Wilfred Thesiger was a writer, an amazing photographer and a consummate explorer. His most notable works are Arabian Sands (1959) which documented his journey across the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula and, The Marsh Arabs (1964) which documented his time living in the marshes of Iraq.
As a student, studying Arabic, I read Arabian Sands. I recall being very much taken with it and it bringing about a sense of nostalgia. The work by Thesiger concentrates on his Arabian travels between 1945 and 1950. It charts two crossings of the Empty Quarter undertaken between 1946 and 1948. Thesiger’s first crossing, from Mughshin in Oman to Liwa across the eastern sands, was followed by a crossing of the western sands from Manwakh in Yemen, via Liwa, to Abu Dhabi.
The book largely reflects on the changes and large scale development that took place after the Second World War and the subsequent gradual erosion of traditional Bedouin ways of life that had previously existed unaltered for thousands of years. It captured well the lives of the Bedu (Bedouin) people and other inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula and is now considered a classic in the genre of travel literature. In the 1950s, The Times described Thesiger as “the last of a great line of Arabian explorers.” In an obituary piece for The Guardian, Michael Asher wrote that Thesiger’s description of the traditional life of the Bedu was probably “the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever.”
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