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The dust raised by Islam’s impetuous entry on the field of history blots out a lot of what was there before. And yet a few features are clear in the murk that extends from that earliest mention of Arabs in 853 BC to their sudden appearance in the international spotlight. Human existence across much of early Arabia was mobile, fissile, fractious; lineage groups roving a harsh environment will, by their nature, divide and compete for survival. Time was measured in the names of ancestors rather than recorded in monuments or annals. Towards the end of the first millennium BC, however, the outer margins of this heterogeneous society (if it could even be called that) had already begun to gain shape through contact with the imperial neighbours – Rome, Persia, and South Arabia, that fertile land of mountains in the heel and instep of the peninsula, where Saba (the biblical Sheba) and its successor empires ruled over largely settled folk.

  Empires, hierarchical and pyramidal by nature, prefer to deal with clearer chains of command than the horizontal structures of tribes and clans can offer. Arab hierarchies thus began to emerge through recognition by the great powers, including phylarchs (tribal leaders) and, later, ‘kings of the Arabs’. The old nomadic, fluid life began to settle, to set at the edges: the kings ruled from centres between the desert tracts and the sown lands that were half camp, half capital. It was as if society, in the Arab lands of north and central Arabia, was solidifying from the outside in, like wax in a mould. And if kings need recognition from their neighbours, they also need it from their own people: they live off praise and propaganda, the stuff of poets in their later guise. Here the high language came into its own, and took the shape it still has today. The language held the potential, too, of a deeper-felt unity. Herder, one of the founding theorists of modern European nationalism, knew the power of poetry. ‘A poet,’ he wrote in 1772, ‘is the creator of the nation [Volk] around him; he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.’

  In Herder’s Europe, that world was still new: in some areas of France at the time, for example, ‘To walk in any direction for a day was to become incomprehensible’, and the ideal of a unified national language was far from being realized. Not so in the Arabic world. Reynold Nicholson, who understood it better than most, was right to say that poetry made Arabs ‘morally and spiritually a nation long before Muhammad’.

  No one, of course, spoke the language of the poets in real life. ‘Nationhood’ was a poetic ideal, a reality only in rhetoric. It always has been.

  THE WORD SPREADS

  In the sixth century AD, as this process of ethnic construction, physical settlement and spiritual nation-building was gathering momentum, the powers around Arabia went to war: Romans (now Byzantines) against Persians, and the Ethiopian empire of Axum against Himyarite South Arabia. As the imperial mould around them cracked, the half-formed society of Arabs itself imploded. With the loss of their imperial backers, the kings of the Arabs lost their raison d’être, the Arabs lost their definite article, and Arabia re-bedouinized, a mobile mêlée of competing rhetorics, each tribe with its poets, and now – for the profession of words had multiplied and specialized – its khatibs, orators, and kahins, diviners or seers.

  Out of the ferment of words and prophecies came Muhammad. But he took the rhetoric immeasurably further than his predecessors. What became Islam was empowered by language; not only by the new and thrilling audio-spiritual universe of the Qur’an, whose language arose from the old oracular high Arabic, but also by the use of slogans – above all the one that proclaimed the power of the old high god of Mecca: Allahu akbar, Allah is greatest. Muhammad was both the messenger of Allah, and His messager.

  As Ibn Khaldun puts it, Muhammad ‘gathered the Arabs together upon the word of Islam’. It was the paramount example of a paramount shaykh’s function – gathering the word; and it was the prime example of the way words can be used for the instant dissemination of ideas, and for the insertion of these ideas into minds. Perhaps, in fact, it is the supreme example in human history of how language, rather than simple Darwinian self-interest and physical strength, can win dominance. For within less than a hundred years of Abu Sufyan’s amazement at the discipline instilled by Muhammad, the Arab forces of Islam had conquered, or perhaps more accurately raided and patchily occupied, an area far larger than that of the Roman empire at its height. A few decades later, Arabs went global with their new capital, Baghdad, its four main gates leading to the four corners of the known world. The language went global too, founding and then binding – faster, in both senses, than could religious dogma – the great and enduring cultural empire called Islam.

  At the same time, Arabs were to be the victims of their own success. The language that had given them cultural unity before Islam, and political unity under it, now destroyed that unity. In a few more short generations, the old, oracular, poetic ’arabiyyah – high Arabic, the ethnic ‘marker’ above all others – had become the medium of culture, worship and administration across the empire; the word, once gathered, was now scattered across a vast spectrum of arabicized peoples from the Pamirs to the Pyrenees. Genetically, Arabs were everywhere. Linguistically, their speech laced this far-flung culture with its distinctive savour. But they themselves became invisible, dissolved by their own empire like salt in seawater.

  A literal if late illustration of this absence can be seen in Eugene Rogan’s The Arabs: A History, which covers the period 1500 to 2000: the first two plates are not of Arabs, but are Florentine portraits of ethnic Turks. As we shall see, the centuries of ‘invisibility’ in fact conceal an Arab expansion almost as remarkable for its extent as the first eruption of Islam – maybe more remarkable, as it was so low-key; but it was an expansion only through the Arab world’s back door, into the Indian Ocean. Elsewhere, Arabs stayed at home and looked on as others took over the job of empire-building.

  Perhaps histories have ‘grammars’ that can be parsed; if so, then most Arabs, who had been so active and so present in the world, had now lapsed into a long passivity lived in their own past. In actual Arabic grammar, the passive is called the ‘unknown’ or ‘anonymous’ voice – and to an extent, Arabs lost their name and disappeared into the greater totality of Muslims.

  THE REAWAKENED WORD

  The long anonymity was ended, too, by words. Just as Germans and Italians had rediscovered their national identities in literature before they tried to hammer them out in politics, it was the poets who sounded the Arab call – for example, Ibrahim al-Yaziji’s summons of 1868:

  Awake, O Arabs, and arise!

  Misfortune’s flood is lapping at your knees.

  And yet, for Arabs, the way to ‘nationhood’, from anonymity to a new unanimity, would be a hard one. The nineteenth-century Nahdah, the ‘arising’ or ‘awakening’ (often called in Western accounts, with confusing connotations, the ‘renaissance’), emerged from earlier European ideas of linguistic-ethnic-territorial nationalism. But it was largely an awakening of intellectuals; most Arabs slept on. Besides, that third element of the European nationalist model – the territorial – proved to be the problem. Al-Yaziji and his fellow intellectuals and poets were addressing an audience whom they defined as Arabs, above all, because they spoke Arabic. These early nationalist writers saw themselves as demiurges: they belonged to the recent European tradition of theorists like Herder, but also to that of the distant Arabian age before Islam, the age of ethnic construction. But what had been possible in the ancient peninsula, and was happening now in the new Europe of nation-states, would be much harder in the vast arabophone zone that had grown with Islam: it stretched nearly a quarter of the way around the globe. The Arabosphere was just too big and too disparate, not least economically, to form a stable whole; the Ottoman empire, which had tried to rule much of that vast area, was now exhausted by the centuries-long effort. After the First World War, hopes of territorial unity were hardly helped by the way in which the Ottoman imperial carcase was hacked about by the victorious powers. Add the small but excruciating wedge driven in
to the heart of the Arabic world by the Zionist project, plus the simultaneous discovery that some of the blankest bits of the map contain some of the richest oil fields – and borders, and daggers, were drawn.

  Nationalism failed to gather the Arab word, or to unite the Arabic world. In more recent decades, some Arabs have pursued the mirage of unity by an older path – the one that led to Islam. Today, however, language, identity and the ideal of unity are still as interwoven as they were in the ages of pre-Islamic praise-poetry and of Qur’anic revelation. ’Arabiyyah, the high language, ‘is regarded by most Arabs as the most significant unifying factor of the Arab world’.

  The trouble is, even if people write in it (or try to, and fall far short), nobody actually speaks it; nobody ever has spoken it as their mother tongue, not since the mists of time when it began to be constructed. High Arabic is an imagined bond, but also a bind – an unattainable ideal that constricts free expression. The reality is dialect, and disunity. Arabs have never been united in speech, or in any other way, only in speeches; never in real words in the real world, only on paper.

  High Arabic is shared by more than 400 million people as the idealized literary form of their spoken language (not to mention another 1.4 billion Muslims as their liturgical language). On the ground the situation is different. Even in quite a small country like Tunisia, with eleven million inhabitants, there are four different dialect words for ‘I’ (in high Arabic, ’anā): anī, ’anī, nā and nāy. Another more extreme case is that of the small island state of Bahrain (with an area of 660 square kilometres), where the ruled Shi’i majority – the ‘Baharnah’, or (native) Bahrainis – speak a ‘settled’ dialect, and the ruling Sunni majority – the ‘Arabs’, as they are still called, who took over in a raid in 1783 – a ‘bedouin’ one. Sectarianism apart, what hope is there for unity, even in a kingdom smaller than the Isle of Mull, when its inhabitants speak two different tongues?

  THE BOOK OF THE STICK

  The ninth-century expert on arabness, al-Jahiz, believed language to be the chief ‘national characteristic’ of the people who were his subject. He also knew the importance of gathering the word, and devoted a short but important monograph to it, The Book of the Stick. The strangely titled work was a rebuff to a growing movement of protest, mainly among Muslims of Persian origin, that claimed the message of equality and harmony preached by the Prophet Muhammad had been subverted by Arab supremacists, characterized as rough tribesmen with loud voices who had a habit of ranting and waving sticks about.

  Al-Jahiz defended traditional arabness by celebrating the very rod that was used to beat Arab backs. The stick, he says, has been a tool of power ever since the staff of Moses had miraculously become a serpent. The stick is the sorcerer’s wand, the sceptre of rule, and the symbol and support of the orator – a baton to conduct the masses, a literal rhetorical prop to lean on, a firestick to ignite revolutions, a cudgel to suppress them. Others have extended al-Jahiz’s images further – the stick, in the form of the scribe’s reed pen, dispenses both balm and venom:

  Fear the reed, and yet desire it, for it is that which

  is known to spit poison and theriac.

  The stick is the consummate metaphor for the potency of speech, for power over people, for the whole concept of the gathered word. And once the word is gathered and unity imposed, to fight against that unity is ‘to split the stick’.

  Those Persian dissidents were not alone. Across the Arab empire, Muslims of Coptic, Berber, Iberian and other origins railed against inequality, and were accused of splitting the stick. In time, however, most of these would-be splinter groups were accommodated, even assimilated; racial memories are not as long as one might think. The Persians, though, reasserted their own history, and reclaimed their own language and culture; relations with their Arab neighbours are still fraught with discontents.

  In Arab lands, however, a basic, systemic problem remained and still does: success in gathering the word does not necessarily depend on the objective truth of that word. The mass manipulation of truth is, of course, not an Arabic monopoly. But Arabic is particularly good at it. As Ibn Khaldun observed, ‘Both poetry and prose work with words, and not with ideas. The ideas are secondary to the words’. In short, if the rhetoric persuades enough people and creates group solidarity, that is proof enough of its truth. The prime example in Arabic is the miracle of the Qur’an: it is a miracle, and true, because so many people believe in it.

  Mass acts of faith, however, are not confined to belief in sacred rhetoric alone. Adonis, the Syrian-born poet and essayist, has noted that because of the ‘organic relationship’ between religion and politics, ‘politics becomes a sort of submission (islām) and an act of faith in the existing regime; anything else is tantamount to rebellion and blasphemy’.

  Elsewhere, he goes further and explains that tawhid (the doctrine of divine unity) is both theological and political: ‘To understand how this tawhid works at both levels is the first basis for understanding the nature of authority in Islam, and for understanding Arab history.’ In other words, saying ‘Yes’ to everything authority says or does is the equivalent of saying ‘Amen’ to God’s commands. The extraordinary discipline Abu Sufyan witnessed in the scene at the beginning of this Introduction has imposed itself on secular life as much as sacred; opposition is heresy. That, at least, is what secular leaders seem to think.

  Those leaders are supported by etymology, if nothing else; the whole semantic foundation of ‘politics’ is radically different in Arabic. The Arabic word for ‘politics’, siyasah, has nothing at root to do with living together in the polis, the city. Siyasah is, in its first meaning, ‘the management and training of horses, camels etc.’.

  Because of all this, the whole idea of the individual voice runs dead against the grain of ’asabiyyah, against the gathered word. There are, of course, still a few other parts of the globe where diversity of expression is silenced. But the power of rhetoric and the fear of splitting the stick are still so great in the Arabic world that the silencing is much easier there.

  The uprisings of 2011 were a stage in which, for a brief season, individual voices could be heard: ‘Everybody, everybody here has become an orator,’ wrote Ahdaf Soueif of the protestors in Cairo’s Liberation Square. ‘We have found our voice.’ Now, once more, nearly all those voices have been silenced, drowned out by the gathered word.

  ATAURIQUE

  There is another kind of unity, larger than the temporary solidarities and polities that rhetoric creates. An anecdote from early ninth-century al-Kufah, Iraq, illustrates its breadth. Ibn al-A’rabi, ‘the Son of the Bedouin’ (the name is a singular of a’rab, those nomads of the Qur’anic verses quoted above), was holding his usual literary salon. A renowned expert on the pure Arabic speech of his bedouin namesakes, he had also written on the history and genealogy of Arab tribes, Arabic poetry, the pedigrees of Arab horses, the cultivation of date palms and many other subjects of Arabian interest. One disciple of his who attended the salon for ten years said that during that time he had never seen a book in Ibn al-A’rabi’s hand, even though he had dictated from memory ‘camel-loads of volumes’.

  Following his main lecture on this particular day, Ibn al-A’rabi noticed two strangers deep in discussion on the subject of the talk. He asked where they were from: one turned out to be from a district of Turkestan near the borders of Tang dynasty China; the other was from al-Andalus, in the far west of Europe. Ibn al-A’rabi rose to the occasion and quoted an appropriate pre-Islamic verse on a meeting between two companions from distant origins:

  We are two friends from far apart whom Time has joined,

  for sometimes from afar two come together and unite.

  The ancient poet had been describing a meeting between two men from the opposite ends of Arabia. The two fans of Arabic culture in Ibn al-A’rabi’s salon came from the opposite ends of Eurasia, nearly 7,000 kilometres apart. But something about the anecdote is more surprising still, and that is the origin
of ‘the Son of the Bedouin’ himself. Far from being the offspring of a nomad, or even of an ethnic Arab, he was the son of a slave from Sind – part of modern-day Pakistan. His knowledge of all things Arab had earned him his name.

  The greatest achievement of Arabs has been not the brief gathering of their own word, but its dispersal. The diaspora has been global and millennial. That metaphorical stick of the orators is also the root-stock of a culture that is planted in ancient Arabia, but which has spread horizontally through space and vertically through time. The growth is both vegetal and formal, a three-dimensional ataurique or ‘arabesque’, continually throwing out new shoots, but also sending down new tap-roots into other cultures, hybridizing all the way to Andalusia, Turkestan, Sind and far beyond.

  As a language of international culture, Arabic has been as important as Latin and English. In terms of geographical spread, its script is second only to that of Latin. Maybe it was always destined to go far. The primary meanings of the Arabic word for script, khatt, are a line, a line of travel, a path: Arabic writing is as much to do with wending ways as weaving texts, and that is appropriate for its Arab originators, whose identity, like the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope, joins the wanderer to the weaver, the mobile to the settled. And as the Arabic word spread via scribes and travellers, so the socioreligious ideology it empowered spread too. It also hybridized, and finally, far from its Arabian roots, bore the fruit of the Arabian spirit that had first inspired Muhammad: that fruit – harmony – that seems to have eluded so many of his own Arab people. It is an irony that, apart from those two short centuries or so of solidarity and dominance, Arabs seem to have benefited least from his message; that the unity which so impressed Abu Sufyan in Medina has proved a mirage only briefly grasped.

  The continuing pursuit of the mirage has sometimes taken Arabs to wild and lonely places, far from the luxuriant growth that they seeded. The usual Arabic word for ‘unity’ is wahdah, which shares a root with wahid, ‘one’. But its oldest sense is that of ‘isolation, exclusion, apartness’: wahdah is one-ness, but also lone-ness. It is not the isolation of a heroic lone individual, but of a heroically lone society. On a crowded planet, the sort of places where a whole society can be culturally self-sufficient are hard to reach; Utopia was built over long ago. And yet the quest, for some, goes on. A country like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (to give an admittedly extreme example) rejects many of the norms of the rest of the world, not least most forms of democracy and all freedom of expression. In 2018 the lifting of bans on cinemas, and on women driving and going to football matches, has been touted as a major step forward for the Kingdom, and in a way it is, for a society that insists on being so self-consciously different. But many, many more bans remain.