Caabu Book Launch with  Eamonn Gearon:  The Arab Bureau

Caabu invites you to a book launch, The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit, by Eamonn Gearon on Monday 16 November 2026 at 6pm at the Arab British Centre in London.

Join us for this important discussion in person book launch with Eamonn Gearon, who will be discussing his book, The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit, on British intelligence organisation operating in the Middle East during the First World War.

To RSVP, please respond to this email or email Joseph Willits ([email protected]). The book can be purchased here.

When: Monday 16 November 2026, 18:00.

Where: Boardroom, The Arab British Centre, 1 Gough Square, London, EC4A 3DE. How to find us here.

The Arab Bureau is not another book about Lawrence of Arabia. Rather, it is a ground-breaking study offers a comprehensive reassessment of a pivotal yet often misunderstood British intelligence organisation operating in the Middle East during the First World War. Drawing on extensive archival research and newly discovered materials, it moves beyond popular Lawrence narratives to examine the Arab Bureau’s collective innovations in intelligence-gathering and propaganda. Among the most significant of these discoveries is a 200-page Arabic-language text, the longest piece of British-sponsored propaganda from any theatre of the war, which Gearon has translated into English for the first time.

But the Arab Bureau’s story does not end with its disbanding, in 1920. Eamonn distils his findings into seven novel yet enduring principles – his Seven Pillars of Intelligence Wisdom – which demonstrate how lessons the Arab Bureau developed for operating across cultural and linguistic divides remain as relevant to intelligence and policy communities today as they were a century ago.

About the speaker:

Eamonn Gearon (DPhil, Oxford; FRGS, FRHistS) is an historian, author, and public intellectual specialising in the Middle East and North Africa, with three decades of experience living and working across the region. He has taught at the University of Oxford, Johns Hopkins-SAIS, and the American University in Cairo. He created, and delivers, specialist MENA area studies training for the FCDO. Eamonn has written and filmed four best-selling lecture series for ‘The Great Courses’: Turning Points in Middle Eastern History (2016); The History and Achievements of the Islamic Golden Age (2017); The Middle East in the Twentieth Century (2021); & The Silk Roads (late 2026). His books include The Sahara (2011); The Arab Bureau (2026), the product of his Oxford doctoral research; and The Arab Revolt (late 2026), an annotated translation of Thawrat al-Arab (Cairo, 1916).

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