ABSTRACT

I began this Arabian interlude in my career hoping to gain from it a deeper understanding of Indonesian spiritual life and so return to the Colonial Service better prepared for the nationalist movement that was then dawning in the Dutch East Indies. But I was also attracted to the spiritual and geographical centre of Islam as a proud rival of Christianity in its claim to provide the remedy for the ailments of this world. To be in Jedda meant to me not only meeting the real Arab, but it also meant contact with Muslims from all over the Muslim world. It meant especially contact with Indonesians and peoples I had never seen before and would never see again as a Colonial Civil Servant. Last, but not least, it meant contact with colleagues representing nations quite unfamiliar to me. The Western colonial powers had attached to their staffs Vice-Consuls and Pilgrim Officers from the important Muslim countries of their dominions. I think that my European colleagues—with whom my wife and I had such happy relations—will forgive me if I say that it was in their Pilgrim Officers, rather than in themselves, and in the colleagues of non-European powers that I was particularly interested.