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Lawrence of Arabia has been a household name in the West, right up there with Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and perhaps even Peter O’Toole. In the late 20th century this was largely due to the latters portrayal of Lawrence in the 1962 film. This romantic portrayal shows Lawrence dressed as a bedouin dashing around on horseback showing the evil Germans and Turks who’s boss. However, the fame and romanticism surrounding T.E. Lawrence and the Arab revolt of WWI is due to an even earlier spread of propaganda.
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Iraq, a nation since 1920, war-torn, conflict-ridden, plagued by despotic rulers, and western political and economic aspirations. The area we now know as Iraq is also the site of many ancient civilizations. Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, and Arabians all built their monuments and cities in this area. A little overwhelmed with my self-driven project to find out more about the history of this “nation” I’ve read almost too much. Now I’m faced with the fact that I wrote a blog that is 3 single-spaced pages. Don’t worry I cut the lot and will not bore you with the whole thing. Do people really care about what the Persians called their Iraq province or when the Mongols sacked Baghdad? Well, perhaps a few people care, but I think my blog is already long enough for most of your TV-addled attention spans.

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British history is filled with intrepid adventurers who took off to foreign climes in search of wealth, fame, and freedom from British conventions. While many of these adventurers did tend to look on “natives” with a more sympathetic eye than Brits at home, prejudice and British patriotism still played a large role in their actions. Gertrude Bell is one such famous British adventurer. While her role is unusual because she was a woman, her actions and sentiments are not really much different from her male counterparts. At least not so far as I can see.
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Somanatha, an ancient South-Asian city whose temple was allegedly raided by Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026, became a rallying point for the British and later, Hindu Nationalists. The British ignored Hindu sources from the time period which made no mention of Ghazni’s raid. Rather, they relied solely on Muslim chronicles trying to legitimate their ruler’s power and legitimacy. In fact, they deliberately mistranslated these chronicles which wrote about various raids simply as war against a neighbouring kingdom–whether Muslim, Hindu, or Jain–and turned these commonplace raids into jihads, or holy wars against infidels. In reality, South Asia around this medieval time period was very diverse, fractured amongst many kingdoms. There was no Hindu/Muslim animosity. Rather Hindus and Muslims lived and worked together quite peacefully. The temple at Somanath around the time of Ghazni’s raid even had a dedication inscription by a local Muslim merchant in both Arabic and Sanskrit. To find the cause of the raid one must look at politics instead of religion.

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