Jesus of Arabia

...In 1914 the Near East, excluding Egypt, was ruled by Ottoman Turkey, and when it entered World War I Arab nationalists looked to the British for help...

...Hating his wife, a religious fanatic, Chapman took the astonishing step of leaving her in 1887 to live with Sarah, adopting her surname but never marrying her, because his wife was alive...

...The basic text, coming directly from Lawrence's dispatches and diaries, "had no personality, no dramatic structure of its own, and— more important—no great emotional climax of a personal nature...

...Perhaps a dozen British officers and officials dealt regularly with the Hashemites...

...He had already spent several years in the East as an archeologist, but that career did not presage the later champion of native peoples...

...In both versions, Asher argues persuasively, the story is "true only in the sense that it deliberately revealed the unseen Lawrence lurking in the shadows": a masochistic homosexual who had long "fantasized about being dominated by other men, especially in the ranks of the Army...

...What was his contribution...

...Lawrence was right, though, in saying "I do not suppose any Englishman before ever had such a place' as he eventually won among them...

...this seems to have been as close as he ever got to an active sex life...

...Despite the way Sarah supplanted her predecessor, she was herself a narrow Protestant sectarian—indeed, the mother from hell who, by beating "Ned" frequently as a child, led him into a life of masochism and sexual frustration that culminated in his decision to spend most of the postwar years until his death in 1935 in the Royal Air Force and the Army as an enlisted man...

...But in the letter there is no explicit rape...

...A Turkish soldier apprehended him, saying, "The Bey wants you," and brought him before the official, who tried to embrace him...

...When he assumed the leadership of the Arab cause in January 1915, at the urging of rebellious Arab officers in the Ottoman Army and a nationalist group in Damascus, the whole idea that people who spoke Arabic were Arabs rather than Syrians, and so forth, was very much a novelty...

...In Seve« Pillars, as Asher notes, there is much gay near-pornography presented as ethnography ("friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace"), and the extent of Arab, especially Bedouin, acceptance of homosexuality is wildly overstated...

...If it is conceivable that Lawrence in native garb could pass for a Circassian (a relatively fair Muslim people of the Caucasus), "how likely is it that he would consistently be taken for one when stripped naked...

...It was known that in June Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, the Emir, or prince, of Mecca—and great grandfather of Jordan's late King—had proclaimed an Arab revolt against the Turks...

...Although he wasn't the only British officer who wanted to help the Arabs, he was the only one who thought of using their nationalism as a weapon against the Turks...

...But in this version of the story, Lawrence, having told the Turks he was a Circassian, insists that he wasn't recognized...

...In yet another, he orders the execution of Turkish prisoners...

...When Lawrence pushed him aside, the Bey said, "You must understand that I know...

...True, Lawrence did not inspire the Arab revolt and it might have succeeded without him...

...Lawrence writes that in November 1917 he went in Arab costume (which he now wore constantly) to scout the railwayjunction of Dara'a, behind enemy lines in Syria...

...The story is no less amazing than his own...

...From his arrival in the field until the end of the War, the Arabs and their chief supporters, the British, communicated chiefly through him...

...It was yet another metamorphosis, this time of the desert warrior into a desert Messiah...

...Lawrence, the "Easterner," maintained that Britain could create an "Arab front" by supporting the urban nationalists of Greater Syria, embracing what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel...

...During those years he paid several men to whip him...

...The Emir and his sons, known collectively as Hashemites, demanded sovereignty over Greater Syria and Arabia, but they didn't dominate the peninsula...

...Subsequently, in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), he claimed that "The Arabs made a chivalrous appeal to my young instinct, and while still at the High School...

...Even there, its Army consisted mostly of indigenous Bedouins whom Hussein did not really control, for they were incapable of comprehending political nationalism and fought on both sides as mercenaries...

...As a War leader, his greatest achievement was the taking of Aqaba, in July 1917...

...I sought to make them into a nation...

...While an undergraduate, Lawrence may have proposed to a girl, but he was more deeply (though, it seems, passively) involved with a homosexual set called the Uranians...

...Soon after returning to Britain a national hero, Lawrence discovered that his late father's real name had not been Lawrence...

...Lawrence "solved the problem by inventing a series of personal incidents" of a heroic though, in many cases, morally problematical kind...

...In him, the force of will that had enabled his mother to rise from the gutter was combined with his father's scarcely believable willingness to leave his privileged life and enter another...

...Against his wishes, in late 1916 he was sent to find out what was happening in Arabia...

...In one of them he describes himself as leading a large personal retinue of criminals...

...And in the incident at Dara'a, the most striking of these episodes, Asher observes, "like Jesus Christ, he had been betrayed [albeit only in the letter], horribly tortured and humiliated, but had risen again to bring his struggles to full fruition...

...Why was the page for these days torn out of Lawrence's pocket diary—the only such missing page...

...The themes of masochism and homosexuality are united in the climax of Seven Pillars: the incident at Dara'a...

...Much of that account, Asher rightly emphasizes, is hard to credit...

...Nor were the limits of an Arab state self-evident...

...Even in Cairo, however, many of them thought the War should be fought on the Western Front...

...The family had hereditary claims only to Hejaz...

...On the contrary, he joined a British team excavating a site at Carchemish, in eastern Turkey, with the hope of "proving that 'Europeans' [the Indo-European Hittites] played a part in creating the civilizations of the East," Michael Asher tells us in Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia (Overlook, 418 pp., $35...

...In 1879 an 18-year-old girl named Sarah Lawrence, the illegitimate daughter of a shipwright who deserted her and an alcoholic mother who died when she was nine, had come to work as a governess to the daughters of Thomas Chapman, the Etonian scion of a family with large estates in Ireland who later inherited a baronetcy...

...His feats of endurance were surely remarkable, although Asher, an experienced camel rider who reproduced some of them, shows that they were distinctly less remarkable than Lawrence claimed in Seven Pillars...

...No doubt his greatest significance to history lay in his incarnation as "Lawrence of Arabia," the first media star, created by the American journalist Lowell Thomas when patience with the War was wearing thin...

...Writers & Writing JESUS OF ARABIA By Roger Draper In December 1914, a month after the Ottoman Empire declared war on the United Kingdom, 26-year-old T. E. Lawrence took up his duties as a map officer in British-controlled Cairo...

...Proposals for expelling the Turks from the port had been floating about for some time, but all of them involved an attack from the Gulf of Aqaba, facing the Turkish guns...

...Lawrence threw himself utterly into his work...

...Its thrust is that an Arab opponent of the Hashemites had given the Bey a description of him, a fact he claimed to have learned from the Bey, an "ardent pederast...

...Lawrence is known to have mentioned the incident at Dara'a on only one other occasion: a 1919 letter to the chief British political officer in Cairo, sent about the time he was writing Seven Pillars...

...There had not been an Arab state in quite a long time—not since 1258 in Mesopotamia (today's Iraq) and Greater Syria, and since 1517 in Hejaz (the cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah, and the adjoining Red Sea littoral...

...He inspired confidence, and he was a master at the art of persuading people while letting them feel they were making their own decisions...

...In another, he shoots a man in cold blood...

...Some other Arabian chieftains were pro-Turkish...

...Thomas Edward, their second son, was born in 1888...

...Like much else in Seven Pillars, that doesn't ring true...

...The account is more questionable than the published version, since the context is political and Lawrence never explains why the Turks let him go if they recognized him...

...During his early period, too, he wrote from Palestine that "The sooner Jews farm it all, the better...

...Ibn Saud, the progenitor of the Saudi royal family and ruler of the Najd, was the shrewdest of all, taking Britain's money but staying on the fence...

...This and other doubtful stories in Seven Pillars may, as Asher suggests, have been conceived by Lawrence as a means of raising the book above the level of a well-written memoir...

...Why did he never report his rape or capture in his dispatches...

...If Lawrence was not recognized, how could the soldier who arrested him possibly know that the Bey wanted him...

...An eager beaver despite his aggressively diffident manner, Lawrence shortly came to play a major role as an intelligence analyst in Cairo...

...If his life had no historical consequence whatsoever, the transformation of this desk officer into a desert warrior would still be a wonderful story, and Asher tells it very well...

...Nonetheless, the guards then whipped and raped him repeatedly, and he escaped the next morning...

...The idea of striking overland, through a desert called al-Houl, the Terror, was Lawrence's, and he actually went on the expedition, sharing the hardships of men bred to the desert for generations...

...In his Oxford thesis Lawrence had argued that features of medieval architecture common to Christendom and Islam came from the West...

...Nevertheless, he was certainly the first person on the Allied side who understood that the Hashemites represented something more than their family ambitions...