Seven Pillars of Wisdom

by T.E. Lawrence

I can’t remember how this book made it on my list. Yet I am quite sure another author somewhere on my list of read books made referenced to it. I would suspect by the title this book gained its reference in some material on philosophy or social study. In the back of my mind, as I began reading I did have a look out for the seven pillars of wisdom. Being of an English author I anticipated them to jump out with pomp and circumstance.

Yet the book was largely a journal of two years of a mans life in Arabia, Sir Lawrence’s Arabia. A landmass including what we now know as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen. The time setting is The Great War 1917-1918 where Britain and allies work to weaken the Ottoman Empire, a German ally for the larger purpose of winning the western front. The ultimate goal for T.E. Lawrence was the Arab capture of Damascus. This goal is slightly conflicted with the governments of Great Britain, France, and Egypt; who held no confidence that the Arab tribes could form a nation. Nearly one hundred years later in a much more sophisticated and changed international world the moral high ground of nation building T.E. Lawrence envisioned has yet to pan out; not only in Arabia but in Afghanistan and for that matter Eastern Europe, Russia, China

As I examine my notes and draw contrast to my first reaction. I found absolute value in this exercise: not only gaining a sense of Arabian militaristic and historical adventure against a descriptive backdrop to pale a National Geographic photojournalist: but I was able to discover Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Most importantly I was able to discover that my Seven Pillars, gleaned from the book; which may be expressed differently from others; may give the illusion of disagreement within my peers, our social, and then world community. SO, let it go.

I am sure the beauty of any desert would not immediately overtake your psyche and dislocate spiritual anchor, T.E. Lawrence in this setting drills deep enough into the fabric of the land and the people to open your heart to all walks of life; and accept them as different; yet allow them their space on earth and in spirit to coexist separately and peacefully on this one planet Earth. I am reminded of my Manhattan experience where the world works together but largely lives, albeit in graduations, in neighborhoods of common social-religious background.


As the book drew to a close I was reminded of a French author’s phrase that is apropos here. While Hugo cautions those with dreams to be ware of those with other dreams; Lawrence writes early on “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they act their dream with open eyes to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a nation, to restore lost influence, to give twenty million Semites the foundation to build an inspired dream-place of their national thoughts.” Hugo writes “Like a fly, flying to the light of the window to be caught in a spider’s web.” So often just when a character believed to be claiming success, something snatched him up to change his view. “Meddle not with fatality; be mindful of the spider web between fate and thee. Lawrence may have had success, but did he find peace?

In summary, this review like others I have written includes a voluminous amount of quotation for a book review. Yet to summarize such poetic description of an experience would shame the efforts of TE Lawrence. I am sharing the quotes that helped me shape only a poetic interpretation of what may be deemed Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Listing them out would be contradictory.




Seven Pillars of Wisdom – Abstract Sketch

While the book suggests Oxford, TE Lawrence is well read yet he is humble in applying his book knowledge to his fieldwork. Lawrence finds himself as a free agent of the British government acting as military advisor of the Arabs revolt against the Turks and coordinator of the British and French Armies. Lawrence was conflicted in his feelings about his assignment and the Arab response as he struggled with the Arabs propensity to believe in persons not institutions. “They saw me as a free agent of the British Government, and demanded from me an endorsement of written promises. So I had to join the conspiracy, and, for what my word was worth, assured the men of their reward. Over the two years of partnership under fire they grew accustomed to believing me to think my government and me were sincere. In this hope they performed some fine things, but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was continually and bitterly ashamed.”

As time brought on success Lawrence continued to wrestle with his feelings on the outcomes and the overarching goal. “ I began at last to think consecutively of the Arab Revolt….it should have been thought out long before action, and we had done what seemed be instinct, not probing in text for the why and what… formulating what we really wanted in the end. I looked for the equitation between my book reading and my movements…plucking at the tangle of our present."

“I was unfortunately in command as much as I pleased, and was untrained. In military theory I was tolerably read….In any case, my interest has been abstract, concerned with theory and philosophy of warfare especially from a metaphysical side.”


The international strategy of which Lawrence was aware of fueled Lawrence’s internal strife. In the course of military strategic debate Lawrence held a position that “the Arab Movement would not justify its creation if the enthusiasm of it did not carry the Arabs into Damascus.” This was unpopular to the French because “the Sykes- Picot Treaty of 1916 between France and England had been drawn by Sykes for the very eventuality; and to reward it; stipulated the establishment of independent Arab States in Damascus, Aleppo, and Mosul, districts which would otherwise fall into control of France. Neither Sykes or Picot believed the thing really possible: but Lawrence knew that it was, and believed that “after it the vigour of the Arab Movement would prevent the creation –by us or others-in Western Asia of unduly colonial schemes of exploitation”

The Arab strategy was less thought out yet equally pragmatic. The Arab participation…”Of religious fanaticism there was little trace. The Sherif refused in round terms to give religious twist to his rebellion. His fight creed was nationality. The tribes knew the Turks were Moslems, and thought the Germans were probably true friends of Islam. They knew the British were Christians and the British were their allies. In the circumstances, their religion would not have been of much help to them and they had to put it aside.

In the transition of international paradigms, the Arabs also began to believe in themselves with every successful demolition of train and track and every city taken from the Turks. In the advance in With in dialogue with Abd el Kerim where Kerim claims “we are no longer Arabs but a people”. He was half proud too, for the advance on Wijh was their biggest effort….Kerim was glad that his tribe had shown this new spirit of service, but also sorry; for to him the joys of life were a fast camel, the best weapons, and a short raid against his neighbor’s herd: and the gradual achievement of Feisal’s ambition was making such joys less and less easy for the responsible.

In dialogue with Feisal, the Arab national leader, after the capture of Wijh: “The Arabs had passed from doubt to violent optimism, and were promising exemplary service. Feisal enrolled most of the Billi. And The Moahib to..My vision of course was till purblind. I had not seen that the preaching was victory and fighting a delusion. For the moment I roped them together, and, as Feisal fortunately liked changing men’s minds rather than breaking railways, the preaching went much better.

In the afternoon, ibn Zaal arrived, with then other of Auda’s chief followers. He kissed Feisal’s hand once and then once for himself, and sitting back declared that he came from Auda to present his salutations and to ask for orders. Feisal, with policy, controlled his outward joy, and introduced him gravely to his blood enemies, the Jazi Hewitt….

During two years Feisal labored daily, putting together and arranging in their natural order the innumerable tint pieces, which made up Arabian society, and combining them into one design of war against the Turks. There was no blood feud left in any of the districts of which he past…”

On religion Lawrence shares a reflective conversation, which may prove useful in gaining an understanding on religious conflicts today. In describing his companion Abdullah, Lawrence digress a bit on religion. “He heard me and leaned forward, peering with rheumy eyes at this white thing splashing in the hollow beyond the veil of sun mist. After a long stare he seemed content, and closed his eyes, groaning, “The love is from God; and of God; and towards God.”

His low-spoken words were caught by some trick distinctly in my water pool. They stopped me suddenly. I had believed Semites unable to use love as a link between themselves and God…Christianity seemed to me to be the first creed to proclaim love in this upper world, from which the desert and the Semite had shut it out: and Christianity was hybrid, except in its first root not essentially Semitic.

Its birth in Galilee had saved it from being just one more of the innumerable revelations of the Semite. Galilee was Syria’s non-Semitic province, contact with which was almost uncleanness for the perfect Jew. Like Whitechapel in London, it lay alien to Jerusalem. Christ by choice passed his ministry in its intellectual freedom; not among the mud-huts of a Syrian village, but in the polished streets among for a and pillared houses and rocco baths, products intense if very exotic provincial and corrupt Greek civilization.

Gadarene poets, stuttering their versus in prevailing excitement, held a mirror to the sensuality and disillusioned fatalism, passing into disordered lust, of their age and place, from whose earthiness the ascetic Semite religiously perhaps caught the tang of humanity and real love that made the distinction of Christ’s music and fitted it to sweep across the hearts of Europe in a fashion which Judaism and Islam could not achieve.

And then Christianity had had the fortune of later architects of genius; and in passage through time and clime had suffered sea-changes incomparably greater than the unchanging Jewry, from the abstraction of Alexandrian bookishness into Latin prose, for the mainland Europe: and last and most terrible passing of all, when it became Teuton, with a formal synthesis to suit our chilly disputations north. So remote was the Presbyterian creed from Orthodox faith of its first or second embodiment that, before the war, we were able to send missionaries to persuade these softer Oriental Christians to our presentation of a logical God.

Islam too, had inevitably changed from continent to continent. It avoided metaphysics, except in the introspective mysticism of Iranian devotees: but in Africa, it had take color of fetishism. An Arabia it had kept a Semitic character…expressing the monotheism of open spaces, the pass-through-infinity of pantheism and its everyday usefulness of an all pervading, household of God. Later Lawrence describes how Islam manifests itself in the Arab participation of the Arab revolt of 1917 Servitude, like other conduct, was profoundly modified to Eastern minds by their obsession with the antithesis between flesh and spirit. These lads took pleasure in subordination; in degrading the body so as to throw greater relief their freedom in equality of mind almost the preferred servitude as richer in experience than authority, and less binding in daily care.

Just prior to Lawrence leading his camel riding Arab force into Damascus he shares thoughts worth repetition here for this review. “Upon this text my mind went weaving across its dusty space amid the sunbeam thoughts and their dancing motes of idea. Then I saw that this preferring the Unknown to the God was a scapegoat idea, which lulled only to a false peace. To endure by order or because it was duty – that was easy… To invent a message, and then with open eye to perish for its self-made image – that was greater.

Yet in reality we had borne the vicarious for our own sakes, or at least because it was pointed for our benefit: and could escape from this knowledge only by a make-belief in sense as well as motive.

The self-immolated victim took for his own rare gift of sacrifice, and no pride and few pleasures in the world were so joyful, so rich as this choosing voluntarily another’s evil to the perfect of self. To each opportunity there could only be one vicar, and the snatching of it robbed the fellows of their due hurt. Their vicar rejoiced while their brethren were wounded in their manhood. To accept so humbly so rich a release was imperfection in them accessory, part guilty of inflecting it upon their mediator. His purer part, for the mediator, might have been to stand among the crowd, to watch another win the cleanness of a redeemer’s name. By the one road lay self-perfection, by the other immolation, and the making of a perfect neighbor. Hauptman told us to take as generously as we gave; but rather we seemed like cells of a bee-comb, of which one might change, or swell itself, only at the cost of all.

Yet I cannot put down my acquiescence in the Arab fraud to weakness of character or native hypocrisy; though of course I must have had some tendency, some aptitude, for deceit, or I would not have deceived me so well…”