A fascinating piece by Andrew Bostom on Gertrude Bell, a turn of the century explorer and adventurer famous for her knowledge of the Middle East, and her writings about the formation of the modern state of Iraq: Fond Foolishness - Utopian dreams and Iraqi irredentism.

Baghdad, March 14, 1920

It’s a problem here how to get into touch with the Shiahs, not the tribal people in the country; we’re on intimate terms with all of them, but the grimly devout citizens of the holy towns and more especially the leaders of religious opinion, the Mujtahids, who can loose and bind with a word by authority which rests on an intimate acquaintance with accumulated knowledge entirely irrelevant to human affairs and worthless in any branch of human activity. There they sit in an atmosphere which reeks of antiquity and is so thick with the dust of ages that you can’t see through it — nor can they. And for the most part they are very hostile to us, a feeling we can’t alter… There’s a group of these worthies in Kadhimain, the holy city, 8 miles from Baghdad, bitterly pan-Islamic, anti-British… Chief among them are a family called Sadr, possibly more distinguished for religious learning than any other family in the whole Shiah world… I went yesterday [to visit them] accompanied by an advanced Shiah of Baghdad whom I knew well.