The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

the border, and the “Akhwan” or Muslim Brotherhood, as the Wahabis called themselves, fired on them from an airplane. Bell goes on to say, “Ibn Saud may, of course, repudiate the action of his followers; that’s the best that can happen, for otherwise we’re practically at war with them.” If one substitutes “al- Qaida” for “Akhwan,” we are in familiar territory: the House of Saud claims to repudiate terrorism among the extremists within its borders, but has been slow to do anything about it. In the early 1920s, after the British-held plebiscite and a general agreement among the leaders of the various factions in what was then known as Mesopotamia to unite and become a nation, a friend of Bell’s, a tribal sheik, said that all the pillars were standing for the formation of a new state and now what they needed was a roof. Shortly after that, Faisal, the protege of Bell and T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), was imported from Mecca to become the “roof.” In early 2004, David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post about the offer of Prince Hassan of Jordan, the great nephew of Faisal, to mediate among Iraqi religious factions to bring them together and become a “provisional head of state.” Bell describes and photographs a grand gathering in 1921 at Falluja of Sunni tribal leaders on camels greet- ing Faisal, and Faisal’s swearing alle- giance to them, saying their enemies are his enemies and vowing solidari- ty. He is “a great Sunni among Sunnis,” Bell wrote to her father. And now Falluja, as a center for Sunni insurgency, is in the headlines again. In her letters Bell reports that the people of Kirkuk in the north are ready to give allegiance to Faisal, but those in Basra have come to her to plead with her government for a sep- arate southern province within a federation. Her response: I am your friend, but I am also a servant of the British government, and London says no to anything less than a uni- tary government. One can almost picture her wraith hovering over the Iraqi gov- ernment today — slender, red- haired, chain-smoking, high-energy — muttering to herself something like “what goes around comes around” or “so what else is new?” A Life of Paradoxes Born in 1868 into a well-to-do Midlands iron manufacturing family, Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was probably expected to lead a quiet life and eventually become a wife and mother, a traditional help- meet. But like other British women travelers such as Mary Kingsley, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and, later, Freya Stark, once she got a taste of freedom — to use Bell’s phrase, “wild travel” — there was no turning back. Bell’s life was full of paradoxes. She won a “first” in modern history at Oxford in 1890 after just two years’ study, rather than the pre- scribed three. Even more remark- able, she accomplished this long before women could actually take degrees from Oxford. (Women could sit for the exams and get rated for them, but could not take a degree until early in the 20th centu- ry.) High-spirited and independent, she challenged one of her examin- ers, saying she did not agree with his theory. As Wallach puts it, she was a young woman with “attitude.” Having failed to find a husband who could match her intelligence and taste for adventure in the three years allotted a Victorian young lady after her debut in society, Gertrude turned to travel. In 1892, she went to Persia, a place she had always longed to see. She was accompanied by her aunt, Mary Lascelles, whose husband was the British envoy to Shah Nasiraddin. In Tehran, Bell fell in love with a British diplomat, Henry Cadogan. The sun, the horseback rides into the surrounding rugged landscape with the young Cadogan, reading the Persian poet Hafiz (also known as Hafez) to each other, the freedom, the romance were the beginnings of her passion for the East. In spite of her strong spirit, when her parents did not approve of the match, she gave him up. She remained single; and though in middle age she developed two strong romantic attachments to men — both of them married — she apparently remained chaste. In her 20s she traveled around the world with family members and to archaeological sites in the Mediterranean. Finally, in late 1899, she was allowed to go on her own to Jerusalem, and began study- ing Arabic. From there she set off on horseback for a trek through hos- tile country to Petra — with a clan- destine side trip into the hills of southwest Syria, the territory of the fierce Jabel Druze, against the wish- es of the Turkish authorities. She wrote home, “Here I am a person” — a phrase that would be repeated time and again in her correspon- dence. A couple of years later she made a months-long trek across Syria that resulted in her classic The Desert 44 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 Bell’s copious letters from Baghdad during the 1920s read like this week’s headlines.