Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Summary

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence. The narrative proper begins in Jidda and Rabegh, where Lawrence judges the sons of the Sherif of Mecca and settles on Feisal as the prophet-leader the revolt needs. Through the winter of 1916–17 the Arab forces nearly collapse before Medina, then shift north along the coast to Wejh. Laid up with dysentery and fever in Abdulla's camp in Wadi Ais, Lawrence works out a theory of guerrilla war: the Arabs should not take Medina but leave the Turks holding it, attacking the Hejaz railway at its weakest points and making the desert their sea. The central adventure follows. With Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat and Sherif Nasir, a small force crosses the Nefud and other waterless country in high summer, raises the tribes, destroys a Turkish battalion at Aba el Lissan and takes Aqaba from the landward side in July 1917. Lawrence rides across Sinai to Cairo to report and wins Allenby's support. Railway mining, the failed raid on the Yarmuk bridge and the battle of Tafileh fill the middle books. Between them comes the Deraa episode of November 1917, in which Lawrence describes being captured, beaten and sexually assaulted by the Turkish governor's men, an account whose details historians have questioned but whose place in the book is central. His young servants Daud and Farraj die, the second by Lawrence's own hand to spare him capture. Money lost, a winter campaign stalled and his own exhaustion lead him to ask to be relieved, but he returns for the final offensive. In September 1918 the Arab regulars and tribes cut the railways around Deraa while Allenby breaks the Turkish line in Palestine. Near Tafas, after seeing a massacred village, Lawrence's force takes no prisoners. The book ends in Damascus with Lawrence trying to set up an Arab administration, cleaning a Turkish hospital filled with the dead and dying, and leaving as soon as his work is done, emptied and ashamed. It is at once a military history, a portrait of desert peoples, a meditation on leadership by persuasion, and a confession of fraud, cruelty and self-division.

Plot or Argument

• Introduction and Book I: The Discovery of Feisal

  Lawrence states his doubts about the revolt's promises, then sails to Jidda in October 1916, rides inland to Feisal's camp at Hamra and recommends British support for him as the revolt's leader.

• Book II: The Opening of the Arab Offensive

  The Arab forces retreat in disorder at Yenbo, recover, and move north to take the port of Wejh, turning a defensive rising into a campaign along the Red Sea coast.

• Book III: A Railway Diversion

  Sick in Abdulla's camp, Lawrence formulates his theory of irregular war against the Hejaz railway; he must also execute Hamed the Moor himself to forestall a blood feud between tribal contingents.

• Book IV: Extending to Akaba

  The march with Auda and Nasir across the northern desert, the recruiting of the Howeitat, Lawrence's solitary reconnaissance toward Syria, the fight at Aba el Lissan and the fall of Aqaba in July 1917, followed by his ride to Cairo.

• Books V–VI: Marking Time and The Raiding of the Bridges

  Aqaba becomes the base; train-wrecking raids with Stokes mortars and mines; the failed attempt on the Yarmuk bridge; the capture and assault at Deraa; Lawrence joins Allenby at the entry into Jerusalem.

• Books VII–VIII: The Dead Sea Campaign and The Ruin of High Hope

  The set-piece victory at Tafileh in January 1918, bitter winter conditions, the deaths of Daud and Farraj, the loss of funds entrusted to Zeid, and Lawrence's request to be relieved of his role.

• Book IX: Balancing for a Last Effort

  Lawrence returns with a bodyguard of hardened men, armoured cars and aircraft, and plans with Allenby the Arab role in the coming offensive.

• Book X: The House Is Perfected

  The railways around Deraa are cut, the massacre at Tafas and the reprisal, the race to Damascus, the chaotic first days of Arab government and the Turkish hospital, and Lawrence's departure.

Characters

• T. E. Lawrence, narrator, British liaison officer

  Scholar turned guerrilla adviser who narrates his own successes and his self-disgust with equal intensity.

• Feisal ibn Hussein, Arab commander

  Third son of the Sherif of Mecca; Lawrence's chosen leader, patient and diplomatic, later King of Iraq.

• Auda abu Tayi, chief of the Howeitat

  Legendary raider and boaster whose tribal reach makes the Aqaba march possible.

• Sherif Nasir, Arab field commander

  Feisal's kinsman and nominal leader of the Aqaba expedition.

• Sherif Ali ibn el Hussein, Harith sherif

  Young, physically splendid companion on the Yarmuk raid.

• Abdulla and Zeid, Feisal's brothers

  Abdulla, shrewd and indolent, hosts Lawrence in Wadi Ais; Zeid, the youngest, spends the gold Lawrence needs in 1918.

• Edmund Allenby, British commander-in-chief

  General who takes Lawrence's plans seriously after Aqaba and coordinates the final offensive.

• Daud and Farraj, Lawrence's servants

  Inseparable young companions; Daud dies of cold and Farraj, mortally wounded, is shot by Lawrence to prevent capture.

• Hamed the Moor, murderer

  Moroccan in the Arab force whom Lawrence executes to prevent a feud.

• The Bey of Deraa, Turkish governor

  Official at whose orders, Lawrence writes, he was beaten and abused in November 1917.

Lessons

• Leading people whose cause you know may be betrayed

  Lawrence admits from the outset that he knew of the Sykes-Picot agreement while urging the Arabs on with promises of freedom. The book turns this double position into a sustained study of political service divided against personal loyalty.

  • Does Lawrence's confession in the introductory chapter excuse or aggravate what he did?
  • How does his knowledge of Sykes–Picot shape his behaviour in Damascus?
  • Can an adviser's personal loyalty to a people coexist with service to an empire?

• Guerrilla war as an argument from space and time

  The Wadi Ais chapter argues that irregular forces win by being everywhere and nowhere, by attacking materials rather than men, and by keeping the enemy holding useless ground. It anticipates later doctrines of insurgency and counterinsurgency.

  • Why does Lawrence decide that leaving Medina in Turkish hands is better than capturing it?
  • Which of his principles depend on desert terrain, and which would hold elsewhere?

• Wearing another people's identity has a cost

  Lawrence dresses, rides and speaks as an Arab and describes the result as a self split in two, belonging fully to neither world. The memoir is an early and painful account of what assimilation for political ends does to the person attempting it.

  • Where does Lawrence's self-description shift from pride to self-loathing?
  • How do Arab characters see Lawrence, as far as the book lets us know?

• Violence erodes the restraint it was meant to protect

  From the execution of Hamed to the killing of Farraj and the no-prisoners order after Tafas, the book tracks how each necessary killing loosens the narrator's hold on limits. Lawrence presents himself as a participant in atrocity, not an observer of it.

  • How does Lawrence narrate Tafas differently from earlier violence?
  • Is the killing of Farraj an act of mercy, and does the text let us decide?
  • What role does exhaustion play in the moral collapse he describes?

Context

The Arab Revolt began in June 1916 when Sherif Hussein of Mecca rose against the Ottoman Empire with British encouragement and subsidy, after the Hussein–McMahon correspondence suggested British support for Arab independence. The secret Sykes–Picot agreement of 1916 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 cut across those hopes. After the war France expelled Feisal from Syria in 1920; Britain installed him as King of Iraq in 1921. Lawrence wrote with that outcome in view.

Composition

Lawrence began writing in 1919, lost most of a first draft at Reading railway station that year, and rewrote it from memory. A text of about 330,000 words was printed in eight copies by the Oxford Times in 1922. He cut it to about 250,000 words for a lavish subscribers' edition of roughly 200 copies in 1926, financed partly by the abridgement Revolt in the Desert (1927). The 1926 text was published for the general public only after his death, in 1935. The title alludes to Proverbs 9:1 and was first used for an unpublished youthful book on seven Eastern cities.

Reception

The 1935 trade edition was an immediate bestseller, and the book helped fix the Lawrence legend that Lowell Thomas's lecture shows had begun. Later biographers such as Richard Aldington (1955) attacked its truthfulness, and the Deraa chapter in particular has been debated. David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) drew heavily on it. Military writers continue to study its account of irregular war, and postcolonial critics read it as a central text of imperial romance and its self-doubt.

Comparisons

• the-river-war

  Churchill's young officer celebrates the machinery of conquest on the Nile in the 1890s; Lawrence, a generation later, uses camels and dynamite for a native rising and records not triumph but shame at what empire asked of him.

• the-persian-expedition

  Xenophon also narrates himself in a march through hostile desert, leading irregular forces by persuasion; Lawrence, who knew the Anabasis, shares its interest in how a stranger becomes a commander but not its untroubled self-regard.

• heart-of-darkness

  Kurtz and Lawrence are both Europeans who go native in the service of empire; Conrad imagines moral collapse from outside through Marlow, while Lawrence narrates his own disintegration in the first person.

• the-odyssey

  Lawrence translated the Odyssey in 1932; both books feature a hero whose cunning, disguise and storytelling matter as much as strength, and whose homecoming brings no peace.

• on-war

  Lawrence explicitly measured his guerrilla theory in Wadi Ais against Clausewitz and Foch, rejecting the doctrine of seeking the decisive battle for a war of dispersion and attrition of materials.

• testament-of-youth

  Brittain and Lawrence both write the First World War as a story of ruined idealism, one from the Western Front's hospitals and bereavement, the other from a sideshow that the public mistook for romance.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The introductory chapter, where Lawrence admits that he knew of the Sykes-Picot agreement while encouraging the Arabs to fight for independence. Every promise and victory that follows is read under that admission.
• Book III, where Lawrence, sick with dysentery and fever in Abdulla's camp, works out his theory of irregular war: leave the Turks holding Medina and strike the Hejaz railway where it is weakest.
• The march to Aqaba in Book IV with Auda abu Tayi and Sherif Nasir across waterless country, ending in the capture of the port from the landward side in July 1917.
• The execution of Hamed the Moor in Book III, which Lawrence carries out himself to prevent a blood feud, and the death of Farraj in the 1918 campaigning of Books VII and VIII, whom he shoots to spare him capture. Watch how he narrates the acts that cost him most.
• The last chapters in Damascus, where Lawrence tries to set up an Arab administration, cleans a Turkish hospital full of the dead and dying, and leaves as soon as his work is done.

Key terms and names

Arab Revolt

The rising against the Ottoman Empire begun in June 1916 by Sherif Hussein of Mecca with British support. Lawrence served as liaison officer to Hussein's son Feisal, and the book follows the revolt from the Hejaz to Damascus.

Sykes-Picot agreement

The secret 1916 agreement in which Britain and France divided the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire into zones of influence. Lawrence's knowledge of it is the source of the bad conscience he confesses in the introductory chapter.

Hejaz railway

The Ottoman line running south from Damascus to Medina. Lawrence's strategy in Book III was to raid and mine it repeatedly, keeping the Turks tied to its defence rather than trying to capture Medina.

Feisal ibn Hussein

The son of the Sherif of Mecca whom Lawrence chooses in Book I as the leader the revolt needs. He commands the Arab forces through the campaign and later became King of Iraq.

Auda abu Tayi

The chief of the Howeitat tribe, a famous warrior whose alliance makes the march to Aqaba possible. Lawrence portrays him as both heroic and boastful.

Aqaba

The Red Sea port taken in July 1917 by an attack from the desert side, where its guns did not face. Its capture turned the revolt from a local rising into a campaign that supported Allenby's advance.

Deraa

The railway junction where Lawrence says he was captured and beaten by the men of the Turkish governor in November 1917. Historians have questioned the details, but Lawrence makes the episode central to his account of himself.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What does Lawrence confess in the introductory chapter about the promises made to the Arabs?
2. Comprehension What strategy does Lawrence work out while ill in Abdulla's camp in Book III, and why does he decide not to attack Medina?
3. Comprehension How is Aqaba taken in Book IV, and who leads the march with Lawrence?
4. Interpretation Lawrence executes Hamed the Moor himself to prevent a feud between tribes. What does this scene show about the price of leading by persuasion among people who are not his own?
5. Interpretation Why does Lawrence place his bad conscience about Sykes-Picot at the very beginning instead of revealing it at the end? How does this change the way we read his victories?
6. Interpretation Lawrence leaves Damascus, the goal of the whole campaign, emptied and ashamed. What has he lost along the way, and what has he gained?
7. Big Question Can a person do great good for others while knowing that the cause he serves will not keep its promises to them?
8. Big Question Is it possible to belong fully to two peoples at once, or does a man who tries become a stranger to both?

Faith Connections

• Proverbs 9:1 (Scripture)

  Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars. Lawrence took his title from this verse, and the last book, The House Is Perfected, completes the image, though the house he helped build in Damascus did not stand.

• Matthew 16:26 (Scripture)

  Lawrence’s narrative turns inward the question Jesus put to His disciples, what a man gains if he wins the world and loses his soul. He wins his campaign and the entry into Damascus, and the book ends with him describing himself as hollowed out by what the victory cost.

• Romans 7:15-24 (Scripture)

  Paul describes doing the very thing he hates and being at war within himself. Lawrence's self-portrait, divided between British officer and Arab irregular, between willed leadership and self-disgust, is a secular cousin of this struggle.

• Augustine, City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 7 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine says that even the wise man who wages just wars must lament the necessity of them, and that anyone who thinks of such evils without grief has lost human feeling. Lawrence's narrative of raids, executions, and the reprisal at Tafas is written with exactly this grief.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The Arab Revolt could succeed only if the Arabs fought in their own way, as mobile irregulars striking the Turks' long railway rather than as a regular army besieging towns. Lawrence, by persuasion rather than command, helped them win this war and reach Damascus. Yet he knew that Britain and France had already divided the lands they were fighting for, so the promises he carried were not his to keep. Therefore the victory was real but also a fraud, and the man who led it was left divided, ashamed, and unable to return fully to either world.

Rhetorical device: prolepsis. In the introductory chapter Lawrence announces in advance that the Arabs would be cheated of the independence they fought for, so that every later scene of hope, from the discovery of Feisal to the fall of Aqaba, is read in the shadow of a betrayal the reader already knows.

Debate: Resolved: Lawrence was justified in encouraging the Arab Revolt while knowing of the Sykes-Picot agreement.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Lawrence calls himself both a leader and a fraud. Using the introductory chapter, the execution of Hamed the Moor, the death of Farraj, and the final chapters in Damascus, argue whether Seven Pillars of Wisdom is finally a story of triumph or a confession of failure.

Comparison with The Persian Expedition: Xenophon and Lawrence were both educated outsiders who found themselves leading foreign fighting men through hostile desert country and who wrote the history of their own campaigns. Compare how each presents his own leadership, and argue which writer is more honest about the gap between his ideals and what war required of him.

Medical Lens

The book is a long record of a body pushed to its limits: dysentery, fever and boils in Wadi Ais, thirst and heat on the Nefud crossing, frostbite and cold in the Tafileh winter, repeated wounds, and the beating at Deraa. Lawrence frames his own endurance as a discipline of separating mind from body, a theme that suits discussions of pain, dissociation and the mind-body problem. His postwar life (self-imposed enlistment in the ranks, reported arrangements to be beaten, deep depression) has led biographers such as John Mack to read the Deraa episode and the book's self-disgust in terms of trauma; that is an interpretation, and the episode's factual details remain disputed. The Damascus hospital chapter is a vivid record of a military hospital collapsed into sanitary disaster, with the dying lying among the dead.

• Book III (Wadi Ais, March 1917)

  Ill with dysentery and fever and covered in boils, Lawrence lies in a tent for some ten days and thinks out the theory of guerrilla war.

  Fever InfectionMind Body
• Book IV (the march to Aqaba)

  The crossing of waterless country in summer; heat, thirst and the search for a lost man in the desert; the near-fatal effects of exhaustion on men and camels.

  Starvation NutritionPain
• Book VI (Deraa, November 1917)

  Lawrence's account of his capture, flogging and sexual assault and of the lasting damage to his sense of self. Handle with care: the account is contested as fact and should be cited as his testimony.

  Trauma Shell ShockPainSexuality Medicalized
• Books VII–VIII (winter 1917–18)

  Daud's death from cold; Farraj wounded and killed by Lawrence to spare him capture and torture; Lawrence's growing exhaustion and despair before asking to be relieved.

  Death DyingMelancholia DepressionWAR Wounds
• Book X (Tafas, September 1918)

  A village massacred by retreating Turkish troops, followed by the order to take no prisoners; a key passage on reprisal and moral injury.

  Trauma Shell ShockWAR WoundsDeath Dying
• Book X (Damascus, October 1918)

  Lawrence finds a Turkish military hospital full of dead and dying men and organises its cleaning and burials amid the chaos of the city's first days.

  Public Health SanitationDeath DyingFever Infection

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Retell the night at Aba el Lissan from the viewpoint of a young Howeitat fighter who has heard rumours about the foreigner in white robes.

• Dialogue

  Imagine Feisal reading Seven Pillars in Baghdad in 1927 and writing back to Lawrence about what the book gets right and what it takes from him.

• Essay

  Evaluate the Wadi Ais theory of guerrilla war against a twentieth- or twenty-first-century insurgency. Which principles survived contact with other terrain and technology?

• Classroom

  Pair the introductory chapter with the text of the Sykes–Picot agreement and ask students how knowledge of the deal changes their reading of every promise Lawrence makes.

Further Reading

• Revolt in the Desert, T. E. Lawrence

  Lawrence's 1927 abridgement for the general public.

• The Mint, T. E. Lawrence

  His account of life as an RAF recruit, published posthumously.

• A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence, John E. Mack

  Pulitzer-winning psychiatric biography.

• Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography, Jeremy Wilson

• Lawrence in Arabia, Scott Anderson

  Lawrence among the competing agents and interests of the wartime Middle East.

• A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin

  The making of the postwar Middle East settlement.