Middle East Centre of Arabic Studies,
(MECAS). Memories of an Arabic language study and of the oil industry in the Middle East of the nineteen sixties

To enter the celebrated halls of MECAS in late 1959 for the first time as a student was scary enough, the more so for a Dutch national and an oilman to boot. I was thirty. My wife and two children accompanied me on “our sabbatical” in Shemlan and were looking forward to enjoying their holiday to the full. But reality quickly took over.

The main body of students with whom I had to compete (for that is how I saw it) were bachelors in their early twenties. The tone was set by a few cocky but brilliant students, straight out of university with firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, who fully expected to perform outstandingly in whatever assignment they undertook. Amongst them was the grandson of a famous British Prime Minister. A happy crowd they were too, hiding their hard work learning Arabic behind a façade of riotous partying, quoting Shakespeare when drunk at picnics in the mountains. Together we investigated some of the most enchanting Arab and crusader castles and ruins of dream houses near streams in blossoming orchards. At weekends we stayed for primitive skiing at the Cedars Lodge in the high Lebanon mountains and purely for the record went swimming in the Med at the end of the same day. My brand new coffee-and-cream-coloured Citroen with pneumatic suspension performed sterling transport services. (Even second hand, two years later, it looked still good enough to be bought by the “Black Prince”, a cousin of King Idris of Libya). The students themselves were much in demand for English- and French-speaking evening parties in the city of Beirut, which proudly upheld its reputation as the “Paris of the Orient”. We actually saw a Saudi Rolls Royce with gold fenders in the streets. Although everyone was fully aware of the well-established armed feuds between Druze, Maronite Christians and Sunnis, nobody had the least inkling that these could lead to the total collapse of the city and of the Lebanon as we then knew and rather admired it. Whenever, infrequently, a car with Druze youngsters raced through our own Christian mountain village, firing their guns into the air, we would merely say: “Oh well, they will never learn how to fight a proper war” and return to our irregular verbs.

Among the students there was, however, a small but influential contingent of men my age or older, diplomats destined to be posted in the Middle East, military men, business executives like myself and Neville Green of the British Bank of the Middle East, and some who perhaps partly justified the Arab nickname for MECAS “the spy school”. A future British ambassador to Saudi Arabia and his glamorous wife became good friends of ours and our children were taught by her sister in the same English kindergarten. He exerted a natural moderating influence on the students and was acknowledged as their unofficial spokesman. But one other man really stood out. By far the most proficient in Arabic studies, perhaps because of his Egyptian ancestry, and universally liked by all who met him: George Blake. Great was our consternation when he was arrested and unmasked as a spy for the hated Soviets. His young wife, living near us with two children, was clearly devastated. His young student friends even concocted, and naively signed, a petition to the Foreign Office to protest his innocence. So unimaginable was his double life to most of us. Yet he had never hidden his distaste for the crass commercialism of firms like mine, for the pomp and circumstance and injustice of public life and the Royal Family. But I thought that it was just this freedom and ability to discuss any contrary opinions, which were shared by many of the younger set, that was one of the outstanding features of MECAS.

Thirty years later, after the fall of the Berlin wall, with Gorbachov still in power, on a visit to the Dutch embassy in Moscow, shock and horror were still the only reaction to the mere mention of his name. I met him for lunch at the most decadently expensive restaurant in Moscow, opposite the infamous Lubianka prison. George, now a charming semi-retired general of the KGB, glanced wistfully out of the window and remarked that in the good old days Soviet citizens did not even dare to walk on the pavement next to it, for fear of being dragged inside never to be seen again. Now, inevitably, things had changed with Dzerzhinsky’s statue having been torn down, together with all the other Stalin cult icons. He firmly believed, however, that Communism, in spite of having been let down by Russian human error, still had a great future. He looked back on his Shemlan days as a very happy interval and his current private life, together with that of old friends like Philby (sadly alcoholic) seemed flat in comparison. They had been severely restricted, for instance he had only been allowed to holiday in East Germany, while what he really yearned for was to be allowed to visit his aged mother in Holland. I left with the advice that he should not even apply for a visa.

The very first day at the first introductory lesson, the Director of the school, Donald Maitland, led us through the scribbles of the whole Arabic alphabet, with a senior Palestinian teacher at his side to pronounce correctly all the impossibly sounding vowels and guttural consonants.(Tape recorders were not yet in use for this purpose.) The following day we would have to be ready to work with these in writing and pronunciation, he proclaimed. A famous dictum of his was: “There is no such thing as a smattering of Arabic. You either learn it properly or you don’t”. Now, with hindsight, I would like to comment on that. After finishing the nine months course “with distinction” I confess that I was distressed at not being able to speak fluent Arabic at all. Yes, I could more or less understand the radio news and read the papers, but truly colloquial conversation with our Lebanese neighbours continued to frustrate me.

To my simple mind there are three kinds of Arabic existing side by side: first, the classical language of the Koran, used by the prophet Mohammed. I later employed several bright Europeans who had studied it at famous universities for five long years, but who could not make themselves understood at all by the ordinary Gulf Arab. Secondly, at the other end of the scale are the many local Arabic dialects spoken by the semi-literate population (and by my wife in the market), which differ very widely from Morocco to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Local intellectuals use it somewhat condescendingly, with apologies to the foreigner. And finally, there is Donald Maitland’s Arabic, the semi-classical universal language of the educated and half-educated, of press and TV, throughout the Arab world. I fully agree with the decision of MECAS (the most practical Arab language institute in the world of the day) to concentrate solely on that last category and on the spoken Palestinian as a useful by-product. But why did I, who speak four European languages with some ease (not including my own) not achieve immediate fluency in that kind of Arabic? Learning a language after infancy is mostly hard work, committing thousands of words and verbs to the brain by repetition. Apart from the intrinsic difficulty of the totally foreign structure of Arabic, the answer to our lack of fluency must be found in our lack of daily contact with real people who had to use it continuously, journalists, politicians, or women. Learning grammar and boring vocabulary can only bring you so far; to a take-off point, any further progress is up to the individual’s imagination, needs and experiences, from pillow talk to business deals. Ask the people who improved their Arabic afterwards. As for the Palestinian and English teaching staff, they were exemplary, performance-oriented in school and sociable outside the office and in the village of Shemlan. They created a sense of belonging to an informal association and that was a major benefit. In East Africa I had already experienced how effective the network of British Colonial administrators could be, but the Foreign Office network of Arabists, based on common study in Shemlan, was to be of far wider importance for me during later work in the region.

Soon after finishing MECAS, the first Arab Petroleum Congress was held in Cairo, which I attended together with a bevy of Shell International executives. The other Western delegates were Americans from Aramco, whose Arabic language school was nearly as good as MECAS. The Cold War was being fought in the Developing World and all our attitudes were infused by it. It is hard now to recall the atmosphere of fear, distrust and loathing which poisoned the official relationship between the West and the Arab world, symbolically led by President Nasser, with his many links to the Communist bloc. We literally sat with our heads down in the large conference hall under a barrage of vehement criticism and calls for socialism and the nationalisation of everything ever built by the West. During an interval I joined Sheikh Yamani, the Saudi Minister of Oil and one of the conference’s most passionate and flowery speakers, who had gone outside for a smoke and a calm look over the balustrade at the River Nile. I had really enjoyed his outrageous intervention, if only because I was happily surprised to understand every word of it. “How come” I asked him “that I can easily follow everything you say, while I have some difficulty with others?” Yamani was anything but modest. “Son,” he said, “It is because I speak straight from the heart”. Indeed, the official rhetoric was an obligatory flourish to create an atmosphere, but personal or business relations were conducted on a quite different wave length. Shell had of course been nationalised with great fanfare in 1956, but when I visited the old office I was embraced like close family. Nasser had picked the well-trained Egyptian ex-Shell executives to run the Suez Canal and other nationalised enterprises and they were all present at a lunch in honour of their former colleagues. At the time we thought we had been dealt an irreversible political blow, but within twenty years Nasser’s successors would invite us back in.

Cyrenaica, Libya was the first appointment to test the value of my MECAS education. It was a typical small commercial outfit with one expatriate assisted by the usual assortment of English-speaking locals and compliant Palestinians, with a Christian Syrian to keep at least the accounts straight. To avoid fruitless debate with the Palestinian staff, I had to declare Israel’s right to exist as a non-subject for conversation. They had heard my opinion and I had heard theirs and we had agreed to differ. Our local employees had forever been in cahoots with our independent dealers helping them to keep their debts unchallenged at stratospheric levels at the company’s expense, but even my smattering of Arabic was enough to be able to deal directly with the offenders and halve the outstanding debts. For dealings at the highest government and army levels, I was ably seconded by an ex-national football team captain, brother of the Petroleum Minister, who became a real friend and was well worth the salary, even if he worked only sporadically. One of his party tricks was to deliver authentic passages in loud, fluent Italian from a speech Mussolini had once given from a balcony in Benghazi during the colonial era. His brother was also the Fiat agent in the country. Their family name Ben Catu was proof, they said, of their claim to be descended from Cato, the Roman senator. One night, at a company cocktail for an important London visitor, a little Libyan clerk stood up and gave an impromptu imitation of my Arabic. Everyone was rolling with laughter, only I thought he was speaking it rather well..

On to more serious developments in the Persian (Arab) Gulf. With the discovery of oil in Qatar and exports by a Shell production company in the early sixties, Doha, Qatar was also the natural base for commercial trading activities throughout the Middle East. These had been invented and very successfully guided by MECAS graduates right from the start in 1957. From the many who contributed to this rapid development, many went on to significant achievements elsewhere, such as Ian Skeet, author on the history of Oman and on OPEC, and Peter Holmes, late Chairman of Shell International. When I took over the pioneering Shell commercial activities, Qatar as an oil exporter and Shell with it, were overshadowed in importance by neighbouring Saudi Arabia, which was Aramco territory, by Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, largely BP provinces, and on the other side of the Gulf by the great oil consortium of Iran.

As a ruler of one of the Trucial States, Sheikh Ahmed bin Thani of Qatar had his official contacts with the British Representative and depended for his security on a cranky British chief of police, but was astonishingly difficult to come to an understanding with as an ordinary foreigner. I hung around in his majlis, whispered occasionally in his ear, my wife visited his wives and discussed fashion with them, I saw him on ceremonial occasions and meals, but I felt him to be exclusively interested in tribal affairs, money, sex and absolute power. Our organisation reflected this virtual separation of our two worlds. We had very few Qatari employees. One of whom was my driver, who doubled as a labour consultant. There was no local work ethic. The real work therefore had to be done by Indians, Palestinians and immigrants of all stripes, including expatriates, who lived in separate cocoons. The sheikh’s tribal policy was really populism, distributing largesse from the oil revenues in return for personal loyalty. We reciprocated by bringing him large golden presents on ceremonial occasions. But our profitable company, which was weaving an interesting economic relations infrastructure throughout the Gulf, building fuelling depots at harbours and airports and transporting the products by tankers, thus reducing prices to the Trucial States’ population, was merely tolerated as an oddity.

The situation was by no means an exception. In Riyadh, our independent and well-connected Saudi dealer, who supplied a large part of the lubricant requirements of the whole Kingdom, only received us in his grandiose office for a friendly chat, interrupted by prayer, while we transacted the actual business with his Palestinian assistant. Our Kuwaiti dealer was an expensive, latest model, office chair behind a massive empty desk. In the next office sat the affable Palestinian who did the business.

Air connections between the states was by the turbojets of Gulf Air. Once, before a flight to from Qatar to Tehran, where we had a small lubricating oil refinery, I found myself in the company of a local sheikh with his wives and full retinue, including several “slaves” holding hooded hunting falcons on their gloved fists. After takeoff some other retainers politely ordered the poor stewardess to stay in her seat, while they began to brew tea over the open fire of kerosene burners in the gangway in the middle of the plane. Then they insisted on serving each passenger themselves, with broad smiles, in a display of true desert Arab hospitality. The pilot did not dare to interfere, perhaps mindful of a similar earlier occasion in which a colleague of his had been shot in the leg.

Nearly all the Trucial sheikhdoms were governed by their hereditary rulers in the style of Ahmed bin Thani, but the most conservative of all was undoubtedly Shahbut bin Sultan of oil-rich Abu Dhabi, advised and, one suspects, strengthened in his prejudices by the legendary Political Agent Hugh Boustead. Travelling by Landrover over the salt encrusted hard sand of the sheikhdom with our local representative, we admired his old palace, but usually gave it a wide berth because in spite of its riches, there was little development. In fact, Dubai, without oil as yet, but with a traditional trading and gold smuggling role in the Gulf under the powerful free-market leadership of Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed al Makhtum, became the hub of our activities. Our tough, young, but non-Arabic speaking, English sales manager still lived in the old town with “air conditioning” provided by the traditional wind tower, a few of which are now carefully preserved as ancient monuments amidst the skyscrapers.

Because our participation in the tremendous potential of Dubai depended on personal relations with Sheikh Rashid, we promoted one of the few high-flying Palestinians to be our permanent representative. At first, it worked amazingly well; our depot at the Creek, supplied by purpose-built shallow-draught tankers, soon had to be expanded. But then our man, Tufiq, overreached himself, by threatening to rival Sheikh Rashid’s old principal advisor Mahdi Al Tajer’s predominance at court. He lost that battle and I had to relocate him hurriedly from Dubai to Sharjah. Tufiq remains an interesting phenomenon however. When, despite his excellent performance, eventually our organisation could not accommodate his aspirations, he left to become principal advisor to Sheikh Saqr of Ras Al Khaima, one of the poorest Trucial States. Besides rapidly developing that state, by capitalising on its potential as a port at the entrance of the Gulf (in the image of Dubai), he made his own private fortune - apart from taking the usual percentage on construction contracts- by issuing postal stamps of Ras Al Khaima and other Trucial States which have considerable rarity value in the philatelist trade. The last time I met him in London, he had, with partners, just bought the Dorchester Hotel.

Nowhere did modernisation encounter more obstacles than in Muscat and Oman. Once, when travelling by landrover in its dusty interior, I received the greatest compliment for an Arabist, from a man who was repairing a deep well. “Who the hell are you talking to?” shouted his mate, who was working ten metres below the surface. “never you mind” was the answer, “just another Arab up here”. Our company used to supply old Mina al Fahal by tipping fuel drums into the sea as close to shore as our dhows dared to get. They had then to be captured by swimming labourers with ropes and dragged onto the beach. But inland, in spite of non-existent infrastructure and poor security, Shell was developing serious oil production for export. It already used a spectacular mountain-locked airstrip at Azeiba. New harbour and bunker facilities were urgently needed in the immediate future, but everything waited for the personal approval of the Sultan Said Bin Tamur, who almost never left the isolation of his palace in Salalah, some 500 miles to the South West on the coast and who was permanently preoccupied by internal rebellions, aided by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, whom he could only defeat with British aid. Ruling his vast country exclusively by telephone, he spoke infrequently to only three people in Muscat: the British Political Agent, my colleague in charge of the oil production and a local trader, also our commercial agent, Omar Khimji Ramdas. On visits I slept in Omar’s historical stronghold on the beach, which nowadays seems backed away into a corner by new developments and elevated road systems. From 3 hours after sunset, after the firing of a canon, pedestrians still had to carry the old hurricane lamp when walking about in the night. One day Omar informed me that the Sultan had invited me to Salalah to hear of our plans for the coastal depot. Flying from Azzeiba over the storm-lashed desolate coast, we landed on the Salalah strip. The palace was low, mud coloured and unassuming. The Sultan himself, who seemed almost shy, insisted on showing us around. Noticing my interest in a parrot in a large cage, he warned me that the bird, in spite of its beautiful appearance, could be very vicious. “I will show you” and he called a servant: “Ahmed put your finger in that cage.” Ahmed did and was savagely bitten without twitching a muscle in his black face.

Unfortunately I remember little beyond the lunch, my humble presentation of our project and the Sultan’s benevolent acceptance of it. But ever since I have been reflecting on the quiet success of British military and diplomatic assistance (before and after 1970), which helped protect such vulnerable traditional rulers and their ancient governing structures throughout the area against too rapid a pace of change and against all rapacious outsiders, until the vast revenues of oil kicked in and a quick change of ruler here and there could safely herald the peaceful transition to a more modern era. And even that era now looks outmoded and headed for further basic changes. If anyone had told me at the time that the Arab world could become even more complicated after the fall of Communism, I would have laughed in disbelief.