╥You won╒t find any foreigners here,╙ one Arab was heard saying to another in the heart of Arab London. And indeed, at the height of the summer season there are parts of the city such as Earl╒s Court or Bayswater which might almost be Kasr al-Nil Street in Cairo, or Phoenicia Street in Beirut.
Arabs from many different countries stroll up and down in animated groups, at the leisurely pace of people who have nothing very much to do. Some, from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, wear flowing robes and headgear, their women veiled or exotically masked. The newsstands are dominated by al-Ahram, al-Anwar, al-Ray, al-Amm and a score of other journals from the Middle East. The shops sell hommos, and other Arab foods. Former hamburger stalls now offer shawarma, mutton grilled on revolving spits instead.
It is Ramadan, and a grocer has pasted up appropriate verses from the Koran. An enterprising estate agent has renamed his premises al-Khalij, the Gulf. A hoarding bears an advertisement, in Arabic, for ╥the longest lasting fruit gum in the world.╙ Foreigners ╤ that is, Englishmen ╤ really are few and far between.
London has experienced such sudden ╥invasions╙ before. Since the Second World War, Americans, Germans, Japanese have, each in their turn, drawn a special, and often ungracious, attention to themselves. The causes have been various ╤ the numbers in which the visitors come, their novelty, their behaviour, or just the memories they arouse of unpleasant things past. But 1976 will undoubtedly go down as the Year of the Arabs. These new invaders seem to fall into a special category of their own.
They appear not just as super-rich tourists, whose money is admittedly as welcome as their manner of spending it is often distasteful, but as humiliating reminders of Britain╒s fallen place in the world, as yet another threat to its flagging economy, if not its heritage and whole way of life.
You can hardly open your newspaper these days without reading of some new Arab ╥takeover.╙ Hotels, hospitals, and historic mansions all seem to be falling like nine-pins into the hands of the new-rich potentates from the fabulous shores of the Persian Gulf.
A princeling from the obscure sheikhdom of Ras al-Khaimah, whose few thousand inhabitants used to live off fishing and the issue of eccentric postage stamps, is now the principal shareholder in the Dorchester Hotel; Mahdi Tajir, the billionaire tycoon from Dubai, and United Arab Emirates Ambassador to London, has acquired Meryworth Castle and a string of other choice properties. The middling rich are busy snapping up all available properties in the ú100,000 to ú300,000 range in Mayfair. They often pay cash down. Lower down the scale, the great mass of ordinary London Arabs are buying up whole tracts of Kensington for ú20,000 to ú50,000 a flat. Arabs have probably now acquired some 10,000 properties in Britain, most of them in the London area, at a cost of ú100 million for this year alone.
The Arab tourists fill up the smart hotels which, if not already bought by other Arabs, are busy ╥Arabising╙ themselves to cope with the invasion. They have Arabic-speaking staff and menus, in both Arabic and English, that cater for the special tastes of their guests. Each Arab country has its own favourite hotel. You tend to find Saudis in the Grosvenor, Kuwaitis at the Churchill and the Portman, Lebanese at the Hilton and Londonderry, Gulf Arabs at the Gloucester, and Iraquis at the Penta.
From the hotels, the Arabs descend in droves on Oxford Street and the great London stores ╤ also reputed to be targets of Arab takeover bids ╤ and make those extraordinary purchases which leave not just the impoverished British, but the Arabs╒ nearest competitors, American tourists, wide-eyed with amazement. There is hardly anyone, it seems, who has not this year seen an Arab buy a hundred suits at once, or his veiled womenfolk bear off armfuls of gorgeous evening dresses without thought for price, nor apparently for size either, and certainly with no opportunity to wear them except in the seclusion of their own quarters.
Other daytime expeditions will take the Arabs to Harley Street or the more expensive hospitals. If they are not undergoing treatment themselves they are visiting relatives and friends who are. Should the new Wellington Hospital be their destination, they will be greeted by an Arab girl at the reception and notices in Arabic ╤ with English, French, and German thrown in for form╒s sake ╤ will guide them round its hushed and carpeted interior; the patients, who are almost entirely Arab, can order their guests any food they should desire and invite them to watch Arabic films on closed-circuit television. As another outing they might go to the New York Curzon Cinema to see the Arabic-only version of The Message, banned in most Arabic countries, which relates the life of the Prophet Mohammed. On Fridays they might go to a service conducted outside the mosque being built in Regent╒s Park; but it will not be many of them who do. In the evening, the Arab visitors, now almost exclusively male and wearing Western dress, are likely to head for a nightclub or a casino. If it is Crockford╒s to which they may have been drawn by sumptuous advertisements in Arabic magazines, they can retire to an ╥Arab room╙ with Egyptian hostesses in attendance. If it is to the Omar Khayyam nightclub, they will find an ambience, decor, floorshow, staff, and clientele so completely Oriental ╤ Arabic, Persian and Turkish ╤ that it must come as a surprise, upon re-emergence in the small hours, to rediscover that this is Regent Street, London.
Such, by and large, is Arab London as most Londoners probably see it. It is certainly an obvious and important part of it. But, Arabs complain, it is all the British ever care to see. In the West, they point out, the word ╥Arab╙ has become virtually synonymous with oil-rich, and, for the British, the Arab-made-flesh does not seem to extend beyond those keffiyah- and abbaya-clad hordes who, this year, have descended on the British capital in greater numbers than ever before. They come essentially from the Gulf, and it is mainly they who commit those solecisms which, in addition to great wealth, Londoners are apt to attribute to all Arabs. It is they who supposedly graze goats in back gardens; wreak havoc with the interiors of elegant apartments; deafen neighbours with noisy children and transistors; squat in Mayfair entrances; hang exotic washing over fashionable balconies; shop-lift, with hundreds of pounds on their persons, at Harrods and Marks and Spencer╒s; think that they can get off with local girls by brandishing ú20 notes.
Many complex ingredients have gone into the making of Arab London, and it would not be much more accurate to call the Gulf Arabs ╤ even if they all really did behave like that ╤ representative of Arab London than it is to describe as ╥oil sheikhs╙ all those rulers who have engineered the four-fold increase in the price of oil since October 1973.
It is Iranians as much as Arabs who are now recycling their new-found riches at Ladbrokes and the Playboy Club. That distinction, London Arabs complain, is rarely made. And still less, they say, do people distinguish between the Arabs themselves. On the contrary, they are arbitrarily lumped together.
╥The British are completely obsessed with the Arabs,╙ says Naim Atallah. A Palestinian, he settled here in 1948 and, while retaining a deep but non-political interest in the Arab world, he is completely assimilated to his country of adoption, a highly successful publisher and film producer. And yet, he complains, whenever anyone writes about some new venture of his, such as his film The Slipper and the Rose, he has to link him with the contemporary Arab phenomenon under such titles as ╥The Sheikh of Showbiz╙.
Some 50,000 Egyptians visited Britain this year, and in many an Oriental cabaret or restaurant, Wimpy or Pizzaland, there are Egyptian waiters or dishwashers. You would hardly guess that there are serious Arabs as well as frivolous ones; some 8,000 Arab university students live lives not very different from their British counterparts. Getaway Arabs as well as gregarious ones: ╥Ten years ago, whenever I saw a compatriot,╙ said one, ╥I used to go and talk to him. Now I run away.╙ Permanent residents as well as
transients.
For every migration leaves a small deposit. The migrations have not only been touristic. It was a political upheaval, the creation of Israel, which brought Naim Atallah here. Since then, London, like other capitals, has received its share of exiles.
Where the threat lies in all this, most Arabs fail to see. It is true that London is now absorbing more Arabs, of more kinds, than ever before ╤ absorbing them, in fact, on a scale that could make it, in some yet unforeseeable degree, into an organic extension of the Arab world itself.
To the British the Arabs may be coming here as the conquerors, with money as their weapon, of their former imperial masters; but to many a discerning Arab it is a very different story; for him Arab London is the reflection not so much of a British, but of a far deeper, Arab sickness.
