Auda ibu Tayi

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Auda ibu Tayi (also: Auda Abu Tayi, etc.) (???? – 1924) was the leader of the Howeitat tribe of Bedouin Arabs at the time of the Great Arab Revolt during the First World War.

Convinced by British Col. T.E. Lawrence to join in the revolt, he and his tribesmen fighters were instrumental in the fall of Aqaba (July 1917) and Damascus (October 1918). Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, calls Auda the "greatest fighting man in northern Arabia". Auda was initially paid off by the Turks, but switched allegiance to Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, becoming a fervent supporter of the Arab independence movement. After the collapse of the Arab government in Damascus, however, he retired to his desert hideout, building a modern palace with captured Turkish slave labor. Before it was complete, however, he died in 1924 of natural causes.

He was portrayed in the David Lean film Lawrence of Arabia by Anthony Quinn as a complex character who blended together paternal wisdom and desert piracy.

[edit] Lawrence on Auda

Auda was very simply dressed, northern fashion, in white cotton with a red Mosul head-cloth. He might be over fifty, and his black hair was streaked with white; but he was still strong and straight, loosely built, spare, and as active as a much younger man. His face was magnificent in its lines and hollows... He had large eloquent eyes, like black velvet in richness. His forehead was low and broad, his nose very high and sharp, powerfully hooked: his mouth rather large and mobile: his beard and moustaches had been trimmed to a point in Howeitat style, with the lower jaw shaven underneath.

His hospitality was sweeping, inconvenient except to very hungry souls. His generosity kept him always poor, despite the profits of a hundred raids. He had married twenty-eight times, had been wounded thirteen times, and in the battles he provoked had seen all his tribesmen hurt, and most of his relations slain. He himself had slain seventy-five men, Arabs, by his own hand in battle: and never a man except in battle. Of the number of dead Turks he could give no account: they did not enter the register. His Toweiha under him had become the first fighters of the desert, with a tradition of desperate courage, and a sense of superiority which never left them while there was Me and work to do... but which had reduced them from twelve hundred men to less than five hundred, in thirty years.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence, chapter 40.