Arabs Read online

  A means of showing the vowels was developed in time, but even today it is only sporadically used; capitals still don’t exist. With practice, reading Arabic does get easier. But it involves different mental processes to those of decoding Latin letters: reading Latin script is like playing chequers; Arabic is chess. And Arabic was even less user-friendly in the beginning, before dots were added to distinguish different consonants with the same written shape: both unvowelled and undotted, a simple two-letter group,

  could in theory be read in 300 ways. Now, all texts are dotted; but none except the Qur’an are regularly vowelled. This superadds a layer of difficulty to what is already an extremely difficult language – and remember, written Arabic is no one’s mother-tongue: speakers of Arabic have to read and write in a ‘foreign’ language. The result is that readers are always approximating the meaning of what they are reading, and sometimes guessing wildly.

  The other great problem, which only became apparent when printing presses were developed, is that Arabic is cursive: beautiful to look at, a joy to write, but a confounded nuisance for typographers and typesetters, and the very devil for users of old-fashioned typewriters. We shall revisit the problem later. For the moment, it is enough to say that both the Greek invention of separate characters for vowels, and the fact that their script retained its non-cursive form, might have given them, and those who derive their alphabets from Greek characters, a small but significant developmental edge. Arabic script is the glory and the main ingredient of Islamic art, the prime emblem of Arab and Islamic culture, a calligraphic culture that – unlike its vast but ultimately parochial equivalent in China – became intercontinental. But if histories can be said to have hamartias, tragic flaws, then for Arabs their script may be another one, alongside the beautiful and lethal combination of the camel and the horse.

  THE KING’S BURIED POEMS

  Kings, like scripts, can have a remarkable unifying effect on culture; the Lakhmid dynasty, who ruled from the likely birthplace of Arabic writing, al-Hirah, certainly did. Having a powerful and wealthy Arab person to eulogize meant that poets flocked to al-Hirah, and met with each other, and vied in verses. This may have been going on since as early as the first known Persian client-ruler, Amr ibn Adi, the father of Imru’ al-Qays the probable defector. There was also a knock-on unifying effect on the evolving ‘high’ language, which as we have seen seems to have developed first in central Arabia, and particularly in the area including the Kindah capital of Qaryat. Now, to the north-east, high Arabic gained even greater prestige as a sort of ‘King’s Arabic’.

  By the sixth century, with important kings in two places, there was healthy competition between the Lakhmids and Ghassanids in ‘collecting’ poets; this rivalry resembled that between, say, the Medici and Sforza dynasties in their sponsorship of the arts of the European Renaissance. All this was wonderful for the poetry market: traditionally minded lovers of Arabic poetry still maintain that the later part of that sixth century was its high point. It is hard to single anything out, and harder still to suggest in translation the power of the Arabic sounds; but a classic example of eulogy is al-Nabighah’s description of the last Lakhmid king, al-Nu’man III, which concludes:

  Crowned with every honour high your glory’s brow

  and in the battle-fray a ramping lion – and beauteous as the moon!

  On hearing this fanfare of syllables, ‘a look of pure joy lit al-Nu’man’s face. He ordered the poet’s mouth to be stuffed with gems, then said, “If kings are to be praised, then let it be thus”.’

  Panegyric may ring hollow in some modern ears. But its force and its truth lay – as ever, with the high speech – more in its sound than in its sense. And its importance went way beyond rhymes for royalty. In the sixth century, the courtly poetry spread like wordfire: kings and courts are there to be emulated, and it is not surprising that the main meme in the mimetic process was poetry. Beyond the few semi-urban settlements, society was short on both artisans and material artworks; any cultural products had to be portable and made of the most readily available material – words. Furthermore, society was still mostly illiterate, so the verbal artworks needed to be not just portable but also memorable. Poetry is made doubly memorable by metre and rhyme: quite a lot of it survives from before the days of writing, as does a fair amount of saj’ – the speech of the seers that is rhymed and rhythmic, but not metrical; no plain prose survives, except what was indelibly inscribed on unportable stone. Lakhmid and Ghassanid patronage of poetry thus helped to unify further the high Arabic language, by setting a single prestigious standard, and not just in the royal courts but also in suqs and guest-tents and camp-fires – anywhere people met and spoke and recited together. Thereby, they also did more than anyone else to unify Arabs.

  Even when poetry had become, for its Lakhmid and Ghassanid patrons, a cultural product, an artwork, it still had more than a touch of the ancient supernatural: it is shot through with the magic that would soon resurface with such power in the Qur’an. It is said that one of the kings of al-Hirah was so entranced by an ode of al-Harith ibn Hillizah that he would only allow the poet to recite it when in wudu’ – the state of ritual purity later deemed necessary for Islamic prayer. Another story from the Lakhmid court is less credible, but it still sums up the way in which the history of poetry at al-Hirah intersects with that of script. Al-Nu’man III ‘gave orders that the poetry of the Arabs be written down for him in volumes. He then had them buried in his White Palace’. A century or so later, an early Muslim governor of the area

  was told that there was a treasure buried beneath the palace, so he had the place dug up and brought out the poems. This is why the people of al-Kufah are more knowledgeable in poetry than those of al-Basrah.

  Admittedly, the Kufan source of the story had been caught out more than once committing Chatterton-like forgeries, designed to discredit the Kufans’ great rivals, the Basrans. But if nothing else, the telling of the tale shows how poetry was seen by later Arabs as the greatest treasure of their pre-Islamic ancestors. It is the gold in the spoil-heap of language.

  THE IDENTITY WITHIN

  High Arabic – ‘the King’s Arabic’ – is sometimes known after the Greek model as a poetic koine, a literary language common to a wide area. Developing apace alongside it was what could be called an ethnic koine. If, as already suggested, the elusive original sense of the word ’arab is that of ‘a mixed people’ from different origins, then a language both shared by and named after them – ’arabiyyah – could only reinforce ’asabiyyah, the feeling of group solidarity. Put another way, the gathering of words – a unified language – fed into the gathering of the word – a united political voice.

  In the poetry of the century before Islam, this voice would be raised against the voices of others. Arabs were already constructing an identity for themselves; the next stage was to strengthen that identity by building a boundary. The complementary pairing ’arabiyyah-’asabiyyah was thus ring-fenced by a pair of opposing terms, ’arab/’ajam, Arabs/non-Arabs. The second term is closely connected with a’jam, ‘unable to speak properly’, so the pairing is comparable with arya/mleccha, Greek/Barbarian, Slav/Nemtsi and so on. This sort of linguistic ‘nationalism’ has been differentiated from the fully fledged territorial-linguistic nationalism of the nineteenth century onwards; but it is half way there. And the opposition in ’arab/’ajam signifies even more: as the late Moroccan critic Muhammad al-Jabiri said, ‘Arabs love their language to the point of sanctifying it. They consider the hold it has over them to be an expression not just of its power, but of their own power too.’

  Like all humans, al-Jabiri goes on, Arabs are speaking animals, but they are also the only truly ‘eloquent animals’: all the rest are less eloquent, and so less powerful, and in a way less human. The progression of ideas may not seem ‘logical’, but it is, if you accept – as did the people of Tarifah, the seeress of Marib – that truth is inherent in the sounds and in the syntactic soundness, not in the sen
se, of the logos, the word. Thinking in Arabic, Ibn Khaldun wrote, is a matter of divine inspiration, not logic; non-native speakers are thus handicapped in the thought processes employed by Arabs. The tenth-century philosopher Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi put it in a nutshell: ‘Syntax,’ the way words work together, ‘is the logic of the Arabs; logic is the syntax of reason.’ Then again, ‘I think in Arabic,’ declared the twentieth-century Lebanese linguist Abd Allah al-Alayli, ‘therefore I am an Arab.’

  Finally, if bathetically, ‘I’m an Arab, by God!’ cried a less philosophical person whose arabness had been called into question. ‘I have no socks to darn,’ he went on, with a swipe at the bestockinged, trouser-wearing ’ajam par excellence, the Persians, ‘and I don’t wear breeches, and I’m no good at foreign gabble!’ (Old-school Arabs regarded hosiery as effeminate, and like the wilder Scots went bare-arsed underneath their kilts.) It is not just that other people’s tongues are less manly; they are less meaningful. If all of this smacks of the sentiments of a linguistic master-race, the implication is probably true.

  The more contact Arabs had with jabbering foreigners – and especially, via the client-court of al-Hirah, with Persians – the more they asserted their own identity through opposition to them. This identity-by-antagonism would strengthen as the sixth century progressed and the Persians themselves became more assertive on multiple military fronts: against the Byzantines in the northern Fertile Crescent, in the north and east of the peninsula and, as we shall see, even in that other Fertile Crescent, the peninsular far south-west. As gabbling, trouser-wearing Persians closed in on their ‘island’, antagonism would become another major feature of being Arab.

  So far, neighbouring empires had been defining arabness – and inevitably shaping Arab identity – by appointing or confirming ‘kings of the Arabs’. In turn, those semi-settled satellite kings, the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, pulled nomad tribes into their own orbits. The beginnings of wider political unities were there, with big blocs like the multi-tribal alliances of Rabi’ah and Mudar allied loosely to the Byzantines or Persians. Towards the end of the fifth century that third ‘lion’, the now ailing Himyari empire of the south, would also summon up enough eleventh-hour energy to undertake a burst of expansion and appoint its own new ‘king of the Arabs’.

  But if pressure from the three neighbouring powers was forcing Arabs into ever more united blocs, the process was two-way: as well as being shaped from the outside, Arab solidarity was also coming about by reflex, as if in a mould formed of those neighbouring others: like the artist Rachel Whiteread’s rooms, in which empty interior space suddenly takes shape and becomes visible, the long-overlooked people of the margins and of the apparent emptiness within them were gaining in identity and visibility. The metaphor of the uniting mould appears in al-Jahiz:

  When the ’arab became one, they became equal as regards habitation, language, characteristics, ambition, pride, violence, and temperament. They were moulded in one mould, and cast in one instant.

  The casting wasn’t instantaneous. The solidification of society was a process that took centuries; it began at the edges, where Arabs had contact with non-Arabs, and worked inwards. And for the identity to emerge, at last, in full, the enclosing mould – those surrounding empires – would first have to be smashed. This would happen soon: the unified high language would inspire a new rhetoric which would in turn, and in time, be the motive force for the biggest diaspora ever, and the longest-running cycle of unity and disunity in Arab history – that of Islam. For a glorious couple of centuries at the start of that cycle, Arabs, for so long hedged about by other peoples’ empires, would hatch their own empire. The grammar of their history would be unstoppably active, and they would earn not just a capital letter but also a definite article. For a time, they would truly be ‘the Arabs’. But the years before the breaking of the matrix were a time of particular commotion: the matter in the Arabian mould underwent a kind of internal combustion.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ON THE EDGE

  OF GREATNESS

  THE DAYS OF THE ARABS

  A CURTAIN FALLS – AND RISES

  The sixth century AD was the time when Arabia became irrevocably more like it is today – more Arab, less South Arabian. Looking back from now, Saba/Sheba and its South Arabian successors appear as they did to the writer of the Book of Joel, ‘a people far off’, with the added distance of time. Their monuments with their bull- and ibex-friezes and horned alabaster moons, the strange elegant semaphore of their script – it all seems ancient and alien. In contrast, one can feel distinct vibrations on the threads that run from that arabized sixth century to the present: to track a tribe like Anazah from its present homelands, a swathe that cuts through the borders of Iraq, Syria and northern Saudi Arabia, back to al-Haddar in the east of the peninsula, from where their ancestors set out well before Islam and where their stay-at-home cousins still live, is to follow such a thread. And there are more than just vibrations. There are distinctive voices coming down the line, loud and clear. The late Moroccan scholar Muhammad al-Jabiri listed the sixth-century poet Imru’ al-Qays – not his earlier namesake, the (probably) defecting king – as the first in his list of great Arabs, ‘who we sense are still here living with us, or standing there before us . . . on the stage of Arab culture, a stage on which the curtain has never once fallen’. We will return to Imru’ al-Qays the poet – and failed uniter of tribes.

  In the first part of the sixth century the curtain was about to drop on that earlier, South Arabian act. The immediate cause was the Himyari King Yusuf As’ar’s official adoption of Judaism and persecution of non-Jews; his reasons were probably less doctrinal than political, for he was an opponent of intervention by the Christian Ethiopians. In particular, he is said to have massacred many Christians in Najran in about the year 518; the event is commemorated as a holocaust in the Qur’an. The Christian Axumite kingdom of Ethiopia, which already had a history of attempted military interventions in South Arabia, had more recently been building up a presence by backing Ethiopian trading enclaves there. Now, with the Najran incident, they had the pretext for a full-scale invasion.

  But there were other, older reasons for the South Arabian demise. Over the previous two centuries, raids by ’arab tribes on settled people had been increasing; at the same time, central state rulers relied more – at their own peril – on ’arab mercenaries for protection. These badw tribes were the fly in the ointment; or perhaps the fly of the supposed prophetic tradition, which has poison in one wing and antidote in the other. But the poison was gaining on the cure, and the South was becoming less ‘settled’ in both senses – more turbulent, and more ‘bedouin’.

  The Ethiopians knew that this time, unlike the response from the powerful old Sabaean-Himyari state to previous expeditions, resistance to them would be far from concerted. The South Arabians seem to have tried to pull their act together at the last gasp: a late Himyari inscription, for example, boasts of the continued ‘inseparable joining’ of the palaces of Silhin and Dhu Raydan, symbols of the old Sabaean state and the newer Himyari one, merged in a united kingdom. But the reality was disunity. Yusuf As’ar had come to power in a coup, never a good idea for stability, and the kingdom of Saba, Dhu Raydan, Hadramawt, Yamanat, and of their Highland and Lowland Arabs, fell apart. In 525, King Yusuf is said to have spurred his horse into the Red Sea from which his conquerors had come, and disappeared into the waves.

  The Ethiopians first installed a tractable Christian ruler, a Himyari, but he was soon replaced by the Ethiopian general Abrahah. In time, Abrahah, with the moat of the Red Sea and a rampart of Arabian mountains between him and his Axumite master, assumed the old royal titles of the Sabaean-Himyari realm and began mounting his own expeditions northward. One of these is recorded in a Sabaic inscription and dated to the year 552. This may be the same as an expedition commemorated not in laconic Sabaic, but in the thrilling Qur’anic ‘Chapter of the Elephant’, which tells how the Ethiopians and their war-pachyderm
were repulsed from an attack on Mecca by flocks of divinely directed dive-bombing birds armed with pebbles; if it is the same campaign, the Sabaic record omits these details. The ‘Day of the Elephant’ may have happened on another Ethiopian expedition, and indeed it is traditionally placed in 570; but if – as tradition claims – Abrahah himself led it, he must by that time have been a very old man. None of this would matter a jot, except that the Day of the Elephant is said to have occurred in the year in which the Prophet Muhammad was born, and it would be good to know precisely when that was.

  The Himyaris in particular had been good at dating things. Later, Islamic-period perceptions of pre-Islamic time go pear-shaped: even the mostly reliable al-Mas’udi can say of King Yusuf As’ar, for example (who, after all, shared a century with the Prophet Muhammad), ‘he reigned 260 years or, it is said, rather less than that . . .’

  When the curtain fell on the ancient South, it was as if that whole thousand-year act of the Arabian drama had been a dream.

  GULFS APART

  The lion of the South, the old Himyari-Sabaean empire, now lay dead. Over the sixth century, too, the Byzantine and Persian empires were getting ever more mangy and moribund, and their support for their Arab client-kings in the north was waning. In the south-west, however, an opportunity arose for the Sasanian shah that was too good to miss. At some time soon after the year of the Day of the Elephant, Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, a Himyari noble, approached the shah through his Lakhmid vassal and complained of Ethiopian tyranny. The shah sent a naval force which, according to legend, was made up of convicts (not entirely implausible: navies would have a long history of pressing convicts into service). The now independent Ethiopian king of the old Himyari lands, Abrahah’s son, was duly defeated, and Sayf installed in his place as tributary to the Persians. Sayf, however, was soon assassinated, apparently by Ethiopian hands, and a Persian viceroy appointed in his place – which was no doubt what the Sasanians, busily interfering in the Arabian subcontinent as they had been since the dawn of their dynasty, had intended all along. Perhaps emboldened by their near-effortless takeover of its southern Fertile Crescent (or at least of its towns), they also began looking greedily again at its northern counterpart. That they were to take their eyes off the Peninsula in between would be their undoing.