Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  If there was indeed a great diaspora of settled peoples as a result of the breakdown of irrigation and society in the South, as the stories claim, the dispersal would have happened long before that last, late pre-Islamic damburst. The folk histories, as we shall see, go on to speak of the migration from Marib of the great tribe of Azd and its important sub-tribe, Ghassan, which must have taken place a few centuries earlier. Whether there was in fact a single mass migration is not known; a gradual ebbing away of settled populations is much more likely. But in either case it would have far-reaching effects: it may not have been a cataclysm, but the setting in motion of settled people in large numbers would be a catalyst for change across the Arabian subcontinent. With nomads percolating into the old settled lands and, now, previously settled people leaving those lands, the old unitary states were dissolving and the boundaries between badw and hadar breaking down: ‘The kings have left their homelands,’ says a poem attributed to a pre-Islamic southern ruler, ‘and gone to other lands where both badw and hadar dwell’.

  Arabia was on the move, and entering an age of dynamic disunity – a shake-up that would eventually set off the epochal migrations and conquests of Islam. And if the grand old southern civilizations were destroyed in the process then, as the saying goes, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

  THE ACTIVE VOICE OF HISTORY

  The most memorable character in the Marib story is Tarifah, the kahinah or seeress who foresaw the dam’s collapse and then led the migration of her people, Ghassan. The male ruler of Ghassan defers to her: it is Tarifah who chooses the route of the migration and, when it is blocked by enemies, incites her people to do battle with them. All her pronouncements are made in the form of high Arabic called saj’, prose with rhyme and rhythm but without the metre of poetry, that would reappear later in the Qur’an. Her special, eloquent speech, bayan (‘exposition’, or ‘the unveiling of meaning’), is used for making statements based on supernatural insight. What she says is necessarily true because she utters it in this special speech. The argument is impenetrably circular; the historically more recent kind of truth, the sort based on empiricism and quantifiable ‘facts’ that arose in Europe some five centuries ago, does not come into it. The ultimate proof is whether enough people believe her – and they do, when she swears an oath:

  By the truth of my knowledge of the eloquent speech that has alighted on me,

  and of my tongue and what is recited by me . . .

  Telling the truth is thus like telling a joke: it’s the way you tell it that matters.

  As someone who can see what others do not see, and who can speak as others cannot speak – and thus can inspire and lead – Tarifah foreshadows a later figure endowed with prophecy, eloquence and command. That later figure, Muhammad, is solidly historical; Tarifah may be inspired by a genuine person, dimly remembered, but the often Grimm-like details of her character almost certainly belong to the realm of the fairy tale. We must not kill her off because of that. The telling of the tale of the Dam and of Tarifah by the earliest known Islamic folk historians (at least as early as Wahb ibn Munabbih, who lived in the first Islamic century) suggests that they understood how the ‘new’ religion had emerged from an old and thoroughly Arabian background – and, moreover, one that covered the old, settled south as well as Muhammad’s immediate Meccan environment.

  Wahb was himself a southerner and, without doubt, pride in the past of the South spurred him and other fellow southerners to stress the region’s importance to the broader, later history of Arabdom. They were right to do so. Ghassan, and the other settled folks who had been set in motion, were no longer South Arabians: they had become Arabs. They had ceased to be ‘Sabaeans’ or ‘Himyaris’, self-centred and self-sufficient in their far-off fertile lands, and were seen instead from a pan-Arabian perspective as Yemenis – Arabians from al-Yaman, ‘the South’ of the peninsula. In a sense, the story of the Marib Dam diaspora – of the stirring up of populations, the mixing of people into a new collective identity – is the Arab ‘national’ epic. It can be told in a page or two, so it is hardly epic in size. But subsequent events make it seem much bigger than it is, a maquette for a great monument: it is the prototype for the seventh-century diaspora of Arabs into three continents, and for the global epic of Islam.

  If the Marib story isn’t strict history, it also shows how important a dash of myth is in compounding a new identity, a whole new ethnicity for the diverse peoples and tribes who would be united by Islam. As parahistory, it is as significant as the Mahabharata or the Aeneid; nations, Renan said, come out of getting history wrong. But perhaps ‘wrong’ is the wrong word. A fiction can be truthful, even if it isn’t true; national identity, like religion, turns on questions of faith rather than matters of fact. A historian, of course, must try to distinguish between the two, but it is often hard. There is no doubting the factuality of the cyclopean remains of the Marib sluice gates, for example, or of the three millennia of alluvial deposits in the ‘two gardens’ which they irrigated and which are mentioned in the Qur’an. Equally factual is the new Marib Dam, bankrolled in the 1980s by the late Shaykh Zayid of the United Arab Emirates. But were Shaykh Zayid’s distant but direct ancestors really of the tribe of Azd who migrated, so it is said, from Marib along with Ghassan and Tarifah? That is a matter of faith, for there is nothing to prove it except poems and tales told long after the alleged fact.

  What is certain in all this is that for the last few pre-Islamic centuries there were large-scale tribal movements across Arabia, and that they belong to an even longer history of migrations. For these there is some independent external evidence: tribes recognizable as Tanukh, Abd al-Qays and Banu Ulays, for example, are located by the second-century geographer Ptolemy in the north-east of the peninsula, where they seem to have arrived since the first-century works of Strabo and Pliny.

  All these diasporas, factual or fictionalized, highlight a feature of the ‘grammar’ of Arab history: the sense that Arabs are active on the move, passive when settled. Arabs would only remain great, said the early Islamic orator and sage al-Ahnaf, ‘if they strap on their swords, tie on their turbans, and ride off on their horses’. To stay inactive at home is to remain majhul – ‘unknown’, that Arabic term for the passive voice of a verb. As in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which inverts the usual metaphor of life as a journey, ‘the road is life’.

  Mobility is a theme that has always been present in Arab history – from the first appearance of Gindibu and his expeditionary force of camels, and before that from the unrecorded day the first voortrekkers left settled lands for the steppe and ’arabhood, through the Prophet Muhammad’s hijrah, or ‘migration’, to Medina, and the hundreds of thousands of hijrahs out of Arabia during the two succeeding centuries, and continuing to latter-day journeys like the poet Jubran Khalil Jubran’s to bilad al-mahjar, ‘hijrah land’, in his case Boston’s Chinatown and New York’s Lower West Side, and those of present-day refugees to Europe and beyond. Fouad Ajami quotes Nietzsche, ‘You shall be fugitives . . . You shall love your children’s land . . .’, as a reflection of the restless Zeitgeist of the 1950s and 1960s. But the words apply equally to the tricontinental super-raids of early Islam, and to the earliest known migrations that preceded them, as well as to the floods of refugees of the twenty-first century.

  NO FIXED ABODE

  Mythicized though many of the early migration accounts are, there are places where they lead into a tangible past. In one sequel to the story of the seeress Tarifah and her people, Ghassan, they pitch up in Byzantine-ruled Syria, settle down – and are promptly presented with that certificate of civilized life, a tax bill. In their years of wandering, Ghassan, like the Assyrians’ Aribi, had known ‘neither overseers nor officials’; pace Benjamin Franklin, in the badw world-view taxes, unlike death, have never been inevitable. Most of Ghassan refused to pay up, and turned back to the peninsula, freedom and poverty.

  This sequel shows not only how mobile populations were, but
also how fluid hadar/badw identities could be at this time. Ghassan, who claimed to have begun life as a settled people in the south, spent a long period as migrants – if not necessarily nomads – and then divided into two groups, one resettling, the other resuming a wandering life. The settled group had also now migrated from the shifting lands of legend to solid historical ground: around AD 490, the Jafnah branch of Ghassan did indeed put down roots in Syria as Byzantine clients, ousting a previous Arab group as Constantinople’s buffer against Persians and nomads. Their leaders were given the title patricius (Arab bitriq; in time the word came also to mean ‘haughty’ and, much later, ‘penguin’ – because of an imagined similarity in appearance?) and were granted the crown of client-rulers. Later, in the mid-sixth century, beginning with the Ghassanid al-Harith ibn Jabalah, they were given the exalted title basileus, ‘king’. Most of them also became fervent Christians, though of the Monophysite persuasion that differed from imperial orthodoxy.

  The roots, though, were shallow. The Ghassanids kept a foot in both camps, nomadic and settled – or rather, a foot in camp and a foot in court; for all their trappings of kingship (including the -id attached to their surname that for Western historians marks a dynasty), they led a semi-mobile life and never had a fixed capital. The nearest they got to one was in their royal camp of al-Jabiyah in the hills of the Golan, a tented palace for kings on the edge of civilization, interspersed with fixed buildings that included a monastery. Linguistically too, they were of no fixed abode: they maintained their Arabic but also used Aramaic for writing, which had long been the default spoken language of the settled peoples in the Levant. They wrote in Nabataean characters, the common script of the region, and they enjoyed Greek pop music, judging by the later Ghassanid who had five singing slave-girls who performed in ‘rumiyyah’.

  Ghassanid roots in Syria may have been tenuous, but they proved tenacious. Under Islam, some of their people would join the new religion, but others would hold to their Christian faith; some present-day Syrian Christians and Lebanese Maronites claim descent from them. For the moment, however, these Byzantine border guards-turned-buffer states, marcher lords-turned-mercenary monarchs, enjoyed power and a high degree of autonomy.

  Of course, they were not alone. Eugene Rogan’s insight about superpower rivalry empowering Arabs also applied to the east, in the Persian sphere. As rivals in empowerment, the Ghassanids had those long-established successors of Imru’ al-Qays ibn Amr, ‘king of all the Arabs’, the Lakhmid dynasty of al-Hirah in Iraq, client-kings of the Sasanian empire. Once more, that image of Arabs stuck on a rock between two imperial lions looks rather too simple: for as well as the third lion down in the south, Arabs were in fact on two adjoining rocks, and instead of fighting off the lions they were, increasingly, fighting each other.

  RIVALS IN THE GREAT GAME

  The Lakhmids, whose ancestors had also moved north from the peninsula, had been acting as a semi-nomadic neighbourhood watch for Persia almost since the establishment of the Sasanian dynasty in the third century. Like the Ghassanids, they maintained a mobile court, but had a fixed centre at al-Hirah, south of the later Baghdad.

  ‘Al-Hirah’ is from the Syriac hirta meaning, appropriately for semi-nomads, ‘encampment’. Like Ghassanid al-Jabiyah, it was a borderline place where cultures met and blurred, and the Lakhmids, while remaining Arab, inevitably picked up Persian influences: the prime symbol of their kingship, for example, the crown, was a Persian import, as is the loan word for it in Arabic, taj. But they were also open to Byzantine influence, especially in the form of the Nestorian Christianity adopted by many of their people. And, like the qariyahs down in the peninsula – settlements in nomad areas, of which Kindah’s Qaryat Dhat Kahl was the prime early example and Mecca, ‘the Mother of Qariyahs’, the foremost later example – the Lakhmids Camptown was also a fusion of nomadic and settled lifestyles. An anecdote from after the fall of al-Hirah to the Muslims illustrates this. Nomadic Arabs referred to the settled agricultural peoples of southern Iraq as nabat, ‘Nabateans’, and when an aged sage of al-Hirah was asked whether its people were Arabs or Nabataeans, he pondered for a while then said, ‘We are nabataeanized Arabs . . . and arabized Nabataeans’. The informant’s alleged age, 350 years, should be taken as a guarantee of his wisdom.

  By the start of the sixth century the Lakhmids were already seasoned players of the Great Game. We have seen the Lakhmid king Imru’ al-Qays (probably) leading a large Persian-backed expedition into the peninsula in the early fourth century, and then (probably) defecting to the Romans. Two hundred years on, with Constantinople promoting the Ghassanids as its own major satellite in the area, the Persians increased their support for the Arab rulers of al-Hirah. When the two great empires clashed, as they did increasingly in this period, it was usually in the persons of their Arab proxies. Some of these vicarious encounters were extremely nasty. In about 544, the Lakhmid King al-Mundhir III captured a son of the Byzantines’ basileus, al-Harith ibn Jabalah, and sacrificed him to the Arab goddess al-Uzza; about a decade later, al-Harith’s champions, personally perfumed by his daughter and wearing both the chain-mail of warriors and the shrouds of potential martyrs, were able to capture the Lakhmid ruler in a death-or-glory operation and to put him to death in revenge.

  This devolution of violence was matched by the Persians’ delegation of policy towards tribes in the north-east of the peninsula. The area of what is now southern Iraq known as al-Sawad, ‘the Blackness’, or perhaps ‘the Dark-Greenness’, because of its dense, dark palm groves, was a common target of raiding, and the Lakhmid rulers would ‘sub-let’ fiefs to nomad chieftains in an attempt to stop the incursions. The Lakhmids also tried to tax the tribes: the taxmen, predictably, often came to sticky ends (stoned to death at the bottom of a well, in one case). Hostage-keeping was an effective way of dealing with tribal unruliness, and al-Hirah in the sixth century was home to 500 sons of tribal chiefs – a sort of forcible boarding school, with terms of six months at the end of which the youths would be changed for others. And if nothing else worked, the Lakhmids would send caravans into rebellious territory that – true to their intermediating position between hadar and badw, empire and tribe – combined raiding with trading.

  Like the Ghassanids, the Lakhmids bestrode the linguistic divide between settled and nomadic tongues, speaking Arabic but writing in Syriac; also like the Ghassanids, they used the Nabataean script. But this was changing.

  LK NW VWLZ

  Because Arabic script is – like the language it records – so important to the Arab story, we need to look briefly at its sinuous, problematic workings.

  Islamic-period sources claim that the script was used by Adam to write on clay tablets; infinitely further back in time, it existed in heaven on the ‘Preserved Tablet’, the original of the Qur’an, which was as old as God Himself. The more down-to-earth origins of the script are attributed, quite plausibly, to the Lakhmid capital al-Hirah and another town called al-Anbar, further south in present-day Iraq. Looking at the shapes of Arabic letters themselves, it is obvious that they grew organically out of Nabataean script, perhaps with influences from other Arabian writing systems. From al-Hirah the new letters spread slowly. There are very few graffiti in recognizably Arabic script earlier than the fifth century, and the idea that it reached Mecca ‘a little before Islam’ – at the end of the sixth century – is backed by a claim that, early in Muhammad’s prophethood, fewer than a score of Meccans could write. Unpromising beginnings; but over the next few generations, the need to preserve a scripture, propagate an empire and promote a culture meant that the Arabic script went viral. It inscribed itself across space and through time to become, after the Latin alphabet, the most widespread writing system in the world.

  An experiment by the eighth-century caliph, Hisham, gives an idea of how the script works. The caliph noticed a milestone by the road, and without looking at it asked an illiterate a’rabi in his company to ‘read’ it to him. For, even if illiterate, a’rabis co
uld read, famously: they could read the landscape, the sparse green growth that revealed hidden water, the tracks of beasts from camels to beetles and of their own and others’ wanderings; they could decipher a whole moving history from the palimpsests of abandoned campsites. In the old desert poetry, signs on the ground are sometimes compared overtly to writing. The late pre-Islamic poet Labid, for example, could read the traces of the camp where his beloved had been,

  marked by relics dim

  Like weather-beaten script engraved on ancient stone.

  Nomadic Arabs lived in a legible world. Looking at the script engraved on the milestone,

  ‘Theres a shepherd’s crook’

  the bedouin said, ‘and a ring

  ‘and three things like a bitch’s dugs

  ‘and a thing like a sand-grouse’s head.’

  Hisham put the characters together in his mind,

  or, with the dots,

  which transcribes as khamsah, ‘five [miles]’.

  It is all beautifully logical. At the same time, there are inbuilt problems. Unlike Latin script (which, ultimately, comes from the same fount – or font – of inspiration, the ancient Phoenician writing system), it doesn’t usually show the short vowels; for instance, that word for ‘five’ above actually reads as kh-m-s-h. Thus, in other languages, you read to know what the text is saying, but in Arabic it helps to know what it is saying in order to read it. The section heading above, ‘Look: no vowels!’, written in Arabic-like notation, may therefore have been puzzling. And to make things trickier, in Arabic there are no capital letters. (I remember trying to read the phrase strtfwrd ’bwnyfwn when I was first learning Arabic. Strtfwrd . . . obviously, ‘straightforward’ was the last thing it was. Attempting to insert vowels, the only sense I could make was satarat fa-warada abū nīfūn – ‘She covered [who was she? what did she cover?], then the father of Nīfūn [who the hell was he?] arrived.’ And then a blessed bit of context turned up – shyksbyr, obviously the Bard – and the mysterious words became, with the b and the f standing for un-Arabic p and v, ‘Stratford-upon-Avon’.)