This Strange Eventful History

By Edward Henderson, Quartet Books, London, New York, 1988, 184 pp. E15.95.

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

The several interrelated levels of This Strange Eventful History lend former British Ambassador to Qatar Edward Henderson's book an intriguing depth and interest. At its simplest, the book is a comprehensive encyclopedia on the Arab tribes and their harsh habitat in the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman.

Scholars can thank Henderson for recording his unparalleled knowledge of tribal life in those areas covering four decades from 1948. The bedouin Henderson describes endured isolation and cruel hardship in almost unrelieved desert and mountain wilderness before the oil wealth came in the mid-1960s. The author provides a wealth of anecdotes to illustrate their ability somehow to scrape by at a subsistence level. The author is determinedly unsentimental about the desert dwellers among whom he has spent much of his adult life. He merely describes their simplicity, belief in "luck," stoic powers of endurance and readiness to dump, unceremoniously, leaders found wanting.

Henderson avoids idealizing the bedouin, as patronizing Westerners sometimes tend to do. Nevertheless, his understanding of the trying lives once faced by inhabitants of this formerly remote corner of the Arabian peninsula and of their ability to overcome adversity leaves the reader admiring them, as the author clearly does himself.

Epic Struggle

A particularly compelling aspect of This Strange Eventful History is the epic struggle by Henderson, then between an eventful military career during and after World War II and a later career as a British resident political officer and diplomat, to push oil exploration into critically important Duru tribal areas between the sandy wastes of the Rub al-Khali (the Empty Quarter) and Oman's deceptively named Green Mountains, The first obstacle was the hesitant support provided by the then Sultan of Oman, the nominal ruler of the Duru, which made him more of a hindrance than help. This was compounded by the unwillingness of Henderson's military escort to take a chance.

Oil explorer Henderson both prevailed and did not prevail. Against terrible obstacles, his expedition did eventually penetrate Duru areas and ensure that their eventual ties to the Sultanate of Oman would be firm. However, despite the fact that exploration for oil was thus made possible, actual production was delayed another decade until 1964.

Personal Memoir

On its third level, Henderson's book is an intriguing personal memoir. He suggests, not very convincingly, that his astonishingly varied career was dictated more by circumstances than by personal inclination. Certainly it was his own interests that led to his taking a degree in modern history at Oxford in 1939. Since that was the year World War II broke out, becoming an officer in the British army was a logical next step. He missed the evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk, but not much else during World War II.

After serving in the battles to turn back German General Rommel's advances in North Africa, and doing a great deal of lone reconnaissance in the remote mountains and valleys of Syria and Lebanon, Henderson finished the war in Western Europe. Then he returned to the Middle East for the last days of British rule in Palestine and service in Jordan's Arab Legion under British General Glubb Pasha. These adventures certainly seem more the result of personal inclination than fate, and stemmed from a restlessness which clearly is a basic attribute of Henderson's character.

When he tired of the military, Henderson entered the oil business. When, in turn, he tired of that, he took examinations and entered the diplomatic service in 1956. There followed assignments as British Consul in Jerusalem' British political resident in both Abu Dhabi and Dolia, and first British Ambassador to Qatar. Restless again after 18 years in diplomacy, he left the Foreign Office to become a researcher and historian in the United Arab Emirates, where his friendships within the ruling families went back to his earlier oil company and political assignments.

Henderson returned to London in 1980 for a year as director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU). Then off to Washington to help establish the US equivalent, the American Educational Trust, with both a speakers bureau and a mass circulation publication, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Henderson was an immensely popular and persuasive lecturer on the Middle East in universities all over the United States during the year and a half he served as chairman of the AET.

Although health problems grounded him for a time, this redoubtable warrior, who has become a Middle East landmark in his own right, now divides his time between historical research in Abu Dhabi and a home in England. He is considering a lecture trip to the United States in the upcoming academic year, following the success of his book, which will be available in the United States in August. Then, perhaps, another historical memoir from a landmark figure who literally wrote the book on Western relations with the families who today rule in the strategically located and richly endowed Arab states of the Gulf.

Andrew I. Killgore is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

This Strange Eventful History by Edward Henderson Is available from the AET Book Club.