Few British Explorers in Arabia have produced books whose importance as travelogues is trans-cended by their literary quality. One such is The Holy Cities of Arabia, published to critical acclaim in 1928, with its author hailed as a worthy successor to Burckhardt, Burton and Doughty.
Few British writers had visited Mecca before Eldon Rutter, an enigmatic figure who one day disappeared
When Eldon Rutter visited Mecca and Medina in 1925-6, seven other Britons had written of making a pilgrimage there. Next week see this year’s great Hajj, and many British pilgrims will be there, but none who are not Muslim.
Of British visitors to Mecca before Rutter, some made much of disguise, such as Richard Burton in 1853, now buried in a tent-shaped tomb in a Catholic churchyard in Mortlake.
Joseph Pitts (1685), was converted under duress as a captured slave, and did not make the journey by choice. Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1814), writing for English readers, lived as a Muslim and was buried as one in Egypt in 1817, having eaten some bad fish.
But who was Eldon Rutter? His fame peaked in 1928, when his Holy Cities of Arabia in two volumes came out to enthusiastic reviews. The Spectator compared him to Palgrave, Doughty, Burton and Lawrence. T E Lawrence himself judged that nobody dared be “Arabians for Arabia’s sake”, that is, “none, save Rutter, I think, and how good, how classical his book”.
Yet Rutter remains a mystery. Thanks to the detective work of Sharon Sharpe, for a new edition of The Holy Cities (Arabian Publishing, 592pp, £36), we know that Rutter falsified his age. He was born in 1894, in Camberwell, served in the First World War and then found a post in Malaya, for Nestlé. There he learnt Arabic from immigrants from Hadhramaut in southern Arabia and formally converted to Islam.
How sincere was Rutter? This central question is put by William Facey in his 50-page biographical preface to the new edition. Rutter travelled in Arabia as a Syrian merchant, but the discovery in Mecca of his English identity caused little problem. He was known as Salah al-Din al Inkilizi (Saladin the Englishman).
In many ways, Rutter lived under pretences. He wrote as Eldon Rutter, but he had been christened Clement Edward Rutter.
Though a Muslim, he married, in 1930, when 36 (or 32 as he claimed) a woman of 19, in the Lady Chapel of Exeter Cathedal. Much of their married life they were apart, during his spells of travel. They had two children, but he left for Venice in 1956, and was never heard of again.
Was Rutter perhaps a British agent? Facey can find no evidence. H St J Philby did not suspect he might be. But Rutter was alive to the danger of being take for a spy, for he arrived in Arabia at a most sensitive time. The year before, the Ikhwan (Brothers), a very mobile militia, had occupied Mecca. They were devotees of Wahhabism, with which we are now more familiar. In alliance with them, a unified kingdom of Saudi Arabia triumphed in 1932.
Their austere doctrine from the desert of Nejd, seeking a pristine Islam, had effects described by Rutter. One was discouragement of even seeming to invoke Mohammed in prayer. “My stick is better than Mohammed,” said one Wahhabi. “Mohammed is dead and gone, and can profit nothing; but this my stick has a use.” This, Rutter wrote, made the Meccan crowd murmur, and a fight almost broke out.
At the Meccan cemetery of al-Ma’la, where Mohammed’s mother, Amina, his wife Kadija, and other famous early Muslims were buried, the “small but handsome domes” above their tombs had without exception now been demolished, together with most of the tombstones”. The guardians of the tombs “no longer dare to spread their handkerchiefs on the ground to receive the pilgrims’ alms”.
Unrivalled among works by Western travellers to Islam’s holy cities, this account of a pilgrimage to Makkah in 1925–26 is made all the more remark-able by its author’s timing. In 1925 ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Saud brought to an end centuries of rule over the Hijaz by the Hashimite sharifs and their Ottoman overlords. Rutter, living as a learned Muslim Arab in a Makkan household, had a ringside seat as Riyadh imposed its writ on Islam’s holy cities. As striking as his account of life in Makkah before modernization are his interviews with Ibn Saud, and his journeys to al-Ta’if and to the City of the Prophet, al-Madinah.
The Holy Cities of Arabia proved to be its author’s only full-length work. After a brief career as a Middle East traveller, Rutter lapsed into obscurity.
This new edition aims to revive a neglected masterpiece and to establish Rutter’s reputation. Little was known about him until now and the introduction tells the story of his life for the first time, assessing his talents as a travel writer and analysing his significance as a British convert.
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