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London-Islamic Tourism
Legendary explorers of the Arab world feature prominently in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Off the Beaten Track – three centuries of women travelers on display until October 31st in London.
The exhibition’s curator, Clare Gittings, wanted to reveal the richness of the National Portrait Gallery’s own collections, so only women whose portraits the Gallery already had were selected.
“I also decided to set a rough end-date of the 1960s as the advent of mass travel, the effects of globalization and the gains made by feminism have created somewhat different conditions for contemporary women travelers. The next task was to discover which women travelers were represented in the collections, in paintings, photographs, sculptures or engravings. I consulted reference books and many people helped in suggesting possible names to look up in the Gallery’s catalogues. This produced forty-eight portraits of women who ventured further afield than Europeâ€Â.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition is a book of the same name which provides a penetrating flash of insight into the lives of Gertrude Bell, Jane Digby, Freya Stark, Hester Stanhope Rosita Forbes and many other legendary woman travelers.
Crossing deserts in disguise and meeting prominent Arab leaders were just some of Rosita Forbe’s (1890 – 1967) specialities. Her first great journey was to Libya in the winter of 1920 -1, when she became the first non-Muslim woman and only the second European to enter the closed city of Kufra. She dressed as a Muslim woman called Khadija, claiming a Circassian mother to explain away her poor Arabic and took photographs with a concealed camera. She journeyed by camel-train with an Egyptian explorer, Ahmed Hassanein Bey, and described the journey in The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara (1921). Khadija than visited Yemen. In 1925, Rosita Forbes published From Red Sea to Blue Nile: Abyssinian Adventures, recounting her journey through Ethiopia. She met leading figures in the Middle East: they featured in her lectures and books. She visited India and, with her second husband, Colonel Arthur Thomas McGrath went to South America. They settled in the Bahamas and she died in Bermuda.
Palmyra, which Jane Digby called by its ancient Arab name, Tadmor, played a major part in her life. No other Western woman had made the journey there though the desert since Lady Hester Stanhope in 1813. Jane first visited in June 1853 with Medjuel, who was later to become her husband, as her guide. They arrived at night, wandering together by moonlight through the ruins, under a great arch. Medjul watched her as she sketched, protecting her from over-inquisitive locals. Two years later, Jane spent her honey moon there. In December 1858 she made the journey on her own, only to find that her husband’s tribe had already left the area. However she chose to live among the ruins for several months, continuing to sketch and paint until Medjul finally reappeared. When she died he placed on her grave in Damascus a block of pink desert limestone brought from Palmyra, on which he carved her name in Bedouin Arabic script.
Gertrude Bell was the first women to achieve a First in Modern History at Oxford. She became excited about the Middle East when she stayed with her uncle, the British Ambassador in Tehran. Her passion for the region infuses The Desert and the Sown (1907) and her other books. She increasingly found that, particularly in Iraq, with her excellent linguistic skills and understanding of complex desert tribes, she could make her mark alongside men like Lawrence of Arabia (1888 – 1935). After the First World War, she proposed the present-day borders for Iraq, favouring an Arab government headed by Lawrence’s friend, Prince Faisal. This she helped to achieve but there was then less call for her political advice. She returned to an earlier interest in archaeology, and founded the Baghdad Museum. Becoming depressed and disillusioned in her late fifties she took a fatal overdose.
Dame Freya Stark’s (1893 – 1993) early years were partly spent abroad where she learned several languages. When her parents separated, her mother set up a factory to a make baskets and rugs in Italy. When she was twelve, Frey’s long hair became entangled in one of the machines tearing away her right ear and some of her scalp. She adopted the swept across hairstyle to hide her injuries. In 1927 she went to Lebanon to learn Arabic and then traveled around the Middle East. In Letters from Syria (1942) she wrote :â€ÂI never imagined that my first sight of the desert would come with such a shock of beauty and enslave me right awayâ€Â. After learning Persian, her book about her Iranian journey, The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels (1934) established her as a notable travel traveler, wining her prizes and financial support. A trip to Yemen followed. She was briefly married to the diplomat Stewart Perowne. In her sixties she retraced the footsteps of Alexander the Great, writing a trilogy steeped in her love of Turkey. At the age of eighty-two she was made a dame; she continued traveling until she was ninety.
Lady Hester Stanhope (1776-1839) was the lively daughter of Charles, 3rd Earl of Stanhope. Her mother died when she was only four, condemning her to a peripatetic childhood. She finally, and most happily, kept house for her uncle, the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger. After his death, she left Britain for Turkey, ostensibly to make her money and go further for her health; she never returned. She adopted Turkish dress after loosing her entire wardrobe in a shipwreck. Myths quickly accumulated around her as she traveled the Middle East, making a spectacular entry into Palmyra in 1813, calling herself ‘Queen of the Desert’. Her remaining decades were spent in a ruined Lebanese monastery, initially admired but living increasingly in destitution. Her memoirs, written by her doctor, were published in 1845 after her death.
Iraq
Tourism: Iraq’s river of gold
www.bbc.co.uk "Tourism can be Iraq’s river of gold," according to Ahmed al-Jobori head of the state-run tourism board." Our oil will eventually run out, but, for better or worse, there will always be people who want to see Iraq."
Once the violence has subsided, Mr Jobori says he believes Iraq's natural and historical attractions - and the palaces and prisons of the Baathist regime - means tourism will boom.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal he said: "For now, I advise our friends around the world to be patient until the terrorism ends. We can keep tourists safe from animals. We can keep tourists safe from natural disasters. But we can't keep tourists safe from unknown enemies, chaos and violence."
But Phil Lalani, a hotel owner from Blackpool in the UK, and his girlfriend, Katrina Copsey, are examples of travellers determined to visit Iraq and "do something groundbreaking". They are going in the care of a former British special forces officer and will be protected at all times by armed guards. Don Lucey is charging ten intrepid travellers $2,200 for a ten day trip.
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