Before Taliban

Introduction / 7
and success of his earlier production. Ultimately, it seems, Western audiences
of the day proved to be more intrigued by the tale of a Westerner who
donned Bedouin robes than of an Easterner in tennis garb, and the story of
a distant king trying gradually and peacefully to modernize his country did
not have the same resonance as that of a European going in and doing the
same job by brute force of will. What no one could know at the time was
how either story would end. It was only just becoming apparent in 1922 that
the cause of Arab independence that Lawrence had championed had been
betrayed by the European powers. And in another seven years Amanullah
would be overthrown by his own people, who resented and distrusted the
Western-style reforms he was urging on them rather more forcefully than
Thomas had realized during his brief visit.
Despite the different outcomes of Thomas’s theatrical productions, it is
possible to discern a greater affinity between Amanullah and Lawrence than
either Thomas or his audience seem to have been able to recognize at the
time—an affinity that is perhaps suggested in the unhappy outcome of both
men’s careers. In an odd way, Thomas’s two leading men were mirror
images of one another, each being seen in his dress, manner, and action as a
variant of the “Oriental” of Western imagining. In Lawrence’s case, the fantasy
centered on the notion of the Westerner becoming more Oriental than
the Oriental himself in order to tame the savage and to bring order to a far
corner of the world. In Amanullah’s case, the fantasy had to do with the
Oriental himself recognizing the superiority of Western ways and voluntarily
submitting himself to the discipline and enlightened attitude of the
West in order to raise his people up out of their degraded condition.
In both instances, dress was useful to understanding the larger significance
of the main character’s progress in the world—Lawrence’s borrowed
robes and Amanullah’s Norfolk coat being symbols of the process by which
the fundamental dichotomy between Barbarian and Civilized that defined
the world in the 1920s could be mediated. The issue of Lawrence’s “crossdressing”
has come under intensive scrutiny ever since David Lean’s 1962
film portrayed Lawrence as a politically and sexually ambivalent hero,
motivated as much by masochistic impulses as heroic ones. Seen through
the contemporary lens, Lawrence has been transformed from “the uncrowned
king of Arabia” (as Thomas portrayed him) to the “prince” of our
postcolonial discontents and psychosocial neuroses (as Thomas Mack and
others have more recently characterized him). 4
Though he has not received the same sort of fervent attention as
Lawrence, Amanullah has himself been the focus of considerable attention,
with Western writers tending to view him as a tragic hero whose noble