Mohammed V of Morocco
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.