New Travel Book: ‘The Marsh Arabs’
Travel Blog • Frank Bures • 01.14.08 | 10:41 AM ET
Author: Wilfred Thesiger, with a new introduction by Jon Lee Anderson
Released: Jan. 2, 2008
Travel genre: Classic travelogues
Territory covered: Southern Iraq
Promo copy: “During the years he spent among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq—long before they were almost completely wiped out by Saddam Hussein—Wilfred Thesiger came to understand, admire, and share a way of life that had endured for many centuries. Traveling from village to village by canoe, he won acceptance by dispensing medicine and treating the sick. In this account of a nearly lost civilization, he pays tribute to the hospitality, loyalty, courage, and endurance of the people, and describes their impressive reed houses, the waterways and lakes teeming with wildlife, the herding of buffalo and hunting of wild boar, moments of tragedy, and moments of pure comedy in vivid, engaging detail.”
Critical verdict: When the book came out in 1964, it was widely reviewed. “Robert Payne…wrote in The New York Times Book Review: ‘It would be unfair to pick out the plums: the feuds, the battles royal and the harsh sufferings. There are magnificent descriptions of weddings and mass circumcisions, of boar hunts, of endless nights spent under the stars.’ [Michael] Asher, however, considers the book less successful as an evocation of marsh life than Gavin Maxwell’s A Reed Shaken by the Wind. The young men to whom Thesiger was closest in Iraq do not emerge with the same vividness as do bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha in Arabian Sands. In a review in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society James (later Jan) Morris praised Thesiger’s ‘perplexing, beautiful and haunting book’ but was unimpressed by Marsh Arab civilization, with its ‘Diseases, blood-feuds, crippling superstitions, robberies with violence, bullying Sheikhs, filth, caste-prejudices, graft, and the perpetual risk of being savaged by wild pigs.’” (Contemporary Authors)
The real draw to this new edition: Jon Lee Anderson introduces “The Marsh Arabs” with some accounts of his own travels through the marshes and of the complexities he encountered there decades after Thesiger.