devastating social and career handicap… So he was an involuntary outsider,” Wilson says.
“Would [these western volunteers] fight in the Middle East if they were content at home? I don’t think the temptation would be very strong....”
In Lawrence’s case, there was also the anti-French angle at the height of World War I. Ironically, according to French intelligence sources, there are some 220 men from France who have gone to Syria – 40 converts to Islam – not to protect French colonialism this time, but to fight the regime in Damascus.
Guidere, who has interviewed fighters from foreign conflicts across French-speaking Europe, says these men have played into traditional French revolutionary aspirations.
“In France, there is a certain revolutionary mindset,” he explains. “Since the French Revolution, the French have waged a lot of revolutions, and each generation aims to wage its own. The problem is there is no ideology or possibility to do this now, even though in the media and the education system the myth of the revolution is still going strong – the idea of radically changing the world through armed revolt. During the 1970s, because it wasn’t possible to revolt in France, aspiring French ‘revolutionaries’ went to South America, inspired by legendary figures such as Che Guevara or Fidel Castro.”
Today, such motivated elements might be trekking to insurrectionary hotspots in the Muslim world. And if Guevara and Castro inspired the generation before them, Guidere says today’s western volunteers find an answer to their aspirations in political Islam and the fight for it.
“You have to add to this the fact that young French people and Europeans in general are opposed to the system as a whole right now,” he says. “They want to radically change the [global] system because they are not happy with it...”
Guidere says some young men may also be motivated by humanitarian reasons, or a desire to “save” the Syrian people, as he puts it, but those concerns do not find an avenue within current crises.
“The Free Syrian Army rejects them because they don’t want trouble with European governments. The secular groups don’t accept them, either. The only groups that welcome them and train them to wage battle are the Salafi ‘jihadi’ groups. But they require them to convert.”
For Brian McQuinn, a researcher from the University of Oxford who conducted field research in Misrata, Libya, during the 2011 revolution, it’s important to distinguish events in Syria from those in Libya.
“There were very few men who fought in Libya that did not have a family connection to the country… Syria might be a different matter,” he says. “Of the individuals who were living in Europe or the UK before the revolution began, the vast majority had family in Libya.”
McQuinn points out that motivations were varied and personal, but the family component was a common one. “Most of them had family members who had suffered at the hands of the Gaddafi government and believed that the revolution was just,” he says.
McQuinn is wary of labelling any armed battle waged by men who happen to be Muslims as a “jihad” - doing so, he says, verges on “Orientalism”. ”Technically, a jihad can only be called by the imams and Muslim scholars of the country involved, and as such it is limited only to that country.”
Many young western men fighting in Libya, Syria or elsewhere are equipped with video cameras and are savvy social media users, so their exploits are broadcast widely. Some have achieved instant stardom as a result of their escapades abroad. Do they risk facing accusations of being fame-seekers?
Wilson points out that during World War I, Lawrence’s activities “were virtually unknown outside a very small circle of British officers”. ”He planned to write a book about the campaigns, if he survived, but he had always wanted to be a writer, and he rightly saw the Arab revolt as a magnificent subject,” he says.
American Matthew VanDyke, 34, describes himself as a revolutionary activist and combat veteran of the Libyan Revolution. He’s also a documentary film-maker and media commentator who joined the rebels in Libya in March 2011 before moving to Syria a year later. In Syria he began to “help the revolution, filming, advising rebels, and some other projects that I haven’t talked about publicly”, he says.
“I was motivated by a combination of personal reasons – I had good Libyan friends there whom I had known for years who needed help – and ideological reasons. I travelled the region for years by motorcycle and saw the effects of authoritarianism on the region and its people,” he says, adding he is Christian and has never converted, although some rebels suggested he do so.
Meanwhile, several new books on the legacy of Lawrence have recently hit the market and the renewed interest is partly due to the cataclysmic events in the Middle East today, making it fair to ask whether the ‘Arab world’ for which Lawrence fought has reached its shelf-life and is coming undone.
Wilson says there is more to this than commemoration of the centenary of World War I – and the drawing up of the borders of the modern Middle East.
“Lawrence took a long-term view of history. He never believed that the specific political solutions set up in the new states in the Arab world would last. He expected the states to try different forms of government until eventually they found something that worked for them,” he says, adding the frontiers drawn up on the ground – on the basis of the Sykes-Picot map – weren’t those recommended by Lawrence.
“Lawrence could not have foreseen the two factors that have dominated Middle East politics since the 1930s – the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula and the State of Israel,” Wilson says.
Perhaps this is the most appropriate lesson that western fighters can draw from the experience of the original ‘saviour of the Arabs’: be careful what you fight for – the end result might not be what you had in mind.
Excerpted from: ‘The white ‘saviours’ of the Arabs’.
Courtesy: Aljazeera.com