St. John Philby

St. John Philby in Riyadh

Harry St. John Bridger Philby (born April 3, 1885 in Badulla , British Ceylon , today Sri Lanka ; died September 30, 1960 in Beirut , Lebanon ), also known as Jack Philby or Sheikh Abdullah (الشيخ عبدالله) a British Arabist , writer and spy . In 1930 he converted to Islam and later became an advisor to King Ibn Saud .

He was married twice, from his first marriage to his son Kim Philby . As an ornithologist , he gave his name to Philby's stone hen .

Early years

The son of a tea grower, he received his education at Westminster School in London and at Trinity College in Cambridge . Here he studied oriental languages with Edward Granville Browne and was a fellow student of Jawaharlal Nehru , who later became the first prime minister of independent India . In 1908 he was transferred to Lahore in Punjab , where he became fluent in Urdu , Punjabi , Baluchi , Persian and finally Arabic . In 1910 he married Dora Johnston, with his great cousin Bernard Montgomery as best man. In addition to their son Kim, who gained international fame as a double agent for the Soviet Union , they had three daughters.

In the Arab revolt

At the end of 1915 he was recruited as a financial officer in Baghdad by administrative officer Percy Cox . The task was the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire to organize and British control over the oil fields of Basra , of which the Royal Navy to ensure depended. Philby, like Lawrence of Arabia later, was introduced to the world of intelligence by Gertrude Bell .

In November 1917, Philby was sent to the interior of the Arabian Peninsula as head of a mission to Ibn Saud , who was bitterly hostile to Hussein ibn Ali , the leader of the Hashimites and Grand Sherif of Mecca , as both claimed to be king of Arabia . After Philby had secretly crossed the peninsula from Riyadh to Jeddah , he received a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society in 1920 . In 1917 he had been appointed Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire .

Towards the end of the First World War , he felt that the promise made by Great Britain and France to form a self-determined, united Arab nation was broken in the Sykes-Picot Agreement . After the Iraqi uprising of 1920, Philby was appointed Minister of Homeland Security in the Mesopotamia mandate .

In November 1921, Philby became chief secretary of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine . He worked with TE Lawrence and met his American counterpart Allen Dulles . At the end of 1922 he traveled to London, where he discussed the question of Palestine at numerous meetings with Winston Churchill , George V , Edward VIII , Walter Rothschild , Wickham Steed , Richard Meinertzhagen and Chaim Weizmann , among others .

Adviser to Ibn Saud and explorer

Eve's grave in Jeddah, photograph from Philby's book The Heart of Arabia , 1922.

Philby believed that both British and Saudi family interests would be best served if the Arabian Peninsula stretched from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf and was administered under a single government. The Saud dynasty was supposed to replace the Hashimites as guardians of the holy places and at the same time protect shipping traffic from the Suez Canal via Aden to Bombay .

In 1927 Philby, who had meanwhile become Ibn Saud's gray eminence , initiated the Treaty of Jeddah , a non-aggression pact between Great Britain and the Saudis, which was signed on the British side by Gilbert Clayton . He converted to Islam in 1930 and became a famous writer and explorer in the years that followed. In the car and on the back of a camel, he traveled along the border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen . While searching for the lost city of Iram , he was the first European to discover the Wabar crater in the middle of the Rub al-Chali desert in 1932. At the same time, he became the representative of the Saudi royal family in the negotiations in the search for potential oil deposits, which were discovered and extracted from 1937. He supported the American companies Standard Oil of California and Texas Oil , which led to the establishment of Aramco .

Political ambitions

Philby was known as an anti-Zionist , but set out a plan to reach a compromise with representatives of Zionism , which was published in The New York Times in October 1929 . This amounted to a recognition of the Balfour Declaration , whereby further Jewish immigration to Palestine would be permitted, but the Zionists would have to undertake to renounce any political dominance. This plan was supported by Judah L. Magnes , a reform rabbi and president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem .

In July 1939, Philby ran unsuccessfully for a seat in parliament as a representative of the far-right and anti-Semitic British People's Party . On a trip to Bombay he was arrested on August 3, 1940 as a sympathizer of National Socialism, deported to England and freed shortly afterwards at the instigation of friends like John Maynard Keynes . He recommended his son Kim, who through his father's mediation had become the Times war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War , to the head of the British counter-espionage, Valentine Vivian, whereupon Kim was smuggled into the GPU .

After Ibn Saud's death in November 1953, Philby publicly criticized his son and successor Saud . He was banished from the country and moved to Beirut , where he spent a few months in comfortable circumstances, partly in the company of his concubine Rozy, who was given to him by Ibn Saud when he was 16, and their children. In 1956 he returned to Riyadh. In September 1960, when he met his son Kim while visiting Beirut, he fell ill and was taken to a hospital. When he woke up from unconsciousness, he muttered, "I'm bored," and died shortly after on September 30th. He was buried in the Muslim cemetery in Beirut.

reception

In her monograph Philby of Arabia , Elizabeth Monroe describes Philby as a contradicting, ambitious character. His conversion to Islam took place mainly to improve his position with King Ibn Saud, to enable his research trips to the Arabian Peninsula and to promote his commercial interests. In his extensive correspondence, some of the Middle East Center at St Antony's College of Oxford University is preserved, it proves to be admirer of Hitler and also as a vocal pacifist. However, this did not prevent him from participating in the arms trade in Saudi Arabia and Beirut. Gertrude Bell described Philby as a "domineering and difficult" character.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Founder's Medal (RGS)
2. ↑ Treaty of Jeddah signed between Britain and Ibn Saud (accessed November 16, 2018)
3. ^ E. Monroe: Philby of Arabia , p. 6.
4. ↑ Robert Kaplan: The Arabists. The Romance of an American Elite . Free Press, New York 1993, pp. 57 .

literature

• Elizabeth Monroe: Philby of Arabia . London, Faber & Faber, 1973. ISBN 0-571-09464-3 . Review online partial view

Works (selection)

• The heart of Arabia; a record of travel & exploration . London, Constable, 1922. Digitized
• The empty quarter: being a description of the great south desert of Arabia known as Rub 'al Khali . London, Constable, 1933. Digitized
• Arabian Highlands . Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1952. Digitized
• The Queen of Sheba. Quartet Books, London 1981.

Web links

Commons : Harry St-John Bridger Philby  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Newspaper article about St. John Philby in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .