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Many
years ago when I was preparing to come and live in the
Middle East I scoured the bookshops in Amsterdam for
anything that could teach me about Arabia and the Arabs.
I could not find anything of a recent date, but there
were several older books that dealt with the subject. By
chance, one was a coffee-table photo book about Al Ain,
the city I was heading for. I gazed at the pictures of
sand dunes, palm groves and animals suqs. The text was
minimal and although my appetite was whetted, I was no
wiser.
Then I discovered a series of books written by a lady
named Freya Stark. They were a sort of diary written in
the years between the two World Wars and told of daily
life in Aden and adventurous excursions into the
Hadramauth Mountains of Yemen. The descriptions of
landscapes and of village life in remote areas were
fascinating. The language was beautiful, detailed and
poetic, as people of that era tended to write.
Since that first discovery 30 years ago, I have read
these books again several times, enjoying them even more
after I had gained my own experiences in this part of
the world. In the course of time, I began to hear more
about other exploits of the author – a truly remarkable
lady. She was 84 when she travelled down the Euphrates
River in Iraq on a raft, visiting the Marsh Arabs
shortly before the large scale destruction of the
marshes by Saddam Hussein’s government. When the BBC
wanted to film her adventure she scoffed: “It is only a
sailing trip, nothing special!”
She lived to be a hundred and each of those years was
packed with adventure.
Freya Stark was born in 1893 in Paris. Her parents were
English artists who were bitten by the travel bug. As
Freya’s biographer puts it so aptly: “Her cradle was
highly mobile”. With her parents she travelled
throughout Europe, settling for short times in England,
but spending most of the time in Italy. She went to
College in the UK and served as a nurse and a censor in
the World War I. After her parents divorced, her father
gave her a small house in Italy and there she set up a
small business, growing vegetables and fruits for the
markets. She used every cent of her earnings for
language lessons – starting with Arabic and Farsi. Soon
she set off on the first of her adventures – long treks
through Syria, Persia, Palestine and Yemen. Her most
audacious trip took place in 1928 when she was 35 - the
first woman to explore Luristan in Western Iran. She
travelled alone into the forbidden territory of the
Syrian Druze, after having trekked across the infamous
Valley of the Assassins. Her first book (The Valley
of the Assassins) was written describing this
journey, commenting in a lively way about the people,
places, customs and history she learned about. The book
made her famous and provided her with a grant from the
Royal Geographical Society. This enabled her to make a
second trip in the late 1930’s into the hinterland of
Yemen, resulting in “The Southern Gates of Arabia” and
“The Dust of the Lion’s Paw”– the books that I found in
the Amsterdam book shop.
During the Second World War Freya Stark worked for the
Ministry of Information, contributing to the creation of
a propaganda network, where her knowledge of local
languages was useful in counteracting Nazi influence in
Arabia, Egypt and Iraq.
In 1954 – she was then 61 years old – she was travelling
in Turkey where time and again she came across traces of
Alexander the Great. It seemed to her that these signs
often contradicted the accepted history of Alexander’s
march through Asia Minor. So she decided to research
Alexander’s route extensively, checking the geographical
facts with the traditional records for inconsistencies.
With two Turkish guides she travelled first by jeep and
then on horseback, crossing the sparsely populated
southern Taurus with its steep passes, the deep canyons
in the high karst-plateaus and the snow-covered
mountains, following the route that Alexander the Great
took so many centuries before. The trips are recorded in
three of her most well-known books: “The Lycian Shore”,
“Ionia – a Quest” and “Alexander’s Path”. With her
entertaining accounts of the history and culture of the
region she managed to bring to life an era that laid one
and a half thousand years in the past.
During travels in the Empty Quarter of Oman, she
re-discovered the ancient route of the incense trade and
predicted the site of some of the great cities of
antiquity, which are only now being excavated, right
where she said they would be.
All in all she wrote 30 books, each one telling a story
about somewhere in the Middle East. The Times of London
called her ‘the last of the Romantic travellers’ and at
the age of 82 she was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, from
then on having the right to call herself Dame Freya
Stark.
In an interview given to Betty Green, a journalist of
Aramco World Magazine, Dame Freya told of her time with
the nomad Bedu she camped with:
“For one thing, they are very pleasant to be with. They
have certain manners that I think are delightful. You
don’t have to talk all the time. If you have something
to say, you say it. They can sit with a circle of twenty
people, quite quiet and silent, who haven’t anything
much to say. And then, if someone has, they say
it. These pleasant pauses are so agreeable that one is
inclined to get into the habit and it isn’t the thing at
all in a European drawing room!”
And: “I have never heard a Bedu interrupt another in
conversation. Conversation is a whole art which, I have
a theory, comes from the fact that the lighting in their
tents has never been good enough for reading. You can’t
really do anything but sit and talk.”
She loved the Arabic language: “I enjoy Arabic. I don’t
speak it at all elegantly but I enjoy it immensely.
There is very great beauty in the language; it is a most
poetic language. It is incredibly rich. That is really
the difficulty of learning it - the very great quantity
of expressions.”
When asked about her view on Arab women, she said: “They
were very kind to me always. I like Arab women. And, of
course, I feel women are just as influential when they
are shut up as when they are let loose. I think we run
the world wherever we happen to be.”
When asked in 1984, after her return from her rafting
trip on the Euphrates, whether the Arabs she travelled
with were interested in their history, she explained it
thus: “They are, but they are not documentarians as we
are. We are becoming wedded to the document. I don’t
think they care about it. They care about the
feeling. It is perhaps the old-fashioned way. They
are very proud of memories and of course they are a
believing people. Religion is still a great force; they
have respect for their religion. People will tell you
that this is old-fashioned and that you hear nothing but
about oil and money...but I noticed that among the young
people we were with (and they were most of them young)
that when you got to know them they were just the same
as I always remembered them, with a very strong belief
that perhaps we used to have and lost: a belief of being
entirely in the hands of Allah, of God, so that human
decision becomes subordinate.”
In one of her later books ‘Riding to the Tigris’ she
motivates her desire for travelling:
“Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of
everyday, placing it like a pictures in a frame, or a
gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are
made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff
that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp
contour and meaning of art. .. Most people try to avoid
having their feeling intensified; for indeed one must be
strong to place oneself alone against the impact of the
unknown world”.
Freya Stark lived up to her name – ‘stark’ is the
Germanic word for ‘strong’.
She was a strong woman, a woman who used her talents for
languages and observation to open up the world of the
Arabs, until then hardly known to Europeans, and to
generate appreciation for the mysterious Middle East.
Her compassion and sense of humour, her patience and
adaptability allowed her to go where few men, leave
alone single women, had travelled before and to make
friends with wild tribesmen, gentle Bedu and city people
alike.
For me she has been a role model, both in her writing
and in her life-style. | 
