Posted on 07/12/2023 11:47:04 PM PDT by Ozguy1945
On July 12 1926, English writer and archaeologist Gertrude Bell died of an overdose of sleeping pills in Mandatory Iraq. (British ruled.)
Bell seems an attractive woman to me, but she never married.
Her work for understanding another culture came first.
Wikipedia reports: ”She was simultaneously an Iraqi nationalist and a British imperialist.”
She saw clearly how hard it is for The West to impose its ways on The East. She wrote of Arab leaders: “Men who have the tradition of a personal independence ……. will not in a day fall into step with European ambitions, nor welcome European methods. Nor can they be hastened. (…) In our own [English] history, from the Moot Court through Magna Charter to the Imperial Parliament was the work of centuries, yet the first contained the grain of all that would come after.”
She loved the Eastern world she worked and lived and died in:
“To wake in that desert dawn was like waking in the heart of an opal. … See the desert on a fine morning and die – if you can!”
She didn’t solve the problems of the region (No mortal can?) but she recognised them and helped a little to improve understanding:
“It’s so nice to be a spoke in the wheel, one that helps to turn, not one that hinders.”
“Until quite recently I’ve been wholly cut off from [the Shias] because their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don’t permit me to veil Nor is it any good trying to make friends through the women – if they were allowed to see me they would veil before me as if I were a man. So you see I appear to be too female for one sex and too male for the other.”
(Excerpt) Read more at freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com ...
She looks as though she’s related to Benedict Cumberbatch.
Those people strove to speak in poetic terms — terms that are vaguely understandable, but not straightforward enough for a barbaric, overly-logic-strapped mind like mine.
It’s amazing how one can hate and love a milieu at the same time.
Thanks.
You made me laugh.
Read TE Lawrence “ The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, and you will get the hang of it.
I’m glad. My svedka loosens me up sometimes.
I did read Lawrence. I also read VS Naipaul’s “Among the Believers”, which gave me a perspective I never had. Highly recommend it.
Ditto Naipaul. Nearly everything he wrote. He was a great favorite.
Also JB Glubb (”Glubb Pasha”). That guy was a professional soldier and not flowery.
My biggest takeaway from Naipaul was his accounts of an incredible “fatalism” among the believers. My strongest sense of God and creation is that He gave to mankind an almost carte blanche kind of prerogative to explore and discover.
Naipaul wasn’t the first in this.
Fatalism is essential in Islam.
” A Good Looking Woman Way Ahead Of Her Time”
“Bell seems an attractive woman to me, but she never married.”
That’s a MAN, baby! (or at least a lesbian)
“It’s amazing how one can hate and love a milieu at the same time.”
.... what a wonderful line .....
thank you
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