Arabs Read online

  A pedigree is something imaginary and devoid of reality. Its usefulness consists only in the resulting connection.

  Also in contrast to the settled sha’b, the qabilah, or tribe, may share in the worship of one divinity or another, but their main loyalty is to earthly leaders.

  These interwoven dualities (never dichotomies) of hadar/badw, ‘settled/nomadic’, sha’b/qabilah, ‘people/tribe’, only become clear with time. What is clear in the murkier beginnings, long before Islam and before even the Christian year dot, is that the more mobile sort of people who defined themselves by ancestry include the first people known as ’arab.

  DESERT AND SOWN IN DIALOGUE

  More mobile doesn’t necessarily mean fully nomadic. But an inherent footlooseness, a sense that location and loyalty are moveable, is part of what has given Arab history its peculiar flavour: the history is epic, but it is epic in motion, Odyssey rather than Iliad. Like the Odyssey, a lot of it is about encounters, some productive, others destructive. In its most recent chapters it is about the protagonists searching for a way back home, back to their defining identity and then, as did Odysseus, finding home changed by time (or is it they who have been changed by the journey?). Even when the motion appears to stop, the potential energy is there – which may be part of the reason why the Arab experiment with the territorially based state, from the twentieth century on, has been so fraught. For what is a state if not static? Borders and wanderlust don’t go together.

  At the same time, those unsettled ’arab were also to share their name with a succession of settled peoples. ’Arab, the term for a peripheral, mobile minority, would eventually become a blanket term, covering people of the desert and the sown and everything in between. Today, proportions of nomadic to settled Arabs are probably less than 1:100; but the nomad’s-eye view of history still skews the way both Arabs themselves and others view the Arab past. Nomadism and mobility are only part of the story. Without the settled element in their make-up, Arabs would have been a minor tributary of world history, along with the Tuareg and the Roma, or at most a flash flood that devastated then dissipated, like the Mongols. Importantly also, while a duality is easy to grasp, reality is more complex. Badw almost certainly originate in settled hadar populations; they are often reabsorbed into them; settled people may not generally up sticks en masse, but they can be culturally ‘bedouinized’. Badawah itself has as many shades and textures as the landscape, from part-time pastoralism through transhumance to the rarity of rootless, full-blown tumbleweed nomadism.

  So the badw–hadar duality has never been Manichaean, desert and sown and the twain never meeting. On the contrary, the two meet, and overlap, and interact, and never more fruitfully than when the stationary and the mobile intersect at halts on highways: oases and suqs, caravanserais and pilgrim shrines, of which the locus classicus – but by no means the prototype – is Mecca. The word suq is in itself a semantic intersection: it is the place where you stop to sell your animals, but the root sense of the word is the act of driving them there.

  Hadar and badw can also counteract as well as interact. The Qur’anic verse quoted above expresses, with beautiful economy, the ambiguous relations between settled sha’b and mobile qabilah. God has created them, ‘that [they] may know one another . . .’ However, the phrase (a single word in Arabic, li-taʿārafū) contains a double sense: the ‘foreground’ meaning is that of ‘get to know one another, i.e. by mutual contact’; but there is also a background shade of ‘distinguish between each other/tell one other apart’. The hope of unity and the lurking possibility of disunity coexist.

  Ernest Gellner examined the sociology of Islam in the light of a binary system, ‘urban’ versus ‘tribal’, and has been criticized for it. Islam, as the world religion it has become, is far too big, too various to be seen from a binary perspective (let alone as a monolith). And yet, in Arabian history, it is clear that there has been a ‘dialogue’ between badw and hadar. I believe the dialogue goes further – that it is one of the keys to understanding Arab history as a whole, not just in but also beyond Arabia, and from the earliest times right up to the present.

  A PEOPLE APART

  The very earliest times of all are hard to make out. So far we know little about the palaeolithic people who left scatterings of tools across the uplands of the Arabian Peninsula. It is clear that they were widely if thinly distributed; the peninsula was no void. Neither is their history a blank. Recent studies of palaeolithic sites in Saudi Arabia have shown that, over time, these earliest Arabians were undergoing and adapting to early changes in climate. Of those neolithic hunters of the once watery Empty Quarter before the big dry set in, we know almost as little. We are, however, beginning to get a picture of other aspects of neolithic life. People were herding cattle by the sixth millennium BC; around 2,000 years on, they were starting to grow crops and – importantly, as it suggests evolving social structures based on ever closer cooperation – to develop irrigation systems in the regions where the highlands sloped down into the increasingly dry interior. Also by the fourth millennium BC, people on the long Arabian coastline, and particularly that of the Gulf, were exploiting its mangrove-fringed, shellfish-rich shores for building materials and food. By the early Bronze Age, the people of the coast were also exporting that precious by-product of their shellfish, the pearl, which became one of the earliest and most valuable items of Indian Ocean trade. Over time, the peoples of the seaboard would remain politically as well as geographically marginal; but their ‘fertile fringe’ would remain economically vital, and thus the target of raiders from the interior. It would also be the springboard for Arab expansion around the Indian Ocean.

  The oldest Arabic histories would have hazy, landlocked and almost entirely fabulous ideas about prehistoric Arabians, whom they rationalized into tribes that fitted into later notions of Arab identity. Foremost among these were Ad and Thamud, about whom not much seems to have been known except for the fact that they were wiped out in large numbers at some unknown time in the distant past. The sixth-century poet Imru’ al-Qays speaks, for example, of the site of a massacre ‘as if it were of Thamud and Iram’ – Iram being the legendary capital of Ad and a sort of Arabian Atlantis or Shangri-La. The two tribes make many appearances in the Qur’an, in parables about divine retribution for human sin: ‘Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with Ad?’ one verse asks. What He did was to wipe them out with a thunderbolt or a ‘barren’ wind for rejecting the monotheistic message. It is tempting to see this heavenly blitzkrieg as a dramatic compression of a lengthy process of desiccation and desertification, and the people of Ad as a memory of those neolithic hunters whose way of life ended, around 4000 BC, with the last major wet period. Elaborations of the Qur’anic story make the idea even more tempting. For example, what may be the earliest surviving Arabic history, a supposedly mid-seventh-century collection attributed to Abid ibn Sharyah, says that Ad suffered three years of drought before their destruction. But the account slips into ever more dubious territory: when at last the destructive wind strikes, it spares a woman called Hazilah and wafts her to Mecca – an Adite version of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – so she can impart the news. Later historians are understandably sceptical: ‘Those who discuss [Ad],’ wrote the reliable Abu ’l-Fida’ in fourteenth-century Syria, ‘differ greatly among themselves, and everything they say is confused and far from the truth, so we have refrained from reporting it.’

  With the extinct tribe of Thamud, we are on firmer, and datable, ground. The name is known as that of a real tribe in the west of the peninsula who, among their other relations, maintained links with the Romans in the second century AD, supplying them with levies. Like Ad, they appear in the Qur’an rejecting monotheism and paying the price; like Ad, they were mythicized by later Arab memory: for example, knowing their own nemesis to be approaching, they plastered themselves with myrrh, wrapped themselves in leather shrouds and lay down to die in ready-carved tombs – a nice folk-aetiology for the leather-bound mummies w
hich presumably once occupied rock-cut sepulchres in the Hijaz, as they still do in a few less accessible spots further south.

  Ad, Thamud and similar mythical or mythicized tribes are remembered by Islamic-era historians as al-’arab al-’aribah, ‘the true/arabophone ’arab’. All others who were to come after them were classed as ’arab muta’arribah, ‘arab(ic)ized ’arab’, and ’arab musta’ribah, ‘arab(ic)izing ’arab’. The accumulating affixes – arabophone-arab(ic)ized-arab(ic)izing – probably reflect a sort of reality: the people who became known as Arabs gained whatever unity they had by a gradual process of acculturation, principally by being absorbed into the language. More important still is the other reality the traditional historians implicitly accepted: that, in origin, Arabs were not a neatly unified people, but a thoroughly mixed bunch.

  Turning from later Arab historical memory to the earliest surviving written evidence, one thing is immediately clear, and that is who Arabs were not: none of the peoples of the settled Fertile Crescent, the coastal fertile fringe or southern Arabia originally called themselves Arabs. To the settled populations of the Crescent, the Fringe and the south, Arabs were clearly a people apart.

  LOOKING IN FROM THE OUTSIDE

  To the Assyrians, who left the earliest certain mentions of them, ‘Aribi’ were indeed a people apart, both geographically and socially, ‘who live far away in the desert and who know neither overseers nor officials’. While one or two biblical references may be even earlier, later editing muddies the chronology. Thus the oldest incontrovertibly datable reference to Arabs known so far comes in the inscription left by the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III: the king records that in 853 he fought and defeated a Syrian-Palestinian coalition reinforced by that first known Arab, Gindibu, and his camels – a thousand of them, no less. Mentions of Arabs (and their camels) multiply after this date, and are eventually joined by others in Greek as well as Hebrew sources.

  Robert Hoyland, the historian of early Arabia, argues that because both Assyrian and biblical texts begin to refer to Arabs – apparently independently – at about the same time, then ‘Arabs’ is what the people concerned must have called themselves. If so, then they were remarkably coy about owning up to their name in writing: they only came out of the epigraphic closet as Arabs some twelve hundred years after that first Assyrian mention. Nevertheless, to judge by their names they are unmistakably Arab in those early texts. That first personal name, ‘Gindibu’, or in standard Arabic transliteration ‘Jundub’, is borne by Arabs regularly, if infrequently, over the coming millennia. It means ‘Cricket’ or ‘Locust’ and presages a long history of calling people after animals. At the tribal level, tribal names like ‘Kalb’ (Dog) and ‘Asad’ (Lion) may be totemic; at the personal level, animal names are apotropaic. As the historian of ancient Arabia, Ibn al-Kalbi, said, Arabs ‘named their sons with their enemies in mind’.

  Not untypical was a tribesman called Waki’ (Strong Horse), whose ancestors included ‘Dog son of Lion’ (or perhaps of Wolf or Cock or several other possibilities) and ‘Desert Rat son of Colcynth’ – the name of bitter or spiky plants performing a similarly off-putting function to those of non-cuddly animals. Sadly, such names are now out of fashion. Others that appear in the Assyrian texts are still used, however – for example ‘Hamdanu’ (my first house in Yemen belonged to a Mr al-Hamdani).

  The Aribi of the Assyrian inscriptions are unmistakably Arab in other ways, too – most obviously in their use of camels, which they seem to have monopolized, but also in the mobility that the camels give them: they form a mobile auxiliary force fighting, as in that earliest Assyrian inscription, for one side or another. Their hardy mounts gave them a sly advantage, enabling them to move through, and make tactical use of, terrain that was in itself hostile to large, unwieldy and hungry armies. Then, as the inscriptional mentions multiply, they appear more and more as carriers in the overland aromatics trade, transporting northward the fragrant gums of South Arabia and later emerging as players in that trade, trying to gain control of the commercial routes.

  The references proliferate, and so do the camels. The Assyrians were in expansive mood, seemingly keen to control the trade of Arabia and ever boastful about their subjugation of uncivilized nomads. In a relief commemorating the victory, in the third quarter of the eighth century BC, of Assyrian King Tiglath-Pileser III over Shamsi, ‘queen of the Arabs’, a stocky but handsome Aribi woman is seen leading a flock of camels, just a few of the 30,000 the king claims to have seized in the accompanying inscription. In the following century, King Assurbanipal captured so many herds from mat Aribi, the Arab land, that, ‘Within my land one bought a camel at the market gate for a few pence’.

  The Assyrian came down on the Arab not like Byron’s mere ‘wolf on the fold’, but as a camel-rustling collective of multinational dimensions. Of course, it made perfect sense to deprive Arabs of the main vehicle for their mobility and independence.

  That latter case of punitive mass rustling (and, naturally, enslavement of humans) was incurred by Arabs supporting, as had Gindibu two centuries earlier, an enemy of the Assyrians – in this case their main superpower rival, the Babylonians. At the same time, however, Arabs had themselves been coalescing, gathering their own word and their own power. Several themes emerge from all this that would be recapitulated over time.

  First, the kernel around which this earliest known, tentative unity formed was a centre of cultic pilgrimage and worship – Dumah, in the north of the peninsula, sacred to a number of tribes. The most powerful of these was a polity, perhaps a tribal confederation, called Qedar. Qedar, which existed between about 750 and 400 BC, is only scantily understood, but may in fact be the first known exercise in Arab – as opposed to South Arabian – history in forging a unity larger than the kinship-based tribe. And it is perhaps not irrelevant to Arab history as a whole that this first known statement of the theme of unity was sounded out at a centre of pilgrimage. It was a theme that would eventually emerge in full thirteen hundred years later and 1,100 kilometres to the south, in another place of tribal pilgrimage, Mecca.

  Another theme that would be heard again and again is that of neighbouring powers giving royal status to Arab tribal leaders. Thus the Assyrians call the defeated Shamsi and the Qedari leaders Zabibah (730s BC; her name means ‘Raisin’) and Hazael (early seventh century BC) respectively ‘queens of the Arabs’ and ‘king of the Arabs’. At one point in the seventh century BC, the Assyrians imposed their own puppet ‘queen’, a Qedari woman named Tabua, on the polity. King-naming – and at times king-making – by outside powers would be a recurring theme through three millennia of Arab history, with its own consequences for Arab identity and solidarity.

  A third theme that would reappear regularly across time was the way in which, when they weren’t punishing them for siding with other powers, the Assyrians would use Arabs as a buffer against these rivals: this was particularly the case with respect to Egypt. A reference in Herodotus also suggests that the Persians were to employ Arabs to insulate their territory from the Egyptians in the fifth century BC. Such symbioses would recur again and again down the coming millennia.

  All in all, to their northern neighbours, Assyrian, Babylonian and, later, Persian, Arabs were marginal, but often extremely useful when they weren’t being annoying. The expectation was that, even if they could never be docile, they would at least be tractable, and duly grateful. Assurbanipal records, for example, that following his campaign against mat Aribi, ‘The people in Arabia asked each other: “Why has such a disaster befallen Arabia? It is because we did not abide by the great oaths of Assur, we sinned against the kindness of Assurbanipal.”’ Many Arabs reading that now would hear it as an early statement of yet another theme that recurs right down to today, a theme that is repeated in their relations with superpowers even in the post-Cold War era: toe the line, or pay the price.

  To the north, then, lay a fissile crescent of empires, with whose interests those of Arabs overlapped or clashed as the cas
e might be. To the south, also, in the rain-fed mountains, plateaux and desert ‘estuaries’ where great wadis flowed into the wilderness, lay a clutch of settled kingdoms that, at various times over the millennium and a half before Islam, came together as an empire, small in extent but powerful in its cultural reach. Most prominent of these South Arabian kingdoms over time was Saba, or Sheba.

  To begin with, Arabs hardly get a mention in the inscriptions of the southern kingdoms. It is only from the last few decades BC onward that the rovers from the north begin to feature prominently in the southern record, almost entirely as mercenary fighters. The clear inference is that Arabs spread southward from the desert borders of the Fertile Crescent in the latter part of that last millennium BC. Even when they do begin to appear regularly in the southern inscriptions, ‘it is clear,’ according to the late great scholar of the texts, A.F.L. Beeston, ‘that they are intrusive elements not fully incorporated into the typical [South Arabian] culture’. As in the north, Arabs were a people apart.

  In time, incorporation would take place, but in an unexpected direction: South Arabians would be culturally and linguistically arabized. It was the first statement of yet another recurring theme, one that would be so prominent in the headlong expansion of Arabdom associated with Islam – but in which linguistic and cultural ‘conversion’ was always more thorough, and probably also more rapid, than religious conversion. Indeed, Sabaeans and other South Arabians would be adopted so fully into Arabdom that by the ninth century AD, in al-Jahiz’s view, ‘(peninsular) Arabian’ had come to equal ‘Arab’: ‘All Arabs are one and the same, because their habitation and their Island are one, their ethical values and innate dispositions are one, and their language is one.’ (Their politics, of course, were almost never one.)