Wilfred Thesiger by Alexander Maitland

Author:Alexander Maitland
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

similar, indeed, to the spiritual uplift inspired by height and space in a cathedral. As well as taking close-up portraits, Thesiger photographed Bait Kathir, Rashid and other nomadic Bedu tribes in their vast landscapes of wind-carved sand, dominated by immense dunes, to which they and the camels they rode or led added life, movement and a sense of human scale.

Thesiger’s photographs of bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha expressed his attraction to these young Rashid no less eloquently than the word portraits he wrote in Arabian Sands; photography complemented his prose, which gave movement, sound and tactile realism to his beautiful images of the Bedu in various attitudes of repose. The photographs which helped him to portray in words his companions and their desert surroundings were informed visual statements, narrative works of art, self-defining visions of Thesiger’s desert world. Less impermeable than some of his writing, more openly expressive of his emotions, Thesiger’s photographs of Idris, Faris, bin Kabina, bin Ghabaisha and others who lived with him or accompanied him throughout his travels, broke the emotive code embedded in his writing, denoted sometimes by key words such as ‘companion’, ‘comrade’, ‘retainer’, ‘servant’. Whatever his feelings towards them as adolescents might have been, Thesiger denied absolutely that they amounted to anything more than an aesthetic appeal. ‘They were beautiful,’ he said, ‘and I enjoyed looking at them.’57 The need for continence and the mastery of his emotions were nevertheless among the hardest privations imposed by Thesiger’s desert journeys with the Bedu. The constant turmoil of emotional frustration, as much as his companions’ often maddening generosity to passing strangers, may have provoked his ‘withdrawn and irritable’ moods, and his occasional, uncontrollable outbursts of temper.58 He wrote in Arabian Sands:

Homosexuality is common among most Arabs, especially in the towns, but it is very rare among the Bedu, who of all Arabs have the most excuse for indulging in this practice, since they spend long months away from their women. Lawrence described in Seven Pillars of Wisdom how his escort made use of each other to slake their needs, but those men were villagers from the oasis, not Bedu…I myself could not have lived as I did with my companions and been unaware of it had it existed among them; we lived too close together…Once when we were staying in a town on the Trucial Coast, bin Kabina pointed out two youths, one of whom was a slave, and said that they were sometimes used by the Sheikh’s retainers. He evidently thought the practice both ridiculous and obscene.59

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