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Tihar Jail den of criminals: Supreme Court 1 day ago. Delhi Declaration for joint fight against terror 1 day ago. She had quite an ego and revelled in her unusual status. She was also infuriated by the inevitable comparisons with Gertrude Bell who had died the year before she had first set sail for the Middle East. But she fell out of favour in when, after a couple of weeks in Delhi, she persuaded the High Commission to allow her to export a car, and drive it to Baghdad, on the understanding that it would then be sold at cost price to the Embassy car pool there.
That put paid to her diplomatic career and she reverted to writing and travelling. She married late in life — at the age of 54 — but her husband was a closet homosexual and they separated after 5 years. Spotted something wrong? Today, one may be able to gain more scholarly and updated history from other authors.
All these books were about the contemporary Arab world as well. Stark had travelled through Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Yemen at a time when national borders retained a fictive quality, and no one could be sure what political or cultural forces would prevail.
The fragrant resin had once been required for the incense that burned on altars from Jerusalem and Cairo to Rome, a substance so precious that it made a fitting gift from a King of the East to a new-born god. Tauris is in the midst of publishing nine others—will find a writer who endows everyone in her field of vision with the heightened interest that she felt herself.
Peasants, Bedouins, tribal leaders, guides, soldiers, and slaves make up a society that is both impossibly strange and palpably near, in the simple and not so simple human sense. Stark was not an objective observer—how could she have been? The essential items that Stark learned to carry were plenty of medications, letters of introduction preferably embossed , and penny-trinket gifts. At night, they slept in hospitable village houses.
The French Army officers who finally caught up with them were confounded by the British ladies one quite pretty, one speaking French and Arabic , who claimed to have been misdirected by their Thomas Cook guidebook.
Suspected of being spies, they were confined to Army barracks for three days that quickly resolved into horseback rides, convivial dinners, and visits to local villages, where the leading officer discoursed on the benefits of civilization that the French were bringing to the barbarous land.
Farewells were nearly tender. And Stark got more from the experience than she had bargained for: permission to continue on her way, plus the trust of the commiserating Druse for having been imprisoned by the hated French.
By contrast, British rule in the mandates which she confessed she had not yet experienced was alert to compromise and to the living spirit of the native people.
She was, nevertheless, presenting the English audience with a cautionary tale. And even after she had come to know British rule and rulers well, she rarely gave any sign that local people chafed under their control, or that, beyond the smug unpleasantness of British wives, they had reason to do so.
But the man merely inquired whether she belonged to the tribe of the British commander—she did not record her presumably sensible reply—and immediately vanished, along with his history and his motives.
And it was in this spirit that she took on the biggest semi-mythic quests she could find. And it is pleasant too, to sit on a donkey pack, when you know how to do it, without rigidity, meeting the jolts and caprices of your companion with an elastic temper and a capacity for balance; riding, in fact, as one rides through life, with a calm eye for accidents and a taste for enjoyment in the meantime.
As a result, she failed to reach the old, sand-covered trading post of Shabwa, which, to add to its allure and her regret, was very possibly the capital of the Queen of Sheba.
Stark was frequently the first European woman to be seen in the places that she went, and she just as frequently found, upon arrival, that the only area immediately open to her—comprising the only people eager to speak with her, if also to touch her, sniff her, and examine her clothes—was the harem.
She became, in time, something of a specialist in the unconsidered trifles of its customs and its days. Like many extraordinary women of her era—she was born in —she had little patience with the dully ordinary women whose fate she had worked hard to escape.
In part, the harem was for Stark merely a means of gaining trust and approaching the powerful men who were the primary subjects of her visit. But her feeling for feminine rites and habits and, particularly, wardrobes was unfeigned.
This quintessentially British woman, as she appeared to the Arab eye, spoke English with an accent: the language of her nursery was German, thanks to a beloved grandmother and an early governess, and she had grown up mostly in Italy. True, her parents were English, but, as aspiring painters and confirmed bohemians, they had felt no need to settle down. The home she remembered, later on, with the poignancy of a childhood lost, was one that her father had built on the moors of his native Devon, all horses and heather and bluebells, and with a bedstead painted by her mother—who despised the cozy, bourgeois place—with sailing ships.
Freya was ten when her mother ended this idyll by running off with a twenty-three-year-old impoverished Italian count. The girls lived there in dispirited poverty, with some minimal education from the French nuns in the town, and no escape. When she allowed herself to think about the subject, rather than simply to mention its existence, she argued that the West had rid itself of slavery only when religion declined—when enough people understood that they had to deal with the causes of sorrow in the world themselves, since God would not.
The Middle East was still a formidably religious society, but it was changing fast—perhaps too fast, owing to the interference of foreigners like her. Politics just got in the way. In , when war was threatening, Stark offered her services to the British government, and was assigned to the Middle East Propaganda Section of the Ministry of Information.
But the British no longer had cause for complacency. Arab sentiment had grown vehemently anti-British in the years leading up to the war, because of unyielding control in the region, but also because of British policy in Palestine. But in , faced with the disruption of vital oil supplies and the loss of strategic bases should Arab states side with the Axis, the British reversed their policy, bringing Jewish immigration virtually to a halt.
The Germans had already exploited the situation, however, to win wide Arab support. But her proudest accomplishment was the Brotherhood of Freedom, an organization that she set up along the lines of the Muslim Brotherhood, which, begun in Cairo and pledged to Islam, had been training Arab fighters against foreign domination since the twenties.
The members of her network, however, were pledged to personal freedom and secular democracy. Her knowledge of Arab customs and mentality was used to influence the local population in a pro-British direction, and she produced radio shows in Arabic in Aden to this end. She was fully convinced that British politics served the interests not only of Britain but also of the indigenous population.
She compared the relationship between colonial administration and indigenous population to that between parent and child. Stark spent the last part of the war in India at the court of the British Viceroy.
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