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  One force above all has brought the compound together, and held it together: language – not everyday speech, but the rich, strange, subtle, suavely hypnotic, magically persuasive, maddeningly difficult ‘high’ Arabic language that evolved on the tongues of tribal soothsayers and poets – has long, perhaps always, been the catalyst of a larger Arab identity. Shared language is important to any ethnic identity. It is an attempt to reverse the divinely inflicted disunity of Babel, that babble of misunderstanding that prevents people from coming together. For Arabs, it has acted not just as an ethnic marker, but as the ethnic genius: ‘It is said,’ goes an adage that was already old in the ninth century AD, ‘that wisdom descended from the heavens on three organs of the people of the earth: the brains of the Greeks, the hands of the Chinese, and the tongues of the Arabs.’

  For this reason, while history is often seen as a succession of men of action, Arab history is as much, or even more, a series of men (and some women) of words – poets, preachers, orators, authors; notably, the author (or, for Muslims, the transmitter) of the first Arabic book, the Qur’an. They and the words they have used will be prominent in this book. They are the ones who have formed identity, forged unity and forced the march of history. From time to time, therefore, for a page or two, we will take stock of how language has impelled progress, and at times impeded it. Progress and regress continue. Recent events, not least the ‘Arab Spring’ and its messy aftermath, have shown how words – slogans, chants, propaganda, mis- and disinformation, the old mesmerizing magic both white and black – still shape the course of the Arab world.

  Or, rather, the Arabic world, the Arabosphere. Language is still its defining feature and its genius, and ‘the Arabs’ are really arabophones. To call everyone from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Strait of Hormuz ‘the Arabs’ would be like calling all North Americans, South Africans, Australasians, Irish and British, regardless of origin, ‘the English’ – or even ‘the Angles’, another group of wandering clans whose language was to end up as the tide-wrack of a long-ebbed empire.

  To explore the origins of the shared identity that – despite everything – has led Arabs to chase the mirage of unity, we must therefore listen to their language. We must also go back way beyond Islam. The pre-Islamic past is certainly less well known and much less knowable. But in terms of written history it is as long as the period since that fateful Islamic eruption from Arabia. The first known ancient inscription mentioning Arabs dates from 853 BC; I am writing the first draft of these words in AD 2017; according to tradition, the boy Muhammad was first recognized as a prophet in AD 582 – the precise mid-point between that inscription and now.

  Islam began with such a flash that it tends to blind us to what was there before. Equally, the flash has cast its own powerful illumination over all subsequent history, throwing much into shadow. We need to look at the whole historical picture, and in a more even light; to give a stereoscopic view, one that sees what has happened since the Islamic year zero as only half of a panorama that goes back at least as far again.

  What did begin with Islam, and gives the impression that a unified Arab narrative begins then too, was Arabic information technology – in other words, new ways to use and control language, and thus to shape identity. Before Islam, literature, culture, history, identity were largely oral. From Islam onwards, new technologies have underlain most of the major developments in Arab history. We will look more closely at them as they crop up over time; for now, a summary will give an idea of just how important they are to the story. In the early seventh century, the first, belated, Arabic book appeared – the Qur’an: overnight, in the terms of our 3,000-year timescale, it made a language and the various people who used it legible, visible. Suddenly they were there on their own page, in black and white. They already had a past; now they entered their historic present, and with an energy that won them a vast empire.

  In about 700, a snap decision to ditch the inherited Greek and Persian languages of imperial administration in favour of Arabic also arabicized that whole empire and its peoples with amazing speed: Arabic became the new Latin. In the later eighth century, Arab paper-making stole a long march on a Europe still wrapped up in an age of parchment, and released an outpouring of Arabic words and ideas. Seven centuries later, with printing, Europe stole its own march; cursive Arabic script never worked happily as moveable type, and typeset Arabic was long viewed in its homeland rather as tinned spaghetti is in Italy. When at long last, in the nineteenth century, Arabic presses did grind slowly into action, so too did an Arab renaissance, the Nahdah or ‘awakening’. Another hundred years on, and a new and thrilling pan-Arab nationalism was broadcast by the border-defying transistor radio. A generation later, Arabic typesetters finally found the antidote to the cursive curse – word-processing; at the same time satellite TV took off, and the words flew further and faster. Most recently, the social media of the early twenty-first century began to subvert old rhetorics and air alternative truths . . . until the reactionaries got on to Facebook too. Now digital dinosaurs do their best to dominate media and minds.

  And yet the pre-Islamic half of history had its social media, its dominating voices; words flew then, too. Most of them flew away on the wind. But some were caught – on stones, in memories – and we can and must still try to listen to them.

  A distinguished historian who begins in the middle, with Islam, is Albert Hourani. He draws the reader into his subject with a portrait of the great fourteenth-century Arab historian, Ibn Khaldun. After decades lived in the thick of intrigues and warring factions, Ibn Khaldun took himself off to a fortified village in rural Algeria and went into a period of intense intellectual retreat. He looked hard at what was going on around him and, with ‘words and ideas pouring into my head like cream into a churn’ as he put it (lucky man!), came up with a model for the rise and fall of dynasties. In short, the model explains how a nomad tribe can be united by what he calls ’asabiyyah, literally something like ‘bindedness’ but often translated as ‘group solidarity’, and thus gain in military strength. The tribe takes over the rule of a settled state by force, and its leaders become a new dynasty: the once peripheral and footloose become the central and settled. In time, however – usually three generations – the energy of the dynasty is sapped by easy living, and the dynasty falls to a new one that still enjoys the old nomad vitality. (‘Clogs to clogs,’ as they used to say in Lancashire of a parallel kind of social mobility, ‘is only three generations.’)

  Hourani was an academic, a library man writing from the purlieus of St Antony’s College, Oxford. With his academic eye, he viewed Ibn Khaldun as a figure who represented an age and a culture. Rereading both authors in my tower-house in Yemen, I had a realization: here, in the thick of it, kept awake by mortars and missiles (my third major conflict) and bombarded by slogans and sermons and poems – political, not lyrical, poems – all day, I saw Ibn Khaldun as a fellow observer, sitting in his isolated redoubt in Algeria as I sit here in San’a, while tribes and dynasties make war and deals and plots and more war around us, both of us forming our philosophy of history from direct experience. While Hourani used Ibn Khaldun as a literary device, I find myself unintentionally impersonating him. In other words, I am experiencing history in situ. Its detritus lies beneath me, for my little tower stands on the tail-end of a ruin-mound built up of bits of pre-Islamic San’a – one of the great cities of Saba, or Sheba – as well as of the Abbasid governor’s palace and God knows what else. In situ, and in real time: the raw materials of history are there, outside my window. (A group of small children has just gone past, shouting ‘Death to America!’ They are accompanied by the rat-tat-tats of drumbeats and firecrackers, and are followed by a red box, born aloft, containing yet another martyr. The box is pitifully small.)

  The raw materials these days seem to be mostly steel and lead. Stuck recently with a flat battery and a kind fellow motorist but no jump-leads, we had a simultaneous lateral thought – and stopped a couple of tribesmen
. We borrowed their AK47 assault rifles, and used them to join the batteries. The car started first go. Only connect! ‘So they do have positive benefits,’ I said brightly, handing the guns back. ‘Their benefit,’ one of the tribesmen replied, ‘is killing.’

  What can one say? In my first book I wrote that, in Yemen, I felt like both the guest at the feast and the fly on the wall. Nowadays I feel more like the skeleton at the feast and the fly in the soup. But one has to try to make light of it. Seeing the land I live in and love falling apart is like watching an old and dear friend losing his mind and committing slow, considered suicide.

  I find that Ibn Khaldun’s model, his elegant paradigm, still works. But I believe it can be further tuned in ways that make its workings clearer still, and more clearly applicable over the three millennia or so of recorded Arab history. The most important feature is still ’asabiyyah, that collective potential energy that catalyses a short-lived unity:

  ’asabiyyah, in time, builds the momentum for

  . . . a successful raid, conquest or, mutatis mutandis, coup d’état;

  . . . as a result of the raid/conquest/coup, and of the group’s resulting monopoly of resources (camels, taxes, oil and gas), the group prospers;

  . . . either the resources are not enough for the group as it increases in size, and/or its leaders fall out over the division of wealth, so . . . unity fragments.

  Eventually a new ’asabiyyah will form, and the process will repeat itself.

  I find also that Ibn Khaldun was right to see ‘nomads’ as the reservoir of change, and I believe – strange though it sounds – that in a sense this is still true today, even though the number of Arabs who actually live from nomadism is now infinitesimally small. Ibn Khaldun’s two basic systems of human society are still in place:

  hadari, or ‘settled’, political society, a (relatively) static system characterized by the related word hadarah – often translated as ‘civilization’, in the sense of people living together in a settlement, a town (Latin civitas, Greek polis); and

  badawi, or ‘bedouin’, apolitical society, a dynamic system in which people live beyond the civil polity, and in which the basic ‘institution’ is that of the ghazw or raid (or conquest or coup d’état).

  My point is that, while actual Bedouin are now a dying breed, there are still plenty of major players in the Arab game whose actions accord perfectly with that second, ‘bedouin’ system. The two systems, settled ‘peoples’ and bedouin ‘tribes’, are mentioned in a famous verse of the Qur’an, from which I take part of the subtitle of this book:

  O mankind, We have created you from male and female, and made you into peoples and tribes, that you may know one another.

  The duality has been in place since the beginning of recorded Arab time, and it has not always been a question of opposition. That first mention of Arabs in 853 BC concerns the employment by the Assyrian state of a transport contractor, a certain Gindibu (‘Locust’), an Arab chieftain who owned vast herds of camels: settled and bedouin societies benefited mutually. Moving to the mid-point in Arab history, part of the Prophet Muhammad’s success was due to his combining elements of both the settled and bedouin systems to set up the original Islamic state. In recent times, the almost total failure of the popular democratic revolutions of 2011 has been bound up with a reassertion of the ‘bedouin’ system over the settled. The Yemen I see outside my window, for example, was considered until the summer of 2014 to be a success story of the Arab Spring, of the aspiration to build a settled, civil society. Since then, the northern part of the country has been seized in an armed raid – the resurgence of an old faction that had ruled for a thousand years – a civil war has raged, and the neighbouring states (all ruled by what Ibn Khaldun would class as ‘Bedouin’ dynasties) have weighed in. History, as I said, in real time. Wars are the worst of history, and civil wars are the worst of wars: they are waged not just within, but against civil society. Ibn Khaldun had no doubt who the main culprits were: ‘civilization’, he wrote, ‘always collapsed in places where the Bedouins took over’.

  Nowadays, it is not that actual nomads on camels undermine state institutions, hijack democratic uprisings or ignite civil conflict. But it does seem clear that the central nomad institution – the raid, the ghazw – is still very much alive. That, perhaps, is why the image of camel-borne regime loyalists causing mayhem among the Tahrir Square protesters in Cairo in 2011 was so potent. Elsewhere, the latest Toyota pick-ups mounted with heavy-calibre machine-guns are potent enough.

  ‘Raiding’ is a loaded word, of course; it smacks of the piratical, the barbarian, the uncivilized in its pejorative sense. But raiding is also an established institution, in that it is a long-accepted means for the redistribution, sometimes more equitable, of wealth. The means by which it is pursued may not be regarded as acceptable in some peoples’ ethical systems, but, looked at coldly, they are rational: you have a surplus, I have a deficit, therefore I will take your surplus. It is important to remember that different cultures have different rationalities; even cannibals, as cultural commentators from Montaigne to Marshall Sahlins have explained, have their own rationalities. People may be essentially the same the world over, but they go about being the same in different ways.

  For much of Arab history, two rationalities have coexisted, those of the ‘settled’ and of the ‘bedouin’, the peoples and the tribes, seemingly in perpetual duality, clashing yet embracing, loving and hating, yin and yang. But which rationality is the more ‘Arab’? Herein is a great dilemma of Arab identity: the term ‘Arab’, as I have said, has most often been applied to tribal groups who live outside settled society, beyond the pale and the politics of civil institutions. In one sense, therefore, the more Arabs submit to civil society, the less ‘Arab’ they become; they lose something of their ethos. In a globalized, urbanizing world of blurring identities, the prospect of losing that ancient aspect of arabness, of becoming part of the global blur, is painful.

  There is more to the story than peoples and tribes. Draw back, look at the bigger picture on the map and over time, and it becomes clear that the cycle of unification and fragmentation sketched out above has been in motion within a context of empires – Assyrian, Roman, Persian, Byzantine, Ottoman, British, American. It is a cycle that has teeth, but is not necessarily vicious: sometimes the teeth have meshed with imperial interests at the points of contact – the two Fertile Crescents (more on them later), Egypt and Iran; at other times they have clashed. In both cases there is friction, heat, conflagration: the cycle is a wheel of fire, both creative and destructive, melding, melting and remoulding Arab identities over 3,000 years.

  In telling the Arab story, this book will look more at that seemingly eternal and often tragic round of unity and fragmentation, and also at that force that feeds the fire, fuels revolutions and has, more than anything, defined Arabs across a history of shifting and regrouping identities: the Arabic language. Language is what ties together all those key historical developments based on information technology, from the word of God captured in writing, to word-processing, and on to mind-processing by newly reactionary regimes. Language is the thread that all would-be Arab leaders have tried to grasp: their aim has always been to create ’asabiyyah, that ‘bindedness’ or unanimity – to ‘gather the word’ of their peoples and tribes, as Arabic also puts it.

  This is a history of Arabs, not of Arabic. But to follow the linguistic thread through it is to explore the deepest strand of ‘being Arab’ in all its different senses. That thread is the only bond that has ever been able to keep Arabs together, to give them identity and unity; even the unity brought about by Islam was based, ultimately, on words. For modern Europeans and their heirs, as Thomas Carlyle pointed out, gunpowder, printing and Protestantism underlay power; for Arabs and theirs, it has been words, rhymes and rhetoric.

  The problem is that words can blow apart as well as bring together. That is what is happening now, both where I live and in many other Arab lands, and it is
why unity remains a mirage. How all this has come about, over the entire known Arab timescale of nearly three millennia, is the subject of this book.

  One last word of my own before the gathering of the Arab word. As well as listening to people and their voices, we will occasionally examine things. What might be called tangibilia are a good way of getting a grasp on the past; they can act as metaphors for time or times, handles on complexity. They can be as big as a whole building assembled from fragments – a mosque that salvages both pagan and Christian materials – or as small as an Arabic coin minted by King Offa in the English Midlands; they can be charged with enigma, like a talisman with Allah on one side and Krishna on the other, or loaded with irony, like a Colt revolver inscribed by a Cold War president of the United States. They are rather like what Jorge Luis Borges, minting a new meaning for an old Arabic coinage, called ‘the Zahir’: a visible and haunting object that takes on different shapes in different places and ages.

  Other, more literary metaphors are useful too for the story to come. The wheel of fire is one; the allusion to legendary sufferings – of Ixion, subverter of divine order, of King Lear, tragic divider of his own realm, both of them ‘bound / Upon a wheel of fire’ – is not coincidental. Wheels, moreover, are good vehicles for histories: they travel along an ever-extending line – time – yet their own motion is cyclical; they combine the constant and the variable. But, for Arab history, they are not the only image to keep in mind.