Lawrence of Arabia's Daggers

T.E. Lawrence, British archeologist and later military officer who assisted the Arab forces against the Ottomans during the First World War, had three Arabian daggers he obtained during the desert campaigns, two silver and one gold.  He gave one away, one is held by the University of Oxford, and one was bought at auction last month for nearly two hundred thousand dollars.

The second silver dagger (Christie's).

Above is the second silver-gilt jambiya dagger (30cm long), gifted to T.E. Lawrence in 1917 by Sherif Nasir at Aqaba after the Arab capture of that town from the Turks.  The dagger was auctioned by Christie’s on July 15, 2015, for a price realised of £122,500 (US $191,713).  (The price realised is the hammer price plus the buyer's premium).

Sherif Nasir was an Arab leader and cousin of Emir Feisal I, a Hashemite prince who was the third son of the Grand Sherif of Mecca, lead the forces of the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans from 1916-18, and was appointed king of Syria and then Iraq after the First World War.  Emir Faisal commanded the Arab forces alongside Abu ibu Tayi in the Battle of Aqaba, with Sherif Nasir participating and Lawrence advising.

Emir Faisal’s delegation at Versailles, during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Left to right: Rustum Haidar, Nuri as-Said, Prince Faisal, Captain Pisani (behind Faisal), T. E. Lawrence, unknown person, Captain Tahsin Kadry (Wikipedia).

 In 1921, Lawrence left the dagger in the possession of sculptor and society hostess Kathleen Scott (widow of Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott), who had seen him at the ballet and not known who he was.  She would later comment to him in a letter that when she had first seen him ‘you had a turban on and I think I thought you had been born in it,’ which makes me wonder why he was wearing a turban to the ballet, who does that.

I have never seen Lawrence in a turban, and they weren’t worn by the Arabs where he was (they still aren’t), so I suspect that when Scott saw him at the ballet he was actually wearing a kefiyyah and agal like he did during the Arab Revolt.  There are many photos of him in one.  Still, why would a Welshman wear that at the ballet.

Scott saw him again at Waterloo station and requested a sitting so she could make a sculpture of him: 

Lawrence acquiesced, stipulating only that she did not ‘do me as Colonel Lawrence (he died Nov. 11. 1918)’. In fact, the resulting sculpture depicted him in just this manner, in full Arab dress, dagger at his waist. Of the sitting on 9 February 1921, Scott wrote: ‘Oh, what a very pleasant day, first Col. Lawrence came. We had great fun about dressing him up in his Arabian clothes, which he finally put on in the drawing room’. After his final sitting on the 20 February, he left the present dagger and robes with Kathleen, that she might continue her work while he sailed to Cairo; it would be over a year later, on the 28 August 1922, that he would write to request their return – ‘There’s a little artist wants to do an Arab picture, & has asked me for kit … Do you think you could provide some from your store?’ – later mentioning in a letter to Lionel Curtis in 1929 (see below) that the dagger still remained in the possession of Lady Hilton Young [Scott having married Edward Hilton Young, later 1st Baron Kennet, in 1922]. No such retrieval was made, and the dagger and the robes have remained in the possession of the family since then.  (Christie’s). 

Lawrence died in a motorcycle accident in 1935 and Lady Kennet died in 1947. This is the only one of Lawrence’s three Arabian daggers known to remain in private hands; it’s being sold by the estate of the last Lady Kennet following her death.

The first silver dagger was given to Lawrence by Sherif Abdullah, elder brother of Feisal and future ruler of the Transjordan. Lawrence presented it as a gift to the Howeitat chiefs in the Wadi Sirhan at the urging of Sherif Nasir - an investment lavishly rewarded by the support of the Bedouin in the assault on Aqaba, according to Christie’s.

 Lawrence appears with a dagger in many photos, including this one from the Telegraph article about the auction:

 I can't tell which dagger he's wearing. It's not the gold dagger, because the gold dagger is a lot smaller and its front bulges.  I think it might be the first silver-gilt dagger, which he gave away in Arabia, as it looks like the shape’s different from the shape of the dagger in the photo provided by Christie's - the point of the dagger being auctioned curves up all the way to the hilt.

Here's another photo of him in the desert somewhere, taken by B.E. Leeson in 1917.  I can't tell if it's the same dagger here either:

(National Portrait Gallery)

Here's a hand-coloured photo of him from 1917.  His dagger is tinted gold, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was gold.  It's definitely not the same shape or size as the gold dagger held by All Souls:

T. E. Lawrence in a classic pose from a photo in the Metcalf collection, 1917 (The Huntington Library).

 His third, smaller gold dagger was sold to his friend Lionel Curtis for £125, and subsequently presented to All Souls’ College, Oxford.  Lawrence was a research fellow at the college from 1919 to 1926.  The college still holds a thobe Lawrence wore, and the canteen set he used during the campaign.

Lawrence's mother gave these robes to All Souls College after his death, in 1938.  He adopted Arab dress in 1916 after being requested to when he joined the Arab forces, because he felt he could not gain the trust of the Arabs while dressed as a British officer, and because Arab dress was better suited to the desert.

Lawrence wore the dagger, discreetly acquired in Mecca in 1917, during the war; it also appears in the famous Augustus John portrait. He had it made small because a full-size one would have been too cumbersome. After the war he sold it to pay for repairs to his Dorset cottage, "Clouds Hill"; in 1938 it was given to All Souls College.  Lawrence had purchased the head-dress in Aleppo in 1912 and given it to his mother the following year. He recovered it to wear during the war because good quality examples were by then hard to obtain. (source).

About 1917 Lawrence had a canteen set made in Jidda to his own design. It included the plate, bowl, and spoon which he carried and used throughout the desert campaigns (source).

 A Hittite horse and rider. Lawrence kept the terracotta figure in his room at All Souls College in Oxford after the war. It dates from the ninth century BC and comes from the area of his excavations at Carchemish before the war (source).

 I haven’t been able to find a picture of the sculpture of Lawrence that Christie’s says Kathleen Scott made, or any other mention of it anywhere, so I’m not sure if it still exists or who might have it.  In 1920 Scott did cast a sculpture of T.E. Lawrence’s younger brother A.W. Lawrence, who was later Cambridge Professor of Classical Archaeology.  It’s a nude statue called "Youth" of a young man with his arms outstretched, which Kathleen Scott (by then Lady Hilton Young) presented to the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge for the opening of the Institute’s building in 1934.

Lady Hilton Young also presented a number of objects and papers to the Institute in memory of her first husband and his four companions, who died on their return journey from the South Pole in 1912.  The statue of A.W. Lawrence still stands outside the building (you can see it here.  It's a photo of the nude statue from behind).  The Latin inscription on its pedestal – LUX PERPETUA LUCEAT EIS – is translated as "let eternal light shine upon them."

Around the Coasts of Arabia

Here's a piece of vintage orientalism I came across while looking for sources on seafaring in the Indian Ocean in times past: an essay by Alan Villiers, author of Sons of Sindbad.  That latter book is his account of his voyage with an Arab trading dhow in 1938-39, with the north-east monsoon from the Gulf of Aden down the East African coast to Zanzibar and back to Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait, where he spent some time with pearl divers.  I haven't tracked down a copy of this yet either; most of Villiers' books are out of print or very expensive and Not Available In My Region.  But the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has put Villier's spectacular photographs from that trip and others online.  You can even buy prints.
  

Excerpted from 'Around the Coasts of Arabia,' published in the Marine Corps Gazette, May 1949:

Muscat, in Oman, is a port of importance in world steamship routes. It is on the regular mail route between Bombay and Basra, and the Indian government, under British rule, maintained a post and telegraph office there. Native craft generally used the smaller, more open port of Mutrah, immediately to the north of Muscat harbor.  

Muscat, Oman 1913 (source)

Badans at Mutrah. The larger of these typically Omani craft could make the voyage to East Africa, while the smaller ones were used for fishing.

Alan Villiers

Here there is the usual covered bazaar, and fish market most unhygienic - on the beach beneath the hot sun. Many of the inhabitants are Baluchi, from Baluchistan across the Gulf of Oman. At Mutrah bay I have seen some of the most primitive sailing-vessels still using the deep sea, some of them dating back, surely, to Phoenician days. Incredibly small and inefficient vessels sail from there down to Zanzibar, in the good season, and frequently also sail back again.

Becalmed off the Swahili coast (Alan Villiers)

Ready for auction, freshly caught tuna await buyers at Sur, Oman’s chief fishing center. From the 7th to the 19th centuries Sur was a hub for the slave trade that stretched from East Africa to India. (NatGeo)

Around the whole of the southern coasts of Arabia and in the Gulf of Oman, the good season is the northeast season. There are two annual monsoons, northeast and southwest. The northeast lasts from October to the middle of April or some time in May; the southwest blows during most of the rest of the year. From the beginning of November to the end of February, the northeast monsoon prevails as a steady moderate breeze with fine, settled clear weather and a smooth sea. These are the conditions which the dhows revel in, both coastwise and deepsea. It is not at all uncommon to find 50 in together at a place like Ma'alla. The area of greatest regularity in this northeast wind is to the eastward and southeastward of the island of Socotra. In March the winds are variable, and now the big dhows begin to come home from Zanzibar and across the Indian Ocean, for they do not like to be out in the southwest monsoon. The weather then is often thick, hot, and extremely unpleasant, and the wind may reach gale force with a nasty sea. The southwest season is no time for amphibious exercises. [...]

A boom under full sail often carried a jib to take full advantage of the wind, like this one probably off the south Arabian coast. (Alan Villiers)

A fine baggala, probably the 'Bedri' of Kuwait, having her hull cleaned, Kwale Island.

Alan Villiers

The most trying conditions for personnel travelling in the Red Sea are to be found aboard transports going either north or south, with the wind following them at the same speed as the ship, and insufficient or no air conditioning. These conditions cause heat prostration, for which the Red Sea is notorious. But ashore the climate is not so bad, especially if people learn quickly to gear their lives to the existing climatic conditions and not those they knew back home. The busiest time in the Arab day is from dawn to about 10:30 am. The Arab eats lightly at dawn, generally breakfasting on a little unleavened bread and some strong tea, heavily sweetened: at 10:30 he has his mid-morning meal, and does not eat again until the early evening. His robes are cool and comfortable; his house, though lacking in sanitation and almost always without even running water, is cool, and well ventilated. He sleeps in the open, whether he be Beduin or Sheikh. He wears his picturesque head-cloth so that he can wrap up his face against severe dust storms, and his head-ropes are to keep his headgear on. He has learned to live properly under the conditions of his country; it would be a good idea to study how he does it, if so be you ever get the opportunity.

Nejdi had come on ahead to the Hadhramaut coast to drum up custom for his boom. These prospective passengers were trekking to Mukalla from the hinterland.

Alan Villiers

While the Bedouin still herd camels and goats and move camp every three or four months to find forage, they no longer depend on them for subsistence. (NatGeo)

On the whole, though trying, the climate is by no means as bad as it is reported to be. Up in the mountains, of course, it is cool enough. The local Beduin have a curious belief that indigo dye will keep them warm. I have seen them coming down from the interior into the roads of Shihr with no clothing other than a brief, black sarong, long matted hair thick with ghee, and black indigo smeared heavily on their lithe and almost fleshless bodies, though they had come straight from the hills. [...]

Now that the age-old seclusion of much of Arabia is becoming a thing of the past, the standard of local government, and services, is improving almost everywhere. But there still are bad spots. On the coast near the Kuria Buria Islands, there are tribes of pirates who are still held in awe by date-laden dhows: in many parts of Oman, the locals would sooner take a pot shot at the stranger than hang out any flags. Policing much of South Arabia was from the air, mainly by the Royal Air Force; when a tribe of Beduin break the raiding rules with persistent carelessness, sometimes they must be bombed. But on the whole there is more peace now than there has been for many years, and the influx of wealth and western ideas is making for good government. [...]

 

HM Taimur bin Turki, Sultan of Oman, 1913 (source)



The typical Arab has two things which very greatly sustain him, no matter what he might otherwise lackand these things are his calm philosophical outlook, the growth of much contemplation in an existence very close to a harsh and unforgiving Nature; and his Moslem religion. To him, both these are very real things indeed. He may know little of mass production and his greatest industry may be concerned with the production of some indifferent tobacco or good coffee beans, or queerly flavored honey. He likes to rub some perfume on his forehead, in the evenings, and to waft the fumes of burning incense into his wide nostrils. He eats in silence, crouching and using the right hand only; womenfolk are neither present nor discussed: he is at home on a strip of rough carpet beneath the stars, or upon a camel's back, or seated cross-legged hour after hour in the stern sheets of a dhow. He may have slaves, concubines, vast possessions (some of the wealthiest property-holders in Singapore are Arabs, and in Java) ; or he may not have a change of indigo. He may trade in pearls or sheep from Berbera, dates from Basra, cotton-goods in the cheap bazaar at the Crater in rainless Aden. He may speak no language the average Westerner understands, though the business man is often at home in four or five difficult Eastern tongues. He may wear a dagger, carry an ancient rifle (not quite so out of date as it may appear), ride a racing camel, fondle his amber rosary.

A old man resting outside a shop in Muttrah Souq. (Times of Oman)

All these things he may well do; but one thing also you may depend upon. He will comport himself with quiet dignity like a man, and a man he is, and was, and always will be. A man's man, at home in a tough man's country. It is a country, too, where we can learn a lot.

I won't say much about 'quiet dignity.'  But I take it Villiers never saw men shouting at each other, sitting around talking and laughing.  Or he just forgot about it.  Confirmation bias and all.  That's a very narrow and Noble Savage view of Omani men.

The Sheikh of Kais, 1913 (source)

And Villers seems to have forgotten that Oman contains as many women as men. 

A picture from September 1955 showing women carrying waterpots in Muttrah with the office of the “Wali” in the background. (Andy in Oman)

'A crowded market in Fanja' undated photo (Every Culture)

Women who live and work and give birth to children and raise them in what were and sometimes still are tough conditions.  He must have encountered women at some point; they were around doing things, but it strikes me how much he and Thesiger and other European travellers considered Oman and the Arabian Peninsula masculine countries inhabited by very masculine men, and rarely mention women or their contributions.  It's not just that women were frequently segregated and they mostly dealt with men, but also how endurance and going on trips involving hardship, especially in foreign lands, are gendered masculine and seen as things men do, and the experiences and contributions of other genders dismissed and discounted.

Most of the sources I found when I searched for "oman women in history" talked about how oppressed Omani women were/are by their culture, the need for Western organisations to liberate them, and the great strides they've made since Westernisation. It's all very colonial.  The introduction to the 'Women in Oman' Wikipedia article (the first hit for that search) pretty much sums up that narrative:

Women in Oman were historically excluded from the forums of everyday life. But with the dispersal of Omanis in the early 1900s and their return in the early 1970s, a more contemporary population of Omanis that were influenced by the British colonial values during their time abroad have slowly challenged many traditions of gender segregation. Women now pursue careers and professional training, slowly moving from their previous household confinement to the public sphere.^[2] In Oman, 17 October is celebrated every year as the Omani Women's Day with various pro-female events.^[3] (Wikipedia)

That whole article is terrible, and I do not recommend it.  It's written by people who fully believe in the development narrative - the modern form of the old colonial civilising mission; their rhetoric's just less obviously racist than it was in Kipling's time.  It's not that there weren't ever major problems in Omani society or aren't still, it's that Omani women are portrayed as victims of their backwards culture who need to be saved by the enlightened West.  Which is totally not misogynistic or exploiting the rest of the world for its own gain, nope.  The past was very different, and great changes have happened in the last forty years, but this narrative of Western influence liberating the world rather than local women and people around them working to change their own society from the inside while dealing with imperialist pressures and using foreign resources as they see fit is racist and ethnocentric, and covers up the real purposes of imperialist projects.

There was one result on the first page of Google result that talks about a few Omani women who were prominent in recorded history:

Indeed, the history of Oman also includes its share of women noted and recognized for their various contributions to public life.  To name a few, based on Al Balushi (2000), Seyyida Moza bint Al Imam Ahmad bin San Said was a top military strategist in the early eighteenth century, while Seyyida Khawla bint Seyyid Said bin Sultan, the daughter of the Sultan who ruled Oman from 1856 to 1857, was a known thinker, planner, and the most reliable member of the ruling family.  Shamsaa bint Al Alama Said bin Khalfan Al Khalili was a well-respected scholar and thinker in Islamic jurisprudence who was consulted to interpret some of the most difficult issues of the early nineteenth century.  Aisha bint Sheikh Issa Al Harthy was a famous poet of her time.  Al Ghalia bint Nasser bin Hmeid played a major role in national unity and social cohesion in Oman in the early 1900s.  The list is long and diverse, and continues from the noted late-nineteenth-century book author Seyyida Salma bint Sultan Al Seyyid Said bin Sultan to the more contemporary scholarly contributions of Nagiya bint Amer Al Hijriya, Sheikha bint Hilal Al Hinaiya, and Nasira bint Suroor Al Riyamiya, to mention only a few.

(Women in the Middle East and North Africa: Agents of Change,  by Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji, Routledge (2013) pg. 217 on Google Books)

I'm not going to do the research right now, but it's clear just from one source that there are many more, and countless other women who were not members of the ruling family or upper classes who lived ordinary lives and were never recorded.  But they were there, and they contributed. (I haven't read the whole book, but the section I quoted from is titled 'Omani women: the journey to empowerment'; it goes on to talk about outside influence empowering Omani women, which is also a pretty problematic narrative.  Empowerment in general is.  It can be hard to find sources in English on topics like this that aren't problematic to some degree.)

The world outside Europe was not only populated and participated in and at times ruled by local women as well as local men, it was explored and colonised and Christianised by Western women as well as Western men.  Women participated in imperialist exploration and mapping projects - quite a few of them.  There were a lot more than I realised before I went looking for lists.  Women were there, on both sides.  But they get left out of accounts, and left out of history.

Explorer Gertrude Bell in Iraq in 1909 (Wikipedia).  She explored and mapped parts of Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Arabia, and wrote about her travels.

Here's a long list of Western female travellers and explorers of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.  Here's another one.  Their imperialism and ethnocentrism and sense of superiority to other races weren't good things, but they were part of history and they should be included in history when we write about it.

Rain and change in Oman

When it rains here, it rains in torrents.  It hammers my the corrugated aluminum roof and washes all the blown dirt that accumulated on it down into my courtyard.  Rain makes things less clean, not more.  It comes in the windows; everyone has at least one room in their house that leaks.  It batters palm trees, shreds the petunias the city planted, soaks the banana fields and the date groves.  Waves crash down the wadis, full of dead trees and mud from the mountains, and wayward cars, and assorted detritus.  Somebody usually decides to swim in the wadi or try to cross it in their car while it's raining, and they often die.

British traveller Wilfred Thesiger wrote of a storm on his journey from Sulaiyil to Abu Dhabi in the late forties:

One night there was a terrific storm, which started soon after dark and revolved around us until dawn. On that bare plain there was no sort of shelter. We could only lie cowering on the ground while the lightning slashed through the darkness of driven clouds, and the thunder crashed about our ears. I had placed my rug and sheepskin over my sleeping-bag. On other nights these had kept me fairly dry, but tonight the weight of water was too great to be turned aside. It flowed over me like an icy torrent. Sometimes the rain stopped and I peered out to see, silhouetted against the night by the almost continuous flashes of lightning, the dark shapes where the others lay beneath their coverings, like grave-mounds on a wet seashore; and the group of sodden animals, squatting tail to storm. [...]

Next day was fine and sunny and our spirit rose as the sun dried our clothes and warmed our bodies. My companions sang as we rode across sands which looked as if they had been uncovered by an outgoing tide. They were Bedu and it had rained, not scattered showers, but downpours which might well have covered all the desert. ‘God’s bounty’ they called it, and rejoiced at the prospect of rich grazing that would last for years. As I rode across these interminable naked sands it seemed incredible that in three months’ time they would be covered with flowering shrubs. Eskimos enduring the cold and the darkness of the arctic winter can count the days till the sun appears, but here in southern Arabia the Bedu have no certainty of spring. Often there is no rain, and even if there is, it may fall at any time of the year. Generally the bitter winters turn to blazing summers over a parched and lifeless land. Bin Kabina told me now that he only remembered three springs in his life. Occasional spring times such as these were all the Bedu ever knew of the gentleness of life. A few years’ relief from the anxiety of want was the most they ever hoped for. It seemed to me pathetically little and yet I knew that magnificently it was enough.

As we rode along, the others spoke of years when it had rained, and bin Kabina told me that never in his life had he known such rain as this. Then inevitably they spoke of the great flood in Dhaufar of sixty years ago. I had myself seen palm-trunks which had been jammed by this flood eighteen feet up among the rocks in the cliffs of the Wadi Aidam, where the valley was more man a thousand yards wide. We speculated as to how many days it must have rained to produce this flood, which had occurred in summer when it was warm. I wondered how long a man could survive such rain in winter before he died of exposure. It rained again in the evening and continued to do so intermittently for the next three days.  - Arabian Sands, Penguin edition, p. 256.

People are happy when it rains.

People are somewhat less happy when they get wet and their stuff gets wet and the streets are impassible and their car is possibly underwater, but still grateful for the rain, and it's an excuse to take the day off work.

It doesn't need to rain like this for long before stuff starts floating by my office window and the floors are wet and the handful of other people who showed up for work ask me why the heck I came in (I had a meeting.  Our projects wait for no one.  There was thunder and lightning and our windshield wipers don't work).

I posted the picture above on Instagram, worried about how I'd get home, and a friend said, بركة, يقال أن الدعاء تحت المطر مستجاب ("Blessings, they say that a dua made under the rain will be answered").  And also, "You can tell I grew up in the desert ."

This isn't the high desert Wilfred Thesiger - loved isn't a strong enough word.  عشق, شغف, شهوة, هيام, maybe.  He craved it and returned again and again to be consumed by it and in a sense he tried to possess it and keep it from changing - which I cannot abide, because I love this country too and because I have been the object of a more powerful person's love.  Object is the key word there.  That sort of 'love' doesn't allow the object to be fully human and changeable with a will and desires of their own, just an idealised image and an experience centered around the subject.  Orientalism and that sort of possessive, controlling love alike are all about the viewer, not the viewed, much as the viewer likes to pretend otherwise. Cf. chivalry.

Thesiger records in Arabian Sands that the Omani bedouin and other Arabs who helped him were often without food or clothing or medical care or education or hope of a better life.  It annoyed Thesiger that the Arabs were constantly sponging food off him, but they did it because they were hungry.  They were improving their lot through him.  That is why it's (still) traditional to feed visitors so much; they might starve otherwise (they may not starve these days, but I have so many times been glad to be fed a hot meal when I'd been living for so long on not enough dry bread and tea).  Ibn Kabina, Thesiger's orphaned teenage companion, gave another man his loincloth because he had nothing, but bin Kabina at least had Thesiger and so a way to support his family.

It is very easy to fall in love with a place and want it to stay just the way it was when you first saw it, if you are a foreigner with foreign financing for food and camels and you don't have to suffer under local conditions permanently, or as much as the locals do.  You can leave, even if you don't want to and would lose something beloved in leaving.  The world is larger, for you.  Yes, heritage has been lost and Oman has paved roads and hospitals now and Dubai has morphed into a science-fiction dystopia city with an  uncertain future - but quality of life has been gained. 

He writes in the prologue to Arabian Sands:

A cloud gathers, rain falls, men live: the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die.  In the deserts of southern Arabia, there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the year.  Is is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease.  Yet men have lived there since the earliest times.  Passing generations have left fire-blackened stones at camping sites, a few faint tracks polished on the gravel plains.  Elsewhere the winds wipe out their footprints.  Men live there because it is the world into which they were born; the life they lead is the life their forefathers led before them; they accept hardships and privations; they know no other way.

The Omanis I know are mostly from villages, but living in the city; the old village with its date palms and banana and papaya trees and maize and irrigation channels still exist, but they don't depend on agriculture to feed themselves anymore.  Rain does not mean life or starvation for as many people as it used to, or not as directly and immediately as it used to now that they live in the city, but it's still very important.  As everywhere.

The courtyard of the hospital has water features, designed I believe to look like irrigation channels:

They even have beds of (decorative) plants next to them, like in the village:

These canna lilies are standing in three inches of water.  When it's not cold and muddy and drowned, it looks very clean and inviting, especially when it's above forty celcius and people have travelled a long way and waited a long time.  A lot of patients come here from the provinces, where the health care isn't as good.  I've seen bedouin families camping in the outer parking lots.

I have never seen anyone bathing in the fountains or drinking from them, but there are signs up to discourage people.  The water may look pretty and blue and clean, but it's chlorinated and not clean at all, especially now, after the rain, when it's full of mud.

They're addressing both men and women for once so I guess I'll have to find somewhere else to make wudhu, darn.

A popular dua for rain:

(source)

اللهم اسقينا غيثاً مغيثاً مريئاً نافعاً غير ضار

Allah quench us with helpful, healthy rain, beneficial and not harmful (sometimes added: now and not later).

When it rains, simply:

اللَّهُمَّ صَيِّبَاً نَافِعَاً

Allah may they be beneficial rain clouds.

And if it rains too much:

اللَّهُمَّ حَوَالَيْنَا وَلَا عَلَيْنَا اللَّهُمَّ عَلَى الْأَكَامِ وَالْأَجَامِ وَالظِّرَابِ وَالْأَدْوِيَةِ وَمَنَابِةِ الشَّجَرِ

Allah let it rain around us and not upon us.  Allah let it rain upon the hills and mountains and forests.

There are many others.