Review of: Lawrence, Col. T.E. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. New York: Garden City, 1938.

            T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. “of Arabia,” wrote The Seven Pillars of Wisdom as his memoirs of the Great War of 1914-18. He expounds on the geography, history, culture, politic, religion, lives and aspirations of the Arab peoples he led in World War I in their insurgency against the Ottoman Turk Empire. In writing about his experiences, Lawrence uses perhaps some of the greatest English prose ever written.

            Lawrence outlines the theme of his leadership of the Arab revolt to unify his crisp observations of Arabia and Bedouin people, revealing much about himself as the great events unfold. He created a work that reads like travelogue, philosophy, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, drama, comedy, and tragedy all in one hefty book. One of the first theorist and consummate practitioners of a modern war of national liberation, Lawrence describes the political and military strategy he invented that helped the subjected Arab peoples overthrow their distant imperial rulers. Yet in the end, the Arabs were betrayed by their French and British allies, subjected to different imperial masters, directly and indirectly, at end state which Lawrence tried to prevent at the Paris Peace Conference held in Versailles in 1919..

             The Seven Pillars of Wisdom has great relevance to modern readers. Lawrence named the book after a book he planned to write about his pre-war travels in modern day lands of Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. As an outsider, Lawrence understood the Arab mind, and comprehended their way of life and their attitudes. He used this insight to formulate a strategy of revolutionary warfare that uniquely fitted the nomadic strengths of the Bedouin and exploited the vulnerabilities of the Ottoman Army.

            Lawrence helped create the pan-Arab nationalism that formed the basis of Middle East politics and conflict throughout the rest of the 20^th Century, reinvented by Egypt’s Nasser in the 1950’s as powerful weapon by Arab leaders to leverage political advantage between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The pan-Arab movement and wars of national liberation that Lawrence devised and harnessed has been emulated by regional leaders like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in their drive for the unity of Muslim peoples fighting Western civilization.

            The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a book of high adventure, like reading about climbing the Everest of political conflict. To read Lawrence’s real Middle East experiences, one learns things about the region pertinent to current affairs. It provides insight into the modern 21^st conflict taking over that region of the world from an historical perspective. Citizens and policymakers wanting to understand the roots of the war against Islamist extremism would do well to study Lawrence’s memoir.