The Marsh Arabs – Wilfred Thesiger

The Marsh Arabs

By: Wilfred Thesiger

A poignant record of people now facing extinction and a way of life, far beyond the experience of contemporary readers.

The Marshes of southern Iraq are fast disappearing and with them the Marsh Arabs, a people whose precarious existence fascinated and impressed explorer Wilfred Thesiger. Casualties of progress; the plight of these people has been compounded by the ravages of war and persecution. They became a focus of international attention during the Gulf War and after, attracting comments from such world figures as Britain’s Prince Charles, who expressed deep sympathy with them in their deplorable situation. In this classic of travel writing and photography, Wilfred Thesiger has created a poignant record of a people now facing extinction and a way of life far beyond the experience of contemporary readers.

Wilfred Thesiger succeeds magnificently; a more richly regarding book than his first – Gavin Maxwell, The Observer

The greatest of living explorers – Raymond Mortimer, Sunday Times A masterpiece – H D Ziman, Daily Telegraph

The Marsh Arabs is about the tribes that live in the Marshes of Iraq, an area covering some 6,000 square miles around the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates. The ravages of the Iran-Iraq war and the brutal policies of the Iraqi regime have taken costly toll on these people and their fragile existence. Forty years earlier, when Wilfred Thesiger travelled extensively in this region the first explorer ever to do so it was the relentless march of progress that most threatened a lifestyle that had existed for thousands of years.

Wilfred Thesiger come to know these people and their way of life intimately through spending a substantial part of every year here from 1951 to 1958 (except 1957), travelling with his medicine boxes and his team of canoemen throughout the Central Marshes. It is a landscape of islands, some floating, may man-made; of lakes and waterway; where the reed houses are of a unique and impressive architecture; where the economy of the inhabitants is based largely on their herds of water-buffalo. They fish, shoot wildfowl, and hunt the enormous and dangerous wild pigs that ravage their crops. There are times of excitement and hardship, accidents, pig hunts blood feuds; there are episodes of tragedy and happiness, and moments of pure comedy. Not only does Thesiger evoke with great beauty the landscape and its teem wild life, but we come to know the people, many of them individually, whose life he shares, the sheiks who are his friends, his canoemen and their families. Few travel books have described an area and its inhabitants with such knowledge and in such interesting and informative detail.

Language: English
ISBN: 9781873544778
Hardcover, 208 pages,