Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  Perhaps most significant of all for a developing Arab identity were the links that would develop from the third century AD between a tribe of camel-nomads, Kindah, and the South Arabian states. Unlike rose-red Petra, Kindah’s caravan town of Qaryat Dhat Kahl (present-day Qaryat al-Faw in Saudi Arabia) remained unsung by Victorian poets, not because its name would be hard to fit into English verse, but as its importance only emerged in the 1970s. The evidence, if less immediately impressive than the monuments of Petra and Palmyra, shows that just as the latter were hellenized and romanized, Arabs in Qaryat were South Arabianized. For example, a man of Qaryat with an undoubtedly Arab name, Ijl ibn Sa’d al-Lat (‘Calf son of the-Luck-of-al-Lat’), whose patronymic invokes the supreme female deity of the nomadic north, was commemorated by a grave-stele with a Sabaic inscription invoking a southern deity, Athtar Shariqan. The two scenes carved on the stele are also expressive of the meeting of Arab and South Arabian: below are two camels, one with the deceased on board, holding a stick and a lance, those tools of herding and raiding; above, the dead Ijl is shown feasting – and making use of those prime accoutrements of settled life, a table and chair. The ’arab trackers and truckers of the wilderness were making their debut in society, wining and dining with the best. Soon they would be transformed from marginal extras into major players.

  THE RECORD OF THE ARABS

  Although the death of Ijl was recorded in lapidary Sabaic prose, he would also almost certainly have been mourned in the more mercurial medium of oral Arabic, probably in poetry. Kindah, the tribal masters of Qaryat, were to produce some of the earliest named poets in the language. We have no elegy datable to the age in which Ijl lived; but, significantly, that oldest known Arabic inscription – the first-century AD prayer mentioned in Chapter 1 – seems to have a repeating rhythm. It is likely, then, that prayers, and probably dirges too, took poetic forms in early times. So too did paeans: an early foreign reference to Arabic poetry just after the heyday of Qaryat comes in a Greek history, which mentions fourth-century Arabs celebrating victories in odai, ‘popular songs’. In the final couple of pre-Islamic centuries, poetry would come to encompass for Arabs every aspect of life and death. It would be ‘the archive of their history, their wisdom, and their nobility’. Again, according to an old saying, four attributes are peculiar to Arabs: ‘Turbans are their diadems, girdles are their curtain-walls, sword-blades are their fences, verses are their archives.’

  Poetry – the diwan, the archive – is a record purely oral in origin, in a speech that is rhymed, rhythmic and, importantly, inflected; the inflections of high Arabic affect not only the endings of words but also their beginnings and even their insides, and they are fiendishly difficult. Poems began, however, almost certainly as a statement not of deeds past, but of future or unseen events, as the medium of tribal seers and shamans. One theory, already mentioned, has it that the language of fully developed Arabic poetry started off as a mystical, oracular tongue: the original meaning of shai’r, eventually ‘poet’, is almost certainly ‘soothsayer’, and in its most basic meaning, a sha’ir is ‘one who perceives that which others cannot’.

  Although there is nothing obviously like poetry in all those thousands of Safaitic inscriptions on rocks in the wilderness, many of poetry’s later themes – love, lust, loss, raiding, longing – appear in them. And while the oldest complete odes that we have are by Kindah poets of the sixth century, it seems impossible that they could have hatched, ab ovo, not only fully fledged but flying high. Poetry must have been developing in those early centuries AD, going on its oral travels up and down the trade routes, picking up its material and forming its character along the way. Indeed, much of the oldest verse is about departures, journeys, mounts. ‘Go!’ urged al-Shanfara, early in the sixth century,

  You have all you need: the moon is out,

  The mounts are girthed to go, the saddles too.

  . . .

  Yes, by your life! The world has room for one

  Who seeks or flees by night . . .

  Epic it is not; but, like Homeric Greek, its special form of Arabic, elevated above everyday speech, brings together diverse elements from many dialects. It all builds up into a glittering linguistic collage that is formal, often severely stylized, but made from found objects. To listen to Arabic poetry is, still, to enter an elaborate grotto of words and sounds, familiar yet unfamiliar, and, at its best, still possessed by something of that ancient divinatory magic. All around Arabia, not just in caravan capitals like Qaryat but also by campfires in the great dark voids in between, Arabs began to fall under the spell of poetry. To understand its power, you must forget the rarefied and marginal place of poetry in the English-speaking world. For Arabs poetry was (and to some extent still is) a mass medium, as ubiquitous as satellite TV and as beguiling as Hollywood; it played a huge part in laying the foundations of a monoculture for a mixed and mobile people.

  It was above all that last feature, mobility, that gave the impetus to an Arab virtuous circle. Diverse but mobile ’arab, working as carriers across Arabia, mixed with each other and had to be able to communicate; mutual borrowing between dialects led to a levelling of language – especially, it seems, in Najd, the area in which Qaryat was situated. Poetry created a further version, a language that was not only levelled, but also elevated – a high plateau to which the poets, orators and leaders of all tribes aspired, and their people with them. In other words, the mobility of ’arab was the mother of Arabic, and Arabic was the mother of Arabs – neither a nation in the modern sense, nor a sha’b, a ‘people’, in the South Arabian sense, but a collection of tribes that was something more than the sum of its parts – an ethnic gestalt. To use the terms of German nationalism, if a Staatsnation was as yet unimaginable, a Kulturnation was forming. The Arab virtuous cycle was gaining momentum, and for a period from the third century into the fourth the caravan town of Qaryat was probably its major hub. In time the momentum would move into higher gears, and the hub would shift – eventually to Mecca, another emporium of wares and words, whose people prided themselves in using what was best of all in Arab speech, and where, in the Qur’an, that speech would reach its highest plateau, level with heaven.

  Also in the early centuries AD, that other, surprising change was beginning to take place. As dialect differences between Arabs began to iron themselves out, the nomad tongue also wormed itself into settled populations. Nomad Arabs were playing an ever-increasing role, not just as mercenaries in the pay of local rulers but also as power brokers, actually influencing the outcome of disputes among the settled southerners. The written record begins to mention two elements in the southern societies. From the second century AD, for example, the inscriptions of the increasingly influential South Arabian Hamdan federation speak of ‘the a’rab of Hamdan and its hjr-people’ [townspeople]. From the following century, the rulers of the largest southern polity would style themselves ‘kings of Saba and Himyar . . . and of their a’rab of highland and lowland’. ’Arab had arrived, both physically and socially, in the south. The haughty kings in their towering palaces were coming more and more to rely on their grubby guests.

  In the last century or two before Islam, ’arab would become the most important people, politically, in southern society. But their speech seems to have begun drowning out other languages long before. As early as the third century AD the Himyaris, for example, although they still wrote their inscriptions in Sabaic, the ‘Latin’ of South Arabia, may well have seen it as a purely epigraphic language and have spoken something else – probably including ever-increasing amounts of Arabic. (By the early tenth century AD, what the learned Yemeni antiquary al-Hamdani regards as the ‘Himyari’ language, still surviving in isolated pockets, is essentially Arabic with a few Sabaic features.) If it is also true that most South Arabians were forbidden by some clerical taboo from using the Sabaic script, this too would hardly have helped the ancient language to survive. Not only were nomad Arabs developing a single standard language; Arabians as who
le were on their way to being arabophones, and thus in a new, united and much wider sense, Arabs. It is a sense that still holds today, and a unity that still joins people together when religion and politics do their very best to separate them.

  But even in those first centuries AD, if language was gathering the word of Arabia, other forces were pulling it apart.

  JUST THIEVES

  With their poetry, Arabs were serenading each other. Increasingly, too, they were raiding each other. Looking back to the grave-stele of Ijl, the lance-bearing, camel-borne warrior, one wonders if he has rustled the second, riderless camel.

  Raiding was a way of nomad life as early as Genesis, which depicts Ishmael as the consummate raider and outsider:

  he shall be a wild ass of a man; his hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.

  The Assyrians, too, noted the fondness of Arabs for raiding (a case, perhaps, of a very big pot and a small kettle). Later, Arab Banksys depicted raids in their graffiti art, and offered up written prayers for booty. As a way of life, raiding was not haphazard: in time, it became a formal economic institution, with a fixed etiquette and shares – usually a quarter or a fifth for the leader of the raid, plus a few extra perks such as the pick of any particularly desirable items. Raiding was not just endemic but systemic.

  For modern Western people, a mental gear-shift is needed to understand how raiding was – indeed still is – seen as something other than roving robbery, dry-land piracy. To an extent it resembles the old maritime practice of privateering, or for that matter the culture of prize-taking in the regular state navies: until as recently as 1918, Britain’s Royal Navy allotted that significant quarter of the prize to the captain, and lesser shares to the rest of the ship’s company. The prize had to be an enemy ship in wartime, of course; then again, what is a state of war but a legal gloss on raiding? Equally, it might be said that reciprocally raiding tribes are in a chronic state of war.

  In a herding-raiding economy, animal rustling was seen as a way of enlarging one’s holdings when other methods of husbandry fell short. The nature of the herding-raiding nexus is revealed by words: ghanam, ‘sheep and goats’, may originally have meant any sort of herded animals; its close cognate ghanimah means ‘plunder, booty, loot’. Revisiting the parallels between ’arab and arya, the Sanskrit word for ‘cow’ (the arya equivalent of the camel) is go and provides the first element in that for ‘war’, gavisti, literally ‘cow-wish’. War and raiding were, in both those mobile, herding societies, a matter of adding not to one’s immovable territory, but to the mobile animals that grazed it. In a society in which the concept of landed ‘real estate’ is absent, perhaps notions of ownership in general are looser: as with the ownerless high seas and naval prizes, so too with the desert and its ‘ships’.

  In time, raiding came to be seen, with Darwinian detachment, as the survival of the fittest: ‘Fertility,’ wrote al-Jahiz, quoting an anonymous speaker, ‘invites one to engage in enmity, to raid one’s neighbours; it invites the strong to eat up anyone weaker’. The ranks of raiders generated their own nobility, whose credentials were the opposite of those of a landed gentry founded on old money: ‘You may criticize me,’ said the poet and aristocrat of the raid, Durayd ibn al-Simmah, whose long life began in about 530 and ended in opposition to Muhammad,

  but I tell you that new wealth

  is dearer far to me than old.

  At the same time, raiding could provide social security for the weakest in society. Urwah ibn al-Ward, a sixth-century ‘vagabond’ leader, would gather the sick, the old and the feeble, would feed them up, and then take them off raiding to support themselves. Raiding and redistribution of wealth go together, and the redistribution takes place first between raided and raider and then within the raiders’ own tribe.

  A neat characterization of an eleventh-century Arab ruler of Mosul named Qirwash calls him wahhab nahhab, lavishing-ravishing – that is, lavishing gifts and ravishing other people’s property, ‘according to the established customs of the ’arab’. Although established practice was to avoid bloodshed, Qirwash had to admit, ‘I have the blood of five or six bedouins on my hands. As for that of the townsfolk, Allah takes no notice of them.’ Something like Qirwash’s epithet is still used of a latter-day lavisher-ravisher, the man who for a third of a century ruled my adoptive country and siphoned off the chiefly portion from its economy. His supporters say ‘Ya’kul wa-yu’akkil’, ‘He eats, but he feeds others’. These others – again, his supporters – also call him sariq ’adil, ‘a just thief’. His unfed detractors say he is just a thief.

  Raiding, whether of flocks or states, fuels the sempiternal cycle of unity and disunity. Eating and feeding, ravishing and lavishing, seizing and distributing plunder provide the quickest way to forge a unity. ‘His hands filled with booty,’ it was said of al-Barraq, leader of the great tribe of Rabi’ah in the late fifth century, ‘and the tribes of the Arabs fell under his sway’. But in most cases the resulting unity will be of the flimsiest. It goes without saying that a ‘system’ of plunder and redistribution was, and is, inimical not just to the formation of a centralized tax-collecting state, a commonwealth of citizens who share in rights and duties, but also to any sort of long-term stability. Transfers of power will be inevitably disruptive, often bloody. Raiding perpetuates an ancient, internecine clash of cultures: between qabilah-tribe and sha’b-people, between competition and cooperation, segmentation and symbiosis, personalities and institutions, unison and polyphony; between a society subsisting on reciprocal raid and one built on mutual aid.

  How, then, of all mobile peoples, did Arabs become raiders par excellence?

  BORN OF THE GATHERED WIND

  Folklore had it that the camel was created from the rimth bush. To a higher authority, supposedly the Prophet Muhammad himself, was due a legendary account of the creation of the horse:

  Allah, when He wished to create the horse, sent word to the south wind, saying, ‘I shall create from you a creature, so gather yourself together,’ and the wind gathered itself together. Then Allah gave a command to Gabriel, who took a handful of the gathered wind. Then Allah said, ‘This is my handful.’ Then Allah created from it a horse, a dark bay. And Allah said, ‘I have created you as a horse, and made you Arab, and favoured you above all the other beasts that I have created, by granting you breadth of livelihood, for booty will be borne home on your back . . .’

  There is metaphorical truth in all this. The horse blew into the Arabian subcontinent on the wind of change from outside (albeit from the north), and it did indeed become not only a vital part of Arab life, but, tout court, ‘Arab’; even in English, the word, when it doesn’t refer to a person, usually means a horse. As for their more concrete history, precisely when horses entered the Arabian scene is unknown. Recently discovered evidence may indicate some sort of domestication of equids (if not horses as such) back in the mists of the major wet period, 6,000 years ago or more. Undoubted horses drawing chariots are depicted in petroglyphs from the north of the peninsula that date back perhaps to 2000 BC. Horses for riding seem to have appeared in the second half of the last millennium BC, a period some would narrow down to the fourth to second centuries BC.

  What is clear is that horses rapidly gained enormous importance in Arab life – and death, for like camels they were sometimes sacrificed and buried with deceased warriors. If a passing mention by al-Baladhuri is to be believed, horses were even worshipped in Bahrain. They are sworn upon in the Qur’an, at the beginning of a chapter named after them, ‘The Runners’:

  By the running horses, panting,

  Striking sparks,

  Rushing to the dawn raid . . .

  And they are celebrated endlessly in the oldest surviving poetry – perhaps earliest and most famously in the sixth-century Kindah poet Imru’ al-Qays’s brilliant crescendo e accelerando,

  charging, fleet-fleeing, head-foremost, headlong, all together

  the match of a rugged boulder hurl
ed from on high by the torrent …

  By the time of those lines, some tribes could field up to a thousand cavalry, and the tribal leader was at times known as the faris – the Horseman or Cavalier. A thousand cavalrymen is a surprisingly high figure to be able to mobilize, even for the biggest tribes of the time, given the demands of horses and the difficulties of feeding and watering them in unforgiving terrain. Indeed, by itself the horse might have remained merely prestigious, costly and about as useful in battle as a Lamborghini. But add the camel to the horse, and you have the perfect double-act . . . you plod to battle on your camel, which also carries your horse’s fodder and water, and then rush headlong into the fray on your steed. The combination is mentioned in the later Safaitic graffiti, probably dating to the second to fourth centuries AD, and in the formal inscriptions of the declining South Arabian states, whose a’rab mercenaries relied on it while their regular armies fielded only footsoldiers. By early Islamic times any warrior worth the name would be inseparable from his two mounts: ‘On clouded nights when thunder rolled but no rain fell,’ said a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad, remembering a famous raiding chief,

  he would set out on a slow-paced camel, with a restive horse at his side, a heavy lance in his hand, and the cloak all but slipping from his back, seated between the waterskins; and thus he would ride till dawn, smiling all the way.

  It is hard to overstate the importance of that pairing of camel and horse, unique to Arabs: the camel is the spearshaft that gives you reach, but the horse is the spearhead. It is what gives you shawkah – point, power, sting, the thorn in the side of others. Thus armed, Arabs also had a military edge over those others. The edge was further honed by the invention, probably in the second or third century AD, of the saddlebow, which helps you fight from camel-back. Yet another technological development that aided fighting and raiding, the stirrup (and to begin with it may indeed have been singular, and made of wood), seems to have reached Arabs a little later, possibly in the fifth century AD. Arabs immediately found the stirrup ‘one of the best aids for anyone thrusting with a lance or striking with a sword’.