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I'll check it out when I have more time.
Lawrence segues into a description of settled Arabs and nomadic Arabs and Bedouins that I don't feel is too pertinent, so I'll skip ahead to the most important excerpts.
He expands on this for several pages on end, which I don't feel are necessary to reproduce here.
Lawrence segues into a description of settled Arabs and nomadic Arabs and Bedouins that I don't feel is too pertinent, so I'll skip ahead to the most important excerpts.
In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. [...] They know only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.
This people was black and white, not only in vision, but by inmost furnishing: black and white not only in clarity, but in apposition. [...] Sometimes inconsistencies seemed to posses them at once in a joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity. [...]
They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation. Their imaginings were vivid, but not creative. There was so little Arab art in Asia that they could have almost be said to have no art, though their classes were liberal patrons, and had encouraged whatever talents in architecture, or ceramics, or other handicraft their neighbors and helots displayed. Nor did they handle great industries: they had no organizations of mind or body. They invented no systems of philosophy, no complex mythologies. They steered their course between the idols of the tribe and of the cave. The least morbid of peoples, they had accepted the gift of life unquestioningly, as axiomatic. To them it was a thing inevitable, entailed on a man, a usufruct, beyond control. Suicide was a thing impossible, and death no grief.
They were a people of spasms, of upheavlals, of ideas, the race of the individual genius. Their movements were the more shocking by contrast with the quietude of every day, their great men greater by contrast with the humanity of their mob. Their convictions were by instinct, their activities intuitional. Their largest manufacture was of creeds: almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of these efforts had endured among them: two of the three had also borne export (in modified form) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translated into the diverse spirits of Greek and Latin and Teutonic tongues, had conquered Europe and America. Islam in various transformations was subjecting Africa and parts of Asia. These were Semitic successes. Their failures they kept to themselves. The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths.
This people was black and white, not only in vision, but by inmost furnishing: black and white not only in clarity, but in apposition. [...] Sometimes inconsistencies seemed to posses them at once in a joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity. [...]
They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation. Their imaginings were vivid, but not creative. There was so little Arab art in Asia that they could have almost be said to have no art, though their classes were liberal patrons, and had encouraged whatever talents in architecture, or ceramics, or other handicraft their neighbors and helots displayed. Nor did they handle great industries: they had no organizations of mind or body. They invented no systems of philosophy, no complex mythologies. They steered their course between the idols of the tribe and of the cave. The least morbid of peoples, they had accepted the gift of life unquestioningly, as axiomatic. To them it was a thing inevitable, entailed on a man, a usufruct, beyond control. Suicide was a thing impossible, and death no grief.
They were a people of spasms, of upheavlals, of ideas, the race of the individual genius. Their movements were the more shocking by contrast with the quietude of every day, their great men greater by contrast with the humanity of their mob. Their convictions were by instinct, their activities intuitional. Their largest manufacture was of creeds: almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of these efforts had endured among them: two of the three had also borne export (in modified form) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translated into the diverse spirits of Greek and Latin and Teutonic tongues, had conquered Europe and America. Islam in various transformations was subjecting Africa and parts of Asia. These were Semitic successes. Their failures they kept to themselves. The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths.
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