Page 262 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

‘Araby the Blest’ 259

from the mass of information about the peninsula which ARAMCO gradually
accumulated in its research division at Dhahran. The fruits of their collabora­
tion are visible in Philby’s last major work, Saudi Arabia, published in 1955
when he was seventy. Between them, Philby and the research division of
ARAMCO evolved an interpretation of modern Arabian history that owed
much more to the example of Scheherazade than it did to the guidance of Clio.
All considerations of objectivity, balance and a proper regard for factual
evidence were subordinated to the aim of hymning the ‘right praise and true
perfection’ of the house of Saud. Its dynastic importance was inflated, its
virtues extolled, its exploits celebrated, its excesses concealed and its rivals
calumniated. To set out a list of the distortions, suppressions and falsifications
of the historical record for which the Philby-ARAMCO school of Arabian
history is responsible would require a chapter in itself. Suffice it to say that
the publications for which this school is responsible outdo in sycophancy and
sanctimony even the works of the Najdi chroniclers upon which they are
largely based; for whereas the principal chroniclers often related in their
writings incidents which revealed the Al Saud in an unflattering light, our
latterday annalists have been careful to rigorously exclude such evidence from
their own writings. Their reticence is understandable, if hardly admirable, for
the Al Saud do not take kindly to candour, or to anything short of adulatory
exposition, as the example of Othman ibn Bishr, one of the major Arabian
chroniclers of the nineteenth century, attests. Ibn Bishr, who had had the
temerity to record in his history of Najd the barbarities inflicted by the Al Saud
upon the people of Hasa after their conquest, deemed it prudent to lay down
his pen in 1851 and never to take it up again, even though he was to live on for
another twenty-two years. Ibrahim ibn Isa, who in this century set down
the history of the Al Saud from 1851 to 1922, had the latter part of his
work, covering the years 1884-1922, suppressed on the orders of the Saudi
court.
It was also due in some measure to Philby’s example that ARAMCO
adopted a particular literary style and imagery, the better to express the spirit

and substance of its teachings. For all his vilification of his native land, Philby
never completely lost his Englishness or erased the mark of his early years at
Westminster and Cambridge. Consciously or unconsciously, he wrote primar­
ily for an English readership, and his literary style, though highly idiosyncra­
tic, reflected this fact. It reached its efflorescence in his Saudi Arabia, which
was studded with phrases of the order of ‘the barony of Dariya’, ‘the sturdy
yeomen of Najd’ and ‘grave Wahhabi prelates’, all of which tended to convey a
picture of some sun-baked Plantagenet England. For their part, ARAMCO’s
publicists had early on shown a certain wistful preference for the contrived and
stilted cadences of Charles Doughty and T. E. Lawrence, the school of the
great, boundless, over-arching vault of the Arabian sky’ and the 'vast, empty,
silent, cathedral-like solitudes of the desert’. Such literary conceits, however,