Giving Britannia her due

Start with Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine and Yemen – once all in the British Empire, now all in our daily terror headlines. Add Afghanistan, with whom Britain thrice went to war. Resulting pattern: a clear correlation, at least in the Islamic world, between past, London-based imperialism and current, violent instability.

Britain often went in like an arrogant, even supercilious lion … and came out like a rattled ‘fraidy-cat. Her presence in Yemen started with a boozy breakfast atop Aden’s volcanic crater in 1839. For the hikers it was all a great joke: “We left, as usual with escaladers like ourselves, a memorial of our visit [the Union Jack] in a claret bottle, which we had emptied.” Bottoms up, and Aden became British. As elsewhere, the hinterland was soon annexed.

Quite a different tone marked the British departure from Yemen 128 years later. “We want to be out of the whole Middle East as fast and as far as possible,” whimpered Foreign Minister George Brown. And what of the situation so abruptly abandoned? “Some things which the United Kingdom expected to settle before independence may be left pending,” said Brown in 1967 as the last Tommy left Aden. “Left pending” was the People’s Republic of South Yemen, soon to become the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, complete with world class, warm water, Soviet naval facilities.

Responsible, in Yemen and elsewhere, for this sequence of economic avarice, strategic advantage, and ultimate debacle were the well-born world rulers in Britain’s Colonial Office. Theirs is a problematic legacy. This verdict from a 1960s South Yemen politician: “It is far better to be Britain’s enemy than Britain’s friend. If you are the former, there is the possibility of being bought. If you are the latter, there is the certainty of being sold.”

But take heart, Anglophiles. The memory of Britannia’s rule benefits enormously from two other personnel types: the dedicated, on-the-ground administrator, and the adventurous, scholarly eccentric. As much of the Muslim world seethes with post-colonial – and now post-Cold War resentment – Britain can be proud of figures like Harold Ingrams and Tim Mackintosh-Smith.

Ingrams represents the empathetic, tireless administrator. Such men often spent entire working lives in the same harsh, remote, imperial locale. (Contrast such permanence with the hyper-peripatetic careers of today’s U.S. diplomats whose posts are switched every two or three years, whether they like it or not. Result: wide but shallow “expertise.”) Ingrams, accompanied by have his equally remarkable wife Doreen and their daughter Laila, spent the better part of three decades way out in Yemen’s Hadramawt.

There was something paternalistic and school-masterly in such efforts. Ingrams taught Pax Britannia to a widespread, badlands classroom of endemically warring tribes. His necessary self-confidence sometimes led to illusion. “I am an Imperialist,” wrote Ingrams in 1941, “and equally certain that the vast majority of Arabs on the Arabian Protectorate are too.” Wrong, but empathetically and generously wrong. Ingrams learned Hadrami language and culture. Doreen, forbidden by regulations to ride in RAF planes, conducted oasis surveys on camelback. She and Laila later published a 16-volume “Records of Yemen.” Laila Ingrams remains active today in two Hadramawt charities. Like the best schoolmasters, these people gave their lives to the people they served.

The reaction from high-up officialdom: “I could never follow him [Ingrams] is his view that the Englishman in Arabia must learn to think like an Arab,” wrote a British Governor of Aden, Sir Charles Johnstone. “It is, I believe, an impossible undertaking. …” Impossible, perhaps, but immensely constructive and certainly preferable to contenting one’s self with, Johnstone’s book title puts it, “The View From Steamer Point.” Note, however, which man got a knighthood.

People like the Ingrams are still remembered on the map of Pakistan, formerly part of British India. The -abad suffix in Persian and Urdu means “built by,” and new Independence-era cartographers have let stand Jacobabad and Abbottobad. John Jacob found his district in anarchy in 1847. Like Ingrams, he both pacified the population and endeared himself to it. Ten years later his native troops stayed loyal in the Sepoy Mutiny. James Abbott, Britain’s first Deputy Commissioner in the town that now bears his name, was described by a 19th century colleague as a “true-knight errant.” Said one of his sepoys, “He was a little man, with bristly hair on his face, and kind eyes, and we loved him.” Abbott’s folk-hero status swelled with time. By mid-20th century the Englishman’s memory had morphed into that of a turbaned, white-bearded, Islamic prayer-leader in the Abbottobad mosque.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith, not yet middle-aged, perpetuates another sort of British imperial legend: the curious, articulate, intellectual scholar-explorer. “Incapable of writing a dull sentence,” writes one reviewer of “Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land.” This recent book has already cornered the market on literary references to Yemen, and I am indebted to its author for some third-person quotes in recent columns. His knowledge is encyclopedic, his mastery of Arabic daunting, and his imagination boundlessly mischievous. Example: the title of his brand new book which retraces the route of a famous 14th century Muslim geographer originally from Tangier: “Travels with a Tangerine: In the Footnotes of Ibn Battuta.”

While not an imperialist himself, Mackintosh-Smith walks in the literary footsteps of such great British Empire travelers as Sir Richard Francis Burton and Wilfred Thesiger. Burton, of course, remains beyond compare in utter brilliance mixed with high derring-do. Who else could speak 25 languages, penetrate Mecca in Muslim disguise, scandalize Victorian sensibilities with translations of Eastern eroticism, and still receive a knighthood from that stuffiest of Establishments? Here is Burton on kayf, a Horn of Africa state of well-being: “the savoring of animal existence [which entails] an exquisite sensibility of nerve; it argues a facility for voluptuousness unknown in northern regions.” What drove him? Read Fawn Brodie’s biography “The Devil Drives.”

Thesiger comes closest as a 20th incarnation of Burton. His actual physical accomplishments (read “Arabian Sands”) were perhaps even more grueling. Of Yemen – and with characteristic aplomb – Thesiger reports, “Nowhere have I experienced more strenuous trekking. … I had the cartilages removed from both knees; apparently I had worn them out.” This man, still alive in his 90s, ranks as an all-time, all-star trekker. For a hilarious (and politically incorrect) last line, read his observation at the close of Eric Newby’s “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.”

A luncheon last month in Aden recalled one more positive aspect of Empire. Scene: shaded, interior patio-balcony with lazy ceiling fans and old wooden doors. Guests: Laila Ingrams with her memories and enthusiasms, the previous British ambassador and his Muslim convert wife, a young American couple who run an educational-cultural center called Amideast, and the Honorary British Consul in Aden. (This last seemed like quite a gig! Can Americans apply?)

The hosts were two citizens of what once had been an interrelated British Indian Ocean world. The sheikh’s father had practiced law – essentially the same law – in Kuala Lampur, Rangoon, Karachi, and Kampala … before settling in the 1930s as Aden’s first Muslim lawyer. The sheikh’s office still held leather-bound tomes titled “The English and Imperial Digest and The Code of Civil Procedure.” His wife, also fluent in English, had been born on board an English ship. Her British passport said so. Theirs had once been a unified British map, in which one could come and go with few formalities, analogous to the earlier Muslim world of Ibn-Battuta.

Later I was driven to Steamer Point and the neo-Gothic Arrivals Hall built by the British in 1919. Britain’s empire had survived World War One, and Arrivals Hall was built to last. Two brass plaques are still in place: “Arriving Passengers” and “Departing Passengers.” As late as the 1950s, a quarter million people per year had come and gone, in orderly fashion, across that platform. Now the stones echoed vacantly to the chatter of qat chewers. Qat spit littered the floor. I looked across the bay, almost empty of ships, to where the USS Cole had been bombed. I asked myself whether the place was better for no longer being British. And, albeit grudgingly, I gave Britannia her due.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.