God's Fugitive

Explorer, scholar, travel writer and poet, the openly Christian Doughty travelled in Arabia in the 1870s, with Haj pilgrims and Bedouin nomads. His archaeological investigations and observations of Arabia, gathered at the risk of his life, were those of one of the great British scholar eccentrics.

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Explorer, scholar, travel writer and poet, Charles Doughty was the progenitor of a noble tradition that includes Lawrence of Arabia (to whom he was a mentor) and Wilfred Thesiger: British writers who have been fascinated by the Bedouin, and in particular by that strange, mythic part of the world, the Empty Quarter (a phrase which Doughty introduced to the West). In the 1870s Doughty spent two years wandering through Arabia, first with the Haj pilgrimage, then joining nomadic bands of Arabs, sometimes staying as a virtual prisoner in far-flung desert towns. Unyielding in his independence of mind, the tall, red-bearded Doughty's aggressive refusal to conceal his Christianity made his travels all the more dangerous: he was threatened with death several times, spurned, insulted and often beaten by angry mobs. The story of his archaeological investigations and his wide-ranging observations of Arabia and desert life were published in 1888 as the famous Arabia Deserta, with its haunting opening sentence "A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus that is called straight."
Feted by the literary establishment, Doughty risked all many times over in his obsesssive quests in Arabia. He often seemed possessed by an almost messianic vision of himself and found among the Bedouin a chivalry and honour that suited his temperament, as it did Thesiger's. Often, too, he found himself at odds with the authorities, his work and his genius, as he saw it, neglected. His long, impassioned and often paradoxical life makes him one of the great British scholar-eccentrics.