Where are the fathers and the fathers’ fathers?
Where is the good deed that went unpraised?
Where is the evil deed that went uncriticized?
Quss has sworn an oath by Allah,
That Allah has a din which is more pleasing to Him than this din of yours.
Quss was a ‘freelance’ khatib, an orator or preacher not attached to a particular tribe, and al-Mas’udi highlights his super-tribal importance by calling him hakim al-’arab, the Sage of the Arabs. That importance is also clear in Quss’s mention of Allah, the supreme deity of Quraysh who was already gaining followers across Arabia. Of Quss’s many fans, one was particularly fervent:
It was the Prophet of Allah, [Muhammad] peace and blessings be upon him, who communicated the speech of Quss, and his preaching from his camel at Ukaz, and his spiritual counsel; it was he who communicated it to Quraysh and to the Arabs, and who inspired their admiration of its beauty and revealed the accuracy of its message . . . Quss was the preacher to all the Arabs without exception.
And it was Muhammad the Prophet who would also preach to all the Arab tribes and peoples without exception, and would deliver his own farewell sermon from the back of a camel.
Some Islamic depictions of Quss paint him as a sort of John the Baptist to Muhammad’s Jesus. ‘There is,’ Quss proclaimed, ‘on the face of the earth no religion better than a religion the time of which has come, with its shade to protect you . . .’ In the Islamic view, Quss is only a herald, an announcer of the coming revelation, but not a part of it. In literary critical terms there are striking resemblances between Quss’s gnomic rhyming prose and that of the oldest parts of the Qur’an. But in doctrinal terms, while Quss’s rhetoric is human, Muhammad’s is divine and thus can have no precursors. Borges said that ‘every author creates his own precursors’. The exception is the Qur’an, which – if we accept the orthodox view of its authorship – destroys its precursors.
Altogether, the preaching and the poetry, the whole magniloquent rhetoric of the century before Islam, ‘founded a collective memory’. As the poet Adonis has put it, ‘a large part of the Arab group unconsciousness is stored there . . . it is not only our first memory but the first wellspring of our imagination’. Without this collective poetics and rhetorical idiom, the Qur’an (if we suspend belief in its eternity) and Islam, and probably the whole idea of Arabs as a ‘people’, would have been impossible. The memory and the idiom still unite Arabs where borders, wars and doctrines divide.
There would be a price to pay. With the word so central to identity, those who can control it have always been able to control the people for whom it forms the core of their ethnic and religious selves. Poetry and preaching can be exploited politically, made viscerally effective as propaganda. The exploitation can be grotesque: outside my window, now, preachers and poets are inspiring fourteen-year-old boys to go off and get themselves blown to pieces by fellow Arabs; they explain that those fellow Arabs are in fact Americans and Jews; when they are killed, they explain that it had to happen because it was divine will, and persuade their parents to rejoice at their ‘martyrdom’, to smile through their tears as they bury their children, as my neighbour has just done to the remaining bits of his son. If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied . . . But perhaps lies are not enough to account for the tragedy. Words themselves can be guilty, and it is a cruel irony that a single one, shahadah, includes in its meanings both ‘martyrdom’, ‘profession of [Islamic] faith’ and ‘[school] certificate’. Context clarifies meaning, of course; but propagandists play with context. They stage ‘shahadah days’ at every school, exhorting students to go and die: what you lose in the examination hall you gain in heaven.
It all goes to show that of the three outstanding conquests of Arab history – those of arms, of Islam, and of Arabic – the first and most enduring has been the victory, over themselves, of the tongue that bears their name.
VISIONS OF UNITY
By the end of the sixth century there existed an unshakeable idea of Arabs as an Arabia-wide, ‘supra-tribal . . . ethno-cultural group’, as Kees Versteegh has called them, adhering to a fairly consistent ethical code. Arabs had come a long way from their beginnings as the boondockers and bushwhackers of the Semitic world, the flotsam and jetsam of the desert shores, the wandering, plundering Ishmaels of Genesis, the hillbillies and haulage contractors who lived in the gap between empires. Whatever their diverse origins, they had by now accumulated enough common values and language – and, simply, enough shared history – to qualify for a unified ethnic identity.
Where they had got to might have been enough. They might have stayed in their semi-detached ‘island’, an appendage to the main body of Afro-Eurasian history, challenging each other to raids and odes. Their onward journey, from ethnic and ethical solidarity to political unity, from Kulturnation to Staatsnation – let alone the ultimate stage of the journey, to empire – was by no means inevitable. A thousand years earlier, Greece had achieved cultural nationhood and a shared high language, but never enjoyed any overarching political unity; more than a thousand years later, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would see a rebirth of Arab cultural unity, and a re-death of the idea of Arab political unity.
Nevertheless, there had been times when peoples and tribes, hadar and badw, ideals and interests, had found an equilibrium, and when the tribes themselves had been brought tentatively together. Kindah’s efforts to promote unity have been mentioned; so too the tribal blocs that coalesced under the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids. But all these experiments were dependent, more or less, on the existence and the will of external powers, South Arabian, Byzantine and Persian. To achieve any further unity, the will would have to come from within. Like Salman Rushdie’s post-independence united India, a united Arab subcontinent was ‘a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will – except in a dream we all agreed to dream’. For Arabs, visions of a possible greater unity were there: that pair of opposites, ’arab/’ajam, Arabs/non-Arabs, was already firmly in place as the sixth century neared its end, together with the sense of ‘ourselves alone’, walled off from the others. What was lacking was the collective will to come together within the wall, and without it the visions always turned out to be mirages.
Sometimes, too, the visions turned into nightmare. As it had opened with the War of al-Basus, the long pre-Islamic century closed with yet more turns of the wheel of fire. ‘When their descendants became wealthy and numerous,’ it was reported of an inter-tribal attempt at forming an agricultural settlement, ‘they all forgot their good fortune, and severed the ties of loyalty, and war flew among them until they had exterminated each other’. Even more disastrously, the tribe of Udwan, which had once been so prosperous and numerous as to include ‘70,000 youths not yet circumcised’, also fell to internecine raiding and war and utterly destroyed their own unity. As their poet put it,
Authority and excellence and wisdom were all theirs
until, at last, Time took them in its fateful turn:
The tribe was torn apart, its limbs dismembered,
and its people scattered far and wide in bands.
Barrenness befell their land, and then their women’s wombs;
the accidents of fate had ruined them for evermore.
The accidents of oral transmission may also have added a zero or two to the population of Banu Udwan. More personal, and thus perhaps more powerful as a record of an Arabia ripped apart by raiding, is the lament by a man called Harithah for a single loss – that of his young son, Zayd, taken in a raid:
I’ve wept for Zayd, not knowing what’s become of him:
is he alive, and to be hoped for? or has death come to him?
The sun reminds me of him at its every rising;
his memory returns each day at fall of dusk;
His recollection stirs with every breeze that blows –
how long my grieving for him, and how
fearful.
(At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them.) Zayd was alive, as it happened, but not to be hoped for: the child had been enslaved beyond redemption. The theme of the verses, unlike laments for glorious dead warriors, is rare: children may be lamented in private, but they have accumulated no hasab, no record of noble deeds worthy of public commemoration. The lines probably owe their preservation to the identity of the child’s future owner and adoptive father, an obscure citizen of Mecca who was about to come on to the stage of great Arabs – and to steal the show.
ADVENT
As the sixth century closed, there were developments of more than personal or tribal consequence. Both the Byzantines and the Persians dispensed with the services their Ghassanid and Lakhmid buffer kingdoms, and tried to defend their borders with regular armies recruited from their own people. The now jobless Arab kings still attracted eulogy, however, and there is a new note of defiance and ‘national’ feeling in it. ‘Your rule in Syria,’ said Hassan ibn Thabit of the Ghassanid king Jabalah ibn al-Ayham, ‘to the bounds of Byzantium, is the pride of every Yemeni’.
The Lakhmids fared less well. In 602, the Sasanian shah had the Lakhmid king – the same al-Nu’man III who had rebuffed the shah’s attempts at a marital alliance – trampled to death by elephants. No particularly high politics seem to have been involved; only personal animosity, a sordid palace plot and a denunciation. However, by so decisively ending their 300-year association with the Lakhmids, the Persians had made a big mistake. Two years later they and some remaining Arab allies suffered an embarrassing defeat at a place called Dhu Qar by a consortium of Arab tribes led by that of Bakr, one of the opposing parties in that War of the Camel’s Udder. In itself, this burst of tribal unity looks like a large-scale raid that ended in the usual squabbles; and, as it happened, the defeat seems to have brought the Sasanians to their senses – and even to have put them on the offensive. From 610 they managed a late last expansion of their empire, trouncing the Byzantines and moving into Syria and even Egypt. But there was a sense that with the Persian defeat at Dhu Qar a corner had been turned. Muhammad, still the obscure citizen of Mecca, is said to have exclaimed on the day of the distant battle, ‘Today the ’arab have demanded vengeance from the ’ajam, and have won’. Whether the statement is the result of telepathic insight or historic hindsight is an open question; what is not in doubt is that Arabs were about to win far bigger victories, and not just over the Persians.
Looking back on the century before Islam, it was as if a pressure had been building from all the migrations and raids and battle-days, energies that had to find release if they were not to cause implosion. But that release would come and, moreover, the energies would be channelled. The Arab word, and the Arab will, were about to be gathered; for a while, Arabs would all agree to dream the same dream, and to make it a waking reality. The poet Hassan ibn Thabit would soon be eulogizing a new master – not a king, but that obscure yet insightful Meccan, the unsuspecting founder of an empire that would, within a a generation of his death, embrace those proud expatriate Yemenis of the far Ghassanid north, their much-removed cousins in the Persian-colonized south, their surviving Lakhmid rivals in al-Hirah, and – astonishingly, briefly – all the perennially bickering tribes in between. In Muhammad not only would the rhetoric of the tribal kahin, khatib, sha’ir and sayyid – oracle, orator, bard and lord – unite with extraordinary originality and charisma; the rhetorical roles would amount to much more than the sum of their parts: to prophethood.
A prophet is someone who ‘speaks for’ a deity. In Muhammad’s case it would be a deity who, like those of the old South Arabians, would function as, and guide, the collective will of His worshippers. The difference was that this deity would suffer no partners, no rivals: His was an uncompromising theological unitarianism, and for a brief but heady season it would impose another unity – not just of language and culture, but also of doctrine and even of arms – and not just on a settled commonwealth but on the whole population, hadar and badw, of the peninsula, and send them out, Arabs all, from their ‘island’. The ‘Days of the Arabs’ were far from over; still, now, they come thick and fast. But Arabs were about to have their day in the history of a wider world.
CHAPTER FIVE
REVELATION,
REVOLUTION
MUHAMMAD AND THE QUR’AN
THE BLACK STONE
‘When Quraysh rebuilt the Ka’bah,’ goes the story of the Meccan shrine’s reconstruction in 608 after a flash flood had destroyed the earlier building,
. . . work progressed as far as the place of the [Black] Stone . . . but then the Qurashis quarrelled over who should lay the Stone in position. In the end they agreed to abide by the decision of whoever should happen to enter first from the Gate of Banu Shaybah. The first person to appear before their eyes through that gate was the [soon-to-be] Prophet [Muhammad], peace and blessings be upon him. They already knew him as ‘al-Amin’ [the Trusted One], on account of his gravity, his sound judgement and the truth of his speech, as well as his avoidance of uncleanliness and filth. They asked him to decide in their dispute and agreed to follow his adjudication. At this he took off the cloak he was wearing . . . spread it on the ground, took the Stone and placed it in the middle of the cloak. He then told four of the men of Quraysh, all of them chiefs and leaders [of different sub-clans of the tribe] . . . to take hold of the cloak, each grasping a side of it. They lifted it up and took it over to the place of the Stone, and the Prophet laid the Stone in position with all of Quraysh looking on. This was first of his public acts in which he displayed his merit and his wisdom.
The Black Stone is still a focal point of the focal shrine of what is now Islam: it is the fervent desire of every Mecca pilgrim to kiss it. And yet the precise reasons for this are unknown. Thirty years or so after Muhammad relaid the Stone, Caliph Umar, his second successor, said he knew that ‘it did neither good nor harm’. So why, then, did he and other pious people kiss the Stone? Because, the caliph said, that had been the Prophet’s custom. For something to have been a sunnah, a practice, of Muhammad, is reason enough for Muslims to emulate it. But as the story of its relaying shows, the Stone also had a past that went back, possibly a very long time, before the year zero that marks the beginning of Islamic time and, supposedly, the consummation of all previous history.
At the time of its final pre-Islamic reconstruction, the Ka’bah housed a whole bevy of idols representing the deities of different Arabian tribes. We do not know whether Allah – the supreme deity of Muhammad’s tribe, Quraysh – had a physical symbol or not. If he had had no symbol at all, he would have been exceptional; conversely, if he had indeed had a symbol of some sort, it would have been natural for the fact to be covered up in Islamic times: the Ka’bah, as represented by Islam, is the most ancient shrine of a strictly aniconic monotheism, dating back to Abraham or in some accounts to Adam; even perhaps to before the creation of mankind, when the angels would gather to worship at its site.
The assumption that the Stone had some association with Allah would be a reasonable one, even if unprovable. It may be supported by the unusual word used for Muhammad’s act of kissing it – istalama – which is found in ancient South Arabian inscriptions with the sense of ‘gaining security with a deity’. The equally aniconic deity of the Jews, after all, is known to have been associated with sacred stones – unworked stones like the Black Stone, that is, not figurative ‘graven images’ such as the one at Bethel in Genesis. (‘Beth El’ is the same as ‘Bayt Allah’, ‘the House of Allah’, the official name of the Ka’bah.) It is also known that unworked stones were used by Arabs to represent deities. When halting on their travels, the antiquarian Ibn al-Kalbi says in his Book of Idols, they would select four stones, using three of them to support their cooking pot and one as their ‘god’. They would make sacrifices to these dieux trouvés and circumambulate them, just as they would process around the Ka’bah. The most binding oaths were sworn on sacred s
tones, and in another rare glimpse of the Black Stone before Islam, an alliance of Qurashi clans was sealed by the washing of the Stone, the drinking of the rinsings, and the making of vows.
There are a couple of less convincing glimpses: of Abraham’s son Ishmael/Isma’il receiving the Stone from the Archangel Gabriel during the building of the Ka’bah (a ‘heavenly’ origin is not impossible – the Stone may be a meteorite, although this has never been proved); and of its having been originally white, and then being blackened by the sins of the pre-Islamic ‘Age of Ignorance’. But, whatever its lost pre-Islamic meaning had been, the Black Stone gains enormous symbolic significance for Arab history from that first public act of Muhammad, two years before the beginning of his revelations. It is the foundation stone of something absolutely new, but whose substance comes from an ancient past. Over twenty years later, when Muhammad returned from his new power-base of Medina, his first act on capturing pagan Mecca was to kiss once more the Black Stone; the kiss sealed the reconciliation with his native town and his native Arabian tradition. When he then smashed the idols of the Ka’bah, the Stone was the point of continuity that allowed the mostly pagan past to elide into the monotheistic future; its customary place, in the eastern corner of the shrine, became a turning point. Most important, because of Muhammad’s wisdom and leadership on that earlier occasion, the Stone ceased to be a source of disunity, a stumbling-block. Instead, it mediated, literally, between the disputing clans; it brought them together to carry it; and it became the property of none of them and all of them, a point not of contention but of conjunction. Muhammad had gathered the word and the will of the people.
Almost none of the millions of pilgrims who crowd in to kiss the Black Stone today in emulation of Muhammad have any idea why it is so significant; yet its significance grows a little with the touch of every pair of lips.
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