PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA

Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research

University of Tlemcen

Faculty of Letters and Languages

Department of English

Section of English

Orientalism in Agatha Christie’s Detective Novel

They Came to Baghdad

An Extended Essay Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for a Master’s

Degree in Literature and Civilization

Presented by: Supervised by:

Ms. TAIBI Chahrazed Dr. BERBAR Souad

Board of Examiners:

Chairperson: Dr. MOURO Wassila

Supervisor: Dr. BERBAR Souad

Examiner: Ms. MENGOUCHI Meryem

Academic year: 2018/2019

 Dedications

None has the right to be worshipped but You (O Allah)

Glorified (and Exalted), are You- above all that (evil) they associated with You,

Truly, I have been for the wrong-doers

Surah Al-Anbya (87-88)

O ‘Allah I rose up with blessing more than I deserve when without your light inside

You the Lord of Majesty and Bounty I am nothing but a spot of Darkness

For Allah, for my beloved family, my parents, sisters and brother, to my brothers-in law
and all my prized friends, for those blessed souls who pray for me, who all together
assist, wish, advise, and were the tender wind that carried me where I am today

To my precious teachers Mr. Belaid Mohammed Amine and Ms. Mengouchi Merriam
for their support and guidance through years of need and study

For myself that during the darkest moment it focus to see the light

I am certainly fortunate and thankful to my whole surrounding who forgave my

necessity and the frustration of all my ambitions and wishes.

II
 Acknowledgements

I am eternally grateful to my dear supervisor Dr. Souad Baghli Berbar for accepting to
take my work in charge and her ongoing encouragement and support. Mention should
also be made for her three years of teaching full of knowledge, assistance and work. She
is warm-hearted and white-hearted, genteel, perspicacious, diligent in her job, hard
working, flexible, tender, wise, helpful, pure and blessed. A woman with energetic way
of teaching, knowledgeable and experienced, responsible, efficient and a big fan of
correcting grammatical mistakes.I would like to express my sincere appreciation and
admiration for her assistance in the preparation of this dissertation.

Sincerest thanks to my beloved teacher Dr. Mouro Wassila for her two years of teaching
of feminism when she taught and performed a higher sensation, softness and elegance,
as pretty as a picture. Clever, hard worker, successful, spirited with quiet intonation
voice and tender-hearted. Many thanks for Mrs. Gaskell for the kind and strong woman
she is.

Similar profound gratitude addressed to Ms. Mengouchi Meryem about her three years
of teaching of literature then creativity and performance. A heavy motivated, energetic,
a symbol of a hard, sincere, serious, passionate and effective woman, a higher sense of
humour and emotion made by a young teacher. I am firmly thankful for your support.

Quite worthy when I have pure, elegant and energetic precious women in my career

My sincere love and regards for Dr. Frid Daoudi Farid for being my teacher of
American civilization when I had never loved a module in literature and civilization as I
did, noted that it was my first passion to choose the branch.

III
 Abstract

Following the assumption that the origin of the detective novel was inspired from the
Arabian Nights, this paper explores the Orientalist landmarks in the novel They came to
Baghdad by Agatha Christie which displays the orient as an exotic and inferior location.
It relies on the groundbreaking critical book Orientalism by Edward Said (1979) that
has pointed another dimension of seeing the east. It adopts a critical analysis of the
novel’s Orientalist elements based on historical evidence. The extended essay is
composed of two chapters, a general background and an analytical study. The first
chapter introduces the basic components of the research work which are: the detective
novel, Orientalism, and the Arabian Nights. The second one pinpoints the analysis of
the novel They came to Baghdad which contains the features of Orientalism in the
detective type more than they seemed to be. They Came to Baghdad is a detective novel
by the ‘Britain’s Queen of Mystery’ Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, written in
1951. It is an espionage and a thriller detective type of story expertly plotted in the city
of Baghdad after the Second World War. The novel is analyzed under the Orientalism
appraisal that indicates how Agatha Christie presents the western characters vis-a-vis
the Orientals). The novel pictures the negative Orientalists’ stereotypes about the
Middle East specifically and about the Orient in general and discusses several
perceptions against the oriental civilization and atmosphere. It emphasizes the
dichotomy of the self and the other and notifies the schism between the west and the
east. The study concludes that They Came to Baghdad is an Orientalist novel by Agatha
Christie with a biased way of examining and presenting the Orient.

Key words: Detective novel, Orientalism, Agatha Christie’s They Came to Baghdad,
The Arabian Nights, Otherness.

IV
 Table of Contents
Dedications .............................................................................................................................. II

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... III

Abstract.................................................................................................................................. IV

Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………V

General Introduction…………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter one: Detective Novels and Orientalism

1.1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 5

1.2 The Detective Story ............................................................................................................ 5

1.2.1 Description and Origin ................................................................................................... 8

1.2.2 Famous Detective Writers ............................................................................................ 10

1.3. Orientalism ...................................................................................................................... 12

1.3.1. Definition ...................................................................................................................... 12

1.3.2. Twentieth-Century Orientalism ................................................................................. 15

1.3.3. Notions of Otherness .................................................................................................... 19

1.4 The Arabian Nights........................................................................................................... 22

1.4.1. Detective Stories in the Arabian Nights ...................................................................... 26

1.4.2. Oriental Characteristics .............................................................................................. 28

1.5. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 30

Chapter Two:Orientalism in The Novel They Came To Baghdad

2.1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 38

2.2. Agatha Christie and the Orient ..................................................................................... 38

2.3. Overview of the Novel They Came To Baghdad ........................................................... 41

2.4. Orientalism in Detective Novel ...................................................................................... 48

2.4.1. Stereotypes of the Orient ............................................................................................. 52

V
2.4.2. The Conception of Otherness...................................................................................... 54

2.5 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 60

General Conclusion…………………………………………………………………61

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………63

Appendix ……………………………………………………………………………. 67

VI
General Introduction

The world is divided into day and night, hot and cold, white and black, beauty
and ugliness, life and afterlife, civilized and uncivilized, upper and lower, rich and poor,
developed and undeveloped. The human himself is in a bitter conflict inside. There must
be another opposite side to put the blame on, another contrast to each single aspect to
balance what the world was built on or what has been represented, even for the west and
the east. The relationship between the west and the east has always been based on
opposition even before Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1978) showed how the west
misquoted the orient and how it distorted it for centuries. Moreover, Orientalism has
also been influenced by the Arabian Nights book that dealt with an atmosphere of
imagination, flying carpet, jinn, miracles, desert by non-western writers. It has shaped
the orient as an ignorant and retarded world that believed in witchcraft, conjuration,
phantasm and lies.

What is less known is that among the marvel of the Arabian Nights stories, there
is the presence of some with a detective type which has flourished as a new literary
genre, determined with crimes and puzzles. But little attention has been turned to these
Oriental detective stories. This is why the present memoir will focus on the detective
elements in the Arabian Nights and compare them with a detective novel set in the
Orient by the famous detective writer Agatha Christie.

This research work focuses on Orientalism in Agatha Christie’s detective novel

They came to Baghdad and draws the attention on an Orientalist writing by the famous
British detective novelist ‘the Queen of Mystery’. The novel is set in the Orient after the
Second World War in 1951 and the author depicts Baghdad and its inhabitants though
in a detective crime story. This research is therefore articulated on two questions:

How does the book of the Arabian Nights influence the detective genre?

To what extent does Agatha Christie display aspects of Orientalism in the novel?

With the intent to respond, the research work adopts a critical analysis of the
novel’s Orientalist elements based on historical evidence to highlight the Arabian
Nights as the first basis for the detective type.

The extended essay incorporates two chapters. The first one is a general
presentation of the detective story and its origin with its famous detective writers, along

1
General Introduction

with the definition of Orientalism before and in the twentieth century and the notions of
otherness, concluding with the Arabian Nights and its detective stories a side to the
oriental characteristics.

The second chapter is a critical analysis of the novel They Came to Baghdad as
an Orientalist work by Agatha Christie. The chapter highlights the elements of
Orientalism in the detective novel added to the author’s stereotypes of the Orient or
‘Middle East’ and the conception of otherness.

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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

Chapter one:
Detective Novels and Orientalism

3
Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

Outline Chapter one

1.1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 5

1.2 The Detective Story ............................................................................................................. 5

1.2.1 Description and Origin...................................................................................................... 8

1.2.2 Famous Detective Writers .............................................................................................. 10

1.3. Orientalism........................................................................................................................ 12

1.3.1. Definition ....................................................................................................................... 12

1.3.2. Twentieth-Century Orientalism ..................................................................................... 15

1.3.3. Notions of Otherness ..................................................................................................... 19

1.4 The Arabian Nights ............................................................................................................ 22

1.4.1. Detective Stories in the Arabian Nights ........................................................................ 26

1.4.2. Oriental Characteristics.................................................................................................. 28

1.5. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 30

4
Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

1.1. Introduction
The field of literature is ornamented with various genres, among which the detective
genre full of fear and mystery which has determined a complex and popular style in
literature. The dark side of the human being, his hatred and greed, the love of control
and money, the ability to kill and to spy, his fierceness and inhumanity gave birth to the
detective style. Primarily, the origin of the type is from the book of the Arabian Nights
which also gave another basis for the Orientalists’ studies about the Orient. The first
chapter hence specifies some hypothesis about the relationship between Orientalism and
the detective story.

1.2 The Detective Story

The Detective novel or story is defined by the Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary
as a story in which there is a murder or other crime and a detective who tries to solve it.
Detective stories are also known as ‘detective fiction’ or ‘crime fiction’ and informally
as ‘whodunnits’ (or ‘whodunits’.)

It is commonly agreed that the loom of detective-style novel or short stories was
in the mid of 19th century, when countries over the world gave more concentration on
police law enforcement such as police, army, military police for promoting security
either in the state or against any foreign attack. This new genre as well mirrored the way
of living of people and the social background related to crimes. The exploration of this
style was depending on the country itself, indicated by Victor Sahaab that as some
countries adopted it years before some others since the rate of the crimes was different
from one country to another. But the translations of French and British detective stories
reached mainly the whole countries. Many British novelists wrote detective novels and
short stories to show how the British race is capable to deal with crimes and sought for
justice.

Detective fiction is a narrative which combines two types of stories in the same
novel: the daily life of the detective and the narrative of the crime itself. During the
second half of the 19th century, many writers published novels whose central topic were
detective and the central theme was mystery. Romero Isami explained that the detective

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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

writers use the legal and medical factors derived from positivist philosophy and
scientific method to create the characteristics of the crime. It explains the rational and
the logical behaviour of the people (55). The protagonist uses a detective method to
solve the crime as the detective story leans on the structure of law and its standards, and
often there is justice in the end.

In wartime, the tone of conspiracies, spies, propaganda, political agendas and

operations, clashes between ideologies and parties, civil unions, etc. They have all led to
a higher climate of doubts and mystery and as major themes in detective stories. This is
the reason why the British, French and American detectives novels spread out, since the
three of them shaped heavy power when the British and French ruled almost the world.

As explained by Romero, the upper class was excluded because the environment
where they lived could not reproduce the criminal behaviour of bandits, and then those
who were potential criminals were only indigenous and lowerclass even they caused a
threat to the upper class (Romero 66). The writer raises a problematic, translating it in a
crime, guilty person(s), detective(s), clues, investigations, hypothesis, questions,
evidence, reasons, and results. In addition to the scientific process to position his claim,
the writer needs to provide social typologies that permit readers to understand the crime
from logical and rational perspectives (Romero 59).

Edgar Allan Poe was known as the father of the detective story with his
publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”.He considered the detective story as a
complex work, with its psychology and descriptions, not only of crimes but also of
characters and their thinking (Vaselska 10).

Michaela Veselska stated that TzvetanTorodov mentioned three types of

detective in his study “the typology of detective fiction”, or three subgenre. The first
contains a mystery called whodunit, the second is a thriller and the third is so-called the
suspense novel that gathers both the first and the second. An American literary critic
Williard Huntington Wright, better known as S.S. Van Dine, published “The Twenty
Rules for Writing Detective Stories” in 1928. Year later, Knox revised the twenty rules
into ten new ones, which are called the Knox´s Decalogue (Vaselska 13). As
demonstrated by Ronald Tierney’s article The ten rules of detective story by the British
clergyman Monsignor Ronald A. Knox’s Decalogue are the criminal: must be someone
mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the

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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

reader has been allowed to follow, all supernatural: or preternatural agencies are rules
out as a matter of course, not more than one secret room or passage is allowable, no
hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long
scientific explanation at the end, no Chinaman: must figure in the story, no accident:
must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an uncountable intuition which
proves to be right, the detective: must not himself commit the crime, the detective: must
not light on any clues which are not instantly for the inspection of the reader, the stupid
friend :of the detective the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through
his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average
reader, and finally, twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we
have been duly prepared for them.

Not all detective stories use policemen to solve problems, a category of a

detective was simple men or women that like to make investigations as a part from their
hobbies.Some detectives were to play the ignorant or the foolish to not let anyone
knows about what they came to. The writers use men detectives more than women; but
some women could ably write in this genre. Agatha Christie was made the dame in
1971, as pointed by oxford dictionary for her successful work in the detective style. The
famous detective made by her was a woman, Miss Jane Marple with infallible intuition,
a great sense of observation and her proper description was in the novel Murder at the
Vicarage (1930) when Agatha Christie wrote, “Miss Marple always sees everything.
Gardening is as good as a smoke screen, and the habit of observing birds through
powerful glasses can always be turned to account”. Even another detective story of her
Tommy and Tuppense a married couple to solve crimes that shows how much
harmonious the work of woman in this domain (Vaselska 26-27).

The genre did not discard it usage by women writers but remarkably the
whodunits of the women were less violent than of men. Within the crime process there
is investigations, evidences, clues, hypothesis, and witnesses, questions to find the doer.
As pointed by Vaselska, the method used by Edgar Allan Poe is called “ratiocination”.
His stories are named the tales of ratiocination i.e. more information, facts and puzzles
(9). The older type of British detective story is often set in a large country house, and
typically includes the discovery of a murder at the beginning, a small group of
characters who are all suspected of having committed the murder, and a surprising
solution at the end.
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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

1.2.1 Description and Origin

Detective stories share the sense of a mission of looking for truth, sense of humanism in
people’s cooperation and their pain when they lost someone, defend for human rights,
liberty, peace and equality. They display a hard life to make people aware of how
people can dare to commit different crimes and how they should protect their lives. The
detective novel defines also law expression, government procedures, gives instructions,
and demonstrates how police work. A large part of detective stories is real and depicts
heavy political massages, while it may contain imaginary stories that lean on magic and
spirituality or ghosts that exhibits the writer’s brain capacity of imagination and
invention.

The founder of this type is William Wilkie Collins in his novelThe Woman in
White (Victor). But there is no agreement about the origin of the crime story. Some
consider that it dates back to the first story of Adam and Eve and their crime towards
their God, most acquainted in many religions, and their fall from paradise to earth as a
sense of punishment. Or its origin is in the Old Testament the story of the prophet
Daniel and a lot of religious stories of crimes “Susanna and the Elders” tells the story of
a woman falsely accused of adultery and executed for committing this crime against
God. “The story exposes the folly of assessing the truth of witnesses' testimony on the
basis of their rank and reputation.”Following the fact that the witnesses are at the same
time her judges, young prophet Daniel intervenes into the process and reveals the
inaccuracies in their testimonies. (Vaselska7).

Another origin was in the Arabian Nights stories, the tale of “the Three Apples”.
It is the story of a man who killed his wife, when he thought she betrayed him with a
slave and threw her in Baghdad River the Tigris (Vaselska 7). David Benvington points
to the story of Hamlet by William Shakespeare in the 16th century when the protagonist
Hamlet took revenge of his father death, since the latter was poisoned by his brother
Claudius (Hamlet’ uncle).

Previously, the detective writers were not aware of this genre, they wrote at
random, describing crimes from their daily lives.According to Vaselska, there were no

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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

police force crimes’ investigations, i.e. an official institution for dealing with crimes,
until 1812 by Eugène François Vidocq; then in 1829, by the Metropolitan Police by
Robert Peel.That is to say, till the 19th century, as there were no detectives so no
absolute detective stories (11). The real standards of the detective are in the 19th century
and being developing and adjusting trough studies and research.

It is pointed by Isami Romero that in spite of its American origins, modern

detective fictions achieved an important position in Great Britain (54).He considers
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) as the founder of the detective novel in literature. Amer
Ali Baraket noted the first western origins of the detective stories which were with
Edgar Allan Poe in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” in 1842, it is also referred as a
completed story to “Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841 and The Purloined letter”
1844 as his first basis of detective genre. And another modern and attempt was with
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House in 1852-1853 and The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1870.
He has afterwards explained that the first murder on earth was about the children of
Adam when Cain killed his brother Abel. It was the first murder in the history of
humanity.

The first Arab origin of the detective stories was highly impressed with the
Arabian Nights detective stories. Obviously, the first aim of the book is to escape a
murder, when Scheherazade used to narrate stories and stop at dawn to have a chance to
continue next day which would be her day to live. And the story of “ the Three Apples”
when the Caliph asked his Wazir to either find the guilty or he would execute him with
the forty people from his relatives i.e. a continuing of killing process. On the third day
when they all were to die, a young man admitted what he did and for which reasons and
he narrated again his story to disclose the clues, that guided them to another story and
the investigation of the Wazir is in process and the caliph who was insisting for the
truth.

He argued that in the detective stories of the Arabian Nights was a clear climate
of crime, mystery, a long investigation, witnesses, clues, a detective person who uses
his intelligence and who matches the details, criminals, reasons and a punishment. The
focus in the story was on the events more than on the detective person. Amr Ali Barakat
cites as a source for the story of “three Apples” the Baghdadi author Djamel El-Dinne

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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

Abou El Fardj Abd El Rahman El-Djouzi in the 12th century when the story narrated by
him gave a higher importance to the policeman who was looking for the guilty.

1.2.2 Famous Detective Writers

The best-known British writers of detective stories include Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–
1930). A Scottish writer, he is best known as the creator of the famous private detective
Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is able to solve crimes and mysteries using his powers of
observation and deduction (logical thought), sometimes without leaving his apartment
in Baker Street, and often to the amazement of the police and his friend Dr.Watson.
People often say, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’, when they think that a problem is easy
to solve, although Holmes never actually says this in any of the stories. He is often
shown wearing a special type of hat called a deerstalker and smoking a curved pipe. He
also plays the violin and sometimes takes drugs. The Sherlock Holmes stories are still
very popular and have been filmed many times, but Doyle also wrote historical novels
and science fiction. He began his working life as a doctor but gave this up after the
success of his first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet (1887). He was made a knight in
1902.

Agatha Christie(1890–1976) is one of the most successful English authors of

detective stories. Her sixty seven books and sixteen plays have been translated into
many different languages. They include The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the
Nile (1937) and A Murder is Announced (1950). She created two detectives. Hercule
Poirot, a Belgian detective who appears as a character in many of the mystery novels by
Agatha Christie. He has a very neat appearance and a neat pointed moustache. He often
considers English people strange and English people in the books are amused by his
accent. He is extremely clever and uses his intelligence, or what he calls his ‘little grey
cells’, to solve every crime. Many of the stories were adapted for a popular British
television series called Poirot in the 1980s and 1990s.And Miss Marple is a character in
several novels by Agatha Christie. Miss Marple is a gentle, respectable old woman who
has a remarkable ability to solve mysteries and crimes. She first appeared in the novel
The Murder in the Vicarage (1930). There have been many film and television versions

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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

of the stories. Agatha Christie also wrote under the name of Mary Westmacott. She was
made a dame in 1971.

In the US, detective stories more often involve the police or the adventures of a
‘private eye’ (private detective), and are often more violent and realistic. Famous US
writers of such stories include Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) a US novelist who wrote
tough crime stories of the kind that are sometimes referred to as ‘hard-boiled fiction’.
He had a great influence on Raymond Chandler and other writers. Hammett created the
character Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1930) and the humorous couple Nick and
Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1932). These books and many of his others were made
into films. Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) created the tough detective character Philip
Marlowe who appears in several books, including The Big Sleep (1939). Chandler also
wrote several films, including Double Indemnity (1944) (Valeska 12).

In addition, Ronald Arbuthnott Knox’s The Viaduct Murder in 1925, and

Dorothy L. Sayers and her snobbish amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey, Margery
Allingham, G.K. Chesterton (Vaselska 17). French detective writers include Maurice
Leblanc with “Arsene Lupin”, Christine Adamo, Marcel Allain, Jacques-Pierre Amette,
Paul Andréota and Claude Aveline (Vaselska 33).

William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), was called the grandfather of the crime
fiction, his novel The Moonstone in 1868 where the general role was given to a police
officer. It was described by T. S. Eliot as the first, best and long story of British new
criminal investigation (Vaselska 12). Dan Brown’s novels The Lost Symbol 2009,
Deception Point in 2001, Angels and Demons(2000), and Da Vinci Code in 2003, can
be considered as the most famous contemporary detective novels. Umberto ECO, an
Italian author, wrote The name of the Rose in 1980 (il Nome de della Rosa) and Keigo
Higashino’s Salvation of the Saint(2008) are religious detective stories(Vaselska19).

Victor Sahaab remarks that Agatha Christie uses mystery in the comportment of
the detective and the characters and in the clue of the mystery of the crime but Conan
Doyle uses mystery in the environment of the crime. Doyle’s stories setting is in
England but Agatha Christie prefers that her characters travels and each novel has a new
setting like England, in train, in Egypt, in the Nile, in Mesopotamia, in Iraq, etc,
showing her interest in the Orient.

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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

1.3. Orientalism

Orientalism is merely defined as a colonial discourse that has touched several fields
such as culture, literature, geographical entity and institutions that are identified through
years of colonialism in the eastern part of the world. So far, Orientalism is a man-made
split into the orient and the occident, identified by Edward Said as a new word to
determine the orient with a full misinformation. Orientalism is a book by the
Palestinian-American author Edward Said in 1978 where he examines the study of the
other kind when westerners often modulate the orient from one sight to another
according to their requirement.

1.3.1. Definition

Said added two meanings of Orientalism as previously known; academic and

imaginative, then historical and material, for the western world to dominate, produce,
manage, reconstruct and have authority over and above the Orient in politics, society,
ideology, scientific and imaginative side during the post-enlightenment period and long
way before.

I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in

India, or Egypt, in the later nineteenth century, took an interest in those
countries, which was never far from their status, in his mind, as British
colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all
academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and
impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact _ and yet that is what
I am in this study of Orientalism (Said 11).

Moreover, in his book Orientalism he mentioned that the relationship between

the orient and the occident is of power, of dominion and complexity (3-5). Orientalism
was and is a representative object for the near orient: Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt,
Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, turkey etc. and the far orient countries like India, Japan,

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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

China, Burma, Pakistan. Yet, Orientalists deal much more with the near east. A
neologism has been adopted for such British, French, American, German, Spanish,
Portuguese, Italians, Swiss Orientalism. Generally titles are Arab studies or studies over
the orient that are demonstrated in texts, for instance: “Genealogies of Orientalism:
History, Theory, Politics” by Edmund Burke III; David Prochaska, “The Birth of
Orientalism” by Urs APP, “Orientalism, Postmodernism, and Globalism by Bryan S.
Turner, “ Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism” by Mari
Yoshihara, “Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961”
by Christina Klein , “ Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism,
and the Ancien Régime” by Ina Baghdiantz McCabe.

For orientalists, orientalism tables the apprehensions of the orient and wants to
locate its place. But, for Orientals, it is an ornamental oriental model by the westerners
that displays threat and danger about them for most shown in Agatha Christie novels or
short stories when she referred to death in the orient: Murder on the Orient Express, in
1934, Murder in Mesopotamia in 1936, Death in the Nile in 1937, They came to
Baghdad in 1951, The Mystery of Baghdad Chest and short stories “the Adventure of the
Egyptian tomb” and “the Gate of Baghdad” and so forth. Orientalism portrayed an
umbrella that covers the claiming upon the orient since Orientals acquainted it as a total
opposite demonstration of the occident, culture, civilization thoughts, value and strong
political forces. They explained that westerners were so generous to the fact that they
spoke and decide instead of them for giving the world a new vision of a complex and
mistaken knowledge.

Additionally, the bold schism between east and west was and is causing wars
and conflicts, classicism and unbalance, materialism and greed, critics and intolerance,
racism and impurity and more of throwing blames. Common expressions are used along
the west-east poles are: “we and they”, “ourness and otherness”, “normal and different”,
“familiar and strange”, “strong and weak” “light and dark”, and the like. It was a new
discipline that flamed the westerners’ minds to deal with hostility in referring to the
orient at a Christian west. From all account, the west perceives the east as: dark far, and
weak. Joseph Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness pointed two visions: culture and
imperialism, he mentioned Africa as place of darkness and terror (Said 22-31). Or
magical, spiritual, backward, disorderly, disappearing like the Arabian Nights,

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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

unworthy societies, traditional, pre-or non-modern communities more than a

comparable ontology of backwardness.

Even when reciting the eastern way of living ,food and cloths , stories, crafts and
skills, their histories and battles, their architecture and drawing, their honour and faith,
their generosity and goodness, their customs and traditions, their folklore and dance,
their music and poetry, their intimacy and tolerance it would be misinterpreted.
Orientalism, further, reports on the parameters between the occident and the orient, it
has been reproducing and reformulating them the west as an ideal, perfect, modern,
scientific, singular, real and of knowledge. That is, to declare it as a completed part or
the total opposite for the orient.

Orientalism is a new commentary of the orient politically, academically,

socially, historically, literary, economically and more, a new definition for a peculiar
sphere of the east that shapes the exception amongst the rest. Afterwards, Orientalism
was (is) circulated texts handled from age to another with the same perception while
having either a slight or a deep difference in accordance to the specification of the
orientalists’ additional views and time. A clear comparison between the two spheres in a
matter of superiority or inferiority, advancement or retardation, knowledge, technology
and hold. The east was the first temptation for westerners for civilization, they got
closer to Orientals, knew about them, lived with them were and still ambitious about the
geographical glowing location, study in their situations, took from them their sources,
books and knowledge but while referring to them they rang the wrong bells. Further,
blinded statements and prejudices and unworthy status linked to the second half of the
world ‘east’.

Here the westerners’ talks are based on major points against those who do not
share the same religion, the same state, the same continent, the same skin colour, the
same belonging, the same nationality, the same wealth and power, who do not share the
west ethnicity. Edward Said explained in his book Orientalism that they claim for Islam
as “only a misguided version of Christianity” (61). They studied the orient and Orientals
and focused of their religion. Orientalists have visited the orient yet not all when in their
travel books stated things they lived through and saw it would always from a westerner
eye, they presented what they wanted to.

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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

Orientalism can be called the empowerment of the westerners. It has stamped

the orient with many unreliable profiles. Edward Said divided it into old orientalism;
traditional orientalism and modern orientalism that started before the last third of the
19th century and after it (22).

Napoleon Bonaparte was known with his paranoia, he wanted to apply his
civilized idea in conquering Egypt and the Suez Canal, he described the west as father
and the father had to find a mother which is the east in sense of the marriage of the west
and east and the combination between them. As quoted by Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Sherif
from the book of Sexual Orientalism by Mamdouh Al-Sheikh, the image of the orient in
the western imagination has been effected for a large extent from what the Orientalists
have produced and presented when the latter described the orient as female, fertile
resources and its fundamental signs are: the lascivious woman, harem, and the
tyrannical ruler. Mamdouh Al-sheikh considered that some of intellectuals and
travellers in their writings about the orient ...they displayed the oriental woman as a
creature that promoted “the pleasure” and that the west was in need for this sort to
justify its colonization of the east that was pictured as “eternal feminine” and the lowest
civilized. In Kabbani’s view, the representations of women, constructed by writers like
Burton, reflected a standard Victorian prejudice, namely that all women were inferior to
men; and that oriental women were doubly inferior, being both women and Orientals,
(Shabarinad&Marandi 24).

1.3.2. Twentieth-Century Orientalism

A number of centuries merely during the eighteenth, nineteenth and the early twentieth
of the Orientalists’ domination on the orient, the story of the non western world have
acquainted a lot of stereotyped views and few positive perceptions. They amassed the
Middle East, North Africa and Asia in form of essays, plays, novels, drawings and
poems. The tourism also in these areas has aggravated the perception of the orient.
Since westerners came to be acquainted with new different ways of living, new
traditions and civilizations, new people but they actually lived as tourists and they went
back as such. They were in love with the music like Taarab, the Oud’ play, the
solidarity of the Orientals, their acceptance of the foreigners and their generosity. Even
the sky, sand and desert took a double look both beautiful and unperturbed when some
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of them came to find himself through its calm and emptiness or portrayed as fearful,
lost, mysterious and unknown.

Some of what they were biased about were the Arabian Nights with its romantic
benchmarks aside to the images of the flying carpets, Jinns, supernaturalism, sensibility,
harems...They generalized what they read as a mere knowledge of the whole orient. The
Ottoman kings and empire were also mentioned in their perceptions and were described
with force, violence, killings, barbarism. The orient was depicted to be of spiritual
places and of witchcrafts.

However, the perception between east and west was pointed from the first while
the Islamic nation collapsed and the west took over. In the angles of reality, the east
after the end of its civilization was in need of the west’s enlightenment in all domains as
the latter formed a higher perception of superiority and control over them. T.E
Lawrence delivered a combination of propaganda and entertainment for the political
(mis)information of the British people; that helped shape and promote British policy
and influence in the Arab world.

In his book, Reading Arabia: British Orientalism in the age of Mass Publication
1880-1930, Andrew C. Long reviews the work of some of these men and the way in
which they portrayed Arabs and the Arab/Islamic World to mainstream British society
during this period (quoted in Aossey).Thus, they wrote in a favour of their country
against all regards. The ideologies of the 20th century era have shaped the tale; it
represented beside to political regimes a deeper contradiction between the west which is
civilized and urbanized and the east which is full of traditions and with a barbarian way
of living (savage). Long does an excellent job of introducing orientalist voices of the
time, including soldier/explorer, Richard Burton; poet and writer, Charles Doughty;
Scottish adventurer and politician, Robert Cunningham Graham; Marmaduke Pickthall,
a Muslim convert and who translated the Quran into English; and T.E Laurence. These
men based much of their work on embellishments and fantasies depicting the Arab
world in exotic ways, while promoting British influence and colonialism in the region
(Aossey).

It is quite understandable that from the first foot which touched the Orientals’
lands for conquering and the clashes between the both started over. Orientalists works
in general have depicted an “exotic” image of the orient else then feminized and

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sexualized perceptions above the inhabitants of the east. All those painting and
photographs were for the pleasure and the service of the colonizer, a question maybe
raised is supposedly all the perceptions were true like their way of dressing or attitudes
were not for an elegant level, their homes and souks were not stylish or well-build and
other, but even if yes they were living under a colonial process for half of the situation
when the second half is that they were living during the aftermath of colonization or
war. Thus both halves were to indicate that what shaped the orient more or less is the
colonial background.

Firmly indicated by Nancy Demardash, the creation of twentieth-century

Orientalism is a result of imperialism, industrial capitalism, mass consumption, tourism
and settler colonialism in the 19th century. She refers to Edward Said’s interpretation
who argued that a dominant European political ideology created the notion of the orient
in order to subjugate and control it. This nexus of power and knowledge enabled the
west to generalize and misrepresent North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The history
was made by the west which has shaped the east within it full standards. Nancy
Demardash again pointed the painting of the Snake Charmer and His audience, c.1879,
by the French artist Jean-Léon Gerome who depicts a naked youth holding a serpent as
an older man plays the flute – charming both the snake and their audience. Gérome
suggests such nudity was a regular and public occurrence in the “East” besides Eugene
Delacroix, Jean-August-Dominique Ingres and others.

Westerners constructed an imaginary scene of the orient as dangerous, exotic,

and mysterious even with strange customs, the way of talking, behaving, and dressing.
Linda Nochlin argued in her widely read essay, “the Imaginary Orient” (1983), the task
of critical art history is to assess the power structures behind any work of art or artist.
She also said, that the historians have questioned underlying power dynamics at play in
the artistic representations of the “Orient”. Theses scholars challenged not only the way
that the west represented the “East”, but they also complicated the long held
misconception of a unidirectional westward influence (Demerdash).

During the 20th century, two categories of the perceptions of the orient were
found, those who still held the same traditional way of seeing the orient “Traditional
Orientalism” and “modern orientalism”, those who had studied using new references.
They checked the prior claims and added that they used a logical way and techniques to

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interpret the orient even though within both categories, a slight split between who used
only inferior regards to the orient and those who included positive images and accounts.
The negative perception may be weaker somehow as the oriental countries have taken
their freedom, they sought for modernization, industry, tourism, crafts, commerce,
trade, production, investments, economics to better all their life sides.

The traditional Orientalism has taken place from before until the end of world
war two, the era preceding shaped the “Modern Orientalism” which held some positive
images brought by westerners. Since Orientalism is a Euro-American fashion, a
contrary source of knowledge about the Orientals, a patchwork of many western
members and wrong perceptions which lacked evidences and understanding, an imperial
establishment in the oriental world, Orientalists’ pervasive attitudes with an occidental
eye, a historical subjectivity, and a neo-colonialism.

The assault on Orientalism was launched on three different fronts. The first
critique came from Anouar Abdel-Malek, an Egyptian philosopher at the University of
Sorbonne in Paris, with his article “Orientalism in Crisis” in 1962. Abdel-Malek starts
by establishing the fact that the emergence of anti-colonial and national liberation
movements in Asia after World War II, and the victories achieved by these movements
in the form of political independence, has plunged the Orientalist profession in a serious
crisis. No longer is it natural that the Westerners would rule the planet and enjoy direct
control of Asia and the Asians. The main reason for this crisis is, according to Abdel-
Malek, the intimate relationship between the Orientalist scholars and the colonial
powers (Hübinette 2). In a nutshell, the perception goes from negative to positive or
vice versa or in between. The negative is always dominating as a result of the political
power of the western countries till nowadays. Tobias Hübinette illustrates the main
threat to the West, according to Huntington, comes from the East in the form of a
nightmare alliance between the Islamic and Confucian civilizations. So, Orientalism is
strongly intertwined with the Western self-image to such an extent that if Orientalism
goes, then Western world power or even the West itself must also go (7). What is
needed in the world is homogeneous and comprehensible cultures that actually live in a
peaceful tone.

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1.3.3. Notions of Otherness

The study of orientalism proclaims the self-legitimacy of both oriental and colonized
countries (near and far east and Africa) which intents to identify the other as presented
by it demonstrators and as represented by the west. Edward Said’ book Orientalism
states that Orientals were seen to be different and the reverse of what is meant by
westerners, the west, the western society and the western belief. Clearly, Said has stated
that Arabs, Orientals and even Islam, are the most dominants criteria that make the
difference for the occident. It is Edward Said’s groundbreaking study, Orientalism that
represented this transition and that made the fundamental developments in post-
colonialism as a theory and literary trend. Said presented “the vacillation between the
familiar and the alien”.

Two cultures are formulated and put in opposition; the Orient and the Occident
or West. The Orient is presented as an object of Western investigation and control, and
of Orientalism as a ‘western style’ or ‘discourse’ for “dominating, restructuring, and
having authority over the Orient” (Said 3). He presents the narrow-mindedness of
western writers and raises an important challenge to those academics who deliberately
write in stereotyped and dehumanizing ways about ‘the East’ in order to create an
imaginary ‘other’(Hashim16).

The concept of otherness is first used by the westerners, that is how they
perceived the Orientals and from which standards they based their judgements. A keen
interest is provided for the people living in the west; Euro-American power in opposing
to those who do not belong to. The colour of skin then the physical appearances,
religion, the social background and other conditions may affect hardly in what is called
the acceptance of other people race or not.

The concept has also been expressed by Frantz Fanon as who is not me then he
is the other and it included all the self-behaviours and thoughts toward that who is not
me, who is different (quoted by Al-Saidi 1). Moreover, the conception of otherness has
emerged from the procedures of wars, imperialism, colonization and hierarchy; social
classes in the same country and superiority and inferiority between states. Marxism
during the 20th century that permits the ideology of capitalism to shape the development
of the world as a best ideology to be follow then the Darwinian theory that shaped the
non-white race as uncivilized and indigenous which later justifies the first procedures

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added to racism. The west/non-west relation was thought of in terms of white versus the
non-white race (Hashim 15). Part from this partition, the relation of the white to the
black is one of subjugation, mastery, servitude and above all to get self- recognition. As
Ziauddin Sardar puts it:

When the black man comes into contact with the white world he
goes through an experience of sensitization, His ego collapses.
His self-esteem evaporates. He ceases to be a self-motivated
person. The entire purpose of his behaviour is to emulate the
white man, to become like him, and thus hope to be accepted as a
man (quoted by Hashim 16)

The conception of the self and the other has been examined by feminism waves that
women were considered the other for men as an inferior part in an unequal and
patriarchal society. Simon de Beauvoir has defined the concept of otherness as a
fundamental category of human thought. She exemplified the position of woman in
man’s life when she said that the humanity is male and male defines woman not in
herself but as relative to him, she is not regarded as an autonomous being...she is
defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is
the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the
Absolute – she is the other (quoted by Zevallos).

Secondly in writings of postcolonial literature when they wrote that they were signalled
to be the other in order to be colonized, thirdly with Orientals who are denoted with the
notion otherness from the Orientalists and westerners as whole. Hardly, the third is
linked to the first since oriental women were having double otherness. First as being
Oriental women when they have been demonstrated in Orientalists writing as
pleasurable body for dance and sexual relationships. Related, even to the second as the
Orient has a wide experience until now of wars and colonization. Therefore, a double
colonization as being Orientals and counted to be less valued of the westerners then to
be colonized and their long misery.

The Western countries want to preserve their culture, politics and democratic system
from the savagery of other. Another motive of imperialism (is derived from the Latin
word ‘imperium’ which has the meaning of ‘power’, ‘authority’, ‘command’,
‘dominion’, ‘realm’, and ‘empire’) sees it as the natural struggle for survival (Hashim2-
6). Thus, the east is demonstrating a threat for the occident, a mere metonymy for the

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concept of the otherness; the difference, another isolated horizon of the west. In so
doing, the colonial projects have led to this categorization and for economical benefits
such as trade and commerce to the master/slave, white/black, west/east. It is a matter of
servitude between higher and lower states as if the latter is obliged to provide what they
have in a favour of the first ones. “The Orient has been turned to a myth than a space in
the world of a complete intellectual domination of the West” (Hashim17).

Through sociological analysis, seemingly, the representation of different groups within

any given society is controlled by groups that have greater political power. They also
mentioned that within cultural or ethnic identities, gender identities, class identities and
other categories that the individuals would think who they are and who the rest are.
Sociologists announced that looking for some identity is what shapes their belonging to
a certain group and lately after this recognition they would choose or term who would
be accepted on their group and who would not. In the same respect, Zygmunt Bauman
writes in 1991 of the notion of otherness that it is central to the way in which societies
establish identity categories. He argues that: “Woman is the other of man, animal is the
other of human, stranger is the other of native, abnormality the other of norm, deviation
the other of law-abiding, illness the other of health, insanity the other of reason, lay
public the other of the expert, foreigner the other of state subject, enemy the other of
friend” (quoted by Zevallos 2011).

The other is the colonized and the self is the colonizer, to identify the position of the
other from the colonizer is to reach it sufficient domination of the colonized as not
being equal to, neither in civilization, economy nor in political status. Since, the
classification of the other was based on it language, rank, economy, social background,
geographical location, and political ideology and system. In 2003 Andrew Okolie
explains the social identities are relational; groups typically define themselves in
relation to others. This is because identity has little meaning without the “other”. So, by
defining itself, a group defines others. Identity is rarely claimed for its own sake. These
definitions of self and others have purposes and consequences. They are tied to rewards
and punishment, which may be material or symbolic. There is usually an expectation of
gain or loss as a consequence of identity claims. This is why identities are contested.
Power is implicated here, and because groups do not have equal powers to define both
self and the other, the consequences reflect these power differentials. Often notion of
superiority and inferiority are embedded in particular identities (Zevallos 2011). Thus,
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the other can be described as the strange, the different, the alien, the odd, the
mysterious, the bizarre, the weird, the unfamiliar, the unknown, uncanny, the hostile,
and the foreign.

Zuleyka Zevallos has also mentioned that social institutions such as the law, the
media, education, religion and so on hold the balance of power through their
representation of what is accepted as “normal” and what is considered as “other”. The
history of the colonized people have been reshaped by the colonizer when the later
touched all its domains; culture, language, traditions, way of dressing, education and
language, and even the geographical locations that were reconstructed or modulated by
the colonizer. So, it is inherently counted that the west and east are in a state of
opposition without any new examination or analysis of the case. Ineffaceable split of the
‘self’ against ‘other’, the ‘us’ against ‘them’, the ‘west’ then against the ‘east’ and the
division is in their minds, in their hearts, their beliefs, and their writings.

It is pointed by Edward Said who declares; “for Orientalism was ultimately a

political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar
(Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the -Orient, the East, ‘them’) (quoted by
Hashim 17-18). The separation between the self and the other has touched all domains
of literature as novels, poems and theatre. Orientals are the outsiders of the self-
community; they are the Orientalists’ worlds of imaginations. The vision has been
amplified with the translation of The Arabian Nights.

1.4 The Arabian Nights

The Oxford Dictionary defines The Arabian Nights as the name often given to the
Thousand and One Nights, a collection of traditional stories from the Middle East,
written in Arabic. Scheherezade marries a king who kills his wives after their first night
together. She survives by telling him a different story every night. Many popular films,
songs and pantomimes are based on some of these stories, such as Aladdin a poor young
Chinese boy in a story in The Arabian Nights. A magician (a person who does magic
tricks) asks him to go down into a deep cave full of gold and jewels, but to bring up
only an old lamp. Aladdin will not give the magician the lamp until he helps him out of
the cave, so the magician shuts him in. Aladdin discovers that when he rubs the lamp, a

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genie (a spirit with magic powers) comes out of it. He uses the power of the genie to
become rich, defeat the magician and marry a princess. The story of Aladdin is often
performed as a pantomime in Britain. The phrase “an Aladdin’s cave” is sometimes
used to mean a place full of wonderful things. Sinbad the Sailor is also a character in
one of the stories in the Arabian Nights. He is a sailor who has unusual and dangerous
adventures each time he goes to sea. In the 19th century, the story of his seven journeys
became a popular subject for pantomimes in Britain.

The Arabian Nights is also defined by Kaltlin Oglesby as a story straight out of a
romance novel. It is an epic collection of Arabic folk tales written during the Islamic
Golden Age. Scorned by an Unfaithful Wife, Shahryar is the king of a great empire, but
is broken-hearted. Shahryar chose to marry a new woman every day only to kill her the
next morning. Needless to say, this did not make him a very popular ruler. More and
more innocent women die until one day Scheherazade the daughter of the king’s top
advisor, offers to marry the king. The king and advisor both protest, but Scheherazade
insists, all knowing that the night could be her last. That night, she requests the presence
of her sister and tells a story that manages to be the beginning of dozens of stories
meant to keep her alive (2019). It is called “Alf Layla wa- Layla”, “the Thousand
Nights and One night” or “the thousand and the one night”.

The whole book is perceived as the early origin of the detective story for part of
it included detective stories. Moreover, the story starts by a cause of betrayal, a
justification for another sexual relationship with the king’s man, then a result which is
murder of the disloyal woman (a crime). Furthermore, it is the basis of the studies of
Orientalism as it contains the Oriental criteria which led the west to rely on it for its
own perceptions whilst the east was known for spirituality, genii, witchcraft, flying
carpet, magic, fear, unreality, exoticism, backwardness, lie, mystery and an antique
living.

However, while the work has been an integral part of the cultural landscape of
that region, it has not always enjoyed the status of high art. When the tales were first
introduced to the Western world in the eighteenth century, they were regarded as little
more than entertaining diversions with little literary merit (Burton). They perceived the
orient as of marvels, exotic, different and bizarre. The book reached the western world
in the 18th century but thought that it was written long before for the oriental audience.

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The book has known a lot of editions, adaptations, imitations and plenty of other
authors’ touch; who within his translation to his mother country added his own stories
either by citing them or with a camouflage input. Scheherazade weaves a deep narrative,
linking together stories into a rich tapestry of old legends and new tales. As you might
expect from such an ancient text, there are a variety of routes over the years to the same
result of Shahryar falling in love with Scheherazade and removing the threat of daily
death from her life. Others have him seeing their children and realizing that he cannot
kill their mother. In any event, the two live happily ever after (Burton 2004).

In the light of the origins of the book the scholars shared a diverged prospect.
Most agreed on the stories was a mixture from Arabic, Indian, Persian and Asians
authors. They were a patchwork of many authors but the pioneer of the book is
unknown added that he often belonged to Arabic origins, an oriental writer; due to his
higher fluency and knowledge of the Arabic language. Much better he is versed in
poems and details of Arab world even the near and far orient.

Another view of the origin of the Arabian Nights by Richard Burton is that the
first identifiable written version of The Arabian Nights is a book of Persian tales
called Hazar Afsanah (A Thousand Legends, written between 225 and 250), translated
into Arabic around 850.He also mentioned that the tenth-century Arab writer Al-
Mas'oodi refers to this Arabic text, noting that it was known as Alf Layla (A Thousand
Nights), it is now lost. The stories underwent considerable modification between the
tenth and the sixteenth centuries, kept alive by professional storytellers, who would
perform them in coffeehouses all over the Middle East. The title “Thousand and One
Nights” was known in the twelfth century and likely originated from the Turkish
expression bin-bir (“thousand and one”).

On another side, many viewed for the source as being from Indian language and
Persian then translated into Arabic. The stories of the Arabian Nights originated from
Persian and Indian folklores then they came to Baghdad in the 9th century after a Syrian
edition in the 14th (Jetha). European translation of The Arabian Nights was completed
by the Frenchman Antoine Galland. The first part of his twelve-volume Les Mille et une
Nuits (The Thousand and One Nights) appeared in 1704. The manuscript that he used to
work from was acquired from Syria and dated from the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
Galland's edition was quickly translated into English, with early editions of the so-

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called “Grub Street” version first appearing in 1708 (Burton). Many European
translations appeared based on the four nineteenth-century sources, including those by
Dr. Jonathan Scott (1800), Edward Wortley Montague (1811), Henry Torrens (1838),
Edward W. Lane (1838-41), John Payne (1882-84), Richard F. Burton (1885), Andrew
Lang (1898), and J. C. Mardrus (1899-1904), (Burton).

Further beside it was mentioned by Caroline Fontaine that the trade route cited
in the book, in real life at that era included Egypt, Persia, Arabian, Turkey, Baghdad,
Syria, and India. Baghdad which was a Muslim Islamic world centre, it dominated place
and characters in the story (Ackroyd). In regard to the book tales, Sir Richard Burton
declared that they have became an inextricable part of the western heritage, the stories
of Princess Scheherazade, Aladdin, Sinbad the sailor and Ali Baba are firmly
established in the western imagination (Burton).

Scheherazade indirectly with her stories formulated a universal sense of

knowledge for the king to make him aware and better in ruling, other stories were
teaching lessons for him in life and how he can manage to be a loyal sultan. The stories
include fairy tales, legends, romances, fables, anecdotes, and other fictions include,
among other tales, the discovery of the unearthly City of Brass, Abu Hassan's waking
dreams, the bizarre peregrinations of Sinbad the sailor, Ali Baba's dangerous and
tempting encounter with the forty thieves, Aladdin's entry into the world of magic, the
insomniac caliph Harun al-Rashid's wanderings throughout Baghdad, and many others.

The stories address universal concerns such as love, death, happiness, fate and
immortality in a manner that transcends linguistic and cultural boundaries. They also
cover spiritual matters, exploring questions about how to live in a world that contains
both good and evil, with these opposites represented by various characters, such as
tyrannical and kind rulers, magicians and witches, good and bad demons…the
relationship between the sexes, the inevitability of human desire, and the quest for
spiritual perfection.

Many stories have been converted to cartoons and films but some other were
not. Early Western scholars also objected to what they perceived as the immoral beliefs
and behaviour of the Islamic characters in the tales. In contrast to the attitude of literary
critics, the tales were well received by many Western poets, especially during the
Romantic period. Writers such as Goethe, Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and

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Edgar Allan Poe saw the collection as a work of unique imaginative power, and the
tales were deeply influential on their thinking and work. They also gripped the popular
European imagination, spawning a number of pseudo-Oriental works (Burton). They
even gave birth to detective stories.

1.4.1. Detective Stories in the Arabian Nights

The stories of the Arabian nights relied on imaginary writing and fantasy by the author
(s) which demonstrated the creativity and the smartness. Zahraa Abdel-Wahab states in
her article that the origin of the detective genre is from the Arabian Nights. She also
mentioned that Edgar Allan Poe who is regarded as the father of the detective genre has
been influenced by the Arabian Nights starting by the second tale. The detective genre
as being displayed talked of many thieves, disloyal, greedy swindlers, those women
who betrayed their husbands, killers; those who kill for money, for power, for love, by
mistaken, or who were accused and the like.

Some detective stories that appear in the Arabian Nightsare: “The Tale of the
Three Apples”, “The Thief and His Monkey”, “The Man Who Stole the Dish of Gold
Wherein The Dog Ate”, “Al-Malik al-Nasir and the Three Chiefs of Police”, “The Story
of the Chief of Police of Cairo”, “The Story of the Chief of the Bulak Police”, “The
Story of the Chief of the Old Cairo Police”, “The Thief and the Shriff” ,“The Sharper of
Alexandria and the Chief of Police”, “Story of the Chief of the New Cairo Police”, “The
Chief of the Kus Police and the Sharper” , “The Thief and the Merchant”, “The Stolen
Necklace” , “The Stolen Purse”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”. Even in “Aladdin
and the Magical Lamp”, the magician stole the magical lamp to make Aladdin poor and
to have the genie as a servant to fulfil his wishes (see Appendix).

All these tales can be said to be detective stories since they display all the
characteristics of the genre. “The Sharper of Alexandria and the Chief of Police”is set
in Egypt in a khan, exactly in Alexandria and then in Cairo, the protagonist is the Chief
of Police named Husám al-Din hightn who was looking for justice, the other characters
are another chief’s officers, soldier and folks. Apparently, the crime stated in the story is
the stealing of thousand pieces of gold. There was afterwards a process of looking for
the thief amongst all prisoners when he was to flog them but a man came to him and

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confessed his crime. The second tale of “Al-Malik Al-Nasir and the Three Chiefs of
Police”, the name Al-Nasir means “The conquering King;” a dynastic title assumed by
Saláh al-Dín (Saladin) and sundry of the Ayyúbi sovereigns of Egypt, whom I would
call the “Soldans”(Burton). The story stated the king Al- Nasir that has demanded from
three Walis to state the crime committed during their work in Cairo, Bulak and Fostat as
explained by Richard Burton.Bulak is the port suburb on the Nile, till 1858 wholly
disjoined from the City; and Fostat is the outlier popularly called Old Cairo (Burton),
i.e. in three places in Egypt.

Furthermore, in “the Story of the Chief of Police of Cairo”, the element of the
law was the chief of Cairo and his servant, the Kazi (judge) and his messenger and the
legal witnesses and the court as setting for interrogatory, others characters were women
of sad reputation, another man, slave girl and the house master. The setting is in Cairo
at night and the crimes were in a form of firstly the bribery that the master of the house
and the two witnesses gave three hundreds dinars for the chief of the police for covering
their second crime which was their corruption (debauchery) when Muslim men and
women having illegal relationships, and drank wine in a closed house. They were both
secretly addicted to intrigues with low women and to wine-bibbing and to dissolute
doings, after the two legal-witnesses and the house-master sitting, and lewd women by
their side and before them great plenty of wine (Burton).

Another crime is the perjury of the two witnesses against the chief of Cairo as
they (two witnesses and the master of the house) gave him money and begged for his
pardon and it was not debt as they accused him for in front of the judge. Apparently, the
statement in the tale “two men of good repute fit to bear witness in matters of murder
and wounds” proved that another feature of crime investigation was used at that time in
Egypt as example, added to that the chief ordered the taverners and confectioners and
fruiterers and candle-chandlers and the keepers of brothels and bawdy houses to
acquaint me of these two good men whenever they should anywhere be engaged in
drinking or other debauchery (Burton).

In “The Story of the Chief of the Bulak Police”the city is Bulak near the Nile
River, the setting was at night. Again the characters were the chief of Bulak and his
servants (of house), a boy and thieves. The crime cited in the tale is about the thieves
who have stolen gold and silver vessels “a great chest, full of vessels of gold and silver”

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Chapter One: Detective Novels and Orientalism

(Burton), then the second crime they cheated and lied on him as they pretended that the
stuffs were of gold and silver but they were not. The chief of Bulak has checked them
but for his misfortune the price was far less than what he exchanged with the thieves
“But when morning dawned I examined the contents of the chest, and found them
copper and tin1 washed with gold worth five hundred dirhams at the most”.

Additionally, in “The story of chief of the old Cairo Police”, the characters in
the story were the chief of the Old Cairo police, the ten thieves, the guards, the thief
who stole the dead-body, the peasant, another dead man. The setting was in the building
of the soldiers; the barracks as stated by Richard Burton “...As late as 1840 the Arnaut
soldiers used to “pot” any peasant who dared to ride (instead of walking) past their
barracks. Life is cheap in hot countries” (Burton). That is to say as the peasant did not
respect them by passing beside their barracks riding animal mostly a horse and not on
his feet. The crime committed in the story of the ten thieves hanged by the chief of the
old Cairo who stole something, the thief who killed two of them for some reasons and
who later stole one corpse, after the peasant who has killed and cut a man that the chief
found within his saddlebag.

All the detective stories in the Arabian nights contains and attains the condition
of being recognized as detective genre like the crime, the policemen, the judge, the
investigation procedures, the reasons and the results, the punishment of the criminals,
the solutions , the justice and the protection of human rights.

1.4.2. Oriental Characteristics

The Arabian Nights discussed a panorama of regions, ethnicity, creatures, religion,

civilization, different eras and emperors. The most dominant characters within the
stories were the caliph Haroun Al-Rachid, his vizier Jaafar Al-Barmaki and the poet
AbouNuwas. The tales talked of the Persian, Indian Arabian, Egyptian, Tigris and
Euphrates and other eastern countries, in a form of narration, puzzles, poetry, even
music and songs to enlarge and ornate the stories andto decorate the tale’s purposes.

Said argues that there existed a negative inversion between the two concepts
where the "Orient" is characterized as opposite of the "good western culture". Thus,
there is a formation of a myth wherein the prototypical "Orient" is viewed as eccentric,

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backward, sensual, and passive. Its progress in comparison with the Occidental culture
was always inferior and conquerable. The discourse was created and employed by the
Western colonial power to dominate, restructure and control the Orient (Solanki).

The images taken from the Arabian Nights according to the western review are
in total negative prospects since they presented and defined the orient as in the Arabian
Nights’ tales, while the tales were written by different authors and for the fun of
literature, full of imagination and not a real background of how the east and it
inhabitants were. The orient was seen to be imaginative; not real, fantastic; weird,
spiritual. Robert Irwin even claimed that the stories reveal racist prejudices not only
regarding blacks, but also with respect to Jews, Persians and Europeansfor the stories
also provide many instances of sexist and misogynistic assumptions, as well as a taste
for heartless mockery of cripples. He also exemplified the concept of racism and
misogyny in the story of “Ashraf and Anjab and the Marvelous things that happened to
them”. He illustrated again with the critic Daniel Beaumont the focus on the originating
frame story’s implicit taboo against black men sleeping with white women: “the racism
involved is clearly worsened by the fact of the slavery was a divine punishment
imposed on blacks was known in medieval Islam” (Irvin).

The Orient is seen asa place full of witchcraft, incantation, occult, lies, savagery,
erotic, exotic, of belly dance, sexuality, djinn, destiny, prognostication, spirits, terrifying
creature. It is equally true that some considered the work as belonging to the lower art
since it has been noted as odd, not realistic, full of ignorance, bizarre, peculiar, strange,
furious, threat, mysterious, cruel, backward in the sense of believing in the witchcraft
and superstitions, full of audacity, hostile, misogyny, obscenity and being marginalized
as it was in the form of imaginary tale and not authentic.

The Arabian Nights became widely known in Europe after the Crusades and
inspired countless artists and writers from Chaucer to Dickens to Rushdie in Britain. Sir
Richard Burton’s translation in the late-19th century brought it a new level of popularity
in Britain, not least because it was purported to expose the vagaries of the Muslim
mentality and Arab way of life. Perhaps these injudicious perceptions, callusing over
time, even laid the foundations for present-day Islamophobia (Farhi). Some of the tales
were made by westerners and Orientalists i.e. the background and the perceptions

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usually were to be seen from a western perspective and not from an oriental one as it
was shaped by occidental eyes and hands.

The discourse of Orientalism was created by Euro-American Orientalists who

were to examine to the Arabian Nights’ tales with their own perspectives and then
involved in other oriental studies as of literature, religion and culture willing to
dominate the orient for formulating a lower regard and information about it. Heinrich
Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that man is bound
to lie about himself (Dostoevsky 41) i.e. each autobiography has to be faithful and in
serve of it owner. It seems a bit global of the characteristics made for the oriental as the
whole west offered a harmful profile for the oriental people and culture when for the
first insight they were influenced, inspired and attracted to the work of the Arabian
Nights and which is still influential today. Thus, they shifted to the studies of the orient
and the conception of the otherness by their own interpretations.

1.5. Conclusion

The chapter investigated the detective genre, its components and structure, the
subgenre, the rules as well as the factors that led to it emergence, some of it famous
authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Wilkie Collins and the
dame Agatha Christie. Besides, it encompasses a description of Orientalism before and
after the twentieth century with a slight difference in the Orientalists’ views and
description. It also examined the notion of otherness as it shapes a direct contact with
the Orient by westerners. Finally, it explored the origin of the detective genre as going
back to the Arabian Nights that was full of crime stories and proved by different
scholars and researchers. The Orientalist studies can help pinpointing the features of an
oriental detective novel by Agatha Christie, They Came to Baghdad.

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Chapter Two: Orientalism in The Novel They Came To Baghdad

Chapter Two:

Orientalism in The Novel They Came To

Baghdad

36
Chapter Two: Orientalism in The Novel They Came To Baghdad

Outline Chapter Two

2.1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 38

2.2. Agatha Christie and the Orient ......................................................................................... 38

2.3. Overview of the Novel They Came To Baghdad .............................................................. 41

2.4. Orientalism in Detective Novel ........................................................................................ 48

2.4.1. Stereotypes of the Orient ............................................................................................... 52

2.4.2. The Conception of Otherness ........................................................................................ 54

2.5 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 60

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Chapter Two: Orientalism in The Novel They Came To Baghdad

2.1. Introduction

After Agatha Christie life’s experiences and in the aftermath of the Second World War,
she wrote the novel They Came to Baghdad which was published in 1951 about the city
Baghdad. It is based on the fear of another world war and the love for the work of
archaeology of her second husband in the Middle East. She portrays a witty detective
novel that gathers between fear and love of the orient, the self and the other, in a
crammed and eventful design for a detective genre.

2.2. Agatha Christie and the Orient

Agatha Christie is a popular novelist and well appreciated among her contemporaries, a
woman of different works and skills who gave another pleasure for the reader with new
science and excitement about the East’s ruins. She is Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller,born
on September 15, 1890 and passed away on January 12, 1976.She was the last daughter
amongst her four sisters, belonging to the middle class. After the death of her father, she
went to Paris to learn how to play the piano (Arageek 2018).

When she got back, she accompanied her mother to Cairo and then they returned
to London. She started writing but her first work was refused by publishers. The
rejected novel was The mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, which was finally accepted
by the publishing house The Bodley Head (Arageek 2018). The work presents a hero
named Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who appears as a character in many of the
mystery novels by Agatha Christie. He has a very neat appearance and a neat pointed
moustache. He often considers English people strange and English people in the books
are amused by his accent. He is extremely clever and uses his intelligence, or what he
calls his ‘little grey cells’, to solve every crime.

Many of the stories were adapted for a popular British television series called
Poirot in the 1980s. Moreover, her novels were sold for two billion copies and were
translated into 103 languages in the world. She was honoured as the Dame Commander
of the order of the British Empire in 1971(Arageek 2018).

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One of her best novels was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926, the year
when she lost her mother besides her husband’s betrayal. With a lot of disappointment
and sorrow she disappeared for some days until the policemen found her in a hotel
under the name of his new mistress. All her previous work was with the detective
Character Hercule Poirot “When modelling her detective”, Agatha Christie
“remembered the colony of Belgian war refugees living in Tor, a parish in Torquay”
(Arageek 2018).Then she decided she would make the detective a Belgian. This is how
Hercule Poirot was born. She wanted her detective to have a heroic name. Therefore she
named him “Hercules, after the hero of Greek myth” (Arageek 2018). Later, she
claimed to be unable to remember where the name 'Poirot' came from, but “she liked the
sound of the name 'Hercule Poirot'” (Mulder7).

But after her second marriage she wrote Murder at the Vicarage, where she
introduced another female character named Miss Marple who was also in The Moving
Finger in 1942, and A Pocket Full of Rye, 1953. She published Unfinished Portrait in
1934 Daughter and a Daughter in 1952 under the name of Mary Westmacott. Further,
she wrote plays like The Hollow in 1951, Verdict in 1958 and her famous one the
Mousetrap in 1952. Many of her novels have been converted to movies or series like
Murder on the Orient Express in 1974 and Death on the Nile in 1978. She wrote a diary,
Come, Tell Me How You Live where she spoke of her travels with her second husband
Max Mallowan (Arageek 2018). She was named “The Queen of the detective novel” or
“the Queen of mystery”. She worked as a nurse during the First World War. In the
Second World War, she worked in a pharmacy where she got a valued experience of
medicines and poisons which has been reflected a lot in her novels containing death by
poison.

She went with her mother to Cairo for a curative trip while her mother wanted to
find her a husband in the large British touristic crowd (Arageek 2018). She studied in
Paris this is why she used a lot of French words and French names in her novels. She
met her first husband Lieutenant Archibald Christie in 1912 and at the end of 1914, she
married him and took his name.

After her divorce she visited the city Ur in Iraq in 1929, while Leonard Woolley
was the archaeologist who was responsible for the monuments found there. It was
prohibited to enter in the places of digs but he accepted her as his wife Katharine was a

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real fan of Agatha Christie’s works. A year after, she received a second invitation from
his wife to visit the same place.

Agatha Christie lived in Baghdad, the city that has always been acquainted with
the book of the Arabian Nights. She wrote about the orient and spent a couple of years
there. Seven of her novels were dedicated to the orient: Murder in Mesopotamia (1936),
Death on the Nile (1937), Appointment with Death (1938), and Agatha Christie's
memoir Come, Tell Me How You Live.

After the Second World War, Agatha Christie wrote another three novels which
took place in the Middle East: Death Comes at the End (1945), which is set in Egypt,
and They Came to Baghdad (1951), which is set in Mesopotamia (Iraq), Destination
Unknown (1954), which is set in Morocco along some short stories like “The Adventure
of the Egyptian Tomb” from Poirot Investigates (1924) (Mulder 4). Agatha Christie
wrote also “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb”, where she refers to the discovery of
the tomb of Tutankhamen by Lord Carnarvon (Mulder 8).

The novel They Came to Baghdad was stimulated by Agatha Christie’s voyages
to the orient as a whole but the novel is about Baghdad, which she visited in her infancy
and lived in after her second wedding with an archaeologist. Sir Max Edgar Lucien
Mallowanwas a British archaeologist, after receiving a degree in classics at New
College, Oxford; he began his long career and made major contributions as an excavator
and educator.He married the novelist Agatha Christie in 1930 and one year after her
death, he married the archaeologist Barbara Parker. He worked in Ur (an ancient city in
Iraq, in southern Mesopotamia), Ninevah, Tall Arpachiyah, Chagar Bazar, Tall Birak,
Balikh Valley were all in Iraq, Syria Nimrud (Editors 2019).

Agatha Christie lived with her husband, got in touch with his colleagues and
learned a bit the science of archaeology. Typically in the novel, she stated both places
where the story has taken place and mentioned other countries which had a link. The
oriental setting and places visited (or only stated) in the novel were Baghdad, Basrah,
Iraq, Cairo, Persia, the office of mister Dakin or the Boac office in Baghdad,
Mesopotamia, Tehran, Souks of Baghdad, Mecca, Rowanduz road (Iraqi Kurdistan
road), Tripolitania (Libya), Egypt, Heliopolis (an ancient city in Egypt), Kuwait, Persia,
BeitMelek Ali (the house of the king Ali), Tigris river, the Nile river, Museum,

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Babylon, the Ishtar Gate, Mandali, desert, Tell Aswad, Kermanshah, Abbasid Hotel,
Rachid street, Bank Street…

Westerners were fascinated with the findings of archaeology; a wave of travels

towards the east took place with total interest for the new objects and materials found
after the digs like in Syria and the tombs in Egypt. The teams of archaeology from
different nations like the British group which was mainly in Baghdad, Syria and Egypt
more than any other eastern part. Agatha Christie’s husband and his group spent their
days of work of digging there. But only few could afford, especially after the First and
the Second World Wars, the economic situation was unpleasant so people were to know
the orient only from the writings.

She respected archaeology so much that she even dedicated Murder in

Mesopotamia to her “Many archaeological friends in Iraq and Syria” (Mulder 10). She
loved her new work with her husband, she discovered new names and objects. She
remained in Mesopotamia for three winters and one winter in Syria. After which they
made a big journey through Asia and Eastern Europe, and twice around Ninevah in
Mesopotamia and the forth one in north Syria in the Habur Valley 1934 (Mulder 09-10).
She accompanied her husband in his work, when she used to classify the monuments,
clean and repair them; she took even a lot of photographs of the objects. He became the
headmaster of the British school of archaeology in Iraq when they found ivory
sculptures. When she lived in Baghdad in a Turkish house besides were the trees of
palms which it was well detailed in her autobiography (translated by me).

In conclusion, Agatha Christie regarded her life in the Orient as important

enough to incorporate it in her novels. Seven of the thirty-three Poirot novels take place
in the Orient, which is about twenty percent. Agatha Christie wrote most of her Oriental
novels in the 1930s, because that was also the period when she lived in the Orient
herself (Mulder 12). She knew about the orient and Orientals as a tourist woman from
Britain who lived there for purpose of work and went back to the west as she used to be.

2.3. Overview of the Novel They Came To Baghdad

They came to Baghdad was a 1951 Agatha Christie’s novel (from 1950 to 05 of March
1951) it is thriller book about spy fiction which took place in the Middle East rather

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than a mystery or whodunit. It contains mystery, crimes, criminals, police force, spies,
murders, cheating, lies, fake identity names, kidnapping, romance, menace, and
challenge. She used the occupation of archeologist of her husband and his friends, her
souvenirs with him in the novel.

The novel starts at eleven in the morning, when Captain Crosbie walked through
the Bank Street, as all the banks were found in the same dark and dirty road, in the city
of Baghdad. The street was full of typewriters working and the clicks of their machines
were tuned. A dusty road with some heat of the sun full of shouts and movements,
motors, sellers, merchandises, disputes, wails of men conducting donkeys and horses
when they used to warn the passengers about not being hit by either animals or motors
they say: “balekbalek”. Kids and even men were selling different kinds of plants, fruits,
tools of shaving, towels, and dishes.

Mr. Crosbie passed through the Rachid Street which was the main street in
Baghdad, he bought a journal from a boy, and after catching some interesting titles he
walked to a small road and passed to Mr. Dakin’s office, he was a spy whose mission
was to control and promote all the coming meeting’s security and success. Mr. Crosbie
asked Dakin if any superpower (a western president) is coming to Baghdad. They both
knew that the British agent Carmichael sent some information through Salah Hassan’s
message as ‘A white camel with a load of oats is coming over the Pass.’ Mr. Crosbie
argued that “they came to Baghdad and on the blotting pad he drew a circle and wrote
under it Baghdad – then, dotted round it he sketched a camel, an aero plane, a steamer, a
small puffing train – all converging”(Christie 11).

The two men were worried about their security since Baghdad was already
accused with death of foreigners, but Mr. Dakin took the mission to cover them. Anna
Sheele is a blond American girl with a good looking and beauty as well as intelligence,
a hard working and trustful woman with a large salary and position. She is a secretary of
Mr. Otto Morganthal the head of the firm Morganthal, Brown and Shipperke,
International bankers (Christie 13).

Victoria Jones is a British girl, courageous and warm hearted (Christie 15) an
orphan, and not a good typist who lost her job with Mr. Greenholtz. She was from
London and once she met a charming boy named Edward who fascinated her. He told
her that he was going to Baghdad and she wanted to join him. There was a family of

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two old wealthy couples leaving to Baghdad to see their daughter who lived in Iraq. The
American woman Mrs. Hamilton Clipp has a broken arm and needed someone to help
her. She went to Baghdad with them as a nurse. The boat was passing Shatt El Arab to
Basrah having a lot of passengers.

A man dresses half of east and west, with old clothes and a red scarf turned
across his neck,. He acted like an Arab citizen when he in reality he was a British agent
called Henry Carmichael or ‘Fakir Carmichael’ who has some secret information which
may serve the whole world. The British spy was thirty years old and was able to talk
different languages such as Kurdish, Persian, Armenian, Hindustani, Turkish, Arabic,
including the Iraqi dialect and other ones (Christie 52). Thus, he came to Baghdad since
he has to fulfil his mission.

They reached the wharf and passed by the Souk which was noisy and messy,
tribesmen, kids, vendors, people pushed each other. Laden donkeys made their way
along their drivers calling out ‘balekbalek’ Children quarrelled and squealed and ran
after Europeans calling hopefully, Baksheesh, Madame, Baksheesh. Meskinmeskin…
(Christie 55).

He felt uneasiness while passing; it was a vague of sense of menace. Nothing

appeared but he felt that he has been pursued by someone, nothing was certain yet.
Carmichael arrived in a store when there were Ferwahs (the sheepskin coats of the
north), he liked and asked for the price: “Beshhadha?” (How much it costs?), but after
he knew that it costed seven dinars he found it expensive. At the meanwhile a Hajji who
came from Mecca has suggested for him to Kerbala when he would find a cheaper
Ferwahs there, then Carmichael asked if there was a white ferwah coming from the
north (Christie 57), the Hajji said yes. All the conversation was secret statements and
coded messages and information, the keywords were ‘white Ferwahs’ and Kerbala’.

At the same time, Richard Baker, an English man came to the consulate to meet
the British Consul, he himself and Fakir Carmichael who dressed as an Arab boy and
another English merchant traveller were in the waiting room, but Richard baker who
was a friend of Carmichael did not recognized him with his Arab clothes. There was a
clear menace, the man tried to shoot Carmichael but Richard Baker knocked his arm.
Carmichael ran and within his way to the door his passed a small message to Richard

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Baker, putting it in his pocket. It was a paper that contains six lines small and difficult
to read.

Victoria Jones and Mr. and Mrs Hamilton Clipp, another man called Mr. Rupert
Crofton Lee and Mrs. Kitchen with her two kids arrived to Baghdad. A man called the
London office and told them that they lost Anna Scheele (A.S), she did not return back
to the Savoy Hotel. Young Mr Shrivenham (Lionel) of the British Embassy went to
Baghdad to meet a VIP, Sir Rupert Crofton Lee. He demanded for Shrivenham to book
a room for him then a ticket for a plane two days later leaving to Cairo since he could
not be five days in Baghdad as he intended because he would not be safe. When they
got there and the Lionel helped him firmly in all his inquiries, he has gone.

Victoria reached Baghdad from the airport with a hot choking yellow dust. She
was unfavourably impressed by Baghdad (Christie101), a lot of loud voices, yell, mess,
and whistles blowing. She came to the Tio Hotel that has a sight on the Tigris, in
unpleasant and difficult conditions. The owner of the Hotel named Marcus was a nice
man who welcomed and greeted them. When she got to her room with a headache and
felt fatigue; she hated the place. She hoped to find Edward that he may help her in her
financial need. She felt strange there; there was no glamour or travel but confusion
(Christie 118). She discovered that her cherished Edward was working at the Olive
Branch with Dr. Rathbone. But unfortunately he told her that Edward was in Basrah for
work. Then she got back to the Tio Hotel,

Four Hours later, an injured man knocked at Ms. Victoria Jones’s door and
asked for her help and to cover him from police. She accepted, after the police left, he
died saying, “Lucifer, Basrah, Lefarge”, which were three keywords Mr. Dakin entered
the room and asked her what he said then he called Marcus to help the dead body of
Henry Carmichael outside. Mr. Dakin proposed that for Fakir Carmichael’s words, the
proofs might be in Basrah, but he did not understand anything about Lucifer or Lefarge.

He asked her to work with him and she would be paid. They started firstly by
Basrah and it was a keen destination since her lover Edward Goring was there. When
she met him she narrated everything related to her only and asked him for help and a
job. She mentioned the story of the dead young man and everything. Edward claimed

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that Mr. Dakin might have lied to her and even the Carmichael might not be dead. He
stated also that there is something unusual and fishy about Olive Branch and Dr
Rathbone.

In the House of Commons last night, the Prime Minister gave fresh details of the
cuts in dollar imports, when Sir Rupert Crofton Lee was found dead in the Nile of
Cairo, and all agreed that it was the worst place ever for that (Christie 179). Thus, two
secret agents Mr. Henry or (Fakir) Carmichael and Mr. Rupert Crofton Lee died in the
orient. It was notable then that anyone who would like to know or to spy about the
business of the holders would be killed.

Edward has found her a paid job there as typist for their activities. When she got
there she could not find anything suspicious, tricky or illegal. She felt some fear and
was bothered by Ms. Catherine who loved Edward as well. She wondered why Dr.
Rathbone asked her whether she was satisfied in the Olive Branch or not.

Days later, Victoria visited ‘Beit Malik Ali’ the next morning... and saw “five to
six dirty children playing in rags...an Arab primitive boatman seated in a primitive
rowing boat” (Christie 198). She also went with Edward to Babylon, but they were not
pleased. ‘But these Iraqis are frightfully good at tying it up with string and saying
Inshallah and then it goes again’ (Christie 200). However, she visited with Edward other
places, and required her to be a friend with Ms Catherine, and to remember all Dr.
Rathbone’s behaviours and talks. He was afraid if she would be killed and thrown in the
Tigris River since the communists were merciless and cruel. She suddenly remembered
a detail about the neck of Sir Rupert who might not have been killed.

The substitute would go to Cairo instead of him then they announced his death
in Cairo when he was killed in Baghdad. Edward Goring felt surprised and he did not
believe her version of what occurred. He suggested for waiting two more days before
telling Mr. Dakin. Victoria was kidnapped by Catherine. She heard some noise and
talking in Arabic but she did not understand. She was in a small but very high room, the
only furniture in the room seemed to be the bed on which she was lying with a dirty rug
thrown over her. There was a window with a kind of wooden lattice-work outside it. A
small child with a face tattooed in blue, and a lot of bangles on, was tumbling as quite
the same there was dirt, noises, depressing furniture, dusty and strange place. A small

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child with a face tattooed in a blue and a lot of bangles on was tumbling about with a
ball and singing in a high nasal whine rather like distant bagpipes (Christie 212).

The place she was in is far from Baghdad, an Arab boy came to her to give some
foods with an old dishes he gave her some remarks but she was totally ignorant in
Arabic. She ate to have some energy to think and move the food was tasty at least. The
evening two women with a hidden face came there and were giggling. It was exciting
for them to have a European woman imprisoned (Christie 215).She addressed them in
French and English but they were only giggling for the she tried to talk to them but the
Arab boy banned her and said ‘Bukra’ which she understand as tomorrow someone
would come.

Victoria managed to escape wearing an old aba (black Arab dress) in the dark
night. Hours later she went out and addressed the unknown, the mystery, the primitive
lands and nature small roads which suited the donkeys and not human, she was furious
and uncomfortable. Victoria walked till she got thirsty and exhausted. On the other
hand, what she badly needed was to get back to civilization, and the only means was
that as far as she could see a European she would ask for a lift (Christie 224). Victoria
Jones asked the one sitting next to the driver if he may help her to go to Baghdad. He
was Mr. Richard Baker and he had just arrived. He went to Dr. PauncefootJones,
Richard told him that he brought his niece with him (Christie 237).

She was talking to Richard and suddenly she got the image of the charter of
Madame Defarge in the novel A Tale of Two Cities in 1859 by Charles Dickens. It is an
allusion to the fact that the vital witness has been stitched into a scarf (Fox 2019) so the
name was Defarge and not Lefarge. The next morning, Victoria went to Baghdad after a
week of loss and fear. Their way to Baghdad was full of primitive sights, nature and
donkeys, hot temperature and dust. Victoria asked about the official office of Mr. And
she went to see him. She explained what happened to her to Mr. Dakin who did not
know anything; she knew that even Edward Goring did not come to look for her. With
the help of Mr. Dakin she wrote a message to Edward to arrange a secret rendezvous
with him.

When he came they talked of many events and persons and he mentioned
wrongly the Bishop office and his face became defenceless. She knew that she did not
mention the office at all previously but to Mr and Mrs Hamilton Clipp but he did not

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know them. She knew that he was the Lucifer that Carmichael has seen before his death,
she recalled Mr. Rathbone’s words who was really warning her from danger and not
threatening her. The miserable Victoria recognized that Edward cheated on her. She felt
pity about herself but she acted normal and thanked him about what he has arranged for
her in Devonshire. Mr Edward argued later that: ‘It’s a new world, Victoria, a new
world that will rise out of the muck and ashes of the old.’(Christie 277). He explained
that the new world and it holders would clear off the old persons, ways of life, thinking,
and old men. He said: The bigoted stupid Communists, trying to establish their Marxian
heaven. There must be total war – total destruction, and then – the new Heaven and the
new Earth. He even suggested for her a new job and she would be paid and Victoria
accepted with a heavy heart to make him believe that she loved him and she could not
refused his demands, since she knew that she could be killed if she disagreed. He said
he may use her to replace a woman called Anna Sheele who was causing them troubles,
for her sad luck she resembled her. Anna Sheele was “the most remarkable brain”
(Christie 281) that disturbed their process.

Victoria was obliged to follow Edward’s instructions and replace Ms. Grete
Harden. In two days’ time the men who represented the two predominant ideologies of
the world would meet in Baghdad to discuss the future (Christie 297). On the other side,
Richard Baker got anxious about Victoria as he and Dr. Rathbone Jones went to the
house of expedition without her. He told his boss that she was neither his niece nor an
anthropologist, which sounded strange for Dr. Pauncefoot.

They all met at the Babylon Palace, the American Embassy called the reception
and demanded Ms. Anna Sheele but her doctor Mr. Smallbrook talked to them,
apologized and argued that she was sick. Suddenly Mr. Dakin appeared to save Victoria
Jones. It was discovered that Mrs. Elsie Shelle was the true Anna Sheele.

They came to Baghdad, the American president and the dictator of Russia who
were in the Regent Palace. The conference has begun, in a small ante-room and Dr.
Alan Breck of Harwell spoke about the voyages of Sir Rupert Crofton Lee and how his
diaries were destroyed during the war by the enemy (Christie 309). Mr. Dakin noted
that when Mr. Henry Carmichael arrived to Baghdad, he had proofs; but the enemy
knew about them and he knew that he was in danger. He since then assured in some
undoubted ways to make them received to his group. He used an old respectful and

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valued man living in Iraq called Sheikh Hussein el Ziyara of Kerbala, the respectful
man was renowned throughout the Moslem word as a holy man and a poet of renown.
Sheikh Hussein swore that he was a friend of Mr. Henry or Fakir Carmichael who sent
him proofs by two men who were “good follower of the prophet”. And the proofs was
either to give them to Carmichael or any messenger who would repeat certain words ‘if
in truth you are the messenger, speak, my son’. Mr. Dakin afterwards mentioned that
the Arabic poet Mutannabi wrote an Ode to Prince Sayfu ’l-Dawla at Aleppo in which
those words occur: ‘Zidhashshibashshitafaddaladnisurrasili.’ Then Sheikh Hussein
gave him the proofs which were microfilms made by Carmichael during his journey.
(Christie 312).

All proofs were in the sacred city Kerbala hidden since Baghdad was not a safer
place to hide into. Further, were at the first carried from the hands of Carmichael to the
hands of Sheikh Hussein el Ziyara by two wandering men (prophet of God), what
surprised her that they were the same men who sung for her when Victoria was in the
desert with Richard. Dakin added that no one would doubt of wandering cinema men
who travel by feet through desert and villages and they were Carmichael’s friends also
(Christie 317). Victoria considered Richard’s feelings for her but she did not want to
remain in Baghdad.

2.4. Orientalism in Detective Novel

Agatha Christie wrote about her life, experiences, journeys, the things she witnessed,
what she learnt aboutarchaeology, her travels in the east and some other countries. She
witnessedimportant events as of theFirst World War and their aftermath, the great
depression in 1930, the Second World War and its apocalypse. She also witnessed what
her country struggled for the great empire and its colonization of most of the world
including some parts of the Orient.

Agatha Christie has written her detective novel They Came to Baghdad about
one of the colonies controlled by her powerful country. It was Baghdad from 1950 to
1951 and she described the city as full of dust, hot temperature, mess, strange
behaviours from varied people and different nationalities, some shabby desks and
clothes, old cities and roads, the children are always playing with dirt and all the day out
shouting and begging from the British or foreigners some money. The Baghdadis were a
lazy people without respect neither for timing nor for work as the author demonstrated.
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People there used to live in ancient buildings and streets and they could not move out
their day’s circle. They were neither passionate nor successful when a higher
recommendation for anyone was to drive a lorry unlike the British citizens.

Orientalism is known as a representation of the east under the westerners’

formulations. They were curious about the orient by either visiting it or about it figures.
Edward Said stated in his Orientalism, the Orient was depicted as something someone
“judges, studies, disciplines or illustrates” (40), the west then talked instead of the east.
The detective genre which deals with murders and ‘who done it?’ is not likely to
examine Orientalism as a topic.

Agatha Christie wrote seven novels about the orient. She spoke of Baghdad,
Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. She stated her Orientalist regards about the orient and a few
positive descriptions. Ellen Mulder has explained that Western people would not easily
be inclined to accept what the people with an Oriental nationality wrote as the truth. The
same goes for authors, when Orientalists (often academics) were writing books, they
were not looking for Oriental sources for verification, but to the works of other
Orientalists (Mulder 15).

However, the east was not only seen as an object of study but sometimes also as
a threat. According to the anthropological studies the Orientals were considered as
people less important in comparing with the white race. What shaped the orient against
the west were the different languages and religions. The period when Orientalism was
most active coincides with the period of European expansion, which was from 1815
until 1914. Thus when the east became weaker and new many declines of its great
empires and nations, the west got to take over. In many Orientalist books reading about
the orient is just like reading about a colonized colony and its political background, and
not a case of study when the conception of Orientalism means at several times
domination.

Detective writers and readers were familiar with Orientalism (Mulder 11) i.e. the
Far East. The westerners may also dress up their characters with oriental clothes for
committing murders, robberyin their stories. The people from the Orient are also
considered as people who do not show much care for their clothing. Either they were
just poor, or clothing was not a priority when they had money (Mulder 27). In Christie's
“Oriental” novels there are numerous references to “Orientals” who are regarded as

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stupid by the people from the west. This complicates the communication between the
westerners and the “Orientals” (Mulder 22). She referred to death, uncivilized and
uneducated people, poverty, oldness, exoticism and illness. She mocked in the way the
boys rode the camels and donkeys and their language and behaviours with animals.
Further, she was obviously an Orientalist writer in all her novels about the east.

Furthermore, westerners in Oriental countries were also more likely to adopt the
bad habits of the people from the Orient (Mulder 28) i.e. the east was pictured with non
suitable and educative attitudes and habits. In the novel They came to Baghdad (1950-
51) she portrayed poverty in “Children quarrelled and squealed and ran after Europeans
calling hopefully baksheesh Meskin meskin” (Christie 55). Lower and simple skills in
the east in “John Wilberforce recommended Ahmed Mohammed as an industrious an
willing worker who is able to drive a lorry and do minor repairs and strictly honest – it
was, in fact, the usual type of ‘chit’ or recommendation given in the East” (Christie 71).
Hateful place of living with babies in their arms (Christie 118), and dark passages with
five or six dirty children playing in rags (Christie 198). Primitiveness in “that primitive
craft of the Tigris” (Christie 138) and an Arab boatman sealed in a primitive rowing
boat (Christie 198), darkness in “the darkest Africa (Christie 170), death in “A report
from Cairo announces that the body sir Rupert Crofton Lee has been taken from the
Nile due to a stab wound...Mrs Clayton said I think Cairo is worse than any place now”
(Christie 179).Also, “I don’t want you knocked on the head and thrown into the Tigris”
(Christie 204). Laziness (superstition), “the Iraqis always try anything with a string and
say Inshallah” (Christie 200). Femininity of the men in “a small child with a face
tattooed in blue, and a lot of bangles on, was tumbling about with a ball and singing in a
high nasal whine rather like distant bagpipes” (Christie 212) and other several images
for the same stereotypes repeated in the novel many times about fear, exoticism,
oldness, backwardness, confusion, a lot of annoyance and social chatter of the
Baghdadis, no fashionable cloths, mess, crowded places, unimportant people, higher
cries and laughter and a total old place and ruins.

In order to strengthen the negative depiction of the Orient, Agatha Christie uses
a lot of animal imagery, and she also lets the westerners in the novels treat the people
from the Orient like animals. The “Orientals” have a lot of peculiar manners, habits and
objects that are considered by the westerners as strange. Next, the “Orientals” are
depicted as primitive, simple, uncivilized and shabby creatures. Furthermore, the
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westerners projected their own negative qualities on the people from the Orient, such as
dishonesty, laziness and cruelty. The relationships between men and women are also
different in the Orient due to the extent to which men and women respect and
predominate each other (Mudler 33).

Westerners have shown the Orientals with a lower status as demonstrated in

their writings. They think they are responsible to solve any problem in the orient along
from their superior race they have to decide for the weaker ones. The detective story
showed also the same perceptions of the eastern citizens as annoying people when they
got crowded for the coming of British people, tourists or a car. The children’s begging
for money from westerners which was a daily and a normal behaviour even it became a
habit or an occupation to gain some coins that bothered the westerners’ tourists.

In her “Oriental” novels, Agatha Christie projects some negative qualities

westerners do not want to acknowledge in themselves onto people from the Orient.
Christie portrays them as stupid and chaotic, as amusements for westerners, and as
heathens, who are animal-like. Furthermore, they are unrefined, racist, primitive, dirty
and shabby. Next, they are savage, lazy, unreliable, thieves, beggars and they are
promiscuous. Christie uses these qualities as evidence that Oriental people are less
developed (Mudler 46). She has a negative perception upon the oriental nationalities in
her novels versus the higher nationalities of the west like British, American, French, and
Belgian

Though Christie is predominantly negative about the Oriental culture in her

novels, she also realizes that Oriental and western cultures are both very different,
because the people in the Orient have different religions, a different way of building,
use Oriental objects, and have a different attitude to life, for example concerning their
wages and family honour (Mulder 46). Agatha Christie's works show a view of the
Orient that demonstrates a lot of characteristics that Said describes in Orientalism
(1978) (Mudler 6). However, for a big part this is caused by the cultures being so
different from each other and having other concepts and priorities. The westerners
admire Oriental architecture, which is positive. They even depict the Orient as fairy-
like. In Christie's “Oriental” novels the Orient is also an object of study (33). The seven
detective novels by Agatha Christie displayed her Orientalist side and negative

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impressions about the Middle East when she herself positioned the area and its
inhabitants as missing of what is meant by care, civilization and urbanization.

2.4.1. Stereotypes of the Orient

The author has associated the city Baghdad where the story has taken place with a
lower status and it was displayed in a lot of negative depictions associated with death,
backwardness, illegalities, menace, darkness, dirt, noise, mess, crowd, murder, fatigued
people, old building and furniture, walls with unpleasant paintings, place of bandits and
no security, foolishness, outlandish, unsuitable behaviours, uneducated kids,
disappointing place, dark skin, poverty and no comfortable living with a lower work
skills and recommendations, dazed condition of transportations and roads, the climate
almost dusty, savagery, boring and depression, odd place, pollution, lost , strange, no
glamour of visiting , confusion, darkness, exoticism, pessimism and intolerance of the
British race for Baghdadis, mystery, primitiveness, death in the Nile of Egypt and the
Tigris river many times, violence, threat, worse place (Cairo).

There is no place to walk in Baghdad i.e. they are not developed in a way they have
some public places or an official roads to have a walk through (no security, no
modernity, no entertainment means), primitiveness, laziness, dependency, destroyed
road, ruined roads and building, lower conditions of masonry, disappointment, danger.
In addition to feminine boys, old dishes, higher voice of Baghdadis while talking and
laughter, primitive nature, a lot of donkeys found in souks, roads and parties, most of
the buildings are with mud-brick, fright, unknowing, emptiness and no life. From the
same account the author has quoted Baghdad to be uncivilized country, no respect for
time at all (not arranged or organized people who value times and plans).and it shows
implicitly how much the westerners are quick and motivated and how they do
appreciate the worker and the time and respect it more than the Arabs who are ignorant
and lazy people when they took a long time to fulfil any simple matter.

Arabs are not civilized, their dress, their building, their attitudes and talks are
not good, fashionable. She made a comparison between British and Baghdadis or an
Arab race; superiority of race. wasting time in London is odd and unusual, the vendors
or the British do not shout when selling, again it is better to not talk ever to not waste

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your time and effort of explanation when speak to an Arab, “the Bank Street full of
swirling dust and the noises were terrific and varied” (5).

The cries of the vendors of various wares … hot disputes between small
groups of people who seemed ready to murder each other but were really
fast friend … Wail of men conducting donkeys and horses amongst the
stream of motors and pedestrians shouting, ‘balek balek!’(6), some very
steep stairs along a rather dirty passage, a shabby desk and a shabby man
(Mr. Dakin) with a tired and indecisive…the melancholy fatigued Dakin
…The door of the office was badly painted (7), An English man
travelling in his car from Persia to Iraq shot dead supposedly by bandits
(9).

A Baghdadi boy twice blew his nose with his fingers (55)...Laden donkeys made
their way along their drivers calling out raucously(55).Women with dirty babies in their
arms... she pursued her way feeling suddenly strange and lost and far from home. Here
was no glamour of travel, only confusion (118).

Baghdad and the Orient in general are depicted as a dangerous place. “How to be
sitting amidst the ruins of Babylon debating whether or not she was likely in the near
future to be knocked on the head and thrown into the Tigris...‘I shall wake up soon and
find I’m in London dreaming a wonderful melodramatic dream about dangerous
Babylon” (204). “There was something subtly terrifying in this large empty waste, but it
was impossible to turn back. She could only go on.” (222).

The author gave her impression of how the Iraqis looked like, their life and
culture in a negative sense vis-a-vis her positive profile of the British and American
people also demonstrated in descriptions like: “Captain Crosbie often looked pleased
with himself a short and stocky, with a red face and a bristling military moustache, he
was fond of a good story, popular among other man, a cheerful man, kind and
unmarried” (5). Miss Scheele, “she (American) is cool and efficient” (12). Ms Sheele is
“a platinum blonde, her pale flaxen hair was pulled straight back, her Pale blue
intelligent eyes, her face had neat small features” (12), She “could memorise
everything”(12). “Even the germs respected Anna Sheele and kept out of her away”
(14).

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Victoria Jones was “a slender girl, with an agreeable figure and first class legs”
(18), Edward was “a good looking young man cherubically fair but with a firm chin
and extremely blue eyes” (22).

you know that interesting looking man? The Britisher? The one that
there’s all the fuss about. I’ve found out who he is. That’s Sir Rupert
Crofton Lee, the great traveller... Sir Rupert was a great authority upon
the interior of China. He was one of the few people who had been to
Tibet and visited Lhasa. He had travelled through the unknown parts of
Kurdistan and Asia Minor. His books had had a wide sale, for they had
been racily and wittily written. If Sir Rupert was just noticeably a self-
advertiser, it was with good reason (83)

Moreover, “Dr Rathbone a man of about sixty with a high domed forehead and
white hair. Benevolence, kindliness and charm were the most apparent qualities of his
personality” (123). Dr Rathbone is optimistic that all his elements Russians Jewesses,
Iraqis, Turkish girls, Armenians, Egyptians, Persia who would like each other while
working and discussing (126).

Westerners have a good reputation, fame, higher positions in the state as men of
law and power, archaeologists, bankers, business men, secretaries and politicians. They
possess intelligence, optimism, kindness, confidence, efficiency of their work, white
skin, good physical appearances and features, energy, good memorizing, friendship,
warm-hearted, fluency in taking and debating, generosity, beauty, people with regard
and prestige. They are successful people, knowledgeable, polyglot, responsible,
travellers, soldiers, charming and important people. This notifies Christie’s strong
Orientalist thoughts and aims about the orient.

2.4.2. The Conception of Otherness

The notion of otherness is a vision of any group which it would start by the examining
of race and ethnicity of the same group from their origin till current time. It would shape
a study of their presentation from different angles as culture, religion, location,
knowledge, politic, origin, economy, and historical events. This notion is closely
associated with the west and the east.

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The west acknowledged itself to perform the ‘Self’ and marked the east to be the
‘other’. Seemingly, the other defines the contradiction between the east and the west
when the latter acknowledged the east to be the alien in an imaginary circle made by the
western part. The Orient, in other words, has become an ideological representation with
no corresponding reality. There can be no “real” Orient because “the Orient” is itself an
Orientalist construction. Orientalism was a signifier whose signified corresponded only
to a western fantasy world, “the Orient”. It was a western projection onto the other
producing only knowledge of “the other” (Mulder 32).

Just like feminism approach when the woman was claimed to be the other by
men and suffered from the patriarchal society, along with the colonial discourse which
again defined the colonized countries and their inhabitants as the other in regard of the
colonizer country and for the same reason they were colonized. It showed what the
colonizer pictured in his writings about the oriental that they are indigenous,
uncivilized, savage, stupid, and undeserving. Edward Said in his book Orientalism
discarded all what was previous stated about the orient and what is going to be said
either, he argued that they are formulated prejudices and fabricated events about the
orient. The full truth that is admitted by all the parts of the world is that due to
colonization and wars, people lost their homes and refuges, they lost their works and
stability, their families, tranquillity, building and all this led to poor communities which
had only ruins in their country. The result is no homes to live in, wandering people with
shabby clothes, dirty places of living, no school to study in, no hospitals to get the
health care, no companies to work in, so complete categories of poor, pessimistic and
jobless people.

The colonizer himself constructed the notion of the other first by colonizing it,
exploiting it and hence criticizing the result he made which is quite sarcastic and
sorrowful. “Orientalism in Crisis” written by Anouar Abdel-Malek and first published
in Diogéne in 1963 critically examines western attitudes towards the study of non-
western societies. He also claims that immediately after World War II, both the
resurgence of the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America and also the victories gained
by a range of national liberation movements paved the way for a new approach to the
problem of understanding the Orient and orientalism (Zengin 04).

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The east is taken as the other which is treated in a negative way with multiple
discriminative perceptions which are already cited in Edward Said’s book. The other is
constructed to define the west, to shape a dichotomy, to be colonized and to put the
blame on it. For perceiving the west as the self and the orient as the other is then the
existence of cultural conflicts, religious clashes and political stress. Here the self is seen
as right, fundamental, powerful, reasonable, masculine, elegant, civilized, elite and
educative, real, moral, dependent, skilful and talented, successful, urbanized and
modern, developed and all what is positive, then the east is a total contrary to the west,
so it has to be the other which is wrong, not important, weak, magical, feminine, old
fashioned, uncivilized, ignorant and uneducated, superstitious, independent, unskilled
and untalented, unsuccessful, rural and antique and all sorts of negative and destructive
images.

Abdel-Malek argues that Orientalists consider the Orient and Orientals as an

‘object of study, stamped with an otherness – as all that is different, whether it be
‘subject’ or ‘object’ – but of a constitutive otherness, of an essentialist character”
(quoted by Zengin 05). The orient has been studied through different periods but the
most dominated one was during the imperialist era when they read about the orient to
better their colonization and also they wrote about when they were in position of rule
and command. As far as some countries were considered to be the other, they were
colonized then. So, the notion of otherness is justified sometimes as the desire, mission
or the duty to civilize the other part that is not linked with the west which is already
developed. Or, being an Orientalist criticizing the east for one way or another can be a
wish to be a ruler of them, a wish to dominate any area, a wish to apply the power he
has above others, is the wish of sovereignty that anyone has in his inside and a wish to
say some sayings to serve his country.

Otherness is an imaginary knowledge about the orient constructed by the

westerners in their studies about the other. That justified then the use of stereotypes and
negative expectations by westerners to facilitate the project of colonization in the
Islamic world. It also participates in the naturalization process of constructing a
dichotomy of the self and the other and to reinforce later the inferiority and hostility of
the easterners. If colonized people are irrational, Europeans are rational; if the former is
barbaric, sensual and lazy, Europe is civilization itself, with its sexual appetites under
control and its dominant ethic that of hard work; if the Orient as static, Europe can be
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seen as developing and marching ahead; the Orient has to be feminine so that Europe
can be masculine (Zengin 18). The other is the other of the west; that is to say which
does never belong neither resembles what the west seems to be and has been pinned
with several signs.

Thus, the ‘Other’ is always objectified, and it operates as the West’s

“contrasting, image, idea, personality experience (Zengin 21). With the representation
of otherness, the detective writers have as well their own visions. Agatha Christie uses
in all her novels about the orient the concept of otherness, especially in the detective
novel They came to Baghdad as a case of study in the current work. She depicted the
westerners as successful, smart, faithful, hard working, knowledgeable, good-looking,
with a white skin and pretty features, polyglot, with a soft and a warm heart, positive
and optimistic, energetic, people.S he showed the devotion of the British people for
science and travelling across the world and know about the other nations; they know
about the other very well. She portrayed in her novel what she believed in as a British
woman and for the British race the “self”.

Trinidad Linares has pointed that Christie was very much a supporter of the
British Empire, which may have led to a colonizer mentality in her work (129).
Meanwhile, the “others” who were the Baghdadis in the novel were perceived
negatively. She described Baghdad and Basrah, the desert as furious, old, gave a sense
of confusion, loss, unknown and mystery, some are abandoned and some are ruined, the
other houses, cities or buildings are with a bad painting, and looked shabby. Dirt was in
most of the areas, souks added to blackness and spots. She also referred to the Tigris
River as a place of throwing dead bodied.

The worst description was for the Baghdadis as clumsy, garrulous, lazy,
uneducated, dirty, femininity of the Baghdadi boy. Baghdadis were voiced when talking
or laughing, women were swaying in their walks putting bangles (and bangles are used
to make sound when walking and attract men).She used the word Meskin which means
poor to show that there was poverty in the east, beggar children were used to ask for
money from any western tourist. She also demonstrated the other as people who did not
respect their works, did not achieve their tasks, neither respectful about the time or their
meetings like in the passage:

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...offered an old man a lift once who was walking from Basrah to Baghdad.
I asked him how long he expected to be and he said a couple of months. I
told him to get in and he would be there late that evening, but he thanked me
and said no. Two months ahead would suit him just as well… Arabs find
our Western impatience for doing things quickly extraordinarily hard to
understand, and our habit of coming straight to the point in conversation
strikes them as extremely ill-mannered. You should always sit round and
offer general observations for about an hour – or if you prefer it, you need
not speak at all.(233).
When she explained the disrespect and the neglect of the time’s passing,she
interpreted the backwardness of the Baghdadis and showed their stupidity, ignorance
and their trivialities. She compared the Baghdadis as part of the orient with the whole
west. Here, she made a dichotomy of the other and the self and gave values.

Agatha Christie's “Oriental” novels show that she is no exception on this as all
the countries she describes in her novels had recently become independent from British
rule (Iraq, where Murder takes place in 1932, Egypt, where Death takes place in 1922,
and Jordan, where Appointment takes place, in 1922). Western people felt superior to
the people of the Orient and felt that it was their duty to take care of them (Mulder 45).
The representation of the other in the detective genre with the total representation of the
genre itself as the crime fiction is a style that deals with the dark side of the human
behaviour, and all his surroundings with pessimism as the representation of the orient
by Christie.

She herself displayed the dark appearance, the dark streets and nature, the
furious sights and emptiness, death, the unsuitable talk, behaviour, the non-elegant way
of dressing and debating, the darkest Orient and more. The ‘other’ in Agatha Christie’s
novels is the people who do not belong to the west i.e. Euro-American sphere as she
gave a higher impression about people from the west like from France, Belgium,
America, England etc and a lower expectations about the Orientals like Baghdadis,
Egyptian, Jordanian, Moroccans in her novels. In her detective novel, she represented
her Orientalist attitudes towards the orient and positioned them as the other. She
considered them as a representative of what is meant by a non-British so they were
indicated with several negative aspects, especially for the place Baghdad and the
Baghdadis.

The easterners were always with a secondary, peripheral role and the westerners
with the principal one. The novel always gives the reader the sense that non-western

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characters are always inferior to western characters. They were considered to play the
‘other’ as for instance they did not play essential roles as the main roles were for
westerners. The Baghdadis were either donkey boy, beggars, vendors in souks,
wandering people, servants, bead seller, bartender, boatmen versus the westerners who
were secretaries, archaeologists, businessmen, experts, famous and VIP characters, air
hostess, men of law, politicians, president etc.

The otherness is noteworthy in the degradation and humiliation of the native

people like during the colonization or within the aftermath of any country when the
damaged and the ruined country due to the war is seen less developed and primitive.
Agatha Christie has indicated the division and contrast between the east and the west as
when she shows the Baghdadis and the Egyptians as uncivilized. Her “Oriental” novels
show that she herself did not see things only as black-and-white. On the one hand,
Christie is the same as other Orientalists, because she criticizes Oriental culture as well,
on the other hand she has a more sophisticated view of the Orient and the people from
the Orient, because she also realizes that there are parts of the Oriental culture that are
equal or even better than their western counterparts (Mulder 46).

There would be no Orientalism if there was not previously a fear called Islamic
civilization and empires. While Agatha Christie described the east as ruined and
primitive, she gave an indication to the reader that it is a place cut of modernity and
urbanization. She has turned to a popular icon with her detective novel to reach a wider
audience. Bearing in mind that the detective fiction has always been a popular genre and
secondly that Agatha Christie’s books, especially her novels, have sold over a billion
copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages throughout the world and
that she is the most widely published and read author of all time and in any language,
outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare’s work (Zengin 27).

Linares Trinidad argued that in They Came to Baghdad Christie evokes some
nostalgia for the heyday of the British Empire; yet, her protagonist’s growing awareness
of real life in Iraq provides a critique of the romanticized Orientalist outlook on the
Middle East (94). In fact, the Orientals novels of the writer Agatha Christie have all
talked about the orient with the same Orientalist panorama. In They came to Baghdad
she did the same when she admitted that there is neither equality nor resemblance
between the western and the eastern poles.

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2.5 Conclusion

The chapter argues that the detective novel They came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie
which took place in the city of Baghdad in 1950 is an Orientalist model of writing that
accompanied the contrast between the west and the middle east, when she assumed the
city as a confusing place of visiting that gave sense of oddity, exoticism, and fascination
for the foreigners. Besides to the Baghdadis who are less valued than the British race
and she cited them with various negative descriptions. She explicitly raised her
stereotype accounts by emphasizing the superiority of the self vis-a-vis the other.

60
General Conclusion

This research work was written with the purpose of giving a particular analysis of the
novel They Came to Baghdadby the British detective novelist Agatha Christie. Thus, it
identified the detective genre as a new type in the western literature but an early one in
the oriental world when it reached the west only in the 19thcentury long after the
Oriental and Arab world.

Baghdad appeared in the detective stories of the Arabian Nights as early as in

the 9thcentury. Thus the latter can be considered as the true origin of the detective novel
with its specific characteristics. The most famous figures of this genre were Arthur
Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie.

Moreover, Orientalism which was the representation of the oriental world (near
and far east, Arab and non-Arab) by the Orientalist authors and researchers across the
Middle East and Africa as the most examined part about the whole orient, started from
the eighteenth century to the twentieth. With the beginning of the 20thcentury, some
Orientalists added few positive descriptions which were more dedicated to the place
than to the inhabitants.

As part of the Orientalists’ citations and alleged perceptions about the orient,
another dimension of the orient was manifested called Otherness which contributed to
the same regard of how the western world perceives the eastern one. The dissertation
notified the deep dissimilarities and differences between the two sides. Further, it held
a literary reading of some of the Arabian Nights’ detective novels with five instances:
The Sharper of Alexandria and the Chief of Police, Al-Malik Al-Nasir and the Three
Chiefs of Police, The Story of the Chief of Police of Cairo, The Story of the Chief of the
Bulak Police, The Story of the Chief of the Old Cairo Police, which assured the early
existence of the detective style in the orient emerging from the Arabian Nights’ tales. It
emphasized the oriental characteristics that shaped later the basic points for the
Orientalist perceptions.

The second chapter of the dissertation was about the analysis and examination of
the chosen novel of Agatha Christie, They Came to Baghdad. It started with a
presentation of Christie, her life and her contacts with the orient, especially because of
her second husband’s work. It explained her motives to write the novel, the Orientalist
depictions in the story along with her bias against the city of Baghdad and the
Baghdadis.

61
General Conclusion

Moreover, her position of the self-versus the other confirms her Orientalist attitude
towards the orient. The novel pictures the negative Orientalists’ stereotypes about the
Middle East specifically and about the Orient in general. It emphasizes the schism
between the west and the east. To conclude, They Came to Baghdad is an Orientalist
novel by Agatha Christie with a biased way of examining and presenting the Orient.

62
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Appendix

Appendix

The Sharper of Alexandria and the Chief of Police

There was once in the coast-fortress of Alexandria, a Chief of Police, Husám al-Din
hight, the sharp Scymitar of the Faith. One night as he sat in his seat of office, behold,
there came in to him a trooper-wight who said, “Know, O my lord the Chief, that I
entered your city this night and alighted at such a khan and slept there till a third part of
the night was past when I awoke and found my saddle-bags sliced open and a purse of a
thousand gold pieces stolen from them.” No sooner had he finished speaking than the
Chief summoned his chief officials and bade them lay hands on all in the khan and clap
them in jail till the morning; and on the morrow, he brought the rods and whips used in
punishment, and, sending for the prisoners, was about to flog them till they confessed in
the presence of the owner of the stolen money when, lo! A man broke through the
crowd till he came up to the Chief of Police — And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of
day and ceased saying her permitted say.

When it was the Three Hundred and Forty-second Night, She said, It hath
reached me, O auspicious King, that the Chief was about to flog them when lo! a man
broke through the crowd till he came up to the Chief of Police and the trooper and said;
“Ho! Emir, let these folk go, for they are wrongly accused. It was I who robbed this
trooper, and see, here is the purse I stole from his saddle-bags.” So saying, he pulled out
the purse from his sleeve and laid it before Husam al-Din, who said to the soldier,
“Take thy money and pouch it; thou now hast no ground of complaint against the people
of the khan.” Thereupon these folk and all who were present fell to praising the thief
and blessing him; but he said, “Ho! Emir, the skill is not in that I came to thee in person
and brought thee the purse; the cleverness was in taking it a second time from this
trooper.” Asked the Chief, “And how didst thou do to take it, O sharper?”; and the
robber replied, “O Emir, I was standing in the Shroff’sbazar at Cairo, when I saw this
soldier receive the gold in change and put it in yonder purse; so I followed him from by-
street to by-street, but found no occasion of stealing it. Then he travelled from Cairo and
I followed him from town to town, plotting and planning by the way to rob him, but
without avail, till he entered this city and I dogged him to the khan. I took up my
lodging beside him and watched him till he fell asleep and I heard him sleeping; when I

68
Appendix

went up to him softly, softly; and I slit open his saddle-bags with this knife, and took the
purse in the way I am now taking it.” So saying, he put out his hand and took the purse
from before the Chief of Police and the trooper, both of whom, together with the folk,
drew back watching him and thinking he would show them how he took the purse from
the saddle-bags. But, behold! He suddenly broke into a run and threw himself into a
pool of standing water hard by. So the Chief of the Police shouted to his officers, “Stop
thief!” and many made after him; but before they could doff their clothes and descend
the steps, he had made off; and they sought for him, but found him not; for that the by-
streets and lanes of Alexandria all communicate. So they came back without bringing
the purse; and the Chief of Police said to the trooper, “Thou hast no demand upon the
folk; for thou fondest him who robbed thee and receivedst back thy money, but didst not
keep it.” So the trooper went away, having lost his money, whilst the folk were
delivered from his hands and those of the Chief of Police, and all this was of the favour
of Almighty Allah (Burton).

Al-Malik Al-Nasir and the Three Chiefs of Police

“Once upon a time Al–Malik al-Násir sent for the Wális or Chiefs of Police of Cairo,
Bulak, and Fostat and said to them, “I desire each of you to recount me the
marvellousest thing that hath befallen him during his term of office.”— And Shahrazad
perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.

When it was the Three Hundred and Forty-third Night, She said, It hath reached
me, O auspicious King, that quoth Al–Malik al-Nasir to the three Walis, “I desire each
of you to recount me the marvellousest thing which hath befallen him during his term of
office.” So they answered, “We hear and we obey.” Then said the Chief of the Police of
Cairo, “Know thou, O our lord the Sultan, the most wonderful thing that befel me,
during my term of office, was on this wise:” (Burton), and he began…

The Story of the Chief of Police of Cairo

“There were in this city two men of good repute fit to bear witness in matters of
murder and wounds; but they were both secretly addicted to intrigues with low women
and to wine-bibbing and to dissolute doings, nor could I succeed (do what I would) in
bringing them to book, and I began to despair of success. So I charged the taverners and
confectioners and fruiterers and candle-chandlers and the keepers of brothels and bawdy

69
Appendix

houses to acquaint me of these two good men whenever they should anywhere be
engaged in drinking or other debauchery, or together or apart; and ordered that, if they
both or if either of them bought at their shops aught for the purpose of wassail and
carousel, the vendors should not conceal-it from me. And they replied, ‘We hear and
obey.’ Presently it chanced that one night, a man came to me and said, ‘O my master,
know that the two just men, the two witnesses, are in such a street in such a house,
engaged in abominable wickedness.’

So I disguised myself, I and my body-servant, and ceased not trudging till I

came to the house and knocked at the door, whereupon a slave-girl came out and
opened to me, saying, ‘Who art thou?’ I entered without answering her and saw the two
legal-witnesses and the house-master sitting, and lewd women by their side and before
them great plenty of wine. When they saw me, they rose to receive me, and made much
of me, seating me in the place of honour and saying to me, ‘Welcome for an illustrious
guest and well come for a pleasant cup-companion!’ And on this wise they met me
without showing a sign of alarm or trouble. Presently, the master of the house arose
from amongst us and went out and returned after a while with three hundred dinars,
when the men said to me, without the least fear, ‘Know, O our lord the Wali, it is in thy
power to do even more than disgrace and punish us; but this will bring thee in return
nothing but weariness: so we reck thou wouldest do better to take this much money and
protect us; for Almighty Allah is named the Protector and loveth those of His servants
who protect their Moslem neighbours; and thou shalt have thy reward in this world and
due recompense in the world to come.’

So I said to myself, ‘I will take the money and protect them this once, but, if
ever again I have them in my power, I will take my wreak of them;’ for, you see, the
money had tempted me. Thereupon I took it and went away thinking that no one would
know it; but, next day, on a sudden one of the Kazi’s messengers came to me and said
to me, ‘O Wali, be good enough to answer the summons of the Kazi who wanteth thee.’
So I arose and accompanied him, knowing not the meaning of all this; and when I came
into the judge’s presence, I saw the two witnesses and the master of the house, who had
given me the money, sitting by his side. Thereupon this man rose and sued me for three
hundred dinars, nor was it in my power to deny the debt; for he produced a written
obligation and his two companions, the legal witnesses, testified against me that I owed
the amount. Their evidence satisfied the Kazi and he ordered me to pay the sum, nor did
70
Appendix

I leave the Court till they had of me the three hundred gold pieces. So I went away, in
the utmost wrath and shame, vowing mischief and vengeance against them and
repenting that I had not punished them. Such, then is the most remarkable event which
befell me during my term of office.” Thereupon raised the Chief of the Bulak Police and
said, “As for me, O our lord the Sultan, the most marvelous thing that happened to me,
since I became Wali, was as follows:” (Burton 2016), and he began…

The Story of the Chief of the Bulak Police

“I was once in debt to the full amount of three hundred thousand gold pieces;and, being
distressed thereby, I sold all that was behind me and what was before me and all I
hathin hand, but I could collect no more than an hundred thousand dinars”— And
Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.

When it was the Three Hundred and Forty-fourth Night, She said, it hath reached
me, O auspicious King that the Wali of Bulak continued: “So I sold all that was behind
and before me, but could collect no more than an hundred thousand dinars and remained
in great perplexity. Now one night, as I sat at home in this state, behold, there came a
knocking; so I said to one of my servants, ‘See who is at the door.’ He went out and
returned, wan of face, changed in countenance and with his side-muscles a-quivering;
so I asked him, ‘What aileth thee?’; and he answered, ‘There is a man at the door; he is
half naked, clad in skins, with sword in hand and knife in girdle, and with him are a
company of the same fashion and he asketh for thee.’

So I took my sword and going out to see who these were, behold, I found them
as the boy had reported and said to them, ‘What is your business?’ They replied, ‘Of a
truth we be thieves and have done fine work this night; so we appointed the swag to thy
use, that thou mayst pay therewith the debts which sadden thee and deliver thee from
thy distress.’ Quoth I, ‘Where is the plunder?’ and they brought me a great chest, full of
vessels of gold and silver; which when I saw, I rejoiced and said to myself, ‘Herewith I
will settle all claims upon me and there will remain as much again.’ So I took the
money and going inside said in my mind, ‘It were ignoble to let them fare away empty-
handed.’ Whereupon I brought out the hundred thousand dinars I had by me and gave it
to them, thanking them for their kindness; and they pouched the monies and went their
way, under cover of the night so that none might know of them.

71
Appendix

But when morning dawned I examined the contents of the chest, and found them
copper and tin washed with gold worth five hundred dirhams at the most; and this was
grievous to me, for I had lost what monies I had and trouble was added to my trouble.
Such, then, is the most remarkable event which befell me during my term of office.”
Then raised the Chief of the Police of Old Cairo and said, “O our lord the Sultan, the
most marvellous thing that happened to me, since I became Wali, was on this wise;”
(Burton 2016), and he began…

The Story of the Chief of the Old Cairo Police

“I once hanged ten thieves each on his own gibbet, and especially charged the guards
to watch them and hinder the folk from taking any one of them down. Next morning
when I came to look at them, I found two bodies hanging from one gallows and said to
the guards, ‘Who did this, and where is the tenth gibbet?’ But they denied all knowledge
of it, and I was about to beat them till they owned the truth, when they said, ‘Know, O
Emir, that we fell asleep last night, and when we awoke, we found that someone had
stolen one of the bodies, gibbet and all; so we were alarmed and feared thy wrath. But,
behold, up came a peasant-fellow driving his ass; whereupon we laid hands on him and
killed him and hanged his body upon this gallows, in the stead of the thief who had been
stolen.’

Now when I heard this, I marvelled and asked them, ‘What had he with him?’
and they answered, ‘He had a pair of saddle-bags on the ass.’ Quoth I, ‘What was in
them?’ quoth they, ‘We know not.’ So I said, ‘Bring them hither;’ and when they
brought them to me I bade open them, behold, therein was the body of a murdered man,
cut in pieces. Now as soon as I saw this, I marvelled at the case and said in myself,
‘Glory to God! The cause of the hanging of this peasant was none other but his crime
against this murdered man; and thy Lord is not unjust towards His servants” (Burton).

72