More of the Meme -- TSG Backstory

[rthstewart]

linneasr asked me about Asim in the previous meme and the response is too long to fit in a comment.  So, if you aren't interested, you can just move along.


Sorry it has taken me so long, but I had a long backstory on Asim and it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about it. When I first started thinking of the story, I was really powerfully motivated by the pictures below. The first two are from or about the film Becket, the last is from the film Lawrence of Arabia and the one right before it is the true Prince Feisal, the third son of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca. Both films star a much younger Peter O’Toole and to the extent I had visuals of Peter, they come from this as well as the film The Lion In Winter.  I was really interested in the friendship shown in the films between Henry and Becket, and between Lawrence and Ali. 

O'Toole and Burton in Becket

Becket

Prince Feisal, the third son of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca

Omar Shariff and Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia

When I actually started researching T.E. Lawrence, as opposed to merely my romantic notions of the film, I came away decidedly disillusioned and Asim was born of that study. As a child and teen he rode and fought with the great men of the Pan-Arab movement, Faisal, his father, Hussein bin Ali, and his brothers Abdullah I and Ali, and the Bedouin leader, Auda Abu Tayi. Because I rapidly learned that there was so much I did not know about that world, that culture, and that religion, I’ve left much of Asim’s backstory untold. Everyone says he’s from Egypt, which is true of a sort, but it’s actually very far east, and specifically, Hejaz, on the eastern side of the Red Sea which is part of present day Saudi Arabia. Hejaz had been under Egyptian and Ottoman control and briefly was its own independent nations. Asim grew up there, with no parent he can recall.

The British were tramping all about the Negev Desert pretending to be archaeologists but really doing intelligence work and that is where Asim met them, working as guide and eventually interpreter. When riding with the Arab Irregulars, he became particularly expert in the various exercises in sabotage committed on the Hejaz railway lines. What exactly he did between the wars and how he came to the rank he has is a mystery, though for a time he was certainly one of Edmund Allenby’s boys and did all manner of tricky things for the Field Marshall when he was in Egypt and the Sudan until 1925 (or thereabouts).

God found him sometime after Allenby’s death and as Asim’s hopes to see a united Arab nation dimmed. It was very reminiscent of Saul on the road to Damascus, a thunderbolt out of the sky that threw him to the ground and when he awoke, God was with him. He enjoys dark chocolate, has never had a sip of alcohol, and he has never been in an intimate relationship with anyone.

Comments

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

If you start doing the math in the story you realize he has to be about this age to have done anything in the Arab Revolts and WW1. I never saw those episodes of the Indy Chronicles with Lawrence -- the film is incredibly romantic and also (oi) casts Alec Guiness as Prince Faisal. Errr, right. But Peter O'Toole striding across the landscape is not something easily forgotten. I really liked the films depiction of his assimilation to Arab culture and his friendship with the Arabs. That was what especially interested me and why I have this thread in the stories of Peter interested in the desert.