Three Scottish historical figures have fascinated me and entered my fiction: David Roberts (1786-1864), Charles Gordon (1833-1885), and Lady Evelyn Cobbold (1867-1963). They were born well after the Acts of Union in which the Scottish and English Parliaments united to become the Parliament of Great Britain. All three travelled to the Middle East and Africa at the height of the British Empire. Talented, adventurous, and ambitious, they set out with a sense of entitlement. By writing about them, I was able to explore, at the individual level, Scotland’s extensive engagement with the British Empire. Through a literary response, it is possible to gain understanding of a distinctive Scottish imperialism that existed side by side with Scotland’s progressive, liberal tradition.
David Roberts was an artist whose lithographs of Egypt were hugely popular and are, even today, instantly recognisable. Charles Gordon was a Victorian military hero and one of the earliest examples of a media sensation. Gordon’s luck ran out in Sudan when, while he was Governor General, Khartoum was put under siege by the Mahdist rebels, and he was assassinated. Lady Evelyn Cobbold was an aristocrat and a traveller. She converted to Islam and was the first European woman, on record, to undertake the Hajj.
Lady Evelyn was the only one of the three whose connection to the Scottish Highlands was clear in my mind. I had studied about Gordon in school in Sudan but thought of him as English. This was because the Sudanese refer to the British, who ruled Sudan from 1898 to 1956, as the Ingeleez. They did so not out of ignorance but because, officially, the British Empire was ‘English’, and all the Scots engaged in empire-building and administration presented themselves as English. When it came to international affairs, even the Scottish press of the time used ‘England’ in reference to the state. Similarly, I had known David Roberts’s paintings but did not know that he was born in Edinburgh. I am always seeking connections between Sudan and Scotland – the country I came from and the one I am living in now. Through fiction, I bring them closer to give meaning to my own personal trajectory.
In my 2019 novel Bird Summons, three Muslim women embark on a road trip to the Highlands to visit the grave of Zainab/ Lady Evelyn Cobbold. Their leader, Salma, says, ‘We might never understand what it’s like to be the eldest daughter of the seventh Earl of Dunmore or to have a townhouse in Mayfair and a 15,000-acre estate in the Highlands, but Lady Evelyn was a woman like us, a wife and a grandmother. She worshipped as we worshipped though she kept her own culture, wore Edwardian fashion, shot deer and left instructions for bagpipes to be played at her funeral. She is the mother of Scottish Islam and we need her as our role model.’
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