Page 221 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

218 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

resentatives of old-established trading and shipping companies. Most of these
Europeans were familiar with the Gulf and the ways of its inhabitants. Their
own callings, as well as their training and inclinations, had imposed upon them
a certain code of personal conduct in their relations with the Arab shaikhs and
tribesmen, a code which was also required by the legacy of Britain’s historical
responsibilities in the Gulf.
Now the Trucial Coast, or the UAE, along with the other Gulf shaikhdoms,
is inundated with Europeans and Americans of every kind, and the old code of
conduct has been discarded. It has gone because the age of the political
residents and agents, the naval and military officers, and the pioneer oilmen
has passed. In its place has dawned the age of the plumbers. The new arrivals
care not in the slightest for the traditions, history or customs of the shaikhdoms
themselves: they are there for a limited time, to construct, to service or to sell,
and in so doing reap themselves substantial rewards. Having no real interest in
the native Arabs, other than that of making money from them, and little
respect for their mores, beyond the minimum necessary to avoid jeopardizing
the attainment of their own ends, the Europeans and Americans lead their lives
very much as they would if they were still residing in the more open and
unrestricted societies of the West. Many aspects of their behaviour - whether it
is their copious consumption of liquor, the cheerful vulgarity of some of their
pleasures, their careless profanity, their casual sexual improprieties, or the
heedless freedom they accord their own women and the lack of restraint these
show in their dress and deportment - have, in one way or another, shocked or
offended, and in some cases corrupted, the local Arab inhabitants.
It is extremely difficult for untutored Arabian tribesmen, accustomed to
keep their own women in seclusion, to regard the inviolability of the harim as a
matter of the deepest personal and family honour, and to punish with death any
sexual infidelity by their womenfolk, to understand, still more to respect, the
contemporary Western attitude towards women. And when they experience
for themselves, as many now have done on visits to Western countries, the easy
availability of Western women, their contempt for Western Christendom, for a
civilization in which men hold their women in such low regard as to allow them
to hire themselves out to men of alien race and hostile creed, becomes absolute.
Rooted though it may be in ignorance and misunderstanding, it is a contempt
which has dangerous implications for both the Arabs and the West.
Yet in all fairness it cannot be said that the Western communities in the Gulf
shaikhdoms have been the prime agents in the corruption of the indigenous
Arab inhabitants, turning them overnight into ‘the hollow pamper’d jades of
Asia’. This dubious honour belongs first and foremost to their own rulers, who
have given them too much, too quickly and for nothing, and to the northern
Arabs who have so rapidly taught them Levantine ways. Some credit, too,
must go to those Western governments, and especially the British and French,
who by their obsequious conduct towards the Gulf oil states have enlarged even