The Last of the Bedu is the story of a journey made by the
Arabist and explorer Michael Asher, through some of the wilder reaches of
the Middle East and North Africa. The journey is both an evocation of
nomadic Bedouin life, in that Asher travels partly by camel, and an attempt to
describe and define the Bedu before their unique way of life disappears.
As the journey progresses, Asher poses the question (to people who are
generally in a fairly advanced state of hostility and suspicion), "what
are the Bedu?" This is rather like travelling through Spain and asking,
"what are the gypsies?" Some people would define gypsies in
terms of their ethnicity, some would say that a gypsy by definition has an
itinerant lifestyle. So it is with the Bedu: some described their people in terms
of tribe, while others said that those who had become farmers could no
longer be called Bedu. One answer elegantly conjured the romantic image of
the noble nomad, and the fine tradition of hospitality which many purists feel
is being eroded by the onslaught of modern culture and technology:
The Bedu is generous and hospitable…He is also brave, but then bravery and
generosity are the same thing, because when you are poor you have to be
very brave to give away even what little you have.
The question, "what are the Bedu" is apparently innocuous: the responses to
it are complex and interesting. But wherever Asher poses his question, fights
ensue, Kalashnikovs bristle; he is accused of being a government spy or an
arrogant, insensitive Westerner. His curiosity provokes a furious Islamic
fundamentalist tirade from a driver, who then apologises and courteously
explains that when faced with someone from a confident culture, one’s own
cultural attitudes tend to harden. As Asher travels through spectacularly
varied and remote country, his journey punctuated by visits to impossibly
ancient sights like the wonderful rock city of Petra and the splendid ruins of
the ancient Ma’rib Dam, he seems mystified by the irritation he provokes. It
is perhaps fatuous to comment that if an Arab walked through Glasgow,
stopping passers-by and asking, "what is a Glaswegian?", he might not be
greeted with open arms. But the outright anger Asher’s presence provokes
creates an unease in the reader, if not in the author himself, about the very
nature and worth of the undertaking itself.
This unease is reflected in the author’s lack of facility with format of the
book. Asher seems happiest when describing the workings of a two
thousand-year-old Nabataean irrigation system, or outlining the complex
genealogy of ancient Bedouin clan. But a good travel book requires a
deftness of description and ability to weave a narrative out of observation
that is sorely lacking here. The writing has no lightness about it; the
descriptions of the changing landscape are turgid and repetitive. I came
across three instances where a ruined building was likened to "a crushed
molar", and one of these crushed molars even contrives to be, "dark and
brooding"; sunset in Damascus is, "the sun like a wan eye blinking through
the last shreds of flaccid cloud." This is flaccid writing, and needed a sterner
editorial eye cast over it. The narrative hops around in time in a disconcerting
manner, and though there are beautifully produced colour photographs in the
book, there are no maps. There is no sense of the continuity in the journey,
either in time or place.
Asher’s conclusions about the Bedu are in fact the conclusions of an
intelligent and sensitive person. He does not mourn the romantic myth of the
Bedu, and recognises that modern technology, education and medicine have
brought the people a better and more stable standard of living. Asher
identifies the Bedu’s adoption of the car as the survival strategy of a
pragmatic people, who adopted the camel as the best available means of
transport thousands of years ago. Modern technology in the form of complex
irrigation systems has also transformed lives: one of the best passages in the
book describes an old man’s excitement at seeing an antelope in a lush area
which has been transformed by irrigation.
As the book seeks to de-romanticise notions about a people who have always
been depicted as noble savages – most famously in Lawrence of
Arabia – the fanciful and vaguely romantic subtitle, ‘In Search of a
Myth’, seems an odd choice. Just as Asher seems unhappily caught between
the roles of serious scholar and nomadic adventurer, the book itself at times
falls victim to the very stereotypes it is trying to dispel. But as he sensibly
concludes, Asher has not been searching for a myth, so much as hunting the
snark. There are no ‘last Bedu’; there are just people, involved in the
dynamic of change that characterises human existence:
Individuals die, cultures change, life evolves…as entities we wither,
but as a process we continue.
Reviewed by Helena Mary Smith
