Improbable Women: Five Who Explored the Middle East

Introduction

xiii Introduction On October 8, 1973, the Israeli Inner Cabinet, in desperate moments of what Israelis now call the Yom Kippur War, decided to arm their nuclear weapons, and on October 9, the General Staff recommended taking “extreme measures” against the Arabs.1 The war began with an attack by the Egyptians and the Syrians, a body blow that forced the Israelis into their first defensive war, a war that Arabs now call the October War. In Kuwait at the time, I was on assignment as an economist and assistant project manager for Thomas H. Miner & Associates, Inc., a Chicago consulting firm. Though at least a thousand miles from the battles, tension was high in Kuwait.The night the war began,Thomas H. Miner’s manager for the Arabian Gulf, his wife, and I had dinner in the rooftop restaurant of the Sheraton Hotel in Kuwait City, and afterward, late in the evening, we encountered military roadblocks at major intersections. Kuwait soon sent a brigade to participate in the war, but in retrospect it seems that Kuwait’s greater concern may have been Iraq and its claim that Kuwait was an Iraqi province. The previous June, Iraq had launched an attack across the Kuwait border, killed one Kuwaiti, and withdrew. It did not require paranoia to imagine Iraq’s using the cover of the October/Yom Kippur War to invade Kuwait again. • A month earlier, beginning our descent into Kuwait aboard an Air India 747, we found that the starlit expanse of desert we had expected was an ocean of black, illuminated at scattered points by blossoms of burning natural gas, then a wasted by-product of oil extraction: xiv • Introduction eerie, writhing columns of flame. We stepped to the top of the mobile stairs at one in the morning to find a 97-degree temperature and air heavy with the mingled odors of jet fuel and burning gas. In the months that followed, the war began, evacuation plans were made and then canceled, and we completed a survey of every business with four or more employees. Everyday events were initially strange and slowly became routine, while language overheard shifted from an undifferentiated flow of sound to a series of words, some understood. Six months after landing in Kuwait, I boarded a 747 bound for Greece with a newly discovered set of interests: the Middle East, its history, its deserts, the Arabs, their culture and their language. Besides the oil wells and modern buildings of Kuwait City, I had found pastel sand dunes, nightingales (in Iran), mysterious souqs (markets or bazaars), mosques of gleaming marble, and a fascinating people that I had only begun to know. During the next twenty-five years, I flew to the Middle East two or three times each year and lived there for almost three years. Somewhere along the way I became aware of extraordinary women travelers who had explored the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, times as unsettled as the present. These strongwilled women had no jets, no five-star hotels, and few embassies to get them out of scrapes; yet they would sail to the Middle East and think nothing of buying camels, hiring a cook and camel drivers, and setting off into the desert. Through the years I made a point of learning about these women, and threads of information began to weave themselves into the fabric of stories. Many women had made the difficult journey to the Middle East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and after reading about them, I reduced the list to six that I found most compelling. They lived in times when women were deemed inferior to men in nearly all regards, when their roles were narrowly restricted to bearing children and raising families. These women defied the conventions of their day. Then I discovered that five of the women shared an intriguing connection. Introduction • xv These forceful ladies were fascinated by Zenobia of Palmyra, the legendary warrior queen who reigned and fought in Syria seventeen hundred years ago. Each of the five had made a pilgrimage to Palmyra and the ruins of her city-state in homage to Zenobia, perhaps in recognition of the mystery of their own spirits, so much like hers. During the last eighteen years, I have traced this exclusive sorority of six (including Zenobia) in libraries in England and the United States. In hopes of understanding...