Mad Sultans
There are some good things about the desert. For one, in the desert ‘you can remember your name, ‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.’ Well, it’s true if you’re in a early-seventies soft rock band and you’re singing about the Mojave.
The desert has also been the subject of good TV over the last few weeks as well. BBC2 has been dramatising the madhouse that was Saddam Hussein’s blood-soaked court in The House of Saddam. Then, last week they repeated The Man Who Walked Across the World, a documentary presented by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who follows the path of the medieval Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta. I must admit to pitiful ignorance about both subjects.
Saddam was a brutal bugger. The programme sees him sweeping to power in a coup that is followed by the classic ‘purge to consolidate power’ gambit that dictators so often seem to use. The glorious leader’s craziest move is to shoot his ‘best mate’ point blank in the head. With friends like those, who needs enemies? That’s Saddam’s reasoning too, and sure enough friends, enemies and everyone else agree and think very carefully before challenging him. Unfortunately, soon Saddam reckons that his country really does need enemies too. The Iranians then get a taste of Saddam’s lunacy.
Suffice to say, in the following episodes, the lunatic Mr Hussein continues to kill and generally freak out anyone in the vicinity. It’s not just the Iranians, Kuwaitis, Kurds, Marsh Arabs who suffer at the hands of his regime, but wives, friends, and retainers. Like Saddam, Ibn Battuta was an Arab, that most desert-born of peoples, but his life was a completely different filigree-covered kettle of fish. The Man Who Walked The World was presented by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who has a familiarity with Arab culture after having lived in San’a, the capital of Yemen for the last twenty years.
Mackintosh-Smith wanted to show us westerners a more nuanced view of Arab culture than we get from the media generally, and no doubt, from programmes like House of Saddam in particular. “I don’t know a single Muslim who supports suicide bombing” he says, and he also doesn’t know a single westerner who supports the war on Iraq. This is probably true for me too, although supporting mindless carnage is probably something you wouldn’t admit to.
The Saddam film looks at the abuse of power by dictator, not necessarily a Muslim, and all the cowering generals reminded me of Downfall. Mackintosh-Smith’s film showed us the diversity of the Muslim world: Moroccans, Egyptians, Turks, Indians and more. This was something House… slipped up on, at least once. I’m sure I heard Saddam propose a unified land of Arabs including Syria, Iran, Jordan and Iraq. Iranians are Persian not Arabs. That script betrays just the sort of predjudice that Mackintosh-Smith deplores.
Iraq’s colonial past that gave rise to Arab nationalism and Baathism is also ignored in House…and the collusion of the USA and western powers in maintaining Saddam’s reign is only alluded to. But without these factors accounted for, it might be possible to take him for another bloodthirsty eastern potentate. Ibn Battuta did meet a genuine cruel sultan in Delhi and even worked for him. Luckily for the ‘Prince of Travellers’ Tulaq didn’t pull a pistol on him and he managed to leave to continue his encounter with the pageant that was the medieval Muslim world.
Tags: House of Saddam, Saddam Hussein, The Man Who Walked The World, Tim Mackintosh-Smith