J. B. KELLY

Arabia, the Gulf and the West

1980

THE BRITISH EMPIRE is said to have been acquired in a fit of absentmindedness, and in 1960 the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave a speech that marked its demise in another fit of absentmindedness. He spoke of a wind of change, as though Empire had nothing to do with human choices or politics but was a matter of climate over which no control is possible. What the metaphor conveyed was that the British no longer cared to keep the peace in far-off places as they had done in the past. In those far-off places, nationalist politicians, some of them unscrupulous agitators, well understood that what began as mob violence about some local issue ended in a demand that they should be empowered. It came naturally to the British elite, civil as well as military, to conclude that they had only to hand over power and independence to anyone who wanted it badly enough, and all would be well.

One serious objector was John Kelly, originally from New Zealand and one-time Professor of British Imperial history at the University of Wisconsin. He and Valda, his wife, lived on Primrose Hill in London, and he first contacted me because he thought my book about the Palestinians had been unfairly reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. He took these things to heart. In his view, the British Empire had been the sole guarantor of law and order in much of the globe. Attacks on the Empire were attacks on civility. Accused of wrongs they had not committed, those in Whitehall and Westminster who had any dealings with Arabs lost self-confidence. Officialdom internalized what in one of his essays he calls “Obsessive pre-occupation with Arab virtue and British wickedness.” This is the cause of “pre-emptive cringe,” a phrase he coined and which ought to ensure him an entry in any Dictionary of Quotations.

A very determined character, he’d read through all the relevant archives and he had a way with words that crushed anyone trying to argue what to him were apologetics and falsities. A journalist by the name of G. H. Jansen, for example, in his book Militant Islam describes Muslim traders in black Africa as “men of extraordinary spiritual power.” John jumped in: “What Mr. Jansen somehow fails to indicate … is that one of the staples of their trade was slaves, and that this traffic in Africans by Muslim Arabs was only brought to an end by Western Christians. It is difficult to understand how such a devout anti-imperialist as Mr. Jansen could have overlooked such a splendid example of imperialism in action as the destruction of the East African slave trade – a trade in Africans, conducted by Arabs, financed by Indians, and suppressed by the British.”

Perhaps nobody but John could have exposed the bad faith of Ali Mazrui, who gave the Reith Lectures in 1980. The BBC sponsors these lectures with the evident intention that they should be one of the intellectual highlights of the year. When Ali Mazrui from Kenya delivered a diatribe against the West for the slave trade, John responded: “There is not a whisper, not a syllable, about the Arab slave trade, which had gone on for centuries before the first Portuguese navigator ever ventured south of the Equator and which has continued up to our day. It is all very strange, especially for a man who bears the same name as the Mazrui of Mombasa who were among the principal slave dealers on the African coast in the nineteenth century.”

The course of events in his view demonstrated that the more concessions were made to Arabs the more they would demand. He was the unrivaled authority on the history and politics of the Persian Gulf, with specialist knowledge of the treaties that local leaders had signed with nineteenth-century British governments. The Saudis had seized an oasis belonging by virtue of one of these treaties to neighboring Oman. The Foreign Office was charged to deliver a legally binding judgment about rightful ownership, and the Sultan of Oman had retained John to present what was a clear-cut case. Yet as he entered the room and before a word had been spoken, as John told the story, he knew the Omanis had lost. Defeatism was in the atmosphere. In the imperial past the Foreign Office had served the national interest, but in the present day they had come to the conclusion that the weak had to be sacrificed to the strong. The Saudi record was one of “bloodshed, terrorism and extortion,” but rather than confront as would once have been the case, the institutional decision now was to bow to it. The “strange love affair” that the United States conducted with Saudi Arabia was leading to “the slow paralysis of American foreign policy.” Western interests were being put at risk for no good reason. In Riyadh he had seen for himself a depot with hundreds of new-model American tanks but there were no fitters to enable them to take to the field. He also doubted the quality of Saudi Intelligence after finding in some official archive a file marked “Freemasonry” containing nothing but photocopies of the pages in Tolstoy’s War and Peace that describe Masonic ceremony. Years before such threats were realized he foresaw the use of oil as a weapon in Arab hands, Islamic militancy, and the attempt to ban free speech in non-Muslim countries. In a letter to me dated September 1980, he wrote, “If I see Arabian history in unflattering terms, at least I’m in good company. Wasn’t it Edmund Burke who categorized it as ‘a record of pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy and ungoverned zeal?”

When Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, some of her advisors recommended a Middle East policy free from pre-emptive cringe and offered to mark up passages in Arabia, the Gulf and the West for her to read. She duly asked the Foreign Office to send over a copy of the book, but instead received a note, “In the opinion of the Foreign Office, this man is not sound.”

Postscript. John and Valda retired to the Dordogne. Intending to write the definitive history of Saudi Arabia, John took with him a mass of notes and photocopied documents. I was in the habit of urging him to finish what should have been another magnum opus, but he didn’t. Saul Kelly, his son and a historian in the same field, has been editing and publishing much of the writing John left behind. Saul gave me a signed copy of The Hunt for Zerzura, his book about Count Ladislaus Almasy, a German agent in the Western Desert during World War II. Of all the signatories I have, theirs is the only father-and-son double act.