Exotic Delights

AT the opening of the Ottoman parliament in 1908, the newsman Francis McCullagh looked around the square of Saint Sophia, filled with “Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Albanians, mariners from the Isles, shepherds from Asia Minor, Arabs from the Holy Cities and the mysterious Peninsula, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Mongols, Turkomans, Tartars, Kirghiz, Aryans, Kurds, Kutzovalaks, Jews, Gypsies, Caucasians, Druses, Maronites, and representatives of all the other races which make up this most composite empire.” McCullagh was on the verge of snickering at this motley mob, when it occurred to him that he should be humbled by it. “This, after all, is no mean assembly,” he wrote. “It contains representatives from Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Mecca, from the races which have given us the Talmud, the Bible, and the Koran, from the tribes which founded Judaism, Christianity, and Islam …”

One of the great strengths of Bernard Lewis’s anthology is that it reminds us that the Middle East is still such a place. Oddly, we need the reminding. In the early 20th century, the region spurred the imagination of adventurers like T. E. Lawrence and writers like Wilfred Thesiger, Peter Fleming, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, who set out in droves to discover it. In the early 21st, few other than specialists even keep up with it in the daily newspapers, and rare is the person who can tell a wali from a wadi, or a pasha from a parshat.

About the Author

Christopher Caldwell

Mr. Caldwell is a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books and the author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.

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AT the opening of the Ottoman parliament in 1908, the newsman Francis McCullagh looked around the square of Saint Sophia, filled with “Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Albanians, mariners from the Isles, shepherds from Asia Minor, Arabs from the Holy Cities and the mysterious Peninsula, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Mongols, Turkomans, Tartars, Kirghiz, Aryans, Kurds, Kutzovalaks, Jews, Gypsies, Caucasians, Druses, Maronites, and representatives of all the other races which make up this most composite empire.” McCullagh was on the verge of snickering at this motley mob, when it occurred to him that he should be humbled by it. “This, after all, is no mean assembly,” he wrote. “It contains representatives from Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Mecca, from the races which have given us the Talmud, the Bible, and the Koran, from the tribes which founded Judaism, Christianity, and Islam …”

One of the great strengths of Bernard Lewis’s anthology is that it reminds us that the Middle East is still such a place. Oddly, we need the reminding. In the early 20th century, the region spurred the imagination of adventurers like T. E. Lawrence and writers like Wilfred Thesiger, Peter Fleming, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, who set out in droves to discover it. In the early 21st, few other than specialists even keep up with it in the daily newspapers, and rare is the person who can tell a wali from a wadi, or a pasha from a parshat.