T.E. Lawrence: The Enigmatic Architect of Arab Destiny
with files from Ted Glenn
Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as T.E. Lawrence or “Lawrence of Arabia,” remains one of the most captivating figures of the 20th century. His profound impact on Middle Eastern history, coupled with his enigmatic personality, continues to fascinate scholars and the public alike. This essay delves into Lawrence’s unique understanding of Arab culture, his personal attributes, and the lasting effects of his involvement in the Arab Revolt of 1916–1918.
Born in 1888 in Tremadog, Wales, Lawrence was a polymath from an early age. His insatiable curiosity and academic prowess led him to study history at Oxford University, where he developed a deep interest in medieval architecture. This seemingly unrelated passion would later prove instrumental in his understanding of Arab culture and geography.
Lawrence’s first encounter with the Middle East came in 1909 when he traveled to Syria for his thesis research on Crusader castles. It was during this time that he began to immerse himself in Arab culture, learning the language and customs with remarkable speed and enthusiasm. His ability to adapt and integrate into the local way of life would later become one of his greatest assets.
The Archeologist Turned Warrior
Prior to World War I, Lawrence worked as an archeologist in the Middle East, further honing his knowledge of the region and its people. When war broke out, his expertise made him an invaluable asset to British intelligence. It was in this capacity that Lawrence found his true calling, becoming a liaison between the British and the Arab rebels fighting against Ottoman rule.
Lawrence’s understanding of Arab culture went far beyond mere academic knowledge. He possessed a rare ability to see the world through Arab eyes, appreciating the nuances of their society, their tribal structures, and their deeply held values. This empathy, combined with his charisma and strategic mind, allowed him to gain the trust and respect of Arab leaders in a way that few Westerners had ever achieved.
The Power of Charisma and Cultural Fluency
One of Lawrence’s most remarkable attributes was his charisma. Despite his small stature and unassuming appearance, he had a magnetic personality that drew people to him. Arab leaders, hardened warriors, and British officials alike found themselves captivated by his presence and persuaded by his words.
Lawrence’s fluency in Arabic and his adoption of Arab dress and customs played a crucial role in his success. He didn’t merely observe Arab culture; he embraced it wholeheartedly. This genuine appreciation and respect earned him the trust of his Arab allies, who saw him not as an outsider, but as one of their own.
A master of diplomacy, Lawrence navigated the complex web of tribal politics with remarkable skill. He understood the importance of honor, loyalty, and personal relationships in Arab society, using this knowledge to forge alliances and mediate conflicts. His ability to bring together diverse and often rival factions under a common cause was nothing short of extraordinary.
The Architect of Desert Warfare
Lawrence’s military achievements during the Arab Revolt were as much a product of his cultural understanding as they were of his strategic brilliance. He recognized that traditional Western military tactics were ill-suited to the desert environment and the Arab way of war. Instead, he advocated for and implemented guerrilla warfare tactics that played to the strengths of his Arab allies.
His most famous military exploit, the capture of Aqaba in 1917, exemplified this approach. Leading a small force across the seemingly impassable Nefud Desert, Lawrence surprised the Ottoman garrison from the undefended landward side. This victory not only secured a crucial port for the Allied forces but also cemented Lawrence’s reputation as a military genius.
The Burden of Fame and the Price of Involvement
Lawrence’s exploits during the war, particularly after the publication of Lowell Thomas’s sensationalized accounts, catapulted him to international fame. The image of the dashing “Lawrence of Arabia” captured the public imagination, but it was a persona that Lawrence himself found deeply uncomfortable.
His commitment to the Arab cause went beyond military strategy. Lawrence genuinely believed in the promise of Arab independence and worked tirelessly to advocate for it during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. However, the ultimate betrayal of Arab aspirations by the European powers through the Sykes-Picot Agreement left Lawrence disillusioned and guilt-ridden.
This sense of failure and betrayal weighed heavily on Lawrence for the rest of his life. Some scholars argue that it contributed to his increasingly erratic behavior in later years, including his repeated attempts to enlist in the RAF and Tank Corps under assumed names.
The original version of the Lawrence of Arabia legend goes like this: A young, blond-haired, blue-eyed English archaeologist named Thomas Edward Lawrence volunteers to fight for the British in Arabia during the First World War. He earns the trust of King Hussein of the Hejaz and his son, Prince Feisal, and works almost single-handedly, with deeds of unmatched heroism and valour, to lead the oppressed peoples of Arabia in revolt against their despotic Turkish overlords.
The Lawrence legend was created and popularized by American journalist Lowell Thomas in a series of multimedia “travelogues” that premiered in New York City in March 1919. Thomas moved the shows to London, England, in the summer of 1919 for a very popular six-month run, and then on to several major cities in the British Empire — including Sydney, Australia, Auckland, New Zealand, Mumbai, India, and Ottawa — over the next decade.
By 1928, more than four million people had flocked to hear Thomas and to “experience the legend” of Lawrence of Arabia. Thomas’s show became a global multimedia sensation and made Lawrence one of the earliest and most famous celebrities of the twentieth century.
“Thomas provided a war-weary Allied public with a romantic campaign to celebrate,” wrote Joel Hodson in Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture: The Making of a Transatlantic Legend. “He gave them a gentleman cavalry general capturing Jerusalem and a modern-day knight in white robes racing around Arabia, instead of gruesome images of corpses draped over barbed wire and young men mangled by machine-gun fire and massive artillery barrages.”
Thomas’s role in creating and popularizing the Lawrence of Arabia legend is well-documented.
An intriguing Canadian aspect of the story, though, is buried deep in the archives. Six weeks after finishing in New York, and two and a half months before opening in London, Thomas brought his multimedia extravaganza to Toronto’s Massey Hall for a limited, two-week engagement. The run was important because Toronto was the first market in which Thomas and colleagues tested their world-beating publicity machine after their uneven start in New York.
More precisely, the pieces Thomas and colleagues wrote for the Toronto Daily Star to promote the shows marked the first time core elements of the Lawrence of Arabia legend were published anywhere in the world.
But who was Lowell Thomas, and how did he come to meet T.E. Lawrence in Arabia? And why did he and Star editor and show sponsor Joe Atkinson think postwar Toronto would be a good market for shows about a minor military campaign in far-off Arabia? What were the core themes, central story elements, and hyperbolic language in the Toronto preview that would go on to captivate world audiences for decades to come?
The story of how Lowell Thomas brought his legend of Lawrence of Arabia to Toronto’s Massey Hall begins shortly after the United States entered the Great War in April 1917. Then an energetic young journalist, editor, and lecturer, Thomas used his connections and the sheer force of his personality to convince senior U.S. officials to support “a trip to Europe to gather material for a series of war travelogues.” These were to be “illustrated with about three reels of colored motion pictures interspersed with 150 colored slides each” and designed to arouse “American people to a whole-hearted support for the Administration and the war.”
To fund the trip, Thomas sold US$100,000 worth of shares in a newly created venture called Thomas Travelogues Inc. Covering his bases, Thomas also secured credentials as a war correspondent from twenty-six major newspapers across North America, including the New York Globe and the Toronto Star, promising to provide weekly war updates in exchange for sponsoring his travelogues after the war.
After four months of stalemate on the Western Front, Thomas learned that General Edmund Allenby, who led the British forces in the Middle Eastern theatre, had captured Jerusalem. Smelling a more sensational — and saleable — story, Thomas sought British and American support to visit Palestine, arguing that “the restoration of Palestine to the Christians after 400 years of Moslem occupation was of the greatest possible importance” to North American readers.
Permissions were secured, and Thomas and cameraman Henry Chase set sail for Palestine in early January 1918.
In transit, Thomas reported hearing of “fantastic yarns … in hushed tones about a certain young Englishman who was said to be at the head of the wild Bedouin hordes which were sweeping the Turks out of Mecca, Medina, and all of Holy Arabia.”
On February 27, Thomas and Chase met the man behind the rumours in the office of Colonel Ronald Storrs, the British military governor of Jerusalem.
Lawrence, twenty-nine, was not tall — only five feet four inches — with “skin too fair even to bronze after 7 years in the Arabian desert,” wrote Thomas in his diary, adding that “the very quiet talking, very modest … research man from Maudlin [sic] College, Oxford” went about barefoot and in the costume of an Arab warrior: “He is an Ameer [chieftain] of the Hejaz and only white man ever made a Sherif and probably only one who ever will be. Always alone with Arabs. Last year never slept more than 3 nights in one place. He acts for the Sherif, signs his name for him and has free hand. He really brought Arabs north into Syria. Arabs trust him because he has accomplished results that no one else ever did. Price of 5000£ on his head by Turks.”
Sensing an even more sensational story than the capture of Jerusalem, Thomas sought Allenby’s approval to visit Lawrence in the field to gather footage of the blue-eyed “King of the Hejaz” in action.
Thomas and Chase met Lawrence in Aqaba, in what’s now southern Jordan, on March 27, along with Prince Feisal, the leader of the Arab forces.
They spent a total of five days there with Lawrence — the sum total of their time with him in the region — and another five travelling to Aba el Lissan, Shobak, and the ancient city of Petra, gathering material for their shows.
The pair left Aqaba in early April and travelled back across the Mediterranean in the summer, the Western Front in the fall, and eventually postwar revolutionary Germany in early winter, gathering stills and footage for future shows.
Back in New York after the war, Thomas and Chase spent much of February 1919 putting miles of film and tens of thousands of still photographs into the travelogue format, which was described by Thomas as “moving pictures and stills to transport audiences to places they’d only imagined … a wholly new and spectacular form of entertainment such as no one had ever before attempted in an elaborate way.”
Six shows emerged, and they were billed under various names. The main ones included The German Revolution, With Allenby in Palestine, and Freeing Holy Arabia. Fred Taintor, editor of the show’s official sponsor, the New York Globe, booked the midtown New York, 2,300-seat Century Theatre for a two-week engagement beginning March 2, 1919.
Thomas originally planned to show all six travelogues at the Century, but only two — Revolution and Allenby — actually made it to the stage. According to Thomas’s wife, Frances, who had accompanied her husband to Europe in 1917 and assisted in putting on his travelogues, “Tommie” had been “so swamped” with “the managing end and the publicity” that he had “not a moment to prepare speeches, or to go through his slides with Mr. Chase.”
Thomas judged the Century run a “messy experiment.” Financially, it was a “howling failure.”
The Complexity of T.E. Lawrence’s Character
Lawrence’s personality was as complex as the political landscape he navigated. His intellect and perceptiveness were matched by a certain recklessness and a penchant for self-mythologizing. He was at once deeply empathetic and strangely detached, capable of great warmth yet often described as aloof.
Some biographers have suggested that Lawrence may have been on the autism spectrum, pointing to his intense focus on specific interests, his social awkwardness in certain situations, and his sensory sensitivities. While such retrospective diagnoses are speculative, they offer an interesting lens through which to view his unique abilities and challenges.
Lawrence’s writings, particularly his masterpiece “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” reveal a man grappling with the consequences of his actions and the complexities of his own identity. The book is both a gripping war memoir and a poetic tribute to the Arab world he had come to love.
Legacy and Lasting Impact
T.E. Lawrence’s influence on Middle Eastern history extends far beyond his military achievements. His advocacy for Arab independence, although ultimately unsuccessful in the short term, helped plant the seeds for the nationalist movements that would reshape the region in the decades to come.
His insights into guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency have continued to influence military thinking well into the 21st century. The “Lawrence Doctrine” of working with local forces and understanding cultural contexts has been studied and applied (with varying degrees of success) in conflicts around the world.
Perhaps most enduringly, Lawrence’s writings and the myths that grew around him have shaped Western perceptions of the Arab world for generations. While some critics argue that his romanticized portrayals contributed to Orientalist stereotypes, others credit him with fostering greater understanding and appreciation of Arab culture in the West.
Conclusion: The Enigma Endures
T.E. Lawrence remains an enigmatic figure, a man whose brilliance and contradictions continue to captivate us more than a century after his most famous exploits. His unique understanding of Arab culture, combined with his personal charisma and strategic mind, allowed him to play a pivotal role in one of the most turbulent periods of Middle Eastern history.
Lawrence’s legacy is a complex one, marked by both triumph and tragedy. His genuine love for the Arab world and his tireless efforts on behalf of Arab independence stand in stark contrast to the ultimate failure of those aspirations. Yet his impact on history, on military strategy, and on cross-cultural understanding is undeniable.
In the end, perhaps it is the very complexity of Lawrence’s character — his brilliance and his flaws, his empathy and his detachment, his triumphs and his failures — that makes him such a compelling figure. He remains, like the desert he loved, a man of stark contrasts and hidden depths, continuing to intrigue and inspire us with his extraordinary life and enduring legacy.
