Gardner of Arabia

Many Westerners, perhaps understandably, take a dim view of Arabs, given not only the usual terrorist atrocities but also the nightly scenes on TV of mobs of bearded men shaking their fists and howling in perpetual outrage.

But BBC correspondent Frank Gardner has devoted his life to a study of Arab language, history, culture and religion. He studied Arabic at Exeter University, hitchhiked all over North Africa, lived with a poor Egyptian family in Cairo, worked as a banker in Dubai and a TV journalist throughout the Middle East. His reward came on June 5, 2004, in Al-Suwaidi, a poor district south of Riyadh, when he was shot six times by a roving al-Qaeda gang.

"I had spent four years studying Islam for my degree, learning Arabic, reading and translating the Koran and other Islamic texts," he writes. "I had lived happily among Arab families, fasted with Bedu tribespeople in Jordan, taught English to the impoverished family of an Egyptian taxi driver in a verminous Cairo slum. For the past few years I had tried hard to explain the complexities of the Middle East and the thinking behind the al-Qaeda phenomenon to Western and international audiences. And this was my reward? A bunch of bullets in the guts from men who had convinced themselves they were killing in the cause of Islam. It just did not seem right."

Gardner opens "Blood and Sand" with a vivid account of his shooting. Then he moves back to his youth and his first moment of fascination with the Arab world. This came about by accident. On a winter's day in 1977, he was 16 and riding on a London bus with his mother when an elderly man arose to give his seat to a young lady. It was Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the legendary Arabian explorer. It just so happened that Gardner's mother had known him in the 1950s and she promptly accepted his offer for tea. Young Gardner was entranced by the Arab memorabilia that decorated Thesiger's flat and thus the course of his life was fixed.

The highlight of his undergraduate career was a junior year in Cairo.

"I liked the Egyptians immediately," he writes. "They have a tremendous sense of humour, a winning way with words, and an ability to see the funny side of themselves and their situation that is sorely lacking in much of the rest of the Arab world."

He tells the story of sitting in a crowded café in a poor section of Cairo when a hoof suddenly protruded from a hole in the ceiling "and suddenly half the ceiling gave way and a sheep fell through the roof and on to the floor of the café. Amazingly, it was unhurt. It picked itself up, shook its fleece a couple times, nodded as if to say 'beat that' and wandered off into the street. Café conversation paused for about five seconds to take this in, then resumed as if nothing had happened. Cairo."

Degree in hand, Gardner lands a plush job with a British investment bank in Dubai where his knowledge of Arab language and culture stands him in good stead in meetings with local tycoons.

"I loved those meetings," he writes. "We hardly ever did business at them, it was just getting-to-know-you stuff. Business may or may not flow at a later date ... One of the delightful things about doing business in the Gulf is that so much of it is based on personal friendships. It must be one of the last places in the business world where the art of good conversation really counts. If the client likes you and trusts you, he will eventually do business with you."

Still, banking didn't give him enough of a challenge, so with a wife and two daughters in tow he plunged into freelance television work, eventually becoming BBC bureau chief in Cairo. Through his reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq he observes a crucial difference in the two conflicts.

"Iraq in the 2000s differs from Afghanistan in the 1990s as the magnet for jihadis in one vital respect. Iraq is a real battlefield, whereas the thousands of young men who made their way to al-Qaeda's Afghan training camps in the latter half of the 1990s were at little personal risk and so survived. After learning to fire a Kalashnikov and rocket-propelled grenade, listening to rousing and vitriolic anti-Western sermons and making some international personal contacts, they were free to move on, choosing either to put their skills into practice in their own countries' insurgencies or simply to lie low and blend back into the societies to which they had returned. In Iraq, many of the volunteer jihadis have made a one-way journey, convinced they are guaranteed a place in Heaven for blowing themselves up and taking a handful of Iraqi 'collaborators' with them. But those who do return from the insurgency are often changed men, deeply imbued with violence, having witnessed bloodshed of the most gruesome kind. The return of these combat veterans to neighbouring countries like Saudi Arabia deeply worries the authorities there.

"The longer the Iraqi insurgency drags on, the bigger the pool of battle-hardened jihadis who will one day turn their attention to new arenas in which to confront the hated West and its allies ... For both sides, the stakes are impossibly high; this is a war that neither side can afford to lose." 

Then Gardner returns to the scene of his shooting. Up until this point, the narrative has been brisk and sprightly. It slows down over the last hundred pages as he describes his lengthy and painful recuperation. Wheelchair bound, he pens this book and goes back to work at the BBC.