Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  Perhaps it all comes from being in origin an island race, as Arabs are in their own cultural imagination. But the reality is less simple and much more interesting: the origins are many, the race is not a race, and the island is not even an island.

  CHAPTER ONE

  VOICES FROM THE

  WILDERNESS

  EARLIEST ARABS

  THE ISLAND OF THE ARABS

  To begin with the land is to put the etymological cart before the horse: there were probably Arabs before there was a place called Arabia, and certainly long before their name applied to the whole Arabian Peninsula. Besides, with such a mobile future ahead of them, the Arab story is more about people than places; more about chaps than maps, to borrow E.C. Bentley’s rhyme. That said, since Arab origins are hard to tie down, a subcontinent – the peninsula and its neighbouring regions – is a suitably large area from which to start. More important, its landscapes have shaped the destinies of Arabs who are now spread across a far wider sweep of earth. We cannot begin to understand those people and where they have got to without knowing where they came from.

  The most prominent feature of this Arabian subcontinent, the peninsula itself, resembles a stumpy club-foot that is aiming a kick at the underside of Iran – except that hard on its heel comes the rhinocerine Horn of Africa, cramping Arabia’s back-swing with a well-aimed butt. Other comparisons are perhaps more useful, and especially with the two other subcontinents attached to the rest of Eurasia: India (including Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) and Europe (not including the European parts of the old Soviet Union). Arabia is, after all, a true subcontinent by one possible definition of the term, in that the peninsula, together with the Fertile Crescent of Iraq and the Levant, sits on a single tectonic plate (or perhaps, given its relatively small size, a tectonic saucer) called the Arabian Plate.

  All three subcontinents are much the same size – rather more than 4 million square kilometres in area. And there the similarity ends. Within the Himalayas, India presents few physical barriers to human movement and interaction; it is a land that lends itself to unities, to longish-lived kingdoms and empires, albeit punctuated by wars in which the players reposition themselves in games of musical thrones. Europe, roughly bisected by a mountain range that raises a jagged welt all the way from Cape Finisterre in Spanish Galicia to the Balkans, frayed ragged at the edges into ever-diminishing sub-peninsulas, calving offshore islands like Britain, is an arena of more fitful empires, a patchwork of truculent tribes that have grudgingly coalesced, late in the historical day, into nation-states. Most of Arabia is, like India, clear of obvious barriers; but there is one obstacle greater than Europe’s gulfs and mountains, and that is the lack of fresh water. India and Europe are refreshingly blue on the rainfall maps, Arabia a parched brown fenced off by the 250-millimetre maximum annual rainfall line. Only at the furthest corners is there much relief (in either sense): down in the far south-western peaks of Yemen; at a few spots in Oman, notably al-Jabal al-Akhdar, ‘the Green Mountain’, in the furthest east; and up in the north-western mountains of Lebanon. The Tigris and Euphrates in the north-eastern extreme are the exception, with their copious and accessible waters; but the Fertile Crescent that they irrigate only serves to highlight, by contrast, the vast infertile peninsula to the south.

  It is not surprising, therefore, that Arabia differs from the other two subcontinents in another way. India, with a a population of around 1.7 billion, has always been a migratory end in itself, a crowded cul-de-sac. So too Europe, with its population of 540 million, although half a millennium of colonial emigration has taken off some of the pressure. Even including with it those richer lands of the Fertile Crescent, Arabia’s population is less than a tenth of India’s – around 160 million. Only a single lifetime ago, before the influx of oil wealth and the various species of expat – labourers from Bangladesh, office-wallahs from Kerala, Texan oilbillies, ‘Jumeirah Janes’ and other denizens of downtown Dubai – it was perhaps a fifth of that, and the population of the peninsula alone less than ten million.

  The drier peninsula has always been drip-fed with inhabitants from the Fertile Crescent. But it has never been absorptive of people; rather it seems mostly to have been a place en route. Geography helps this. The peninsula is separated from its neighbours at three points by strategic straits. At its heel and toe are two water-straits: Bab al-Mandab, at 26 kilometres wide only little more than the crossing from Dover to Calais, and the Strait of Hormuz, at 54 kilometres roughly the distance from Cape Cod to Nantucket. The third point of separation, the dry 200-kilometre ‘strait’ of Sinai, is broader, but easily navigable. And that is the point: all three straits separate, but also join. They invite crossings.

  Crossing them seems to be what early hominids and humans did, on their journey out of Africa – both Homo erectus, nearly two million years ago, and Homo sapiens at various possible times between 45,000 and 125,000 years ago; perhaps even earlier (much research remains to be done). One route of exodus led them through Sinai and across the top of the Arabian Peninsula; the other route took them over Bab al-Mandab, when sea-levels were much lower and the strait even narrower, then through the south of the peninsula and on across the equally diminished Strait of Hormuz.

  In contrast to these three straits, the seaward prospect from the instep of the peninsular foot, the south coast, does not invite crossings: there isn’t a whole lot of land ahead of you until you reach Antarctica. But that same south coast lies in the realm of seasonal winds that would eventually take Arabian sailors and settlers round the Indian Ocean rim, in a great and growing mercantile crescent that would stretch from Mozambique to the Malacca Strait and beyond. Their camels of the sea would be as sleek and hardy as their ships of the desert, and the winds they would domesticate and make their own: ‘monsoon’ is from Arabic mawsim, ‘season for sailing’.

  Turning to the north, where the peninsula articulates with the main body of Eurasia, there is no barrier, no Himalaya to stop you crossing from Peninsula to Crescent and into further lands. That is what Arabians have often done, from way before Islam, leaving their peninsular transit-camp for a more central position in Eurasia and in geo-history. A ‘wave theory’ has pictured surges of nomads periodically pouring out of the peninsula and making for the valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile. While there is clear evidence for this – and none clearer than the last and greatest wave, the tsunami of Arabians set off by Islam – nothing suggests that there was any regularity to the currents of emigration. And, vital to remember, movement by this northern route has been both ways: linguistic evidence shows that, at least in historic times, the Arabian Peninsula has largely been peopled with incomers from the Fertile Crescent. The Levant, the land to the east of the Mediterranean, is almost without doubt the region in which the ‘Semitic’ family of tongues originated, and Arabic has preserved, pristine, many of the earliest features of those tongues. This is another reason to look at both areas together, as a subcontinent in terms of both plate tectonics and linguistics. The wave might thus be better pictured as an alternation of tides – most recently, that incoming tide from all over Eurasia and beyond, drawn by the gravitational oil field of petrodollars.

  All this goes to show that the Island of the Arabs, as Arab geographers were to call their ancestral peninsula as far as the Tigris–Euphrates valley – older Arabic doesn’t distinguish between insula, ‘island’, and peninsula, ‘almost-island’ – is noticeably uninsular, and in fact rather well connected with its neighbouring land-masses. Any insularity is more in the mind than on the map.

  It also goes to show why humans in Arabia have often been in motion – and, internally, in commotion – and why Arabia has been a place of comings and goings, slow influxes and sudden diasporas. In some respects, the Island of the Arabs resembles another well-connected island – one that was also to found an empire and export people and language: Great Britain. Like Britons too, it might be true to say that Arabs have often taken a little of the
ir psychological insularity abroad with them. But there is a major difference: other than as a place of pilgrimage, Arabia itself was swiftly sidelined after that greatest exodus, the Islamic one. It was as if, as the British empire grew, Britain itself had become a backwater.

  ARABIAN LANDSCAPES

  Part of the reason for this net export of people is the brown on the rainfall map: the Fertile Crescent may be irrigable, but the rest of the subcontinent is not at first sight a land of milk and honey, let alone of petroleum and gas. And yet there is much more variety than first appears.

  The three classical divisions of Arabia are still a useful shorthand. Arabia Petraea, ‘Rocky Arabia’, comprised the north-western parts, principally the Nabataean region whose capital was Petra – itself meaning ‘Rock’ (the local name is not known). Arabia Felix, ‘Fortunate Arabia’, covered a large area – the southern two-thirds or so of the peninsula, subject more or less to the rule of indigenous South Arabian kingdoms. Parts of this area were certainly more climatically fortunate than the rest, but the felicity was due as much to the vast amounts of foreign cash that went in there as to the frankincense and other gums that came out to fuel temple rites and perfume the living and, especially, the dead of Mediterranean lands. The perfumes of Arabia Felix come, in fact, from spiky and stunted trees that thrive in spiky and dry environments. Parts of the region, principally in present-day Yemen, are indeed green and pleasant for humans; but, as we shall see, they need human intervention to become productive in food as well as exportable gums. The third division, Arabia Deserta, ‘Desert Arabia’, signified the sparsely inhabited regions of eastern Syria and Mesopotamia.

  The classical divisions were as much to do with politics as with topography. And yet they do also give an idea of landscape. What Mediterranean geographers did not realize was that the actual rocky and otherwise desert parts of Arabia are the majority: climatically, most of the Arabian subcontinent is decidedly infelix. What modern scholars have realized is that the desertification has been relatively recent. Arabia as a whole was much wetter than it is now: people lived and hunted in the dried-out heart of the peninsula that is now called the Empty Quarter; you can still pick up their flint arrowheads by hollows in the dunes that were once water-holes, where hippopotami wallowed in the then Watery Quarter. This, the most recent ‘major wet period’, has been dated to around 8000–4000 BC or a little later, and was caused by fluctuations in that vast and fateful weather system, the monsoon. The big dry took place quickly. Climate change can happen fast, even without human help.

  And yet even in the driest desert there is variety: ‘empty’ quarters are not empty to those who know them intimately. The early tenth-century geographer al-Hamdani, for example, lists terms for desert features in his Description of the Island of the Arabs, categorizing dunes, plains and steppeland with wonderful precision. To take just one class of terms, nouns containing repeating pairs of consonants, nafanif are ‘lands that lengthen journeys by their ups and downs’, sabasib or basabis are level, ‘flowing’ plains devoid of herbage, water and human company, dakadik are sandy plateaux between mountains, especially those on which the rimth or salt-bush grows; and the list goes on, with fadafid, ’atha’ith, salasil, sahasih . . . There is a rhythm, even a poetry, to the most minimal of landscapes.

  SOWERS AND MILKERS

  This relative dryness, so recent in the geological timescale, took hold not long before the beginning of written human history in the Arabian subcontinent. And yet it has had far-reaching effects on that history. In fact, environment, and particularly the way in which people in drier and wetter regions relate to each other, has been a – maybe the – fateful factor in that history.

  Arabia may not be an island as such, but it is insular in that other sense, far deeper than the sea-bed, sitting on its own tectonic plate. Moreover the fault line to the west, running along and beneath the Red Sea, is a continuation of one of the biggest and busiest faults on earth – the same one that has created East Africa’s Rift Valley and, to the north, the deepest valley on earth, that of the Jordan. Tectonic movement is pushing up the heel of the peninsula, raising and ruckling its south-west corner. Over millions of years, the lifting has formed a long line of mountains. This sticklebacked chain, called by Arab geographers al-Sarah, ‘the Ridge’, is well within the Tropic of Cancer, too far south – and, with its highest peak standing at 3,700 metres, also not high enough – for snows and meltwaters. But the cool summits do suck up precipitation from the humid coastal plain beneath and, more important, they catch the edge of the monsoon.

  So in the south and west of the peninsula, as in the Fertile Crescent, there is water – but no Tigris or Euphrates: people need to harness rainfall and run-off with manpower-intensive, often large-scale works. A verse attributed to a pre-Islamic Yemeni ruler describes the scene in Yahsub, a montane plain in the Sarah chain:

  In the green garden of Yahsub’s land

  Water ever flows, springing from eighty dams.

  The number may not be exaggerated: the locations of over sixty pre-Islamic dams are still known in the area. Not far away at Baynun, pre-Islamic hydraulic engineers cut a 150-metre-long tunnel, big enough to drive a car through, in the base of a small mountain, in order to channel irrigation water from one valley to another. The most famous of all irrigation works lies further to the north-east at Marib, where there is a massive dam-controlled run-off from a catchment area of 10,000 square kilometres. All this harnessing of nature necessitates, and in turn reinforces, social organization and stability; disorganization and instability lead inevitably to decay. In time the inevitable happened, and the bursting of the Marib Dam inspired a parable for societal collapse in the earliest and still the most authoritative Arabic book – the Qur’an. The moral of the story is also one of the morals of history (if such things can be said to exist): if you want to build and maintain dams and sluices, tunnels and terraces, you also have to build and maintain a working settled society. Civil engineering, in other words, is as much to do with law and order as bricks and mortar.

  In contrast to the south and west of the peninsula, rainfall is scant in the desert and semi-desert areas, and never wholly predictable. There can be sudden, surprising verdure: ‘The wormwood has put forth leaves,’ reported a ninth-century ra’id, a pasture-scout of the nomadic camel herds,

  the salt-bush is sprouting, the thorn-tree is in leaf. Herbage covers the ground, the water-courses are green, the valley-bottoms are verdant; the hillocks are clothed in grass and the tussocks in new shoots; purslain, trefoil and mallow have sprung forth.

  But finding such ephemeral, pastoral paradises means being on the move with your flocks and tents, and when everyone else is doing the same, there will be competition for resources, and social instability.

  All this gives rise to a duality: hadarah, the settled life of the wetter south and west and of the watered Fertile Crescent, which imposes stability (and has a flipside – stasis, at times stagnation); and badawah, the wandering life of the badiyah, the open steppe and desert, which impels mobility (and also has a downside, that of political and social fragmentation). A plural adjective deriving from badawah, badawiyyin, gives other languages the word ‘bedouin’. It is an essential human pairing, as old as the biblical Cain and Abel, the settled agriculturalist and the mobile pastoralist. There is a plausible theory that the names of the two sons of Adam are cognate with Arabic qayn, ‘metalsmith’ – the defining occupation of settled existence from the Bronze Age on – and abil, ‘camel herd’. Arabic, which loves doublets, preferably rhyming ones (Cain and Abel are themselves Qabil wa-Habil) characterizes the duality by madar wa-wabar, ‘[people who live in houses] of clay and of camel hair’, or zar’ wa-dar’ ‘seed-sowing and udder[-milking]’.

  Another doublet appears in the Qur’an: sha’b, ‘a people, a folk’, and qabilah, ‘a tribe’. The Qur’anic verse alluded to in the title of this book suggests that it is a duality, an antithesis as basic as that of gender:

 
O mankind, We have created you from male and female, and made you into peoples and tribes . . .

  Most commentators have interpreted the verse as referring to settled Persian peoples and nomadic Arab tribes; some scholars argue, more convincingly, that this interpretation is anachronistic, and that the pairing in fact refers to the fundamental and age-old social duality within the Arabian sphere itself.

  We shall return to these two groups: the way in which they interact explains many of the strengths and the tensions that run through Arab history as a whole. For the moment, it is enough to point out that a sha’b, a people, is defined by place, not by kinship, and – apparently from early on – united in large and relatively stable blocs by allegiance to a single chief deity. In contrast, a qabilah, a tribe, defines itself not by shared residence in a particular area, but by an idea of kinship. Often that idea proves flimsy on investigation: one example is that of the tribes of Asir, who were all of Qahtani lineage until, at some time before the tenth century, they switched completely and claimed Nizari descent. There is no exact European equivalent, but it would be something like an old Anglo-Saxon family suddenly denying their roots and asserting that, in fact, they had come to England with the Normans. Similar graftings from one ‘family’ tree to another still take place: only a generation or two ago, two major sections of the Yemeni super-tribe of Bakil fell out with their comrades and joined the other super-tribe, Hashid; the process was called mu’akhah, ‘brothering’. Ibn Khaldun put it bluntly: