Arabs today might therefore feel grateful to the Iranian Nizam al-Mulk, vizier of the two great Saljuq Turks, Alp Arslan and Malikshah (and patron of Umar al-Khayyam, the great mathematician better known in the West for his Persian poetry). Born in Khurasan in 1019 or 1020, he became fascinated early on by the science of hadith studies that had grown up around the sayings ascribed to Muhammad. He did not claim to be a specialist, but was admitted nevertheless into the elite circles of oral hadith-transmitters: ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘to bind myself to the camel-train of those who have passed down the sayings of the Prophet of Allah – peace and blessings be upon him.’ Through ever-extending chains of transmitters – Nizam al-Mulk’s ‘camel-train’ – Muhammad was still gathering the word four centuries after his death. Nizam al-Mulk’s importance was that, by founding the first great madrasahs, colleges of Arabic and Islamic studies, he ensured that the train would extend into the future. He used a different metaphor, however, more suitable for a warlike Turk, when lobbying for funding for his new institution from his master, Malikshah:
‘The best marksmen in your army could not shoot a mile . . . But with this money, I could muster for you an army the arrows of whose prayer would reach the throne of Allah . . .’ And the sultan wept and said, ‘My father, make this army even greater . . . and you may have all the wealth in the world.’
The madrasah’s origins go back further than Nizam al-Mulk. But by tradition it was he who took the teaching of Arabic and Islamic studies, put it in a dedicated building, gave it a formalized curriculum and, importantly, endowed it richly with inalienable income. Nizam al-Mulk’s first college, the eponymous Nizamiyyah in Baghdad, founded in 1065–7, provided board and lodging for its students and taught the Qur’an and the pagan classics – pre-Islamic poetry – as the basis of all learning. The Nizamiyyah also taught jurisprudence according to the Sunni school of al-Shafi’i, but later madrasahs would often provide teaching in all four main Sunni schools and in other subjects, sometimes including Sufism; the madrasah complex would always include a place for prayer, and often the tomb of its founder. The funding of colleges soon became the ideal vehicle for conspicuous charity: the Balliols, Yales and Wafic Saïds had their predecessors in the madrasah builders of the middle centuries of Islam (it has even been suggested that some aspects of the European university system were consciously imitated from the madrasah). For temporal power-holders, building a madrasah was also an ideal way to save one’s soul, a kind of spiritual money-laundering. Thus a poet in Cairo, addressing the tomb of a member of Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty in the madrasah he had built, could say with tongue only half in cheek,
You’ve built fine colleges to safeguard erudition;
Perchance you’ve saved yourself, come Doomsday, from perdition.
Madrasahs, along with mosques, have proved to be the most enduring built monuments of the Arabic-Islamic world. Of Abbasid Baghdad, for example, in its heyday the centre of the Old World, very little remains visible above ground. One of the few exceptions is the Mustansiriyyah madrasah, founded by an early thirteenth-century caliph in the tradition of the Nizamiyyah. It is much restored but still extant and, despite eight hundred years of occasionally over-eventful history, still teaching on a new site as the Mustansiriyyah University. Perhaps more important, the madrasah curriculum still survives. Traditional jurisprudence is still taught along the lines laid down in the old madrasahs; as for the qawa’id, the ‘foundations’ or grammar of the high Arabic that underpin the only real unity of the Arab world, ‘The university student of our days is essentially offered the same course in Arabic grammar as the student of a late Abbasid madrasah’. And to think that this grand and enduring tradition was founded by an Iranian and funded by a Turk.
Perhaps that is Nizam al-Mulk’s greatest legacy – that madrasahs would do so much to preserve the cultural unity and continuity of the old Arab empire, flaking so visibly apart in his age but metamorphosing into the expanding community of Islam. But if madrasahs provided an anchor, they also exerted a drag: the focus on the pre-Islamic classics projected, through time, the ancient Arabian bedouin heritage that had come to be the Arab persona. And, in another way, they fed into disunity. By design, madrasahs were pro-Sunni, anti-Shi’ah, and it was in them, in the halls of learning as much as on the battlefield, that the dichotomy would harden.
AN ARAB INDIAN SUMMER
Their empire had taken Arabs into a west–east, Maghrib–Mashriq theatre of events. But Ibn Khaldun saw Arab rule as just one phase in a longer history. From the seventh century to his own fourteenth century, its time was also measurable on another axis, in great north–south pendulum-swings between Arabs and Turks,
the former in the southern lands, the latter in the north. Over time they have taken turns in ruling the world, so that for a period the Arabs were in control and displaced the non-Arabs to the furthest north, while at another time the Arabs were themselves displaced to the ends of the south by Turks and other non-Arabs.
Writing while the Ottoman empire was still in its infancy, Ibn Khaldun was not to know how the pendulum would follow through into the Turkish side and stay there. But even in the earliest stages of Turkish dominance nearly five hundred years earlier, the picture was even more complex: not just some giant imperial swing, but also local oscillations of power. In some of these, Arabs retained their old primacy.
One family who did so were the Hamdanids, prominent in northern Iraq and northern Syria for much of the tenth century. They traced their ancestry back to the mobile tribe of Taghlib, one of the belligerents in the forty-year conflict of al-Basus, ancient Arabia’s Trojan wars; sections of Taghlib, including the Hamdanids’ forebears, had migrated into northern Iraq well before Islam. More recently, the family had taken on a Shi’i shade – not that it seemed to matter very much: Caliph al-Radi’s brother and successor al-Muttaqi, for example, figurehead of Sunnism, had offered to hand over power to them, in order to get shot of his Turkish protectors/persecutors. Conversely, it was the Hamdanids who fought the bitterest battles against the Shi’i Buwayhids.
The Hamdanids were famous for those ancient Arabian pursuits of raiding and poetry. Their most famous leader, Sayf al-Dawlah, ‘the Sword of the State’, was said to have been buried with his cheek resting on a brick made from the dust shaken from his clothes after his many raids into Byzantine territory. And like the old pagan warriors, he had a way with words as well as with swords. They showed a gentler side to him, however, for he could compare a rainbow
To petticoats trailed by a pretty girl,
a multicoloured underlapping train.
As that sophisticated image suggests, the Hamdanids were a product of the urban, Abbasid age as much as of their ancient hair-tent heritage; they were readers as well as raiders. Patrons of cosmopolitan scholars, they cosseted men like al-Farabi, an immensely talented Turk from the lap of the distant Tien Shan range who had studied with Christian Aristotelians in Baghdad and who wrote on philosophy and music. Sayf al-Dawlah’s court at Aleppo became
the meeting-place of writers, the arena of poets. It is said that, after the caliphs, no other rulers had so many of the shaykhs of poetry and the other literary stars of the age congregating at their palace gates.
Most notably, Sayf al-Dawlah was the patron of al-Mutanabbi – still, today, probably the most famous Arabic poet since Islam. The prince’s generosity was matched by the poet’s love of money, preferably in quantities so big that they had to be weighed, not counted. A visitor recalled seeing al-Mutanabbi,
with an amount of cash, gifts from Sayf al-Dawlah. The coins had been poured on to a palm-fibre mat that he had spread out; they were then weighed and put back in their bag. One coin, however, the smallest of the hoard, had got stuck in a tiny gap in the mat, and the poet applied himself so single-mindedly to the task of trying to prise it out that he completely forgot about his guests.
Perhaps not surprisingly, jealous rivals poisoned the court against him and he fled to another ruler. As we
shall see, this new patron was as different in origin from the Arab Hamdanids as possible, and yet typical of the cultural empire that Arabs had founded.
A PERSIAN PURDAH
The hollowing out of authority at the centre was one thing; at the edges, power was sheering away with alarming rapidity. In the furthermost east, the Arab position had always been tentative. As we have seen, descendants of Arab tribesmen settled in Khurasan were soon subsumed into their environment, becoming Persian-speakers. Beyond the Oxus in Bukhara, the Arab invaders had been obliged to leave the local rulers in charge; before Islam took root there, they had even experimented with paying the locals two dirhams each to go to Friday prayers, and had allowed a Persian version of the Qur’an to be used. For worship and for writing, Arabic would soon prevail everywhere. But in speech, most people in the old Persian realms that stretched eastward from Iraq continued to use the Iranian languages.
Iranian discontent had found its literary voice early and widely, in the Shu’ubiyyah movement, and in Arabic. Rather later, it began to express itself politically in the form of independent states. Particularly successful was that of the Saffarids of Sistan, an area straddling the modern border between Iran and Afghanistan. Around the time of al-Mutawakkil’s killing by the Turkic praetorians in 861 – that fateful turning point for Arab fortunes – Ya’qub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar made himself governor of Sistan. Baghdad was no longer in a position to argue, or to object when the governorship became hereditary in Ya’qub’s family; for the next century and a half, while the Saffarids paid lip service to the caliph, they paid him no taxes. Ya’qub, however, did send the caliph al-Mu’tazz a flat-pack mobile mosque, big enough for fifteen worshippers and made of silver. It was perhaps subconsciously symbolic – as if Islam had gone travelling and had come back to its origins with added value. But there was no hidden meaning in another act of Ya’qub’s: he took an army deep into the heart of the caliphal territory and claimed the rule of all Persia and Iraq. The claim never came to anything more than a raid; but the fact that Ya’qub’s threat loomed just as the Zanj slaves were devastating the south of Iraq showed how the Abbasid Round City of Baghdad had ceased to be a bastion, and was now a target – with the Arab caliph at the bull’s eye.
The eventual takeover of Baghdad by the Buwayhids, and its status as second city to their capital in Persian Shiraz, were further symptoms of Iranian resurgence. With the subsequent persianization of the ‘world’-ruling and long-lasting Saljuqs, the whole east wing of the empire would be lost not just to Arab control but, in the long term, to Arabic culture. Divines and other scholars would, of course, continue to be fluent in the ecclesiastical language of Arabic; the new madrasahs would ensure that. And the new Persian would be interwoven with Arabic words, a richly figured linguistic carpet. But the warp, the basis, was Iranian. From the Caspian to the Gulf a cultural curtain, a Persian purdah, descended across the gates of the east. Beyond it would flourish Firdawsi, Sa’di, Hafiz, and a whole Persianate future all the way to Safavid Iran, Mughal India and Ayatollah Khomeini.
It was in the west that arabness persisted, even intensified. However, that did not mean Arab political unity; far from it.
THE ALCHEMY OF ARABNESS
It was the interconnectedness of their empire that helped the rot run wild through Arab rule. Even in Egypt, it was those mobile and troublesome Turks from furthest Central Asia who were the first to challenge the sovereignty of Baghdad. In 868, as the Saffarids were consolidating their own rule in the east, and as the anger of the Zanj was about to boil over in southern Iraq, the lieutenant-governor of Egypt declared his own independence from the caliph. Ahmad ibn Tulun’s father had been a slave-soldier from Farghana, in the service of Caliph al-Ma’mun; now, yet again, the Arab outsourcing of security would mean their slaves and freedmen gaining mastery over them. Worse, within a couple of decades Tulunid forces overran Syria and clashed with the caliph on Iraqi home ground. What with the Iranian Saffarids from the east, the Turkic Tulunids from the west, the East African Zanj in the south, and the praetorian peril at the centre, it was no longer helping the Abbasids to be – as the Tang emperor had pointed out – in the middle of things.
The Tulunid mini-dynasty did not last, however, and for a time the caliph reasserted himself over Egypt and Syria. But in 935 far-off Farghana provided a second short line of independent rulers in Egypt when another governor defaulted on taxes and fealty: like the Tulunids, the Ikhshidids took over Syria, and even added parts of western Arabia to their domains. As it happened, they proved to be a micro-dynasty – and a microcosm of current history as a whole, for they were displaced by their own cuckoo-in-the-nest, Kafur.
A black eunuch slave, Abu ’l-Misk Kafur (‘Father-of-Musk Camphor’) was the power behind the Ikhshidid throne of Egypt for over twenty years and sole ruler for two, from 966 to 968. That he looms much larger than he might in the Arab chapter of Egypt’s long history is largely because of poetry, and in particular a clutch of odes by al-Mutanabbi, last seen fleeing his old patron in Aleppo. Kafur – illogically, a common name for black slaves because camphor is so white – seemed an unlikely new patron. He had been bought for a paltry eighteen dinars; but he had risen fast in the Ikhshidid household, and on gaining control of Egypt he set about showing his true worth. Appropriately for someone whose name changed his colour from black to white, he was well aware of the power of spin and spared no expense on it. When, for example, an earthquake shook Egypt and a clever versifier declared –
You think the earth of Egypt quaked because of mere mischance?
No! Egypt’s joy at Kafur’s justice made it belly-dance . . .
– Kafur paid him 1,000 dinars. It was supposedly the glint of that gold that made al-Mutanabbi head for the land of the Nile. A string of odes in praise of Kafur ensued. But, ever the poetic prima donna, al-Mutanabbi soon fell out with his new eulogee as he had fallen out with Sayf al-Dawlah. At the last minute he switched from praise to satire, having first planned his getaway in secret, and his final, over-the-shoulder fling at Kafur ends,
A well-hung, well-heeled white man’s sense of gratitude soon palls;
what thanks can be expected from a black man with no balls?
Imperial fragmentation may have been death to unified Arab rule, but it gave new life to Arabic culture: it meant more patrons, more travelling poets like al-Mutanabbi, and more peripatetic scholars like al-Farabi. It is precisely because of the force and flexibility of that culture – illustrated in the muscular language of al-Mutanabbi, and in his own mobility as he flitted from court to court and from praise to satire – that we remember Kafur and many others in Arabic terms. It might be argued that it was also Islam that united these disparate people, all the poets and princes, the scholars and sultans of diverse origins. In theory, it was. On the ground, however, Islam has tended to be a divider as much as a uniter; that said, one of its most important functions has been as a vessel to preserve and transmit Arabic language and culture. That is the triumph of Arabs: they lost their empire, but in the end their culture won.
Egypt has been a brilliant example of this victory, a crucible of arabization that has unified extraordinary diversity. The Tulunids and Ikhshidids, from what is now the junction of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and Kafur from sub-Saharan Africa, were not the only alien rulers of Egypt who would be absorbed into Arab history. The alchemy would continue working on successive incomers: Fatimids (dubiously Arab, as we shall see), Kurdish Ayyubids, Qipchaq and other Turkic Mamluks, Ottomans from the Balkans. Well into the nineteenth century, the son of the Albanian viceroy Muhammad Ali Pasha declared, ‘The sun of Egypt changed my blood and made it all Arab’. By the time Arabs themselves got to rule Egypt again, in the revolution of 1952, being Arab would be more complicated than it had ever been, a many-layered tell or Troy-town of identity. Undeterred by the complexity, Nasser, the great showman, would promote Egypt as the heartland of ’urubah, arabness. In a sense he was right: Egypt was the millennial melting-p
ot, a Pharaonic-Ptolemaic-Hellenistic-Roman-Byzantine-Coptic cauldron with ingredients sourced from around the Mediterranean, the northern Fertile Crescent and Black Africa. But for the thousand years up to Nasser the dominant flavour had been intensely Arab.
So when Kafur’s rule ended and a new power took Egypt by storm – this time, for a change, from the west – the ambiguous arabness of the newcomers didn’t seem to matter too much.
BLOODLINES AND TIDELINES
Kafur had not lacked metaphorical balls: among the many threats to Egypt that he successfully fended off were the Fatimids, an Isma’ili dynasty who had been established for some decades in Tunisia. His immovability prompted their agents in Egypt to give him a wry nickname, ‘the Black Stone’. Their extremist fellow Isma’ilis, the Qarmatis, had recently removed the actual Meccan Black Stone; the Fatimids had to wait until 968 for death to remove Kafur. The news was the signal for the Fatimids’ commander-in-chief to advance on Egypt. A freedman of probable Eastern European, possibly Sicilian, origin called Jawhar, ‘Gem’, he was one of a long line of foreigners to whom the Fatimids, like the Abbasids, would delegate defence and governance. That their new city of Cairo, founded in 969 by Jawhar and ruled by other foreigners – Kurds, Turks and Albanians – for the latter 800 of the next thousand years of its history, would succeed Baghdad as the metropolis of Arabdom, is yet more evidence of the alchemy of Arabic culture: it absorbs, and transmutes.
Arabs Page 43