Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  Recite! In the name of your Lord who has created . . . Who has taught by the pen.

  Reciting and writing go together from the start of the revelations, and writing as much as reciting is a divinely inspired act; it is not impossible that there are influences at play, yet again, from the earlier civilization of South Arabia, where writing may have been an activity restricted to priestly scribes. Another early revelation, the Chapter of the Pen, begins with an ancient sacred oath sworn on that instrument of modernity –

  By the pen and what they write . . .

  The old oral, magical world of the kahins had come together with the new era of recording technology.

  If the phrase ‘recording technology’ suggests associations with hi-fi, they are not out of place. In Arabic, ‘the written symbol is considered to be identical with the sound indicated by it’. Letters are not just phonetic; they are phonic, acoustic, ‘. . . script that fills the ears of him that sees it’, as the poet al-Mutanabbi was to call them. Robert Byron, writing on Kufic, the earliest Arabic script, is spot-on when he says that it ‘seems in itself a form of oratory, a transposition of speech from the audible to the visible’. What this means in practice is that a written version of an oral text is not a separate entity, a next stage in composition; it is seen (or heard) rather as a direct audio-recording, not so much a dictation as a notation, like that of music. Thus an old saying, ‘The pen is a second tongue’.

  From early on, the Qur’an had a material, written presence. The revelations were jotted down on anything that came to hand – leaves, bones, bits of hide, pieces of wood, potsherds, stones, recycled scraps of imported papyrus. And at some stage, probably quite early in the second decade of the seventh century, written portions of it started circulating. Umar, who had imagined Muhammad to be just another kahin, is said in some accounts to have converted to the Prophet’s cause on reading a single leaf that he happened to find in his sister’s house. Such leaves probably began as a form of aide-mémoire to recitation for Muhammad’s followers among his family and acquaintances. Later, in Medina, recording became systematic, and Muhammad would dictate Qur’anic verses – often hot off the heavenly airwaves – to ‘the scribes of the revelation’. Once, when a verse that had already been revealed had slipped Muhammad’s memory, a scribe had to prompt him, a case of the recorded version collaborating with the live performance. In another case, one of the scribes would maliciously substitute wrong words in his copy; he was found out, fled back to pagan Mecca – and a Qur’anic verse duly descended to criticize him. The revelations themselves take account of this shift from oral to written: earlier ones tend to speak of a qur’an, ‘recitation’, later ones of a kitab, ‘writing, book’.

  That the Qur’an became the first Arabic book is not just a fact of literary history. The Qur’an is more than those disparate jottings bound together; much more than the sum of its parts. A major part of Muhammad’s argument against the pagan Meccans was that they had no scripture to prove the truth of their eclectic spiritual beliefs. For example, the Qur’an challenges the pagans for asserting that supernatural beings like angels are the daughters of Allah:

  Or do you have clear authority?

  Then bring forth your Book if you are telling the truth!

  Of course, the pagans had no book to bring forth. Muhammad trounced them by producing not only the old sacred language but also by producing a new sacred scripture.

  Furthermore, part of the miracle of the Qur’an is that its recipient, Muhammad, was ummi, a word often glossed as ‘illiterate’. But a better gloss may be ‘gentile’: in other words, Muhammad was from a community – Arabic ummah, Latin gens (hence ‘gentile’) – who, unlike the Jews and the Christians, did not have a scripture. There are some indications that he could write. In the story mentioned above about the monk displaying Muhammad’s portrait and predicting his prophethood, Abu Bakr’s first reaction was to say, ‘But Muhammad cannot write well,’ not that he was unable to write at all. Stories from the Medina period may confirm that he had some ability to write.

  What is certain is that Muhammad knew the power of writing, and would use it widely in the later community- and state-building years at Medina. As Benedict Anderson argues in his Imagined Communities, there is no more powerful fundamental unifying force for a community than language. For the language to come from a deity, and to be written in a book for the first time, could only increase that force exponentially. Part of Muhammad’s genius, whether he himself could write or not, was therefore to grasp the potential of writing – the earthly power that pens can wield alongside swords. In this respect if no other, he may have resembled the chief of the Nambikwara tribe with whom Claude Lévi-Strauss stayed in Brazil: ‘I could not help admiring [his] genius in instantly recognizing that writing could increase his authority, thus grasping the basis of the institution without knowing how to use it.’ Perhaps, too, he resembled the legendary king Cadmus, said to have disseminated the Greek alphabet – and also to have grown himself an army sown from dragon’s teeth. (The king, like both Greek and Arabic letters, is also said to have been Phoenician in origin.)

  So who did know how to use writing in early seventh-century Mecca? As we have seen, it was probably a newish technology there, one that had filtered down the trade routes from the Lakhmid-ruled north-east of Arabia by the later sixth century. It had revolutionized Meccan book-keeping, and raised commerce to new levels. A poet is said to have congratulated the Meccans in verse on the benefits of their newly acquired Arabic script,

       by which you now can keep account

  of wealth that had been scattered and disordered.

  . . .

  You ply your pens back and forth along the lines

  as nimbly as the scribes of Khusraw and of Caesar;

  You have no need for the ancient script of Himyar . . .

  The verses make a historical point of great importance. It was not just that Meccans were discovering the joys of accountancy; Arabs were at last joining, as independent members, the regional club of literate civilizations – Khusraw’s Persians, Caesar’s Roman-Byzantines, and the now superannuated Himyaris of South Arabia. Henceforward, Arabs would compete with these imperial neighbours on equal terms. Soon, with the added benefit of their God-given (or at least Allah-based) solidarity, they would outstrip them.

  Altogether, seventeen Qurashis are said to have been literate at the beginning of Muhammad’s prophethood, but the number soon increased and started to include women. Significantly, among those seventeen were some of Muhammad’s closest companions: five of them acted as his secretaries, and it was those five who would eventually succeed him in turn as heads of the new state that he founded. By the time of the fifth successor, the state had become an empire. Only an administration based on writing could have kept that empire up, running and expanding; faith and arms alone would never have been enough.

  The spread of writing, until now confined to the courts of the client-kings in Lakhmid al-Hirah and Ghassanid Syria, transformed Arabs. By learning to form their own Arabic characters in ledgers and scriptures, they were also forming their character as a people, and inscribing it on the pages of a bigger history.

  RHYME IS REASON

  During Muhammad’s life, ‘scripture’ meant a loose-leaf, unbound mass of texts. Putting them together as a single book would take a long time, and would not be completed until nearly thirty years after his death. Part of the problem was the editing: the editors had to splice, but, given the divinity of the material, they couldn’t cut. The volume that eventually appeared is, not surprisingly, full of repetitions and internal echoes. One must expect not to read a sequentially constructed narrative in the Qur’an, but to hear a set of themes and variations. To think in visual terms, it is not an exercise in linear perspective, but a synoptic view of a cosmic subject by a compound eye and from multiple angles; it is not just cubist but endlessly polyhedral. It is aware of its own potential infinitude:

  If all the tre
es on the Earth were pens and the seas were replenished after it with seven seas [of ink], the words of Allah would not be exhausted.

  It is not that the Qur’an is physically long: even in translation, which is inevitably much wordier than the original, it is the length of a moderate paperback. But it has generated hundreds of commentaries, each many times the length of its subject, and the story of the commentator who spent thirty-six years delivering an oral exposition and still never got to the end bemuses, but doesn’t surprise.

  Part of the reason for this excess of exegesis is its multiple inbuilt ambiguities. Edward Said thought the inexplicability of the Qur’an to be an Orientalist cliché. But the inexplicability is there in the Qur’an:

  In it are verses that are entirely clear . . . and others not entirely clear . . . None knows its hidden meanings save Allah. And those who are firmly grounded in knowledge say, ‘We believe in it: the whole of it [both clear and unclear] is from our Lord.’

  In the end, what matters more in the Qur’an is not what it says, but how it says it. It is not the logic that counts, but the magic – ‘magic’ in its first and now forgotten sense: for the earliest Greeks, magoi were the keepers of oral tradition in Media. Muhammad compared the experience of receiving revelations to the shrill clang of a bell. The simile of striking, ‘abstract’ sound is appropriate: the ideas, as Ibn Khaldun said, are secondary to the words. It is a strange claim: surely truth is inherent in what you say, not how you say it . . . Yes; but not when what you say comes straight from God. For those of us who live in a post-supernatural environment, there may be an analogy with the visual arts: one can look at a portrait by, say, Francis Bacon, and sense that even if it is far from photo-realist, it reveals another sort of reality – that it contains a deeper truth about the subject, that it is inimitable and even in some way ‘inspired’. For seventh-century hearers of the Qur’an, for whom supernatural beings were real and words the only art, there was no doubt about the inspiration and inimitability of Muhammad’s revelations. The irony of it, as Geert Jan van Gelder has said, is that the dogma of the Qur’an’s divine origin ‘has denied Muhammad a place among the world’s most gifted and original authors’.

  The Qur’an inherited the ancient magic of the kahin’s speech. This magic, now promoted to divinity, is proof of the book’s own truth. In the end, truth would out in the events of history.

  The linguist Joshua Fishman pointed out that language, ‘is not merely a carrier of content . . . Language itself is content . . .’ The Qur’an is a particularly egregious case of language-as-content. This is not to say that the content it carries is unimportant; far from it. Many Muslims over the ages have pondered the content deeply, and digested its messages sincerely and faithfully. But it is possible to get away with much less. The ninth-century founder of the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam said,

  I saw the Almighty in a dream and asked, ‘O Lord, what is the best way to manage to be near You?’ He replied, ‘My Word [i.e. the Qur’an], Ahmad.’ I inquired, ‘With understanding or without understanding?’ He said, ‘With or without understanding.’

  AND THE WORD DWELT AMONG US, AND WE IN IT

  In time, the Qur’an’s inbuilt obscurities would invite conflicting interpretations and inspire bitter clashes; many of Muhammad’s most sublime spiritual messages would be buried under the business of running a state, then ruling an empire. But to start with, the obscurities didn’t matter. What counted – and still counts above all – was not logic, but the direct appeal to the ear, the heart, the soul, bypassing the brain. Ibn Qutaybah, a ninth-century polymath, said that the time of Moses was ‘the age of magic’ (transforming staff into serpent, dividing the Red Sea); that of Jesus ‘the age of healing’ (curing the sick, raising the dead); and that of Muhammad ‘the age of bayan’, of the clear, eloquent speech of the Qur’an. Earlier miracles were supernatural; Muhammad’s was superlinguistic.

  The Qur’an was Muhammad’s main miracle. But for Arabs, it was enough. The proof of the miracle was and is the great number of people brought together by belief in it:

  If you [Muhammad] had spent all that is in the earth, you could not have united their hearts. But Allah has united them.

  As al-Mas’udi put it, with the Qur’an Muhammad ‘challenged the most eloquent of all peoples [Arabs] . . . and he stunned their hearing and disabled their minds’.

  No clearer proof is needed: the Arabic language is not only the third of a series of conquests by Arabs of others, after the victories of arms and Islam. It was the first conquest, of themselves by themselves, and without it the others would never have happened: Arabs would have been a footnote to world history, not a continuing and important chapter. The language that bears their name both ensorcelled them (‘enchanted’ is not strong enough), and empowered them and their coming empire. The point needs to be restated, because the many books that the Arab chapter of history has inspired have never made it clearly enough. It is the reason we can speak of ‘the Arab world’ – really, the Arabic world, the Arabosphere – and the reason why that world is still alive, while the Roman world is as dead as its language. Arabic, as its early twentieth-century celebrant Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi’i wrote, ‘was built on a magical foundation which gives it eternal youth, never growing old or dying’. Some would disagree about its eternal youth; none can deny that it is still alive.

  Jan Retsö has gone as far as saying that Muhammad and the Qur’an revived the whole idea of arabness, which had been on the verge of disappearing. Retsö is speaking of his own complex definition of ’arab, as traditional soothsayers and guardians of local cults. It would be truer to say that whatever ’arab had been or had become, Muhammad redefined them through the book he gave them, not just as guardians of marginal local cults but as the vanguard of a global culture. The culture would include non-Muslims and embrace non-Arabians. To quote al-Rafi’i again, ‘The Qur’an is a linguistic nationality that unites disparate lineages to the Arabic language’.

  Returning to my own earlier metaphor, the high formal language of pre-Qur’anic poetry had given Arabs their most prominent item of ‘national dress’. Now, in the Qur’an, it also served to clothe a transcendent deity and thus make Him visible, if veiled. (It has been rightly said that the Qur’an is the equivalent not of the Gospels, but of Christ, the Logos: the Christian godhead veiled Himself in flesh and became man; the old high god of Mecca veiled Himself in a text, a textile of words.) But the consequences of the Qur’an went way beyond theology. Arabic, the national dress, had been loose. As the Islamic centuries progressed, exegetes and lexicographers would turn it into something much more uniform – a uniform that could be adopted to make Arabs of people far beyond Arabia. It was, and still is, formal wear: people feel uncomfortable in it, and speak day to day in the motley of dialects. And yet that difficult and formulaic tongue, stiff with the starch of millennia, is still the medium of reading and writing. It still unites Arabs ‘from the Ocean to the Gulf’. Whatever ‘Arab’ has meant in the past – marginal camel herds, cultic guardians, tribal raiders – it now means, primarily, users of the Arabic language. As Munsif al-Marzuqi, the Tunisian intellectual and recent head of state, has written, ‘Our [Arab] community, unlike all others, does not live in a land; it lives in a language’. He meant the old language that goes back via the Qur’an, and ultimately to the poetry and magical speech of pre-Islamic Arabia. Arabic is something to put on, a habit in its oldest meaning, but also something to inhabit.

  LA ILLAHA ILLA ’LLAH

  If the stuff of the Qur’an is secondary to the style, the content to the form, certain messages stand out, and one above all others. It is the first phrase of the Islamic creed:

  There is no god but Allah

  – lumpy in English, but in Arabic mellifluous, mantra-like and mesmeric:

  La illaha illa ’llah.

  For the idol-rich Meccans, however, whose current economic boom was at least partly due to trading on the Ka’bah’s popularity as a divine hypermark
et, it would hardly be a popular mission-statement. In Mecca, there were lots of gods beside Allah: the place was crowded with images of deities from all over Arabia and beyond. But, looked at in a wider context, Muhammad was only following the regional zeitgeist. The Hijaz was the last great island of paganism in the Mediterranean-Arabian world, and Muhammad was going with the monotheistic swim. But which way would he go?

  The One God in His various guises had been moving in on western Arabia in a long slow pincer movement. It began with the dissemination of Judaism to the north during the first millennium BC, and perhaps a tentative early monotheism in South Arabia with the worship of Dhu ’l-Sama’, the God of Heaven, half way through that millennium. By the the fourth century AD, Christianity had a firm hold over the regions to the north, while a new indigenous monotheism spread in the south with the worship of al-Rahman, ‘the Merciful’ (about whom little is known except that He begins to supplant the old pantheon in inscriptions). Judaism was also to gain a foothold in the south, as we have seen with the early sixth-century ruler Yusuf As’ar; the Christian presence there increased with the Ethiopian takeover that ended Yusuf’s rule. In the same century, Christianity also spread in the Ghassanid and Lakhmid Arab client-kingdoms in the north. There were major pockets of Judaism in the Hijaz itself, notably in Yathrib, Muhammad’s future Medina. Even in pagan Mecca, Christianity made inroads: several Meccan Christians are known by name, and among the sacred furnishings of the holy of holies was that icon, the Virgin of the Ka’bah.

  Most notably, the Hijaz was home to the hanifs whose monotheistic devotional poetry, as we have seen, shares features with Muhammad’s message, including the term islam. The sharing may even go further than themes and isolated words. The hanif Khalid ibn Sinan al-Absi, who lived just before Muhammad’s time and was accepted by him as the penultimate prophet, was said by some to have pre-empted him by reciting a whole chapter of the Qur’an, that known as the Chapter of Purity, or of Unity: ‘Say,’ it begins,