Gullible Westerners, then and now

I have written here before about Ahmad (“You can’t blame me for trying”) Chalabi and the way this convicted fraudster was so easily able to put one over on Bush administration hawks who desperately– oh, so desperately– wanted to believe that what he told them was true… (Try hitting “Chalabi” in JWN’s Search window for past posts to this effect. Also, look at yesterday’s post.)
But today, during our continuing Tour de France, Bill and I stumbled onto the story of what must be one of the all-time-great instances of gullible Westerners– people who oh, so strongly wanted to believe that what their Middle Eastern interlocutors were telling them was true.
You’ve heard of the (ill-fated) Shroud of Turin? Welcome, friends, to the story of the Shroud of Cadouin.
So, this morning I was driving, generally east along the Dordogne valley. And let’s just say a wrong turn was taken, okay? I was reluctant to turn round, and besides, 400 pesky French drivers were pressing on my tail. Bill, sitting beside me with the map, charted a new course to bring us to where we wanted to aim for. By chance, that new course took us through the small Dordogne town of Cadouin.
And there was a Romanesque (11th-12th century) abbey advertised as being there. Well, we’re both suckers for Romanesque religious buildings. (We visited three great ones yesterday.) So of course we had to stop and have a look. We found a large, beautiful church with some ovoid arches. And next to it, which we almost missed, the cloister from when there was body of Cistercian monks there. We’re suckers for Cistercian cloisters, too. Five Euros each? Sure. We paid up and went in.
Bill got our his handy Michelin Guide Verte for the region. “Oh, there’s a shroud here, reputed to be the shroud of Christ, that was picked up in Antioch by a local priest and brought here in 1115,” he said, scrabbling through the pages.
Antioch, 1115. That would be one of the early Crusades that took a local priest to that spot on the eastern Mediterranean in today’s Turkey.
In a room off the cloister there was a little museum giving the history of the Shroud of Cadouin. In the years that followed, it seems that everyone who was anyone in early-modern Europe made the pilgrimage here to see it. That includes Richard the Lion-heart, Saint Louis, France’s King Charles V, etc etc. Then, as the centuries rolled on, the French Revolution put a bit of a crimp in the pilgrimage business (basically, by outlawing it, I think). But as those restrictions eased in the mid-1800s, believers started flocking to Cadouin once again…
It was great for the local economy.
In that same room, they even had the Shroud!! It was so exciting!! It was displayed flat in a tab;e-like display case: maybe four feet by ten feet. Beautifully fine woven cloth. Mostly near-white. Nothing that to my eyes looked remotely like the image of a man’s face. (But hey, that was the so-called “Shroud” of Turin that purported to have that, I guess.) And at each end, a number of half-inch bands of very intricately woven designs in colored yarns: mainly floral and geometric, very even, repetitive, and skilfully done.
The Guide Verte told us, slightly abruptly, that in 1935 this “Shroud” was discovered to be not authentic. It didn’t tell us why.
We walked to the next section of the little museum. One of the informational panels told us that in 1935, someone figured out that the designs on the embroidered bands actually read, in Arabaic, “God is great. Muhammed is the messenger of God. Ali is the friend of the prophet… ”
Oops!
We walked back, of course, and pored over the decorative bands. At which point the Arabic script leapt out at us immediately.

So for more than 800 years, no-one who had visited the so-called “Shroud of Christ” in Cadouin had noticed that….
Or perhaps, some people had noticed, and understood the writing, and been too scared of upsetting the tourism/pilgrimage-industry applecart to draw any attention to it?
It is kind of amazing, to think of all those Western-Christian pilgrims, people who so desperately wanted to believe that this was the Shroud of Christ, coming here and expressing their veneration for an object that actually turned out to be an expression of Muslim religiosity.
The God is the same of course. That’s okay. But I’m not sure Charles V, Richard the Lion-heart, and all those simple folks who invested their life savings in making this pilgrimage would have been so happy about the part about the Prophet.
Oh well. O tempora, o mores, as I believe I have remarked on JWN once before. (Which means, “Oh, the times, oh the habits!” or, more roughly translated, There’s nowt so queer as folk.)
In our own times, there was also, throughout the 1990s and down to this year, a desperately eager desire on behalf of many well-positioned Westerners to believe the story being peddled to them by another latter-day Middle Eastern snake-oil salesman. The Westerners in question were Richard (he not of the lion-heart) Perle, Douglas (ye of little) Feith, Wolfie, etc etc. And the salesman was Chalabi.
What he sold them, that they really wanted to believe, was roughly speaking:
(1) that he had networks of supporters throughout Iraq who would rise in support of the US forces and make for an easy US takeover, a.k.a. the cake-walk;
(2) that these supporters could provide/were providing lots of excellent, well-authenticated intelligence about Saddam’s WMD programs and his regime’s links with Al-Qaeda (!); and
(3) that once he had ridden to power in Baghdad on the hood of a US tank, he and his supporters would be happy to install a government that would make peace with Israel.
Quite possibly, it was this last part that they really, really wanted to believe… So now, the poor battered Iraqis, the poor battered US grunts, and the much-abused US taxpayers all find ourselves stuck where we are, thanks to that desperate, and desperately informed desire on behalf of those individuals to believe in the myth that they had created.
A footnote here. In the French towns we’ve visited, I’ve been interested in checking the war memorials erected by each community, in which they list the names of local sons who died in each of the two “World Wars” of the 20th century. In Cadouin, a very small town, fifteen local men lost their lives in WW-1 and five in WW-2. The proportion is roughly the same in each of the places we’ve visited.
I remember, growing up in England, that the numbers there were more equal between the two World Wars.
But those losses, repeated throughout Europe, do a lot to explain Europe’s current war-aversion. People in the US should take note, and be sympathetic rather than mindlessly derogatory.