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Abstract

This article discusses the image presented by Spanish journalist and writer Morato Cristina about British women who have embarked on bold adventures across Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Arabian Peninsula through her fascinating book “Women Travelers Across the Middle East” (2015), which falls under travel literature. The author portrays the lives of some English travelers and what they observed and recorded of events and facts during their journeys. Some of them interacted with Arab Bedouin women in past centuries and resembled them to the extent that they preferred to live and die in the Middle East desert over their aristocratic lives in England, as was the case with Jan Diegby, who married a Bedouin sheikh in Damascus and lived with him in a Bedouin tent until the last day of her life, or Hester Stanhope, the daughter of the first English ambassador’s brother, who is considered the first European to visit the ruins of Homs in the Syrian desert and who was crowned as the queen of the desert under the Arc de Triomphe in Palmyra, and preferred to stay in her home there until her death. We also do not forget Lady Mary Montagu, the first Western person to set foot in the secret rooms designated for the harem of the Ottoman Empire, who was fascinated by the hospitality of the Turks, their sophistication, and the grandeur of their palaces and mosques, as well as by their beautiful women. The researcher also sheds light on the life of Isabel Burton, who provided several services to England along with her Arabized husband and explorer who worked as a spy in many Arab countries, and also reviews the life of some luminaries of the twentieth century, like Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, Arabized and archaeologists, who were forgotten despite their great contribution to expanding geographical knowledge of those countries and setting modern Iraq’s borders. We also do not forget English writer Agatha Christie, famous for her detective novels, most of which she wrote in remote Iraqi areas while accompanying her husband Max Malowan, an archaeologist who conducted many excavation campaigns on excavations in those Arab sites.

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