Beset by accusations of backwardness, belaboured as loud-mouthed lizard-eating bedouins, Arabs counter-attacked. Or rather, other non-Arabs counter-attacked on their behalf: with few exceptions, ‘genetic’ Arabs had still not taken to sharpening their pens; just as they were relying more and more on Turkish soldiers to defend them militarily, so they depended on non-Arab clients to defend them in the debate with the Shu’ubiyyah. Thus the greatest ideologue of arabness, the copious author known as al-Jahiz, was no noble scion of some ancient Arabian tribe, but the ‘pop-eyed’ (jahiz) grandson of a black slave in al-Basrah.
Al-Jahiz believed that the Shu’ubiyyah were whipping up palpable hatred of Arabs that would imperil the empire and Islam. His most forceful counterblast, The Book of the Stick, has already been mentioned in passing. In it he takes the Shu’ubis’ disdain of stuck-up, stick-waving, word-wielding bedouins, and uses it to strike back at them. In the stick, both he and the Shu’ubiyyah had hit on a powerful image. Sticks are an essential feature of traditional Arabian kit: they appear in pre-Islamic reliefs, in the hands of camel-riders of the ninth century BC, and of ritual dancers of the later centuries BC; today they are still carried, like swagger-sticks, by conservative tribesmen; one may find a camel stick on the dashboard of the latest SUV (and perhaps a falcon’s hood on the gear knob). But sticks are also a tool of Arab rule and Arabic rhetoric, a rebus of control. In Shu’ubi eyes, Arabs used sticks and loud words to herd their camels, and they thought they could do the same to people.
Al-Jahiz, however, defends the stick – and thus the whole business of being Arab – in his strange, stream-of-consciousness style. Sticks, he suggests, can indeed be used to herd animals, but also to guide people to the true religion, as Arabs guided Persians via the message of Muhammad (in a Christian context, the shepherd’s crook is also a bishop’s crozier). But above all for al-Jahiz, the stick is the tool of the Arab orator, and the symbol of rhetoric. Like a conductor’s baton, it acts as an extension of the orator’s hand, emphasizing his gestures. It is the essential adjunct of Arabic public speech, of – most importantly of all – a rhetoric that none but Arabs themselves can aspire to master. ‘Orators are to be found among the Persians,’ he admitted,
except that for them all speech, and for non-Arabs in general all meaning, can only ever result from lengthy thought and mental exercise; from periods of solitary contemplation and other periods when ideas are discussed and exchanged with others; from meditation and book-learning . . . Whereas for Arabs it is all a matter of intuition and extemporization: as it were, of inspiration . . .
Has al-Jahiz got into some inmost part of ‘the Arab mind’? No, because such a singular object has never existed. He has certainly grasped a lot about the old high language and its origin as a special, supernatural tongue, evidence of ‘inspiration’ in poets and seers. But his assumption that Arabs have some innate, quasi-genetic disposition to eloquent speech is wishful thinking on behalf of the Arabic culture he had embraced; they arise from his fears for the future of that culture. He and other defenders of arabness were becoming more vehement the more Arabs lost political control. There was no hiding that loss: Turks like Bajkam were taking over in broad daylight, turning themselves from slave-soldiers into praetorian princes. But Arabs would never concede the loss to others of their language; it was the factor above all that had made them Arabs and kept them Arabs over history. There is a saying attributed to Muhammad, supposedly uttered in defence of his Persian companion Salman and much quoted by the Shu’ubis: ‘He who speaks Arabic is an Arab.’ With most Arabs, it cut no ice. They were happy for non-Arabs to use their language for worship, book-keeping, and immortalizing the heroic Arab past. To make further claims on it, as the Shu’ubis did, was to try to steal what they saw as the very soul of arabness.
Arab attitudes to Arabic can still be possessive. I have found that to speak the language is at first praised and encouraged – until one speaks it well enough to disagree with its owners. Many of them do not see this as debate, but as disloyalty – the ‘splitting of the stick’, of the gathered word. The feeling is seldom put into words; a rare example is that of the contemporary Moroccan scholar Abdelfattah Kilito, who admits in one of his books that he dislikes foreigners knowing his language, and feels they have ‘robbed’ him of it. The English title of the book is eloquent: Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language. (Professor Kilito himself teaches French, and presumably speaks that language.) As an old Spanish proverb warns, ‘Do not speak Arabic in the house of the Moor’.
THE WOBBLING PEDESTAL
Elsewhere, feelings of inequality gave rise to similar conflicts between Arabs and others. In Egypt and North Africa, there were Copt and Berber Shu’ubis. In the Spanish far west, discrimination against local converts to Islam led, at times, to uprisings and bloodshed. Non-Arab Muslims had often retained their old family names, arabicized, such as Banu Bashkuwal (Pascual), Banu Gharsiyah (Garcia) and Banu Quzman (Guzman); some Arab supremacists, however, referred to them by derisory blanket terms like banu ’l-’abid, ‘sons of the slaves’. When the discrimination persisted into the second century of Arab rule, a few of the native Muslims revolted and managed to found their own short-lived statelets. In time the revolts were contained and the rebels placated. But that Islamic ideal of equality was, again, unrealized; Arab chauvinism always weighted the scales. By the eleventh century a late, literary Shu’ubiyyah arose among Spanish Muslims of Berber and European origin, very much like the earlier movement in the East.
In the furthest southern corner of the empire, too, at the far end of their own ‘island’, Arabs found even their supposedly long-arabized South Arabian brethren turning against them – or at least against the narrow, bedouinized view of arabness promoted in the Age of Setting Down. We have already heard the poet Abu Nuwas, not himself an ethnic southerner but a mawla of southerners, laying into backward bedouins. Sometimes his attacks are outrageous: Abu Nuwas was famous for his homosexual love poems, and his satires of the rough a’rab can be filled with queeny spite, as when he declares that if the old macho bedouin poets were alive in the Baghdad of his day, they would be poncing around like perfumed Persians and drooling over pretty boys. Nor did Abu Nuwas’s satire spare Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet and his Abbasid successors. As a result, the poet spent a long spell in prison by command of Caliph Harun al-Rashid. The fictionalized Abu Nuwas of The Thousand and One Nights, al-Rashid’s amusing companion, has had his sting removed.
Abu Nuwas’s attacks were in part a symptom of the ‘North–South split’, which had been so deepened by the struggles of Umayyad times. Now, as the ninth century progressed and the Persian Shu’ubiyyah intensified their own literary attacks, down in southern Arabia itself there was a resurgence of pride in ancient Saba and its sister-civilizations – the original shu’ub. Local rulers began to assert both their political independence from the caliph in distant Baghdad, and their descent from the indigenous pre-Islamic nobility. Local writers like the tenth-century antiquarian and geographer al-Hamdani would try to resurrect the forgotten glory of the South. But their efforts hardly impinged on the bigger cultural picture of Arabdom: they were memorializing ruins in what was now the back of beyond. Just as tribal nomads had infiltrated and arabized the old South in the centuries before Islam, so in the centuries following it, and especially in the Abbasid Age of Setting Down, the narrative of history itself had been effectively bedouinized.
In their attempts to meet Arabs on even ground, the Shu’ubi levellers of all lands had set themselves an impossible goal. They never succeeded in knocking Arabs off the pedestal they had built themselves as the Prophet’s folk, the original owners of the language of the Qur’an. Politically too, Arabs were the kings – still, just, nominally – of the castle; they were up on their rock, and the lurking lions had, for the moment, skulked away. Nevertheless, the Arab perch was precarious, both politically and culturally, and the peoples whom Arabs claimed to rule were doing their best to wobble it.
; Shu’ubi sentiments would reappear over time. Urban lampoons of lizard-munching tribesmen would persist for centuries. On the Arab side, their nineteenth-century ‘Awakening’ would revive the language of the debate: Ottoman nationalists and, later, opponents of Arab Nationalism and even Marxists would be accused of Shu’ubism. Saddam Husayn’s Iranian adversaries were labelled as Shu’ubis in the war of the 1980s. Now too, in the conflict outside my window, the Iranian-influenced Huthis have been accused of pursuing a Shu’ubi agenda. In terms of timescales it is as anachronistic as calling Great War Germans ‘Huns’. But it may not be quite so inaccurate. Like all conflicts, the fight before me now is in part a fight over identity. The Huthis have built themselves an idiosyncratic identity from the fragments of several nonconformist pasts, sectarian, cultural, political. Their opponents, Saudis and others, see themselves as part of the bedouin-Arab narrative of history. They still twirl their sticks with swagger.
(Then again, the Huthis, accused at the end of 2016 of firing a missile in the direction of Mecca, have been further likened to the Qarmatis who plundered its sacred Black Stone, and to that even earlier assailant of the holy city, the sixth-century Abrahah the Ethiopian. History has too many themes and variations ever to recapitulate exactly. It is the rhetoric that repeats itself.)
CUCKOOS IN THE CALIPH’S NEST
Defend their cultural imperium as they might, it seemed there was nothing Arabs could do to stem the haemorrhage of their political power. Bajkam the Turk, whose portrait medallions so dismayed Caliph al-Radi, was a paradigm for the new power-holders: he had risen from being a lowly slave-soldier in the provinces to the post of al-Radi’s Prefect of Police, before imposing himself on the caliph as commander-in-chief and de facto ruler in 938. He may have been the first interloper actually to portray himself on the seat of power; but others of his kind had been aiming for it for some time. Nearly 200 years before, the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, had set a precedent by relying on guards who were slaves and ex-slaves in preference to free Arabs; in the early ninth century, al-Ma’mun was bringing increasing numbers of non-Arab troops to Baghdad from his original eastern power-base in Khurasan. It was al-Ma’mun’s brother, al-Mu’tasim, who took the trend even further. During a reign that began in 833, he imported ever more slave-soldiers, and especially Turks. It would only be a matter of time before that large and growing body of armed men would start to throw their weight about politically.
Slave-soldiers make sense: in the absence of a strong abstract state as the focus of allegiance, the loyalty of free soldiers – and particularly of those from the sort of ready-armed tribal background from which Arab soldiers tend to be recruited – can be bought by the highest bidder or the most persuasive speaker. (I am watching a country fall apart because of this: the apparent Yemeni army devolved overnight into a rag-tag bunch of private militia; perhaps it was never really more than that.) But the loyalty of slaves is not negotiable; that, at least, is the theory.
For al-Mu’tasim, Turks were the cream of slave-soldiery: ‘Turks . . . are the bedouins of the non-Arabs’, wrote al-Jahiz at the time – from him, high praise indeed. Their skill as riders and archers was legendary, their vigilance almost supernatural: ‘The Turk has two pairs of eyes, one at the front and the other at the back of his head.’ We do not know whether al-Mu’tasim’s preference for Turks was influenced by the fact that his mother was herself a Turkic slave-concubine, but it can hardly not have been a factor. He stockpiled prime-quality Turkic warriors as Saudis stockpile the latest laser-guided missiles; three years into his reign, he had amassed 4,000 of them. But the narrow-eyed centaurs refused to champ at the bit in their barracks; instead, they cantered about Baghdad, causing havoc. Al-Mu’tasim’s solution was a combination of lateral thinking and grand design: build them another Baghdad.
Al-Mu’tasim founded his new capital, Samarra’, 125 kilometres up the Tigris from Baghdad, in 836, and moved his Turks and other foreign troops to it. Samarra’ has been likened to Versailles; but it was also an overblown Aldershot or Fort Hood, a military metropolis of mud-brick and dust inhabited by Central Asian cavalrymen and caliphal camp-followers like al-Mu’tasim’s jester, Ali the Cobbler, who would store his farts in his capacious sleeve then waft them over the more po-faced courtiers. As for the troops – not only Turks, but also Khurasanis, Farghanans from hard by the Tien Shan range, North Africans and others – they were divided by origin into cantonments whose relative positions echoed the geographical disposition of the various races’ homelands: Samarra’ was a scale model of the empire. It also mushroomed into one of the biggest cities in the world, at least in area. But its time as capital would also be small in scale – it lasted less than sixty years before it was abandoned. That there are six variant ways of writing the name in Arabic seems only to reflect its impermanence. And yet the irony is that while almost all traces of Abbasid Baghdad have long been buried under later layers of habitation, the Great Mosque of Samarra’ survives, at least in outline, with its curious helical ziggurat-minaret rising still like a helter-skelter from the dust, marking the centre of that now silent Babel.
The overwhelming turkification of the army brought with it other ironies. In 838, for example, al-Mu’tasim raided far into Byzantine territory, destroyed the city of Amorium south-west of Ankara, and took numerous captives. The exploit was celebrated by Abu Tammam ibn Aws in one of the most famous and sonorous of all Arabic poems, a Tchaikovsky-last-movement of an ode. It begins:
Sword tells more truth than books; its edge is parting wisdom from vanity:
In gleaming blades, not lines of dusky tomes, are texts to dispel uncertainty and doubt.
Knowledge is found in the sparkle of lances, glittering between opposing ranks, not in the seven sparkling lights of heaven . . .
It is all a paean to bedouin Arab martial prowess, a declamation of the flashing rhetoric of sword and lance that puts mere written, prosaic truths (penned, of course, by Persians and other Grub Street foreigners) in the shade. And it is a homage to the ancientness of that other, sharper truth. As one recent commentator has said, ‘The poet . . . transforms the ethical values of his [al-Mu’tasim’s] pagan tribal ancestors into the moral foundation of the Islamic state.’ But further investigation reveals the slippages from reality. The poet was himself by birth not the hyper-Arab-sounding ‘ibn Aws’ but actually ibn Thadaws – the son of Thaddeus, a Christian tavern-keeper of Damascus. And what he does not admit is that the ancient Arab heroism was being recapitulated by an army of Turks. Neither does he mention that, back home, al-Mu’tasim’s nephew al-Abbas ibn al-Ma’mun was making an unheroic and decidedly underhand bid for the caliphate, thus scuppering his uncle’s plan to follow the victory through with a march on Constantinople.
The raid on the neighbours – pre-Islamic tribal war writ large – was splendidly traditional; so in a different way was the enemy in the family. But in the case of the former, Arab tradition had been outsourced to foreigners, and ultimately the foreigners, the Turks, didn’t give a damn for tradition. They cared only, of course, for power. They had the weapons, the numbers and, increasingly, the sort of ’asabiyyah or group solidarity that had empowered Arabs; and whether might is right or not, power makes people cower – even the caliph.
BLINDED TO THE BEAT OF DRUMS
The crisis came with the caliphate of al-Mu’tasim’s son and second successor, al-Mutawakkil. By his time the Turkish pawns had crossed the board and become major players; the Abbasid family, fount of honour and arabness, were themselves no more than pawns. From now on a catalogue of caliphs would start their stints on the throne with bewilderingly similar regnal names, and finish them, for the most part, with similarly violent ends.
Al-Mutawakkil favoured his son al-Mu’tazz to succeed him; another son (from another mother), al-Muntasir, plotted with the Turkish praetorians to ensure his own succession. The plotters chose a night in December 861 to act. The caliph was drinking with his closest courtiers. ‘He was exceedingly drunk
,’ recalled the poet al-Buhturi, one of those present.
About three hours of the night had passed, when suddenly Baghar [one of the Turkish commanders] appeared with ten other Turks, all veiled and clutching swords that glittered in the candlelight. They dashed towards us, making for al-Mutawakkil. Baghar and another Turk leaped on to the caliph’s dais. Al-Fath [ibn Khaqan, al-Mutawakkil’s secretary and himself an arabicized Turk] shouted, ‘Woe to you! This is your lord!’ The cup-bearers, courtiers and cup-companions who were present flew headlong when they saw the Turks. Only al-Fath remained in the audience-hall and tried to fight them off. Suddenly I heard al-Mutawakkil cry out: Baghar had struck him on his right side – with a sword that al-Mutawakkil himself had given him – and sliced him open down to the waist; he then dealt him a similar blow on his left side. Al-Fath had rushed up to try and fend the Turks off the caliph, but one of them plunged his sword into al-Fath’s stomach till the point came out of his back. And yet al-Fath held his ground and did not flinch. Never did I see a braver soul, a nobler man. He threw himself on al-Mutawwakil to protect him; but they died together. They were rolled up in the carpet on which they were killed. Thus they remained for the rest of the night and most of the following day, until al-Muntasir had been confirmed as caliph. He ordered that they be buried together.
Arabs Page 41