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  In my first book I wrote that, in Yemen, the past is ever present. I didn’t realize at the time that Harold Ingrams, the imperial administrator and Arabian traveller, had also written in his Yemen book, ‘This is a country where the past is ever present’.

  A generation and a revolution or two separated our statements, but the past we wrote about was the same, still present. It is present now, another generation and a few more revolutions on. And it is not only the Yemeni past as seen by British observers that is inescapable. Near the beginning of his sprawling book on Stasis and Change, the Syrian poet and critic Adonis writes of the tendency across the Arabic world ‘to make the past ever present’. This ever-present past was what led that astute observer, Jan Morris, to call the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ‘an antique autocracy’ in 1955, only two years after its founding autocrat had died.

  We must all be stating the blinding obvious. What only becomes obvious with time is how that ever-present past also contains the future – contains in both senses: comprises, but also confines. An ever-present past can have positive effects, for it keeps societies rooted in themselves. Equally, it can entrap those same societies and stifle their futures. It can be an incubus, an undead weight. The recent and obvious example is that of the Arab Spring, the rolling revolution that began in 2011 and gave expression to a younger generation’s aspirations – only to be smothered, almost everywhere, by the reactionary forces of the Arab past.

  Exploring Arab history thus means stepping now and again off the time-line; looking ahead as well as back. ‘Time present and time past,’ as Eliot knew,

  Are both perhaps present in time future,

  And time future contained in time past.

  This complexity is the bane of all historians, but maybe most of all for historians of Arabs: years and pages turn in sequence; but not necessarily action and reaction, cause and effect. Causes, factors, tragic flaws may remain latent for centuries, even millennia, until they work themselves out, if they ever do. An extreme though trifling instance is one in which, in the mid-twentieth century, a village shaykh (chief) demanded that the British colonial authorities in Aden should pay for an old well to be dug out and reinstated. His argument was that the well had been filled in by a Roman expeditionary force in 26 BC, and that the Romans and the British were both species of ‘Frank’ – that is, European. A more serious instance is that concerning the transfer and nature of power in the post-Muhammadan state: the problem has boiled up intermittently but bloodily over the past 1,400 years. Clearly, the wheel alone, trundling steadily along its time-line, is not always enough. We need another image, repetitious yet arbitrary.

  As often, poets have the answer. The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani saw the ever-present Arab past as

  the hourglass that swallows you

  Night and day.

  That past is the sand in the bottom of the glass, waiting for the next turn of events. Qabbani knew that history is no mere timepiece or pastime, but a player in its own right, often malevolent. It is the hourglass, squatting there, marking time, not measuring it – until it is turned once more, and then you see the grains are human lives, or human deaths, for the people are both the quicksand and its victims.

  You can count the grains: 6,660 civilians killed by the war in my adoptive land; at least 50,000 dead combatants, many of them no more than boys; perhaps 85,000 younger children, infants under five, starved quietly to death by war’s old ally, poverty. These are the stark statistics – so far – from the UN, ACLED and Save the Children, as I let go of this book at the end of 2018. Would those who turned the hourglass have done so if they’d known, or even if they could have guessed?

  1 The Arabian Peninsula and adjoining regions before Islam.

  2 The Arab empire.

  3 Arabs abroad.

  4 The Arabic world in recent centuries.

  INTRODUCTION

  GATHERING THE WORD

  ‘The main function of a paramount shaykh is to gather the word of all.’

  Paul Dresch, Tribes, Government and History in Yemen

  ORATORS AND PREDATORS

  Before sunrise on a winter’s day early in the year 630, a captive in the Arabian town of Yathrib looked on as the men of the place gathered in the courtyard outside his cell. He could make out little between the few splashes of lamplight. But when their leader arrived – it had to be him, for the whispering had stopped – and the men drew themselves up in rows, the captive sensed something momentous was about to happen. A thought came, colder than dawn: ‘I believe they mean to kill me . . .’

  It would not have been surprising. For several years the men of Yathrib had been raiding the rich trading caravans of the prisoner’s own people; he himself had led a number of counter-raids. Many had died, and there was blood between them. Although a treaty earlier in the year had halted the skirmishing, it had recently been broken by allies of the captive’s tribe. But in truth there was no knowing what the Yathrib men would do: they were a break-away group that crossed tribal boundaries and was led by a maverick but charismatic seer – a cousin, in fact, of the captive – and their actions were unknowable.

  What happened next amazed the prisoner. The seer stood alone in front of the rows, chanted some of the strange incantations for which he was famous, bowed, and then prostrated himself. The ranks of men behind him copied his movements. It looked something like the worship of the Christians that the captive had witnessed on his trading trips to Syria. But these men were so precise, so drilled in their motions that they moved as a single body. As the prisoner watched, he uttered an oath on the old high deity of his tribe:

  By Allah! Never have I seen the discipline I’ve seen this day, and in men who have come from here, there and everywhere . . . No, not among the noble Persians, nor the Byzantines with their braided locks!

  The captive was a clan chief of Mecca called Abu Sufyan. His maverick cousin was called Muhammad, and for a few years his captors had been calling themselves ‘Muslims’.

  What surprised Abu Sufyan so much was the unity of these men of Yathrib (or Madinat Rasul Allah, ‘the City of Allah’s Messenger’ – al-Madinah or Medina for short – as they were starting to call it, in honour of their leader). This was a body of people of diverse origins, united neither by blood nor even, as was the case in most tribal groupings, by the pretence of a blood relationship. Some of them in fact were from his own tribe of Quraysh, which over the last five generations had split into competing clans. Most of them, however, were from tribes that had settled here in Yathrib long ago but came originally from South Arabia – al-Yaman, ‘the South’, a land of mountains and gorges, forests and fields, distant and different in its tongues and manners. There were even a few Jewish Arabians in the bowing ranks. Yet here they all were, moving, responding as one body. Muhammad had achieved, with spectacular success, what all would-be Arab leaders had always tried to do: he had ‘gathered the word’ of the people – he had achieved unanimity, and silenced all dissent.

  Abu Sufyan’s comparison with the Byzantines and the Persians is revealing. As an experienced merchant in the international trade, he was no stranger to the peninsula’s warring imperial neighbours. But he knew that, for all their own claims of internal unity, those empires were themselves split by political disagreements and sectarian disputes. Here before him, in the heart of eternally squabbling Arabia, was a paradigm of unity – of unanimity, the gathered word – that put those imperial pretensions to shame.

  It was too good to last. Within less than three decades, Abu Sufyan’s son would be bloodily at war with Muhammad’s son-in-law over the question of authority – control of people and of an income that would have made the rich old merchant’s head dizzy. In a sense, that same conflict continues today, with exponentially enlarged figures and ramifications, often simplified with a sectarian gloss as a conflict between Sunnah and Shi’ah but in reality still to do not with dogma but with earthly powers: power over wealth, power over people, power over power.

  Fo
r the moment, however, Muhammad had found the two keys to unity. The immediate key, as those disciplined ranks of worshippers showed, was a shared allegiance to a single deity. Despite the Christian-looking form of prayer with its prostrations, the deity was not so much like that of the Byzantines and Ethiopians with their interminable wranglings over the divine nature. Nor was He quite like that of the Jews; He might have been, had events turned out differently; but most of the Jews of Yathrib had rejected Muhammad’s overtures in his early days in the town. Instead, He took His name from that of the cultic high god of Muhammad’s own ancestral town of Mecca, one of the last great bastions of polytheism in a largely christianized or judaized Near East. As for His nature – a severely minimal nature, stripped of attributes, about which wranglings need not arise – it was as simple and self-contained as the desert stones the bedouins would come across and set up as their gods, or even more so. Indeed, this deity was unimaginable, except by reflex, through His creation and through His word as revealed to His prophet. That word inculcated a shared allegiance to the deity by daily prayers. It also forged a wider, deeper unity, expressed not in kinship but in worship.

  The other key to unity, the ultimate one, unlocked that first key. It was Muhammad’s power over language – not the language of everyday speech, but the special oracular tongue, the high Arabic with which daemons and familiar spirits inspired the traditional Arabian seers; except that in Muhammad’s case, the tongue was inspired, via an angel, by that same abstract God who had chosen Muhammad as His ‘noble messenger’. Muhammad had received the word of God and gathered the word of man. Yet He knew that the unity he had brought about was itself unique, and doomed. Whether or not it is true that he said, ‘This community will split into seventy-three sects’, he knew from his Qur’an, the collection of recitations sent down from God and passed on by him, that the reality was disunity:

  By the night as it envelops,

  By the day as it dawns bright,

  By Him Who created male and female,

  I tell you that your efforts lead to different ends.

  He was also aware of a paradox. The oracular message that, in his mouth, had become divine, was aimed especially at the people who would best understand it – the many people across the peninsula who knew, or at least could be moved by, the high Arabic of divination and poetry; in other words, most tribal Arabs. That may sound like an obvious point, but it is one that the Qur’an makes, self-referentially, time and again. For example,

  We have sent it down as an Arabic Qur’an in order that you may understand.

  And yet the only people referred to as Arabs in the Qur’an – those who might be expected to be most moved by the message, and in whom it might produce some spiritual benefit – were the least likely to heed it:

  The a’rab are the worst in unbelief and hypocrisy, and the least likely to know the laws which Allah has sent down to His messenger.

  Divine words, then, falling on closed ears. Admittedly,

  Of the a’rab there are some who believe in Allah and the Last Day.

  Admittedly, too, the form a’rab (a plural, while ’arab is a collective . . . a quibbling difference) is often taken to refer to the outright nomads who lived on the margins of Muhammad’s own environment of settled traders. But still, it was the raiding ethos of those very nomads on which the military success of the new community depended and which, in time, would give the community its edge over the ageing empires that surrounded it. The nomads and their predatory skills had to be incorporated into the community of believers.

  The oldest Arabic book, the Qur’an, thus seems to be saying that there are two connotations of arabness – the eloquence of the high Arabic language, and the turbulence of the people among whom that language developed; that Arabs can be orators, but also predators. Looking at Arab history before and since Muhammad, this makes sense. A potent mixture of rhetoric and raiding has powered the cycle of unification and fragmentation, and still does.

  True and lasting unity, as Muhammad knew, was impossible without one great principle, that of absolute equality under God. Among the fractious tribes and clans of Arabia, becoming part of a larger unity meant ceding power; to cede power to anyone stronger than you – other than the all-powerful God – was to admit defeat. But even with God in charge, that principle of equality, one of the eternal underpinnings of Islam, has always been elusive on earth. So, therefore, has unity: it remains a shimmering mirage on the horizon, while along the way the word is gathered at times by leaders with voices that are eloquent, persuasive or simply loud; they impose a perilous unison, then, inevitably it seems, it collapses in a din of competing rhetorics. Harmony – the coming together of diverse voices, in which all have an equal right to speak and an equal duty to listen – has seldom been heard.

  But – you see how easy it is? – with Muhammad, Abu Sufyan and Islam, I too have started in the middle. It is an (probably the) illuminating ‘moment’ of Arab history, if such things can be said to exist; it sheds light on what came before, and what would come after. Medina, too, is in another middle: it mediates between the nomadic Arabia of the north and east and the more settled Arabia of the south and west; between ’arab tribes and South Arabian peoples – the two main elements that were coming tentatively together in a single ‘Arab’ whole. And yet Medina was far from being the only mid-point in Arabia. And Muhammad, if he was the greatest gatherer of the word, was not the first. To go back and search instead for the beginnings of the long quest for unity will be, in part, to ‘de-islamize’ the history of Arabs, to fix a spotlight on the people, rather than to see them only against the rich and distracting background of what Islam has become. It is also to re-arabize the history of Islam, and of Arabs themselves – to see Islam not just as the world faith which it is today, but also as a unifying national ideology, and Muhammad as an Arab national hero.

  Something else becomes clear if you go back to the beginning. Philip Hitti, in his big old (and still very useful) History of the Arabs, saw the Arabic language as ‘the third stage in the series of conquests’ by Arabs, after those of arms and of Islam. In reality the Arabic language was the first conquest, and not by but of Arabs. Without it, the other conquests would not have happened; there would never have been Arab histories to be written.

  One of the best early Arab historians, al-Mas’udi, compared the task of telling the Arab story to that of ‘someone who has found a scattered hoard of gemstones of all different kinds and colours, and has then strung them in order and turned them into a precious necklace’.

  Eleven hundred years on, the hoard is that much bigger and even more various, but the task is the same. Straightforward chronology fixes the rough order of stringing; the final design depends on how the historian chooses the various shapes and colours and places them together and, to a degree, on the taste of the times. But the success of the necklace also hangs on the strength of the string. Mine is the Arabic language, which I called the ‘deepest strand of “being Arab”’; it would be worth briskly reeling through 3,000 years of it over the next few pages, before the events themselves – many of them curious, dazzling and distracting – are strung. Language, the word, is the hidden thread: it is, after all, what Arab unity has itself so often gathered itself upon.

  IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE POET

  Over the three millennia of recorded Arab history, the gathered word has set off three waves of unity. To use Ibn Khaldun’s term again, ’asabiyyah, ‘group solidarity’, has always got its momentum from ’arabiyyah, the high Arabic language par excellence. The scale of these waves, however, has been far greater than the Khaldunian one of tribe or dynasty. The first wave, ancient, slow, but deep, was one of ethnic self-awareness, swelling over a millennium before Islam. The second was a tsunami of physical expansion, the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries and their aftermath, that dissipated as quickly as it began and ended in a long lull, but left behind a rich and enduring sediment of language. The third wave, powered b
y dormant forces that were awakened by nationalist movements in nineteenth-century Europe, was one of rediscovery of the ethnic, cultural – and, later, cultic – self. That last wave is still breaking now. The three waves shape the larger sections of the coming book into three groups, unequal in years but roughly equal in pages: ‘Emergence’ and ‘Revolution’ (900 BC to AD 630); ‘Dominance’ and ‘Decline’ (630 to 1350); ‘Eclipse’ and ‘Re-emergence’ (1350 to now).

  The beginnings of the first wave, of self-awareness, are obscure and hard to fix in time. It seems that with the increased mobility that came from domesticating camels as pack-animals, and with Arabs working in long-distance transport and trade, a language had to form that could be understood by speakers of different North Arabian dialects (South Arabians spoke another group of languages, distantly related but incomprehensible to the northerners; the distance was something like that between German and Italian). Later, at some time well before the fifth century AD and possibly in the central peninsula, a ‘high’ form of the unified northern language also took shape. This, the ’arabiyyah, was not everyday speech but a ‘mystical tongue’ used for ‘oracle giving and recitation of poetry’. Those who could command this special tongue – above all the sha’ir, later on a ‘poet’, but in its oldest sense probably more like a seer or a shaman – could attract followers. In time of raids, the sha’ir also played the role of Whitman’s poet, ‘the most deadly force of the war . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood’.