The Walking Drum - A Novel by Louis L'Amour

This Arabic influence is brought experience to earth in the protagonist's application of it to his consume life and needs. He seeks non only his father, kidnapped, enslaved and perhaps already dead, but likewise his own education and enlightenment. It is no surprise to find the devil goals intertwining d wizout the book, as if the discovery of his father parallels his discovery of the riches of the Arabic culture. Modern western culture does non make the Arabic culture as dead certainly, but that civilization in general does not acknowledge Arabic contributions to it, choosing quite to portray Arabs and Moslems with the most belittling of stereotypes. L'Amour obviously wants to correct those erroneous and malicious impressions and replace them with what he sees as the truth.

The protagonist's first essential mention of Arabic, or Moorish culture, is not coincidentally link to his father. The reader learns immediately that the son has absorbed the father's appreciation for the Arabic culture:

My father's house had been filled with treasures looted from eastern ships, and frequently he had spoken of the life in Moorish Spain where I longed to go. . . . My father had brought from Moorish Spain a love of beauty and cleanliness. . . . The sexagenarian Crusaders learned a little, but merchants and minstrels had picked up the Moorish substance abuse of bathing, changing their clothing instead of allowing it to wear out and degrade off (18-19).

Kerbouchard cannot praise the Arabic culture enough, finding i

n it the sources of numerous advancements and conveniences at the heart of Western civilization. He contrasts the Arab valet de chambre favorably with Christianity, not only in terms of bathing, but also in terms or literacy. He says that in the Christian world, the record book was viewed as the only book necessary, while in the Arab world all varieties of books are read and appreciated. The hero's father had learned this through the same kind of travel the hero himself was now embarking on, suggesting that a well-travelled individual is a soul which will more in all probability appreciate cultures different than his own.

The hero openly connects his learning from the Arabic culture and his eventual success in winning his granting immunity and discovering his father's whereabouts and reuniting with him. John tells him that he should go to a major Arabic city to learn, because knowledge is the only possession that others can not take away from one. Kerbouchard thinks:

To be fair to L'Amour, he does not give us a portrait of Arabs and Moslems which could be called a fairy tale. There are Arab characters who are evil, violent and sordid as any non-Arab character. The Arabic culture is also itself illegal of acts which one today would consider atrocious, such as slavery: "The Moors of Cadiz would not be friendly to escaped slaves (45). However, before one condemns, one might consider that slavery in the unite States had not even begun in what would be the United States, and would lock away exist legally in that nation seven ascorbic acid years after the era about which L'Amour is writing in this book.

In other words, the Arabs were responsible not only for their own original contributions, but also for serving as cross-cultural conveyor of earlier cultures' contributions.

If the Christian world was rejecting books because they differed with the Bible, the Arab world was comprehend books on science which the protagonist gladly devoured and put to fair use in his search for his father: "The book in Arabi
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