damascus, that she wanted to meet the most. Yasin Pasha al Hashimi, Jafar Pasha al Askari and Nuri Said would one day, she suspected rightly, be the core of an Arab Government in Iraq. Yasin, a small, thick-set man in his thirties, headed Al Ahd al Iraqi, an intensely nationalist group whose fervent goal was Arab independence in Mesopotamia. It wanted the country free from all foreign control and, under the rule of the Sharifian family, sought an Iraqi alliance with Syria. She was pleased to hear him acknowledge, however, that for several years, at least, the Iraqis would not be able to function without British advice; Sir Percy Cox, he thought, should be appointed High Commissioner to an Arab king. But he was certain that Faisal’s brother Abdullah, who had been proposed as King of Iraq, would become even more popular than Cox.