Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/58



"Mahometans or even Wahabees, but they are no more 'Arabs' than they are 'rebels,' though it suits the newspapers to call them so.'"

I was desirous of obtaining General C. W. Thompson's opinion respecting the difference observable between the Arabs of the desert and the natives of Maskat; and writing to him on the subject I received the letter, part of which I have already quoted; and the part of which I now quote seems to explain the apparent inconsistency. He says:—

"'I think it will be found on inquiry that the natives of Maskat subject to the Imâm (from whom my mother and I met with much kindness and civility more than sixty years ago, both on shore and afloat) were, and probably are, a very different race from the Arabs and Wahabees of the desert—much more civilized, commercial, and peaceable than the latter; less rude, ferocious and bigoted, and less inclined to risk their own or their neighbours' lives in any quarrel, religious or political, whatever. A corps of two thousand of them led by the Imâm in person, and comparatively disciplined, were with my father at Beni Bou Ali on the 9th November, 1820, and although they did not run away like the Sepoys, and the Imam displayed great gallantry in endeavouring to save a European Artilleryman, in doing which the Imam was shot through the hand (I can remember him with his hand in a sling on board ship afterwards)—yet his Maskat troops showed no anxiety to retrieve the day, and many of the friendly sheikhs who had joined"