Romauld Landau (1899–1974) was born in Poland but became a British citizen when he served as a volunteer in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He was a sculptor, author, educator, Foreign Service officer and specialist on Arab and Islamic culture. His particular area of interest was Morocco. He was also an art critic and book reviewer for several newspapers and periodicals, including The Spectator.
Early life
Born of Polish-German parents, Landau studied philosophy, art, and religion at various European schools and universities notably in Germany, and spent his early years travelling and working as a sculptor. In 1922, living in Berlin, he became the pupil of Georg Kolbe, then Germany's leading sculptor. During the late 1920s and the early 1930s, Landau established a minor reputation in Europe as a writer. His themes were art history, Polish biography (notably, Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Józef Klemens Piłsudski), and comparative religion. Landau's best known book from those years was God is My Adventure (1935).
Travels
Rom Landau first visited Morocco in 1924 and became a student of Islamic culture. Landau taught himself Arabic and spent as much time as he could afford living and travelling in North Africa and the Middle East. In 1937 he visited King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah I of Jordan, and other secular and religious leaders of the Middle East. Landau published a book, Arm the Apostles (1938), about his trip in which he advocated arming the Arabs so that they might aid the British and French in the coming war with Nazi Germany.
Second World War
Landau became a British citizen and served as a volunteer in the Royal Air Force (1939–41), and later a member of the Arab Committee of the Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office (1941–45). During this period he published (with A. J. Arberry) the standard work Islam Today (1943). After the war, Landau returned to North Africa and he established close personal ties there with Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco and other Arab leaders of liberation movements. Landau discreetly supported the groups, but his interest in the cause of Arab independence would seem to have been motivated more by a traditionalist's wish to slow the region's modernisation and Europeanisation than to improve the common people's living standards.
Morocco
In 1948, Landau began to devote his writing skills exclusively to Morocco and Moroccan affairs. Over five years, Landau published Invitation to Morocco (1950); Moroccan Journal (1951); The Beauty of Morocco (1951); The Sultan of Morocco (1951); Morocco (for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1952); Portrait of Tangier (1952); and France and the Arabs (1953). He later published a historical study The Moroccan Drama 1900–1955 (1956), biographies of King Mohammed V (1957) and King Hassan II (1962) and History of Morocco in the Twentieth Century (1963). Landau also wrote numerous essays and book reviews for The Reporter, New Statesman, The Spectator and other British and American periodicals of the day. It is important to note that his involvement in the Moroccan cause for independence was not exclusively due to his political beliefs, but rather due to his positive experiences during his trips there and the connections with people. Part of his work Invitation to Morocco has been reviewed by a leader of Istiqlal to ensure that it reflected the agenda of the nationalist movement, and later on, he distributed the manuscript to British leaders and intellectuals, among which King George VI, Anthony Eden, Winston Churchill and Arnold Toynbee.
Academic years
After a lecture tour to the United States (1952–1953) Landau settled in San Francisco, where he was employed by Frederic Spiegelberg's American Academy of Asian Studies, headed for a period by the instructor Alan Watts. It soon affiliated with the University of the Pacific, Stockton, California (1954), and Landau became a professor of Islamic Studies at the university (1956–1968) despite the fact that he had never finished an academic degree. In 1962–1963 he supervised the Peace Corps training program that prepared volunteers for service in Morocco. After his retirement (1968), Landau settled in Marrakech, where he lived until his death.
God is My Adventure
In his earlier career Landau wrote God is My Adventure (1935), a best-selling book in which he recounted his various contacts with leading figures and unusual persons of philosophical, religious, and mystical fame, such as Hermann Graf Keyserling, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Frank Buchman, Rudolf Steiner, G I Gurdjieff, P D Ouspensky, Meher Baba, and others.