The journalism of warfare.

In December 1996, Robert Fisk of the London newspaper The Independent traveled to the mountains north of Khartoum where he met Osama bin Laden. The opening sentences of the article he wrote about the meeting went as follows:

 
   Osama Bin Laden sat in his gold fringed robe, 
   guarded by loyal Arab mujahedin.... With 
   his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long 
   brown robe, Mr Bin Laden looks every inch 
   the mountain warrior of mujahedin legend. 
   Chadored children danced in front of him, 
   preachers acknowledged his wisdom. 

In a second article he wrote about the same meeting, Fisk upgraded bin Laden's attire from gold-fringed brown robe to "white Saudi robes." But whatever the detail, you get the same message. Here is a man whose face and garb reveal his nobility. Fisk's description bears a close similarity to another account by a British writer of his meeting with an Arab aristocrat. In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence describes his first meeting with Prince Feisal in 1916.

 
   Feisal looked very tall and pillar-like, very 
   slender in his long white silk robes and his 
   brown head-cloth bound with a brilliant scarlet 
   and gold cord. His eyelids were dropped; 
   and his black beard and colourless face were 
   like a mask against the strange, still watchfulness 
   of his body. His hands were crossed in 
   front of him on his dagger. 

In Fisk's description, bin Laden was attended by "bearded, taciturn figures" who never strayed more than a few yards from him. In Lawrence's account, Feisal was accompanied by a retinue of slaves who guarded his person and lit his path with lamps. Students of British imperial adventure novels will recognize the genre. The world the writers conjure up is pre-modern, where natural aristocrats, tall and slender, lord over male servants and slaves who are handsome, silent, and strong. The aristocrats are famous for their warrior skills. Their long robes are trimmed with gold and scarlet. They carry daggers in their belts. It is a world without women and it reeks of homoeroticism.

In conjuring up this imagery, Fisk was doing the same as the many European writers who have been drawn to the Arab world over the past two centuries. In his book Muslim Society, the late Ernest Gellner analyzed the nature of the appeal of this pre-modern, feudal order. Gellner wrote:

 
   The European discovery and exploration of 
   Muslim tribal society occurred in the main 
   after the French Revolution, and was often 
   carried out by men--long before T. E. 
   Lawrence--who were possessed by a nostalgia 
   for a Europe as it was, prior to the diffusion of 
   the egalitarian ideal.... They sought not the 
   noble savage, but the savage noble.