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ShareBy Mahmoud Zakaria
Dame Freya Madeline Stark was one of the best-known figures of recent times, acclaimed for her intrepid exploration and her prolific writing. Her talent for befriending local people as she traveled gave her photographs a unique perspective. Born in Paris in 1893 and died in 1993 in Italy, she was brought up in Italy. In 1911, she moved to England to study English and history at Bedford College.
When World War I interrupted her studies, Stark served as a nurse on the Austrian front from 1915. At the age of 28, she began learning Arabic, and from 1928 onwards, she traveled almost continually through the Near East, Iraq, Persia and southern Arabia. In 1950, she traveled extensively in Greece and Turkey, and between 1960 and 1970, she visited China, Afghanistan, Nepal and Kashmir.
Stark’s journeys to Kuwait in 1932 and 1937 have been described in two references. The first one is the book “Freya Stark in Iraq and Kuwait”, published in 1994 by Malise Ruthven. The second is an article published in Geographical Magazine in Oct 1937. In Nov 2003, the Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait republished and translated the two articles so that we could have a quick look at the past of Kuwait. This article reminds readers of the social and economic conditions in Kuwait at that time, giving us a true vision of life in Kuwait before the discovery of oil.
Of all the sights in Kuwait, Freya was most impressed by the Arab dhows in the harbor, built of shiny yellow wood from Malabar, their ribs often made out of single forked branches of trees. “Who can describe the beauty of those boats with their high carved sterns? Or the feeling of time turned backward as one walks along what the crusading fleet drawn up for overhauling on the sands of Acre or Athlit?”
Stark inspected the long slender batteel, the admiral’s boat that commanded the pearling fleet, the larger boom that sailed as Zanzibar. She admired the bold and simple lines of the sambuq, the straight-down keel of the jalboot (or jollyboat), and the baghlah, the most ancient craft of all, a mere bundle of reeds crafted into the shape of a boat and tied together, with a “hollow place in the middle for the fisherman to sit in the oozing water”.
On her second visit to Kuwait five years later, Stark was taken by the British Resident, Gerald de Gaury, to the island of Failaka, a two-hour crossing by launch. They were accompanied by Yusuf Al-Mutawwa, a gentle old man who lived “on a respectable income made years ago by his work in the trade of dates”.
Stark noticed that new slaves were no longer being brought into the sheikhdom, and increasing numbers of those already there were being set free. Times were changing — though not too fast. “Civilization,” she concluded, “will come tempered, more like a marriage and less like a rape; and the poor little town — that looks to her untried bridegroom hopefully for all temporal blessings — may yet, with gentle treatment, keep her peculiar charm.”
Stark wrote about her observations: “The wall, as a matter of fact, is not old. It was built in 1916, hastily in three months against the assaulters, but it might be any age, slapped up with mud, with an inner raised walk and small steep-staired towers at intervals, and three gates between sea and sea.
“The police who sit in the three gatehouses might also be dated, as you please. The three old men lounge in their seats or squat in the windowless den brewing coffee, keeping their eye on who goes in or out, and in their toothless way, upholding the rule of law. They wait for the approaching end of their days with that dignity which is the keynote of Arabia, made of poverty and leisure, of a complete unconsciousness of dress as an asset to respectability or of physical comfort as an essential to happiness.
“Kuwaiti boys with time on their hands lure the common little blue and brown kite for the sky. A few decoys tied to stones sit demurely about in the dust. Here and there, traps are arranged — circular concave metal discs that close with a snap when the spring is released. This centers on a white caterpillar tied by the waist, who wriggles slowly round and round like a semaphore, succulently obvious from above. The boys wait at a distance and get four or five prisoners in a day, selling them to children who like to walk about with a bird at the end of a string in their hand.”
