The female scholar behind Iraq's independence
The Librarians
Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) was the granddaughter of British nobility and the daughter of an monied industrialist. Instead of seeking a life of cocktail parties, her brain actually required a high-class education. In 1884 Bell went to
Queen’s College and
Oxford University, gaining
1st Class Honours in Modern History. She spent the next 15 years in constant travel including
Persia, Egypt and Algiers.
A “cause” arrived in 1899 when she met
archaeologist David Hogarth and his world of Middle East antiquity. Already
fluent in Persian, French and German, Bell also studied
Arabic and Hebrew, and in 1900 she completed the first of her desert travels through
Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. She then began learning desert rules and the social practices of nomadic Bedouin, building valuable friendships among sheiks, warriors and Mesopotamian merchants. From 1900-12 her focus was on developing her skills as an
archaeologist, map-maker and ethnographer in a tough part of the world. Her
1907 trips with Sir William Ramsay in Anatolia became the basis for her book,
The Thousand and One Churches (1909). She was becoming a specialist in
Byzantine religious architecture, writing monographs as she went.
1911 was when met the young
archaeologist T.E Lawrence (1888–1935) aka Lawrence of Arabia. They shared a passion for Arabic culture and antiquities, becoming powerful forces in the next decade
promoting Arabic independence from the Ottomans and from Europe.
After a long trip along the
Euphrates River, Bell discovered and surveyed an C8th Abbasid fortress at Ukhaidir. She wrote the account in her 1909/10 journal, and an architectural monograph,
The Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir (1913).
In 1913 Bell travelled by camel through modern
Saudi Arabia and Iraq, hoping to reach the famed White City of Hayyil. She negotiated her way through contested territories, critical water shortages, hostile tribes and the shifting sands. Then she went home with maps and knowledge of Arabia that were invaluable as Europe faced WW1.
With
Turkey and Germany allied in WW1, the Middle East suddenly became an area of military importance remote from British intelligence. Who were the relevant powers there? Who did they support? So in
1915 Gertrude Bell travelled to Cairo, to work with British Intelligence, compile information and form a strategy for organising Arabic resistance to Turkish rule. However she did not participate in the
Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 that eventually divided Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.
Bell, Cox and Ibn Saud in Mesopotamia in 1916.Feisal's two staunchest supporters re holding the new Mandate of Iraq together
Imperial War Museum
After the war, the
Ottoman Empire was being dismantled and Bell sought to help the Arabs. She was asked to make her recommendations for
Mesopotamia, as her 1920 report “Self-Determination in Mesopotamia” made very clear. Bell was in the middle of the region’s politics, acting as mediator between the local
Sunni, Shiite and Kurd leaders, the British government, and Winston Churchill.
Self-Determination in Mesopotamia was the paper that earned her a seat at the
Paris Peace Conferences (1919-20), to honour the Allied promise of Arabic independence.
She opposed French delegates who were creating their mandate in Syria. And she opposed the British delegates who were creating a British mandate in Iraq and Palestine.
participants of the 1921 Cairo Conference.
L to R: Winston Churchill, Gertrude Bell and TE Lawrence.Under the Sphinx of Giza.
Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for the Colonies, called the 1921 Cairo Conference. While other British officials argued for Iraq’s continued subservience to Britain, Bell argued hard for their independence, and for the promotion of a larger Arabic state from France. For a newly unified Iraqi state, Bell and Lawrence highly recommended Faisal bin Hussein, former commander of the Arab forces that helped the British in the war. And through his charismatic leadership, a nation was forged! Bell became one of King Faisal’s most trusted advisors, beloved in Baghdad.
Yet Bell and her boss British high commissioner,
Sir Percy Cox, laid down state policies in Iraq that were taken up by
Saddam’s Arab Ba’ath socialist party. Iraq retained the Kurdish mountains as a buffer against Turkey and
Russia, and
promoted Sunni Muslims over the Shia majority. They expelled the Shia clergy to Iran, and deployed air power as a form of political control. Why did the U.K care? Iraq enjoyed
valuable oil resources AND acted as a buffer zone in the region to protect against Turkey, Iran and Syria.
Bell believed passionately in Arab independence and persuaded London that Iraq had enough able men at least to provide an administrative façade; and she contributed importantly to the construction of the Iraqi state in 1921. But she had two difficulties. Firstly she always overestimated the popularity of Cox and herself. And secondly she underestimated the force of religion in Iraqi affairs.
Bell and Sir Herbert Samuel, British High Commissioner in Palestine,
meets Jordanian pilot 1921. Highbrow.
Bell was never loved in London. And when Cox left Baghdad in 1923, she lost her bureaucratic protector. Yet Bell still wanted help in preserving Baghdad’s heritage in a new Archaeological Museum and she was named as the Director of Antiquities by King Faisal. Later she helped draw up the borders of the new nation of Iraq.
She
died in 1926 in Baghdad at 57, from ?lung cancer. The citizens and British officials lined the streets to pay respect to this wealthy British scholar who’d dedicated her life to Arab culture; the King of Iraq stood in a place of honour.
Bell’s greatest legacy was indeed the recovery and preservation of ancient artefacts and archaeological sites all over the Middle East, as at the
Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle Uni. But in 1921, Churchill agreed that Mesopotamia should be a self-ruling state, and Bell was a central figure at the Cairo Conference. Her influence was essential to the establishment of modern-day Iraq.
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