"The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the
ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from
matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the
atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert
pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of
rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out
over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period
which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a
desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have
been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the
precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like
dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine,
this violet, this rose'."
"But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets
of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the
effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That
slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and
had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its
first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it
seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told
me, 'is the best: it has no taste.' My Arabs were turning their backs
on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had
no share or part."
SOURCE: "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" - "INTRODUCTION: Foundations of Revolt - Chapter III" (T. E. Lawrence - "Lawrence of Arabia")
Of all the western minds that have attempted an understanding of the Arab ethos, none has been more astute than Thomas Edward Lawrence. It can be argued that "Severn Pillars of Wisom" is the definitive treatise by a westerner of the Arab history, definition and predicament.
"Come and smell the very sweetest scent of
all..." (T. E. Lawrence - "Lawrence of Arabia")