We are delighted to announce the appointment of Sir. Derek Plumbly as Chairman of the Arab British Centre!

10 March '16

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Sir. Derek Plumbly as Chairman of
the Arab British Centre!

 
Sir. Derek Plumbly has long experience as a diplomat and international official in the Arab world. In this interview, Rosa Perez talks to Derek about his career, interest in Arab culture, and his new appointment.

Derek 2

You are an Arabic speaker. Can you tell us what sparked your interest in Arabic and Arab Culture?

I joined the Foreign Office in the beginning of the 1970’s and I was keen, after previously teaching in Pakistan, to work either in the Middle East or in South Asia. The Foreign Office sent me to the Middle East Centre for Arab studies in Shemlan, Lebanon, to study Arabic, which I was very pleased to do. I lived and studied in the village for a year and half. Before the civil war, Lebanon was a lovely place to be and I was very enthusiastic about Arabic.  I then went to university in Jordan for a time and studied Arabic and Arab history alongside Jordanian students, which got in me deeper.  And then I went to Jeddah and I got in deeper still into it for a couple of years before moving to Cairo.

Cairo is a great city. At that time in the seventies, Cairo’s cultural life was particularly lively. A lot of interesting things were being written and films made. It was an exciting time and the history of the city is extraordinary too.  So… if you came away from Cairo being uninterested in Arab culture you would be a very strange person! Cairo also changed my life because I married there. My wife is Egyptian, she studied literature and her father was a writer which fixed my interest further. So that is how it all began and it has been with me ever since!

You have lived and worked for many years in the Middle East. Can you tell us a bit about your career?

I worked in two capacities. As I said, I was with the Foreign Office for the greater part of my career.  I was appointed again to Saudi Arabia as the Deputy Head of Mission and was there during the Gulf War.  I was subsequently appointed Director for the Middle East and then Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and then Egypt.

I suppose in the past fifty years I have spent much of the greater part of my life in the Arab world.

After I retired from the Foreign Office I worked as an international official in Khartoum which we loved. I was chairman of the peace commission there, which oversaw the peace agreement between the north and south until the independence of South Sudan.  Finally, I represented the UN Secretary General in Beirut as the UN coordinator there. It was marvellous to go back to Lebanon and play a part alongside the Lebanese people and UN colleagues in trying to keep the country safe at a time of terrible turmoil and tragedy in Syria.

You have always worked to promote Arab-British understanding. Why is this important to you?

It is worth saying that what I have described sounds like a career that has been all about politics and conflict resolution. But actually all aspects of our relations with the Arab world or the individual countries in it are important. The cultural and commercial relationships are immensely important in promoting understanding and wellbeing and you become heavily engaged with them. Europe and the Arab world are close neighbours. The interaction, as we are seeing now, is really intense. The potential for stereotypes and misunderstanding are very great so the more we understand each other’s cultures the deeper and more sensitive will be our understanding of our common humanity, what we can achieve together, and how we can best help each other. So… I think it is really important that institutions like The Arab British Centre are working to promote understanding.

On top of all of that for me it is a personal thing. My family is half Arab and half British. You scratch my children on one day and they feel Egyptian and on another day, they will feel British. They all speak Arabic and they are all working either in the Arab world or in fields like Islamic Art which are connected with it. And we are not the only ones like that, there are many, many British people in the same position and that is a strength definitely to which this centre can play.

What are your aspirations for The Arab British Centre?

The centre has been working ever since 1977 and it has been a solid part of the relationship between Britain and the Arab World. It exists because of the generous support of people in the Arab world and here who endowed it in the first place, notably Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and others from the Gulf, and secondly because all of the work that the centre and its residents have done over almost 40 years.

I know it is a difficult time for relations with terrible things happening and challenges multiplying. For that reason I think we must do more. We should be able to do more by way of events, exchanges courses in all the fields we are concerned with; culture, literature, art …  I am really pleased that we have got a young and highly motivated staff, experienced and equally youthful trustees, and lots of ideas! We just had the International Fashion Showcase at London Fashion Week, and played an award winning part in promoting young designers from Lebanon. Things like this show the diversity of the Arab world – not just the images that people expect from the news but the exciting positive things that are going on. In this case it was fashion but it could have been anything from painting to the digital arts. I hope that overtime we will be able to help more working as much as possible with the other institutions in this field and reaching wider audiences including outside of London.

What is your favourite Arabic song and book?

My taste is a bit elderly! I like Abdel Halem Hafez and Fayrouz. If I was looking for books I would reach for Al Tayyib Salih or the authors I read in the 70s to get my Arabic up to the right level such as Tawfiq al Hakim or Naguib Mahfouz. But now I have an opportunity to be brought face to face with young writers, new artists and new filmmakers through The Arab British Centre.