Arabs Read online
ARABS
OTHER WORKS BY THE AUTHOR
Travel/History
Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land (1997)
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (2001)
The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah (2005)
Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah (2010)
Editions/Translations
The Travels of Ibn Battutah (2002)
Two Arabic Travel Books (with James E. Montgomery; 2014)
Kitab al-Ifadah (Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi’s description of Egypt; forthcoming)
Fiction
Bloodstone (2017)
Copyright © 2019 Tim Mackintosh-Smith
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Sha’b: . . . Collection, or union; and also separation, division, or disunion . . . A nation, people, race, or family of mankind . . .
Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon
And if your Lord had so willed, He could surely have made mankind one community. But they will not cease to disagree.
Qur’an 11:118
Thus we had upwards of 1,400 separate tribal ‘governments’ in the two [Hadhrami] states. There were also several hundred autonomous towns of unarmed men . . . Altogether I calculated there were about 2,000 separate ‘governments’ in the Hadhramaut.
Harold Ingrams, Arabia and the Isles
In memory of a unified Yemen (1990—2014)
and of Ali Husayn Ash’ab (1998—2016)
and all the others who died with it.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations and Maps
Foreword The Wheel and the Hourglass
Introduction Gathering the Word
EMERGENCE: 900 BC–AD
1 Voices from the Wilderness: Earliest Arabs
2 Peoples and Tribes: Sabaeans, Nabataeans and Nomads
3 Scattered Far and Wide: The Changing Grammar of History
4 On the Edge of Greatness: The Days of the Arabs
REVOLUTION: 600–630
5 Revelation, Revolution: Muhammad and the Qur’an
6 God and Caesar: The State of Medina
DOMINANCE: 630–900
7 Crescaders: Openings-Up
8 The Kingdom of Damascus: Umayyad Rule
9 The Empire of Baghdad: Abbasid Sovereignty
DECLINE: 900–1350
10 Counter-Cultures, Counter-Caliphs: The Empire Breaks Up
11 The Genius in the Bottle: The Hordes Close In
ECLIPSE: 1350–1800
12 Masters of the Monsoon: Arabs around the Indian Ocean
RE-EMERGENCE: 1800–NOW
13 Identity Rediscovered: Awakenings
14 The Age of Hope: Nasserism, Ba’thism, Liberation, Oil
15 The Age of Disappointment: Autocrats, Islamocrats, Anacharchs
Afterword In the Station of History
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
AND MAPS
ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Wadi Rum, Jordan. Daniel Case.
2 A village near al-Tawilah, north-western Yemen. Bernard Gagnon.
3 Gypsum wall panel from Nimrud, Iraq, 728 BC. British Museum 118901 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
4 Part of the southern sluice of the Sabaean dam at Marib, Yemen, sixth century BC. Chris Hellier / Alamy Stock Photo.
5 A South Arabian calcite-alabaster stele commemorating Ha’an ibn Dhu Zu’d, first–third century AD. British Museum 102601 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
6 Muhammad Ali at the Ka’bah, Mecca, 1972. Bettmann / Getty Images.
7 Persian image of the Prophet Muhammad on his ‘night journey’ and ascension to the heavens, early twentieth century. Chris Hellier / Alamy Stock Photo.
8 Qur’an fragment with parts of Chapters 19 and 20, before AD 645.
9 Mosaics from the west side of the courtyard, Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, early eighth century. Heretiq.
10 The Baghdad Gate, al-Raqqah, eighth century. B. O’Kane / Alamy Stock Photo.
11 A gold coin minted by King Offa of Mercia, AD 774. British Museum 1913, 1213.1 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
12 Sultan Qabus of Jurjan’s mortuary skyscraper, Iran, AD 1006. Robert Harding / robertharding.
13 A manuscript miniature from al-Hariri’s Maqamat, AD 1237. World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.
14 Marble tombstone commemorating Ali ibn Uthman al-Mursi, Aden, fourteenth or fifteenth century. British Museum 1840, 0302.1 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
15 A panel over the entrance of the Great Mosque, Xi’an, China. Frédéric Araujo / Alamy Stock Photo.
16 Napoleon visiting the Great Pyramid in 1798, nineteenth-century woodcut. World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.
17 The procession of the Egyptian mahmal leaving for the Mecca pilgrimage, c. 1917. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018.
18 King Ibn Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy, Egypt, 1945.
19 Nasser of Egypt with Nikita Khrushchev of the USSR, 1964. Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.
20 Saudi Aramco’s main installation, Dhahran. MyLoupe / Contributor / Getty Images.
21 Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi in Belgrade, near the beginning of his rule. Courtesy of Tanja Kragujević.
22 Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi in Addis Ababa, 2 February 2009. U.S. Navy.
23 Graffito by Banksy on the Israeli-built separation wall, Palestine, 2012. Nick Fielding / Alamy Stock Photo.
24 A camel-borne hireling of the Mubarak regime scatters anti-Mubarak protesters in Cairo, February 2011. Mohammed Abou Zaid / Associated Press.
25 Members of the ‘Islamic State’ use sledgehammers on a statue in the Nineveh Museum, Iraq, February 2015. Screengrab from an ‘Islamic State’ video.
26 Fans of Bashshar al-Asad at a rally to support his candidacy in the forthcoming presidential election, Damascus, April 2014. Xinhua / Alamy Stock Photo.
27 Detail of the late thirteenth-century minbar formerly in the Great Mosque, Aleppo. Bernard O’Kane / Alamy Stock Photo.
MAPS
1 The Arabian Peninsula and adjoining regions before Islam.
2 The Arab empire.
3 Arabs abroad.
4 The Arabic world in recent centuries.
FOREWORD
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
I did not think that time would ever wear out what was new,
or that its changes would divide a people who were one.
Dhu ’l-Rummah
Twenty-seven years ago I began work on my first book, an exploration of the land and history of Yemen, the country in which I was living, and where I still live now. The two former parts of the country had been unified not long before, in May 1990, just ahead of German unification. Walls were coming down, iron curtains parting, and a line in the wilderness was
being erased. In Yemen, it was a time of optimism. Admittedly, there was a short war of attempted secession in 1994, in which the former regime in the south shot almost as many Scud missiles at us in San’a as Saddam Husayn had launched at Israel three years earlier; in response, our rulers in the north inflicted a horde of straggle-bearded islamists on Aden who trashed, inter alia, the only brewery in Arabia. But the unified Yemen survived. Bygones, it seemed, became bygones.
That first book of mine was a homage to a land that had held on to much from its past, to its millennial cultural unity. Between the lines, the book was also homage to its renewed political unity. Yemen had been a unified state in earlier periods: in pre-Islamic times, briefly in the fourteenth century, briefly again in the seventeenth. To many Yemenis, as to me, that unity seemed, still seems, to be somehow right and proper, something natural. It seemed right at least as long ago as the fourteenth century: ‘If Yemen were to be united under one ruler,’ wrote an observer in Egypt, ‘its importance would increase and its position among the eminent nations would be strengthened’.
In fact, for more than nine-tenths of its known history, Yemen has not been unified; far from it. Now, as I write, it appears to be falling apart again. So too, seemingly, are Iraq and Libya; Syria may hold together, just, under brute force; Egypt’s integrity looks safe, but its society is deeply riven. These five countries contain half the population of the Arabic-speaking world. According to a recent United Nations report, that ‘world’ is home to 5 per cent of humanity, but generates 58 per cent of the earth’s refugees and 68 per cent of its ‘battle-related deaths’ . . . Sometimes it seems that only one thing unites Arabs, and that is their inability to get along with each other. Why this disunity? Why this extraordinary level of self-harm?
‘The absence of democracy and its institutions,’ Westerners (shorthand but useful) would say. They may have a point; but recent foreign interventions allegedly aiming to promote democracy appear only to have added to the mayhem. And when there are free and fair elections, the islamists tend to win them; the elections are annulled in a military coup, and the Westerners go strangely silent. Mouths and money do not go together, it seems.
‘The failure of Islam to unify itself,’ the islamists (again, shorthand) would say. But that unity has itself been a mirage almost from the Islamic year dot. Battles over authority and legitimacy have been fought within the community of Muslims, with words and other weapons, since the fourth decade of the Islamic era.
‘The legacy of imperialism,’ Arab nationalists (there are still a few left) would say. But nearly every attempt at unity in the post-imperial age has failed, usually because of inter-Arab suspicions and squabbles. One Arab commentator, in a post-mortem on the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, wrote that ‘The Arabs would have won the battle for Palestine had there not been something false and rotten in themselves’. That ‘something’ was mutual distrust, resentment and fear. It was the rottenness of bad blood, and it has bubbled up time and again through Arab history.
Of course, disunity is hardly an Arab monopoly. Much of the map of Europe was a crazy paving of statelets well into the modern age. That German reunification of 1990, itself part of a contrary process that fragmented the Soviet Union, was a return to a unity that was then a mere two lifetimes old. During those lifetimes, Europe had been the epicentre of wars that blasted apart the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and led to the gentler meltdown of the British empire – but out of which came the United Nations and the European Union (those well-known bastions of unanimity). All the world’s a crucible in which once-stable compounds are continually breaking down and new ones forming. If there were no such change, there would be no history. Union and division are part of the same process. Hence the first epigraph to this book, from Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon:
Sha’b: . . . Collection, or union; and also separation, division, or disunion . . . A nation, people, race, or family of mankind . . .
(Things become slightly clearer when we see how this apparent contradiction in terms works: as well as a ‘people’ and all these other things, a sha’b is also a cranial suture, the place where the bones of the skull both meet and are separated; the bones themselves are called qabilahs, otherwise meaning ‘tribes’ . . . It is as if the human head, with its ‘peoples’ and ‘tribes’, provides an Arabic anatomy of humankind itself.)
And yet the Arabs always seem a special case. Don’t we, and they themselves, usually call them just that – ‘the’ Arabs, as if they were a discrete and clearly identifiable body of people? If they are, then who are they? And why do they seem so particularly fissile, so reactive? Should there not be at least an Arab Union, or even a United Arabian States? . . . Come to think of it, there was a United Arab States (UAS), forgotten by most histories: it was a confederation formed of the United Arab Republic (UAR) – itself a political union of Egypt and Syria in the brief heyday of pan-Arabism – joined by the then Kingdom of North Yemen. The UAS and UAR lasted all of forty-four months, from 1958 to 1961.
There is no reason why political unity should be a good thing per se. But I believe there is a case for claiming that unity in at least a general sense – that of harmony, the absence of strife, peaceful coexistence and cooperation – is better for human society than fragmentation and violent competition. On a small planet with too many people and too few resources, and particularly in crowded countries like Syria, Egypt and Yemen, it seems to hold out the only hope.
Unless we kill each other and start all over again.
Histories of Arabs tend to begin with Islam; perhaps with a prefatory nod to what came before. Islam certainly furnishes an identifiable body of people, unified for a great moment in history. But it was a unity that was apparent, not real. According to traditional accounts, the tribes of Arabia came together in 630–1, the Year of Delegations, when tribal representatives visited the Prophet Muhammad and paid allegiance to him and the state he had founded. Within two years, on the death of Muhammad, most of those tribes had gone back to their old independences and old squabbles. At first the splits were patched up, and the extraordinary conquests that took Arabs out of Arabia forged among them an esprit de corps that seemed miraculous – indeed, God-given. But the underlying tribal divisions were never healed. Within 300 years united Arab rule was only an elaborately cherished memory, and for the next thousand years or so Arabs, with few exceptions, were themselves divided and ruled by Turks, Persians, Berbers, Europeans and others. Their own empire had been amputated; the pain would subside in time, but the memory of it would remain, like that of a phantom limb.
The historiographical upshot of this is that political histories of Arabs by modern writers nearly always turn, when they reach about AD 900, into histories of Arabic culture, then – while Arabs themselves all but disappear from the picture – morph into histories of other peoples’ empires. Part of the problem is the word ‘Arab’ itself. Like any name, it is not identical with the thing it denotes, but is a label placed on that thing. Labels are useful but confusing. They can cover up a multitude of differences and can hold splits together; they can tell lies. In time, a label fades and gets over-written, while its original meaning – if it ever had just the one – is forgotten. In reality, we are all like old-fashioned travelling trunks, covered with many labels, geographical, genetic, linguistic and so on (inter alia, I am British/English/Scottish/Anglo-Saxon/Celtic/European/Indo-European/Yemeni/Arabian/Arab(ic) . . .); few sections of humanity are as belabelled as the long-travelled people known as Arabs. But, in the end, most of us get stuck with just one label, and adhere to it, as it does to us. The broader it is, the harder it sticks.
‘Arab’ is a label that is very broad, very sticky (it has been around for almost 3,000 years), and yet very slippery. It has signified different things to different people at different times. The meaning has shape-shifted, expired and resurrected so often that it is misleading to talk about ‘the’ Arabs, and that is why this book does not. To do so would be to try to pin down Pro
teus. All one can say is that, for more of known history than not, the word has tended to mean tribal groups who live beyond the reach of settled society. That is probably what Arabs were during much of the long period up to Islam; it is certainly what they were throughout most of the second AD millennium. During both periods, there is good reason for transliterating them as a common noun, in italics, not as a ‘proper’ people: as ’arab, not ‘Arabs’. What is surprising is that those peripheral, mobile, numerically insignificant people – people without a capital letter, let alone a capital city – have been so central to an identity. From Greek city-states in the fifth century BC, through imperial China, to recently colonial Europe, societies have defined and simplified themselves in contradistinction to the nomad, the ‘uncivilized’, the ‘barbarian’. Arabs, however, take not only their name but also their only consistent defining feature, their language, from the epitome of nomadism and footlooseness, those tribal ’arab.
The people we know today as Arabs are an ethnic compound. The two main founding elements, nomadic or semi-nomadic ’arab tribes and settled South Arabian peoples, may both have originated in the Fertile Crescent to the north of Arabia in prehistoric times; their languages descended from the same old ‘Semitic’ family. But over time their tongues had forked and split, and so too had their lifestyles: the South Arabians had developed settled societies based on irrigation systems and agriculture (they may well have inherited these systems from older, indigenous peoples already established in the Arabian south, with whom they intermingled); ’arab, in contrast, practised pastoral transhumance, their wanderings directed by wells, rains and raids. Mutual interests, both commercial and political, meant that these two founding elements began to come together in the centuries before Islam. In early Islamic times, the shared experience of empire-building made the compound more cohesive for a time – but also more complex, as peoples from beyond the Arabian Peninsula were assimilated to the mix. Throughout this long process, tribal ’arab were part of – indeed, at the heart of – Arabs in the wider sense; they still are, despite their tiny numbers. But they themselves have always complicated Arab history from the inside. For the tensions between the settled and unsettled elements of the compound have generated great strengths, but also fatal instabilities. We will examine these strengths and weaknesses in the coming chapters.