June 29, 2011
Frank Gardner’s life has been profoundly affected by the Arab world, and he speaks of the rapidly changing Middle Eastern situation with an authority rare outside its borders. As the BBC’s security correspondent, he is now pivotal to our understanding of this once ‘sclerotic’ but now unprecedently turbulent region of the world. However, before he ‘sent myself there freelance’, the BBC believed there was ‘no news in the Gulf.’
A meeting over tea in the Chelsea flat with the great 20th century explorer Sir Wilfrid Thesiger, arranged by his mother, helped him ‘zero in on something unusual’ to make his way in the world. Surrounded by camel saddles, daggers, Thesiger’s incomparable black and white photographs of ‘desperate faces in desperate times’ encountered on travels in Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s, Gardner found his ‘world Unique Selling Point (USP)’.
Studying Arabic at Exeter University was a good move: even a few words opened doors to astonishing, unfailing hospitality – no matter what the circumstances Gardner discovered behind them. Bedu shared their choicest portions after sunset during Ramadam, under a desert sky; an awesomely proportioned Egyptian flat owner (who filled Gardner with dread, when he knocked on a door at random, wanting to see inside) welcomed the Western stranger in with the words: ‘Our house is your house’.
Addressing the audience yesterday under a marquee in summer sunshine, Gardner’s emphasis was on the region’s generosity, kindness and cultural richness – not on the armed men who in 2004, shot him seven times at point blank range in a quiet Riyadh back street, leaving him for dead, and without the use of his legs. His wheelchair was testament to another current running freely in the Middle East, even as the Arab Spring overthrows long-established dictatorships, and their hated secret police – terrorism and jihadism under the nebulous al-Qaeda.
Gardner believes that every country in the Arab world is in a ‘slow motion state of flux.’ While he deplores Bush’s provocative knee-jerk ‘War on Terror, which only provokes violent reaction (‘you cannot have a war against an abstract concept, and victory is therefore illogical), he argued that events of the Arab Spring have superceded jihadism and weakened the appeal of al-Qaeda.
Discussion ranged widely: the death of Osama bin-Laden, the rights of Saudi women, the repression of populations by dictators’ secret police, the inclusion of moderate Taliban in the future Government of Afghanistan, once NATO troops leave.
Gardner left the audience with a greater understanding of the diversity of the Middle East. ‘It would be unrealistic to think that a person sitting in the front row has exactly the same views about eco-tourism as someone in the back row.’ Gardner’s profound wish is that in the changing political landscape of the Middle East, human rights are reassessed, repositioned and constitutionally protected.
‘It’s important that the West does not expect too much, too quickly, and open ourselves up to the charge of hypocricy. After all, the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Women over 30 finally got the vote in 1918.’ Gardner believes democracy will take ‘at least a generation’ to bed in. And that’s going it some.
NOTE:
Frank Gardner’s book Blood and Sand describes the attempt on his life, his remarkable recovery and the journeys that have taken him there.
Sir Wilfrid Thesiger’s photographic collection of 38,000 negatives and 71 personal albums was given to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 2004, in lieu of death duties. Images can be viewed on line, and prints purchased from the Museum.
A meeting over tea in the Chelsea flat with the great 20th century explorer Sir Wilfrid Thesiger, arranged by his mother, helped him ‘zero in on something unusual’ to make his way in the world. Surrounded by camel saddles, daggers, Thesiger’s incomparable black and white photographs of ‘desperate faces in desperate times’ encountered on travels in Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s, Gardner found his ‘world Unique Selling Point (USP)’.
Studying Arabic at Exeter University was a good move: even a few words opened doors to astonishing, unfailing hospitality – no matter what the circumstances Gardner discovered behind them. Bedu shared their choicest portions after sunset during Ramadam, under a desert sky; an awesomely proportioned Egyptian flat owner (who filled Gardner with dread, when he knocked on a door at random, wanting to see inside) welcomed the Western stranger in with the words: ‘Our house is your house’.
Addressing the audience yesterday under a marquee in summer sunshine, Gardner’s emphasis was on the region’s generosity, kindness and cultural richness – not on the armed men who in 2004, shot him seven times at point blank range in a quiet Riyadh back street, leaving him for dead, and without the use of his legs. His wheelchair was testament to another current running freely in the Middle East, even as the Arab Spring overthrows long-established dictatorships, and their hated secret police – terrorism and jihadism under the nebulous al-Qaeda.
Gardner believes that every country in the Arab world is in a ‘slow motion state of flux.’ While he deplores Bush’s provocative knee-jerk ‘War on Terror, which only provokes violent reaction (‘you cannot have a war against an abstract concept, and victory is therefore illogical), he argued that events of the Arab Spring have superceded jihadism and weakened the appeal of al-Qaeda.
Discussion ranged widely: the death of Osama bin-Laden, the rights of Saudi women, the repression of populations by dictators’ secret police, the inclusion of moderate Taliban in the future Government of Afghanistan, once NATO troops leave.
Gardner left the audience with a greater understanding of the diversity of the Middle East. ‘It would be unrealistic to think that a person sitting in the front row has exactly the same views about eco-tourism as someone in the back row.’ Gardner’s profound wish is that in the changing political landscape of the Middle East, human rights are reassessed, repositioned and constitutionally protected.
‘It’s important that the West does not expect too much, too quickly, and open ourselves up to the charge of hypocricy. After all, the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Women over 30 finally got the vote in 1918.’ Gardner believes democracy will take ‘at least a generation’ to bed in. And that’s going it some.
NOTE:
Frank Gardner’s book Blood and Sand describes the attempt on his life, his remarkable recovery and the journeys that have taken him there.
Sir Wilfrid Thesiger’s photographic collection of 38,000 negatives and 71 personal albums was given to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 2004, in lieu of death duties. Images can be viewed on line, and prints purchased from the Museum.