Dubai Festival of Literature: Robert Lacey – Inside the Kingdom

'Great to be here in the "sink of sin", as we see it in Saudi Arabia,' says Lacey, aiming his laser penlight at Doha instead of Dubai. It is not, perhaps, the most auspicious of starts, but the remainder of Lacey's talk is an enthralling canter through the modern history of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with its 'two enormous resources' of oil (in the east) and holy places (in the west).

We are given a brief introduction to Mohammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab ('servant of God the Giver' and founder of the strict Wahhabi sect - whom Lacey describes as an Islamic Luther or Calvin), before picking up the narrative proper in the early twentieth century, when the Persian Gulf was a 'British lake' vital to the security of India, but the scattered tribes in the interior of the Arabian peninsula were slowly being conquered and unified under the charismatic Abdul Aziz ibn Saud of the House of Saud. Lacey's talk is accompanied by a series of slides, amongst which is a magnificent archive photo (taken by William Shakespear, British Agent in Kuwait) of ibn Saud's militia on camelback, galloping under a green standard emblazoned with the shahadah (Islamic proclamation of faith) – similar to the flag of Saudi Arabia today.

The relationship between Saudi Arabia and the US is tracked from the grant of the oil concessions in the 1930s and the production of first oil in 1938, through the Arab oil embargo and the oil boom of the 1970s, to 9/11 and beyond. The giant oil concessions went to the Americans as opposed to the British in part through the 'treachery' of Harry St John Philby, an English adviser to ibd Saud who was in the pay of the Americans, and in part through ibn Saud's own (mistaken) belief that the Americans, being a long way away from the Middle East, were less likely than the British to meddle in Saudi affairs. The boom years of the 1970s had a complex effect, leading to a rising fear of Arab wealth in the west ('just six hours' pumping, and the Arabs could buy up Buckingham Palace; give them another day, and they'll buy up half the City of London') and a religious reaction at home, as a deeply conservative populace searched the fundamentals of their faith to cope with change.

Today, Lacey views the House of Saud as being in a 'paradoxical' position, demonised as a 'repressive clique of old men' by the west, while being criticised for its 'modernising' and 'progressive' stance at home. He leaves us with an intriguing thought: was 9/11 the dawn of a Saudi glastnost – an event which finally brought home the need for change within the Kingdom? If so, where will it end? With the collapse, as in the former Soviet Union, of the old regime which tried to reform itself, or with a modern state like Qatar or the UAE?

Dubai International Festival of Literature: James Waterson

Not one of the big names of the festival (Waterson is charmingly surprised we have turned up at all, given that Jung Chang and Robin Sharma are speaking at separate sessions during his slot), but the topic is tantalising: 'A Mongol Khan of Europe?'

The battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 is not one I am familiar with, but Waterson manages to weave together the central theses from his two books, The Knights of Islam and The Ismaili Assassins, into an amusing and compelling narrative. In defeating the Mongols and preventing the fall of Cairo, Waterson argues, the Mamluks inadvertently also save Europe (then a 'cold, forested peninsula full of sheep, on the rump of Asia') from Mongol devastation.

With the aid of a broad and engaging selection of slides (including stills from PlayStation's 'Assassin's Creed'), Waterson takes us through the rigorous training of the Mamluk slave soldiers, including instruction in the arts of the furusiyya (horsemanship, archery and swordsmanship); the covert use of Assassins by the courts and caliphates of the near East (Polo's accounts of the use of hashish by the sect is dismissed as 'romantic nonsense'); and the rise of Baibars from the slave markets of Damascus.

Both Mongol and Mamluk were ultimately war machines, and in some ways more similar than dissimilar. Waterson cites a contemporaneous account of the defeat of the Mongols at Ain Jalut which observed that 'to everything there is a pest of its own kind', and uses details from the baptistry of Saint Louis (once used to baptise infants of the French royal family, but an object of Mamluk origin) to demonstrate the distinct oriental facial features of the Mamluks.

The difference in their legacy, Waterson argues, lay in their creed. Whereas the Mongols razed the great Islamic centres of Herat and Baghdad, the Mamluks had been steeped in the precepts of Islam from their earliest training and, having usurped the Ayyubids in Egypt, needed religious legitimacy - hence their contribution to some of the great classical Islamic architecture of Egypt.

Dubai International Festival of Literature: Robert Irwin and Sir Mark Tully

'The Camel: Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know... and Plenty that You Didn't' by Robert Irwin could have been a great session. It starts off promisingly, with lines from a pre-Islamic poem describing the slaughter - in almost sensual terms - by a traveller of his favourite racing camel in return for sexual favours from a 'fair virgin', but then loses its way somewhat.

All very well to learn that the camel is a retromingent animal, and that the Grand Union Pub on Westbourne Road in London serves meat from feral camels culled in Australia. Given the setting, however, Irwin might perhaps have dwelled a little longer on the rich camel lore and cultural significance of the animal in the Middle East.

Another session which didn't quite live up to promise was Sir Mark Tully's talk on 'India's Unending Journey'. It was clear that the audience - a capacity crowd of Indians and Indophiles - was there to listen to his sometimes maddening and sometimes profoundly moving experiences on the subcontinent. His little vignettes of Indian life (a frustrating but amusing journey on Indian Railways from Patna to Bangalore, the inconveniences of dealing with the neta-babu raj (the petty bureaucracy and corrupt officialdom), the intricacies of the caste system) were well-received, echoing - to a greater or lesser degree - the experiences of anyone who has ever travelled or lived in India.

His theme - the 'uncertainty of certainty' at the heart of Indian civilisation, its ability to absorb and indigenise external influences (such as languages and religions) and its syncretic spirituality (in contrast to the dogmatic fundamentalism of the monotheistic traditions) - is a grand and wide-ranging one, so it is a little perplexing that Sir Mark chooses to use that as the basis primarily for a diatribe against unrestrained consumerism for most of his talk.

Sir Mark supports the Indian cricket team and admits to passing the Tebbit test in reverse.

Dubai International Festival of Literature: Alexander Maitland on Sir Wilfred Thesiger

I start the second day of the festival with Alexander Maitland in conversation with Ian Fairservice on the travel writings of Sir Wilfred Thesiger.

Maitland (Thesiger's authorised biographer, literary executor and friend) is an angular, scholarly man. He begins the session by describing his first meeting with Thesiger, recalling Thesiger's nasal voice, stylised way of speaking, and odd habit of emphasising prepositions ('This is utterly meaningless to me', Thesiger would say). (Thesiger also apparently smelled of Brylcreem and mothballs at that first encounter.)

We move on to Thesiger's writings and photography, which both Maitland and Fairservice assert were the by-product of his travels, in that he never travelled with a book or a photo project in mind. Seeking 'savagery and colour', Thesiger travelled instead to be with the people he came to love, and to experience (as Lawrence did) the 'keenness' of the desert. The tale is told of an encounter between Thesiger and Sheikh Zayed, following Thesiger's arrival in Abu Dhabi after crossing the Empty Quarter.
'But why did you take such a long way to get here?' asked the Sheikh.
'Your Highness,' Thesiger replied, 'I wasn't travelling to get here. I was travelling.'

Those of you familiar with Thesiger's writings will know them to be spare and lyrical. There is not much humour in 'Arabian Sands' or 'Marsh Arabs' (both widely regarded as Thesiger's finest works), but Thesiger the man (though 'farouche and unpredictable') could be very funny. Once, when an expensive car sent to ferry him around on a return visit to the Gulf broke down, he reputedly quipped 'At least when your camel breaks down, you can eat it'; and, on another occasion, to a dowager regaling him with tales of society cocktail parties, he reputedly said, 'Madam, last week I was at a party where all the guests arrived naked and we ate one of them before leaving'.

The session is accompanied by a slideshow from Thesiger's photo-library. Thesiger hated colour photography, and worked almost exclusively in black and white. He had a 'tremendous eye', and insisted that his pictures were published as the 'photographer's composition', without editorial cropping. I find myself mesmerised by his work - here are mementoes of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah from a vanished era.

'How would Thesiger have reacted to the Middle East today?', asks a member of the audience.
Maitland and Fairservice both agree that Thesiger would have found the Gulf today 'an Arabian nightmare'. The Gulf had begun to change during his latter years, and Thesiger was never one for modernity. Although he accepted the need for people to enter the twentieth century, this didn't prevent him from feeling a 'tremendous sadness and nostalgia' for the way of life he had known.

His works, however, stand as a 'literary, visual, historical and very human imprint' of a bygone world.