Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  I hugged him and felt the violent beating of his heart . . . Then he said to me,

  ‘Ahmad, I don’t doubt they’ll take me to my brother. Do you think my brother will kill me?’

  I replied, ‘No, for the bond of kinship will make him pity you.’

  And he said, ‘Forget that. There is no kinship in kingship. It is barren.’

  In one sense he was literally right: the word for ‘kinship’ – translated in the poem above in the plural as ‘birth-bonds’ – is rahim, which also means ‘womb’: with their different mothers, a womb, a birth-bond, was precisely what the two brothers did not share. Some anti-Aminist historians even ‘efface’ their shared paternity and call al-Amin, after his mother’s name, ‘Muhammad ibn Zubaydah’. Al-Amin was not sent to his brother. He was killed there and then; the usual trophy, his head, was sent instead. (The third brother and joint ruler, al-Mu’tamin, had wisely bowed out of the fight and spent the rest of his life in obscurity.)

  Al-Ma’mun was victorious, and would go on to be a philosopher; but the ties of family – let alone of clan or tribe or race – had, as the poet and the caliph realized, been fatally severed. Increasingly, from now on, rulers would buy loyalty, relying on non-Arab followers and mercenaries. The trend had begun as early as the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, who had depended on his slaves and freedmen in preference to Arabs. But al-Ma’mun would now greatly accelerate it by importing Transoxanian troops to Baghdad and putting them on the official payroll. Soon, as we shall see, military and then political power would slip from Arab hands. Of all the reverse futuhat – reciprocal ‘invasions’ of Arabs by those whose lands they had conquered – this was the most decisive, for it would end for ever Arab supremacy, and any pretence of political unity.

  1 Parsimonious beauty, short commons for the herds, but a livelihood of sorts. Arabias Petraea and Deserta intersect in Jordan’s Wadi Rum.

  2 Arabia Felix . . . and yet felicity only comes with social organization and hard graft. Building and maintaining these terraces is labour-intensive, but they retain the precious topsoil. A village near al-Tawilah, north-western Yemen.

  3 A handbag? No, a vase. The gesture with the other hand is one of submission or despair: this was one of the times it didn’t help Arabs to be the neighbours of empires. Gypsum wall panel of 728 BC from Nimrud, Iraq. The woman and camels have been captured in Assyrian campaigns against the Arab ‘queen’, Shamsi.

  4 Alluded to in the Qur’an, this great hydraulic monument has proved to be one of the most durable structures in the history of civil engineering. Part of the southern sluice of the sixth-century BC Sabaean dam at Marib, Yemen. It remained in use for over a thousand years.

  5 A’rab of nomad origin riding roughshod through settled South Arabian society. A first–third-century AD South Arabian calcite-alabaster stele commemorating a certain Ha’an ibn Dhu Zu’d.

  6 Kiss like a butterfly: black power meets the Black Stone. Boxing legend Muhammad Ali at the Ka’bah, Mecca, in 1972.

  7 Buraq, the miraculous mount, is shown with a human face; but never the human prophet who rides him. An early twentieth-century Persian image of the Prophet Muhammad on his ‘night journey’ and ascension to the heavens.

  8 Perhaps the earliest surviving Qur’an manuscript, these folio parchment leaves have been carbon-dated to a time before AD 645.

  9 A gilded paradise empty of people. Early eighth-century mosaics from the west side of the courtyard, Umayyad Mosque, Damascus.

  10 In Baghdad itself, nothing remains above ground of the great Round City of the early Abbasid caliphs. This provincial survival hints at the grandeur of the imperial metropolis. The eighth-century Baghdad Gate, al-Raqqah, Syria.

  11 To those with Anglo-Saxon attitudes, it looks upside-down. But, taking a world-view, it was the old Classical order that had been overturned by the newly coined Arab empire. A gold coin of AD 774, minted by King Offa of Mercia, England, in imitation of the contemporary Abbasid dinar.

  12 Brutalist beauty: Sultan Qabus of Jurjan’s mortuary skyscraper, in which his corpse is said to have hung in mid-air in a crystal coffin. The Arabic proclaims, ‘This lofty palace . . .’ Gunbadh-i Qabus, tower-tomb of AD 1006, in the town to which it gave its name, Iran.

  13 A final fanfare for the caliphs before the coming of the Mongol hordes: a poignant image used on countless book jackets. An AD 1237 manuscript miniature from al-Hariri’s Maqamat, showing the caliph’s mounted standard-bearers.

  14 ‘Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His Light is a niche wherein is a lamp . . .’ Marble tombstone, fourteenth or fifteenth century, commemorating one Ali ibn Uthman Al-Mursi. Found in Aden, Yemen, but imported there from a workshop in Cambay, India.

  15 The East of the-West-of-the-East: Islam goes native in Arabic chinoiseries. A panel over the entrance of the Great Mosque, Xi’an (formerly Chang’an), China.

  16 Liberty, equality, fraternity? Or just the next imperial lion? A nineteenth-century woodcut of tricolours and turbans in the Great Pyramid during Napoleon’s 1798 visit.

  17 A far-travelling pavilion, empty of content but filled with the symbolism of power and pilgrimage. The procession of the Egyptian mahmal, or ceremonial camel-borne pavilion, leaving for the Mecca pilgrimage, c. 1917.

  18 Taming the latest imperial lion . . . King Ibn Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia charming US President Franklin D. Roosevelt via his interpreter aboard the USS Quincy, Egypt, 1945.

  19 . . . and melting another Cold War emperor’s heart. Comrades-in-arms-deals: Nasser of Egypt with Nikita Khrushchev of the USSR, 1964.

  20 Engineering liquid assets: 2,500 years ago it was the water in the Marib Dam (cf. Plate 4); now it is the oil in the Dhahran refinery. A Blakeian vision of Saudi Aramco’s main installation, at Dhahran on the Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia.

  21 & 22 Before and after. As a famous line of Arabic poetry goes, ‘O that my youthful self could come back for a day, / That I might tell him what grey hair has done . . .’ Libyan leader Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi, near the beginning and near the end of his forty-two-year rule.

  23 This and other works have inspired what might be termed the West Banksy school of graffiti art. Graffito by Banksy on the Israeli-built separation wall, Palestine, 2012.

  24 Still giving them stick: latter-day a’rab ride roughshod over civil society (cf. Plate 5). A camel-borne hireling of the Mubarak regime scatters anti-Mubarak protesters in Cairo, February 2011.

  25 The sledgehammer school of history. Are they simply denying the past? Or are they wreaking revenge on that oldest imperial lion nearly 3,000 years too late (cf. Plate 3)? ‘Islamic State’ iconoclasts ‘cleansing’ the Nineveh Museum of ancient Assyrian ‘idols’, Iraq, February 2015.

  26 Butcher or bosom pal? Both, when the mass Stockholm syndrome is at work. Teenage fans of Bashshar al-Asad at a rally to support his candidacy in the forthcoming presidential election, Damascus, April 2014.

  27 A Bach fugue for the eyes. Detail of the late thirteenth-century minbar (pulpit) formerly in the Great Mosque, Aleppo, Syria. At the time of writing, its whereabouts are unknown.

  Add to that the linguistic infiltration of Arabic by non-Arabs, and the genetic invasion at every level of society by the monstrous regiment of concubines, and it all meant that Arab identity was sliding out of control. But not before an official version of the Arab past – of what it had been to be Arab, and might be once more – had been preserved.

  SETTLING DOWN, SETTING DOWN

  During the century and more of pell-mell imperial expansion from the 630s onward, Arab vision had been blurred by the sheer speed of movement. Arab energy had been absorbed by the need to maintain momentum and, less successfully, cohesion. Now, for a time, Arabs could take stock: like astronauts settling into orbit after the thrills and perils of the launch, they could look at where they had got to, where they had come from and, importantly, at themselves.

  In their attempts to keep a grip on the world they knew, Arabs wou
ld do what they would do in later times, and what many still do now: they would cling to the past. Not just to the recent, revolutionary past of Muhammad’s time, but also to the earlier Arabian past from which Islam had emerged – that old, self-completed past of their ancestral ‘island’. Nostalgia is an underrated force in history: time goes forward; but people often flee backwards, from crisis and complexity to imagined simplicity and purity. The past can be another country, but it can also be a homeland.

  For Arabs in Abbasid times, that past had first to be retrieved and recorded. The movement has been called ’asr al-tadwin, ‘the age of setting down’. It was a kind of foil to the translation movement – a foil almost in the literal sense of the foil that backs the mirror, for the translation was not from outside, but inward and backward into the Arab self. It was also the beginning of a slippage that still affects the life of Islam – between that introspection on the one side, and on the other a greater openness to the world beyond Arabia. Those who were open to the wider world used the medium of Arabic and the material of Islam to create a global civilization, in which inherited Arabian ritual was enriched by the indigenous pre-conquest wisdoms of other lands. The result has been aptly compared to Hellenistic civilization. But it was, and is, a civilization from which many would yearn to go on pilgrimage back into its Arab past.

  CREATION OF A LEGACY

  The trouble was that much of the past had been lost. The continuity, the mirror of memory, was broken: in the new settled society, it was not only the caliph who had forgotten the meaning of ‘pasture’. To put this right, scholars turned to those whose lives still revolved around pasture – the bedouin.

  From the later eighth century onward, philologists, lexicographers and ethnologists from the towns descended on the remaining Arabs whose lives were supposedly uncontaminated by urban ways and speech. Their object was to gather folklore in its widest and most etymological sense – the whole inherited knowledge of a people. The movement is sometimes reminiscent of that in the changing Europe of a century and more ago, when Cecil Sharp and Béla Bartók gathered dances and tunes. But the Arab version was not just inspired by artistic curiosity or folksiness: it was rescue archaeology performed on the living remains of a people’s past, and in a mobile society in which words had always been more important than places or artefacts, it focused on language. Like some other, later archaeologies – those, for example, of Zionism and Hindu nationalism – it had a programme, and was happy to present a particular view of the past. In the Arab case it was the bedouin past, or at least that part of it which had survived into the present among the nomads of the north-east of the peninsula, the part nearest to the Iraqi Oxbridge of al-Kufah and al-Basrah. The other major Arabian past, of settled non-tribal societies, of great dams and temples, lay far away and forgotten in the deep South, the dark side of the Arabian moon.

  The bedouin subjects of these studies were often bemused by the questions they were asked: whether, for example, one should say ‘Isra’il’ with a glottal stop, or ‘Israyil’ with a y, and whether ‘Filastin’, ‘Palestine’, had a genitive case . . . ‘How long,’ asked one a’rabi informant, ‘will you go on asking me about these nonsenses? How long will I make up fine answers for you? Can’t you see your beard’s going grey?’ One lexicographer benefited from being kidnapped for several years by a bedouin tribe. Some researchers paid ready money for their information, while some informants moved to the towns to sell their knowledge. Often, researchers were not over-careful about their informants. As al-Ma’arri said of them,

  how often do grammarians quote any tiny tot, who knows of letters not a jot? Or any person of the female gender, in need of men to defend her?

  Of course, the point was to find subjects who didn’t know their letters; moreover, women are often the best informants, being more conservative in speech than men.

  The lore was in essence linguistic. But the study of language often entailed the collection of poetry, and understanding poetry entailed, in turn, the gathering of information on the topography and genealogy of the pre-Islamic past. And it would all have repercussions far beyond the interests of antiquarians and the preservation of a rich and curious heritage: it would, in fact, define and refine for all time the whole Arab ‘brand’. The brand is still with us today, stamped on people of great diversity from Mauritania to Muscat. Once again, as with those early wanderers of varied origin whom their neighbours lumped together under the same designation nearly 3,000 years ago, the label of ‘Arab’ has proved its strength and durability.

  THE RETURN OF THE NOMAD

  The Abbasid reality was that of a largely urban, agrarian and settled society, increasingly plural and diverse. Bedouin Arabs had served their purpose as spearhead of the conquests; since then, they had been absorbed into the new society or, if they had maintained their old existence, had faded back into the political and geographical margins. When they do appear, it is either as linguistic informants or as a subversive force – taking part in a two-year war between ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ tribes in Syria in the time of al-Rashid, for example, or raiding the Mecca pilgrim caravans, as did a force of 6,000 Tayyi’ nomads in 898. This latter phenomenon would continue on and off for over a thousand years, until the rise of the centralized power of the Al Sa’ud. Arab pirates attacking Muslim pilgrims . . . there could be no better illustration of the continuity with the old herding-raiding past, or of the disconnect between between Islam and its peninsular origins.

  At the same time, in recording the past for posterity, it was precisely that herding-raiding past that was made prominent and given a heroic gloss. The badw ethos was inserted deep into the collective Arab cultural memory. It became the ideal, whatever the reality might be. In other words, it became a kind of national persona. As a recent critic put it, it was now, in the age of setting down, that ‘Arab personality began to be conscious of itself’. But if it was the beginning of self-consciousness, it was also the latest stage in a long period of development. That Arab personality had existed in embryo for centuries; it began to take on recognizable features before the Christian era; it was born before Islam, around the time of the Lakhmid kings, and further shaped by its environment – particularly by the presence of powerful non-Arab neighbours; it was weaned on a diet of post-Muhammadan conquest, and further nourished in Umayyad times with the transfusion of South Arabian blood. Now in the diversity of the empire it faced a more complex and threatening world than it had ever known, and in self-defence it had set about establishing, in retrospect, its own identity. The personality had, in effect, matured to adulthood, and if with the self-consciousness there also came a certain self-deception, it is by such shifts that adults confront the world.

  The supposedly changeless bedouin world filled a growing library of poetic commentaries, works on philology and history, and the first dictionaries. In the ‘non-Arab, Khurasani’ reality of Abbasid society, however, urban Arabs who actually tried to return to their a’rabi roots were ridiculed. They included the poet Hays-Bays, who affected archaic, bedouin speech: his nickname itself was a long outmoded bedouin expression, often used by him, meaning ‘Dire Straits’. He claimed membership of the great tribe of Tamim, and was told,

  you haven’t a Tamimi hair on your head!

  But go eat lizards, nibble dried colocynth,

  And, if you really want, drink ostrich piss . . .

  But the old-fashioned bedouin persisted as the dormant identity, the default personality. For a thousand years from the ninth century to the nineteenth, from ‘the age of setting down’ to ‘the Arab Renaissance’, the meaning of ‘Arab’ would split in two: on the one hand, all those who used the Arabic language were in a cultural-linguistic sense Arabs; on the other, and in usual parlance, Arabs were uncivilized lizard-munching nomads, even if their ancestors were heroes. Exactly the same split is visible in Yemen today: ‘Oh, they’re just qabilis, tribesmen,’ someone might say dismissively of uncivilized, gun-toting rustics. But insinuate that the spe
aker himself is not of tribal origin, and you will insult him to the quick. The relationship between the two halves of this split personality is all part of the continuing dialogue between hadar and badw.

  The extraordinary valorization of the bedouin past meant that anyone with literary pretensions, or who wanted to find employment in the bureaucracy, had to have a knowledge of ‘the Days of the Arabs’, the raids and battles of the pre-Islamic tribes. There were a lot of such Days: al-Isfahani’s collection described 1,700 of them. The obsession continued across time and distance. Poets in fourteenth-century urban Andalus would celebrate bedouinness, and so would the emigrant Lebanese-Brazilian poet Ilyas Farhat, celebrating tents and camels in twentieth-century São Paulo. Often, the bedouin ethos would, and does, override Islamic ethics; raiding Mecca pilgrims is only the extreme example of a mass of less obvious cases in which customary laws and mores trump Qur’anic ones. Often, too, it would come in for harsh criticism. ‘It may not be an exaggeration,’ the late Muhammad al-Jabiri suggested,

  to say that the a’rabi is in fact the creator of the ‘world’ of the Arab, the world inhabited by Arabs on the level of words, expressions, visualization and imagination, or indeed of the mind, values and emotions; and that this world is deficient, impoverished, shallow and desiccated, a world of sense and nature, ahistorical, reflecting the ‘pre-history’ of the Arabs – the age of the Ignorance, before the conquests and the foundation of the state.