AUDA ABU TAYI, THE BEDOUIN ROBIN HOOD
“By the grace of Allah, I, Auda Abu Tayi, warn you to quit Arabia
before the end of Ramadan. We Arabs want this country to ourselves.
Unless this is done, by the beard of the Prophet, I declare you
proscribed, outlawed, and fair game for any one to kill.”
This was the official and personal declaration of war issued by
Auda Abu Tayi, the Howeitat chieftain, the greatest popular hero
of modern Arabian history, the most celebrated fighting man the
desert has produced in four generations. The proclamation was
addressed to the sultan of Turkey, to Djemal Pasha, the viceroy of
Syria, Palestine, and Arabia, and to the mutesarif of Kerak, who
was the Ottoman governor of the important district on the edge of
the desert near the southern end of the Dead Sea where Auda lived.
The Arabian revolution appealed to the Bedouin Robin Hood, largely
because it furnished him with an ideal excuse to declare personal
war against the Turkish government.
When Auda heard that Shereef Hussein had started a revolt against
the Turks, he and his fearless Howeitat followers jumped into their
saddles, galloped across the desert sands to Feisal’s headquarters,
and swore on the Koran that they would make the shereef’s enemies
their enemies. Then they all sat down to a banquet in honor of the
occasion. Suddenly old Auda uttered a potent Moslem oath and
reminded himself and his friends that he was wearing a set of
Turkish false teeth. Cursing the Turkish dentist who had made them,
he dashed out of the tent and smashed them on a rock. For two
months he was in agony and could eat only milk and boiled rice.
When Lawrence came down from Egypt, Auda’s mouth was giving him so
much trouble that he had to send to Cairo for a British dentist to
make the old brigand a special set of Allied teeth!
His undying loyalty and friendship proved a most valuable asset to
Hussein and the Allies in the Arabian campaign. Besides, he offered
his rich and rare experience in the kind of warfare suitable to
his country. With the exception of Lawrence, he has been the
greatest raider of modern Arabia. During the last seventeen years
he has killed seventy-five men in hand-to-hand combat; all of them
Arabs, for he does not include Turks in his game-book. I do not
think that his claim is far wrong, for he has been wounded
twenty-two times and in his battles has seen all his tribesmen hurt
and most of his relatives killed. His right arm is so stiff that
he can’t scratch himself and has to use a camel-stick. Although
the Howeitat territory is situated inland near the Gulf of Akaba,
Auda has led expeditions six hundred miles south to Mecca, north
as far as Aleppo, and a thousand miles east to Bagdad and Basra.
Occasionally the tables are turned on him. One year while he was
leading an expedition against Ibn Saud, the ruler of Central
Arabia, the Druses came down from Jebel Hauran, in the hills south
of Damascus, and spirited away all his camels. Auda took his loss
calmly and philosophically, but word of his misfortune reached the
ears of his friend, Nuri Shalaan, emir of Jauf, ruler of North
Central Arabia. In accordance with one of the unwritten laws of
the desert, Nuri Shalaan immediately sent Auda half of all his
possessions.
Old Auda prides himself on being the quintessence of Arabian
tradition. A hundred successful raids have taken him from his home
near the Dead Sea to all parts of the Arabian world. His loot he
dispenses in staggering hospitality. He talks long, loud, and
abundantly in a voice like a mountain torrent.
Although Auda has probably captured more loot on his raids than
any other Bedouin chieftain, he is a comparatively poor man as the
result of his lavish hospitality. The profits of a hundred
successful raids have provided entertainment for his friends. One
of his few remaining evidences of transitory wealth is an enormous
copper kettle around which twenty-five people can gather at a meal.
His hospitality is sometimes very inconvenient except to guests in
the last stages of starvation. One day, when he was helping me to
a heaped portion of rice and mutton from the copper kettle, I was
discussing the subject of camels with him and mentioned the fact
that we had none in my country except in the zoos. The old Bedouin
couldn’t understand this and insisted on presenting me with twenty
of his prize dromedaries to take back to America to start a camel
industry. It required all Lawrence’s persuasive eloquence to
convince him that it was impossible for me to accept the regal gift
on account of the difficulty of transporting his camels half-way
around the world.
In May, 1918, the Turks sent a large number of camels down from
Syria. They put them into an impromptu corral at Maan railway
station. Auda heard of this, and at the head of a small party of
twelve of his tribesmen he dashed boldly into Maan. There were
thousands of Turkish soldiers all around, but before they realized
what had occurred Auda had rounded up twenty-five of the camels
and had driven them off at a twenty-five-mile-an-hour gallop. He
was full of such pranks as this and recounted his adventures
afterward with great gusto.
One of the most amazing bits of brigandage in Auda’s long and lurid
career was when he held up his intimate friend and prince. Feisal
was on his way across the desert on an expedition and had four
thousand pounds in gold coin. Unluckily his route lay through
Auda’s country, and somehow the latter got to know about the
treasure. So he insisted that Feisal and retinue remain as his
guests until they had given the old pirate three thousand out of
the four thousand sovereigns. Auda, of course, did not use force;
he merely intimated that he was entitled to the gold!
Auda Abu Tayi is a handsome old chieftain, a pure desert type. He
is tall, straight, and powerful, and, although sixty years of age,
as active and sinewy as a cougar. His lined and haggard face is
pure Bedouin. He has a broad, low forehead, high, sharp, hooked
nose, greenish brown eyes inclined to slant outward, black pointed
beard, and mustache tinged with gray. The name “Auda” means “Father
of Flying,” which recalls the day on which he made his first
aëroplane flight. Instead of showing any fear he urged the pilot,
Captain Furness-Williams, to take him higher and higher.
The old hero is as hard-headed as he is hot-headed. He receives
advice, criticism, or abuse with a smile as constant as it is
charming, but nothing on earth would make him change his mind or
obey an order or follow a course of which he disapproves. He is
modest, simple as a child, honest, kind-hearted and affectionate,
and warmly loved even by those to whom he is most trying—his
friends. His hobby is to concoct fantastic tales about himself and
to relate fictitious but humorously horrible stories concerning
the private life of his host or guests. He takes wild delight in
making his friends uncomfortable. One time he strolled into the
tent of his cousin, Mohammed, and roared out for the benefit of
all present how villainously his kinsman had behaved at El Wejh.
He told how Mohammed had bought a beautiful necklace for one of
his wives. But, alas, Mohammed met a strange woman, a very beautiful
strange woman in El Wejh who was as fascinating as starlight, and,
succumbing to her charms, he presented her with the necklace. It
was a wonderful necklace with gems that sparkled as the stars, with
blues that recalled the seas and reds of desert sunsets. Most
eloquently Auda discoursed on the lady’s charms. On the other side
of the partition the women of Mohammed’s household heard of their
lord and master’s perfidy. Although the tale was mischievously
fabricated, there was a great commotion in the household of
Mohammed, and his life was made unbearable for several weeks.
Auda’s home is on a mud flat eighty miles east of Akaba. During
his association with Lawrence in the Arabian campaign, he picked
up many interesting details of life in Europe. His eyes sparkled
at tales of hotels and cabarets and palaces, and he was suddenly
fired with the determination to abandon his tent for a house as
splendid as any Sidi Lawrence had known in London.
The first problem that confronted him was the question of labor.
This was solved by raiding a Turkish garrison and taking fifty
prisoners, whom he put to work digging wells. After he had finished
that job, he promised them their liberty if they would build him
a beautiful house. They constructed one with forty rooms and four
towers, but on account of the scarcity of timber in the desert, no
one could figure out how to roof such an enormous building. Auda,
keen as a steel trap, immediately worked out a plan. Summoning his
warriors, he started out across the sands to the Pilgrim’s Railway,
over-powered the passing Turkish patrol, and carried off thirty
telegraph-poles, which now form the framework of his desert palace.
Photograph: SAND STORM ROLLING DOWN ON KHARTOUM
Photograph: THE WALDORF-ASTORIA OF ARABIA—INCLUDING 200 ROOMS
WITH ACCOMMODATIONS FOR 1000 GUESTS WITH ALL THE LATEST ARABIAN
CONVENIENCES EXCEPTING BATH, ’PHONE, LIGHT, HEAT, OR SERVICE
Photograph: THE LAST RESTING-PLACE OF THE MOTHER OF US ALL
Even a forty-room palace is none too large for Auda, who has not
been strictly abstemious in his nuptial aspirations. In fact he is
noted throughout Arabia for his reckless polygamy. Every Mohammedan
is permitted to have four wives at one time—if he can support them.
Old Auda has been married twenty-eight times and is ambitious to
raise that record to fifty before he dies. But in spite of his
numerous marriages he has only one son living. All the others have
been killed in raids and feuds. Young Mohammed Abu Tayi was eleven
years old when I saw him, but so undersized that his father could
pick him up by the scruff of the neck and swing him into the saddle
on his camel with one hand. When the caravan was on the march at
night, his father, afraid that Mohammed when asleep would fall off
the camel, often picked him up and stuffed him into one of his own
saddle-bags, where the boy would spend the night. The youngster
fought beside his father and Colonel Lawrence through the whole
Arabian campaign.
Auda’s enthusiasm in making the Turks his enemies to the _n_th
power—pouring into the cause all the hatred he had reserved for
personal feuds—brought many of the tribes to Lawrence’s personal
standard. Lawrence once remarked that Auda was somewhat like Cæsar
in his ability to keep around him a free country of faithful
friends, and around that a great ring of enemies. Even the renowned
Nuri Shalaan, as well as many other powerful chiefs friendly to
Auda, were in constant terror lest they should offend him.
The Howeitat tribe was formerly under the control of Ibn Rashid
and his tribe, which long roamed the North Arabian Desert. Later,
under the leadership of Ibn Jazi, the tribe broke up into discordant
sections. The Abu Tayi subsection is the joint work of Auda, the
fighting man, and Mohammed el Dheilan, the thinker. Ibn Jazi
mistreated a Sherari guest of Auda’s, and the proud and hospitable
chief was infuriated. In the fifteen-year feud that followed,
Annad, Auda’s eldest son and the pride of his heart, was killed.
This feud between the two sections of the Howeitat was one of
Feisal’s greatest difficulties in the operations around Akaba and
Maan. It drove Hamed el Arar, the Ibn Jazi leader of today, into
the arms of the Turks, while Saheiman Abu Tayi and the rest of the
subtribe went to El Wejh to join Lawrence and Feisal. Auda made
peace with his sworn enemies at the request of Feisal, and it was
the hardest thing the old man ever had to do in his life. The death
of Annad killed all his hopes and ambitions for the Abu Tayi and
has made his life seem a bitter failure. But Feisal ruled that his
followers were to have no more blood-feuds and no Arab enemies
except the adherents of Ibn Rashid in North Arabia, who have
carried on perpetual and bitter warfare with all the other tribes
of the desert. Feisal’s success in burying the innumerable hatchets
of the Hedjaz is pregnant with promise. In all Arab minds a shereef
now stands above tribes, men, sheiks and tribal jealousies. A
shereef now exercises the prestige of peacemaker and independent
authority.