Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  It is impossible to judge how much the Sasanian takeover of the south enhanced consciousness of an ’arab/’ajam, and specifically Arab/Persian, split – and thus of a sense of Arab identity, an ethnic whole that spanned the peninsula. But it is certain that such a consciousness had been growing fast in the main Arab–Persian interface in the north-east. There, three centuries of political alliance had done little for race relations: when the Sasanian shah sent a request to his client-king of al-Hirah, al-Nu’man III, to marry his sister, al-Nu’man is alleged to have said, ‘Aren’t the cattle of al-Sawad enough for him, or does he have to have Arab women as well?’ The very idea of a Persian taking an Arab for his wife was ‘a vile abomination’, he added (naturally, the converse was perfectly acceptable in al-Nu’man’s patrilineal view).

  Al-Nu’man’s riposte belongs to the twilit region between history and myth. What is clear, however, is that the theme of Arabs versus Persians has played throughout history, with variations: tribes versus empires, shaykhs versus shahs, Arab cultural reactionaries versus Persian cultural revivalists, Sunnah versus Shi’ah, Iraq versus Iran, and now, outside my window, what is in part (or at least in the imagination and the rhetoric of both sides) a proxy war between Riyadh and Tehran. Arabia and Persia may be all but joined physically at the Strait of Hormuz, but they are separated by an abyss of antique antagonisms older than Islam and deeper than the Persian Gulf . . . or is it the Arabian Gulf? It matters terribly which side you take. Speaking in later times, when the Abbasid caliphate was dominated by Persian warlords, that most Arab and popular of poets, al-Mutanabbi, said,

  A people’s fortunes mirror those of its kings – and never

  Will Arabs be fortunate when their kings are Persians.

  There is even an idea, to which we will return, that the original Islamic state in Medina came about as an Arab response to the increasing Persian presence in Arabia.

  While it is impossible to measure objectively how far the Persian presence reinforced the growing sense of arabness, there is no doubt that the double destabilization of the south, first by Ethiopians and then, hard on their heels, by Persians, handed more power to the badw – the ’arab – elements in society. As later adventurers in the same south of the peninsula, for example the Ottomans and the British, were to discover (and as the Americans were to discover in Iraq), it is all very well to breeze in and rule the towns, but the outsider’s writ doesn’t go far into what is often an impenetrable landscape. The rough rural hinterland of the south had long been infiltrated by ’arab. Now, with repeated foreign intervention, the old institutions of the settled areas were breaking down, and the flimsy tissue of relations between hadar and badw, town and country – always a matter of faith, not of contract – was ripping apart. It all enhanced the power of the ’arab and of their leaders, personalities whose legitimacy rested above all on their control not of institutions, but of rhetoric.

  WALLS AND WEAPONS OF WORDS

  It is hard now to appreciate just how important rhetoric was. But in such a restive century as the sixth, when the balance of power was shifting from settled societies to ’arab tribes, words were not just the most portable cultural product; they also acted as defensive walls, and as offensive weapons. Politically, tribes were led by their most eloquent elders, men (sometimes women) who ‘gathered the word’ of the people; militarily, tribal clashes were preceded by battles of poets, skirmishes in verse, and then recorded by the victors in odes.

  Three titles recur among the orator-leaders: sayyid, ‘chief, lord’, khatib, ‘public speaker’, and sha’ir, ‘poet’. The functions were not necessarily distinct, and often blur in the same person. A sayyid would usually come from a family who enjoyed particular inherited ‘honour’; but lordship depended ultimately on personality and prowess in battle – also, vitally, on eloquence, which might be expressed in prose or verse or both. A sayyid was thus swordsman and wordsman, wordlord and warlord – with a touch, inherited from the old shamanistic magic of bayan, ‘unveiling of meaning’, of the warlock. When a tribe had a hereditary line of khatibs, they often combined the role with that of tribal genealogists and historians, something like European heralds – or, perhaps more nearly, the jeli families of West Africa.

  In terms of pure rhetoric, the role of the poet was anciently the most important, but became debased when poets got into the business of selling their praises to kings and their emulators for cash. However, war-poetry has retained something of its magical force throughout history. The force was that of a curse uttered under supernatural inspiration; to silence the curse, captured poets had their tongues tied, literally, with thongs, even while they were being slaughtered (enemy orators, too, might be punished by having their lower front teeth knocked out, thus wrecking their enunciation). The force would survive into the age of prophecy: the Prophet Muhammad himself admitted that the shafts of his poets were ‘deadlier to [the unbelievers] than a volley of arrows in the dark of night’. And the force is still with us: ‘We have cut off his hand,’ incanted the ruler of Dubai recently of the Iranian-supported Huthi leader whose own slogans flutter beneath my window,

  and he has stared defeat in the face:

  His army has shattered in the clash –

  and, with an extra shaft shot at his backers in Tehran (personified by the name given to the defeated pre-Islamic Iranian kings, ‘Khusraw’),

  the rout has rolled up Khusraw’s battle-banners!

  So far, the claim looks premature: the banners still flutter.

  Also prominent in the aristocracy of rhetoric were kahins like Tarifah, who led the legendary diaspora from Marib. The title – and the function – are cognate with those of the ancient Hebrew kōhēn; their ability to divine what others could not perceive came, al-Mas’udi thought, from their tendency to be alone in wild places, to spend a lot of time in reflection, and to view the world with ‘the eye of enlightenment’. In addition, al-Mas’udi says, many of them were physically deformed, and made up in spirit for what they lacked in body: the celebrated legendary kahin Satih, for example, supposedly had no bones in his body, and could be ‘rolled up like a gown’. Their rhymed and elevated supernatural speech resurfaces, as we shall see, in that of the earliest Qur’anic revelations. As Ibn Khaldun points out, however, truth differs from kahin to prophet: prophets connect directly with the angelic sphere of truth; kahins are ‘inspired by devils’ and thus mix truth with falsehood. Of course, most people are not able to appreciate this all-important difference in perception; ultimately, the ability of both seers and prophets to persuade and lead depends not on the inherent truth of what they say, but on their command of rhetoric – on how they say it.

  The old settled South, as central institutions broke down, probably also saw the rise of orator-leaders. During the period of dissolution and then of opposition to foreign rule in the sixth century, the title qwl becomes common for regional strongmen or warlords: it may indicate a ‘word-gathering’ role – in Arabic the root qwl is to do with speaking (for example, qawl, ‘speech’, qawwal, ‘speaker, orator’). What is certain is that the stronger the qwls were, the weaker central rule was, and that as they proliferated and vied for ever-decreasing amounts of available power, so their own raiding and plundering increased.

  The rhetoric of all these word-gatherers united tribes or peoples, and by creating ’asabiyyah, the spirit of solidarity, powered the revolutions of the wheel of fire.

  THE INSTIGATORS

  It is not surprising, given all the loudly competing voices, that the long sixth century was an age of many ‘days’ – the so-called Days of the Arabs. These battle-days were sometimes a case of organized raiding getting out of hand, more often of minor disputes over grazing, alleged insults and the like blowing up into violence. But whether small skirmishes or outright wars, they still usually had a sort of chivalric order to them, their own Queensberry Rules. Eventually a neutral party would intervene, and the combatants would make peace, or at least reparations: the total dead would
be worked out, and blood-money paid to the side that had suffered more. Sometimes the ‘monetary’ cost was enormous, as in the reparations paid after a war between the tribes of Abs and Dhubyan – 3,000 camels for three years of hostilities.

  The archetypal clash of this age was the War of al-Basus, which set two ‘brother’ tribes against each other – Taghlib and Bakr, whose territories were in the north-east of the peninsula and extended into southern Iraq and the Syrian desert, neighbouring those of the Lakhmid kings. Both tribes claimed descent from the same ancestor, Wa’il. The conflict began probably at some time in the 490s, dragged on for forty years and, rather like the War of Jenkins’s Ear, was sparked off by an event that in itself was not exactly earth-shattering: what was shattered was a clutch of lark’s eggs in a nest in a hima, an area of reserved grazing, monopolized by the Taghlib chief Kulayb. The culprit, Kulayb decided, was a clumsy-hoofed she-camel called Sarab, ‘Mirage’, belonging to an associate of the tribe of Bakr. Kulayb had married a Bakri wife, and it was her brother whom he blamed for allowing the interloping camel to enter his own grazing lands. Taunts followed, but nothing more – until the suspected she-camel, waiting in line one day to be watered after the camels of Kulayb, broke loose and jumped the queue. Kulayb, incensed, took his bow and shot her in the udder. The brother-in-law’s aunt, al-Basus, equally incensed by the insult to the camel’s owner, who was under her protection, tore her headscarf in indignation and let rip a string of verses. The verses, which came to be known as ‘The Instigators’, conclude,

  But now such folk I dwell among that when

  The wolf comes, ’tis my sheep he comes to tear!

  At this point, the soap-opera events turned nasty: al-Basus’s nephew, Jassas, killed Kulayb, leading to all-out war between the brother tribes. It was a war in which words were in the vanguard, but it was no less deadly for that: poet upon proud and posturing poet poured incendiary odes on the fires of conflict, and the days and the death-toll mounted. And should the power of poetry be in doubt, the whole horrible affair is called not after Kulayb, or his killer, or even the camel, but after the old woman whose verses ignited it all. Nor were other women the least of the combatants, tearing off their headscarves, baring their heads to the battle and wielding their words: ‘War! War! War! WAR!’ screamed one,

  It has blazed up and scorched us sore.

  The highlands are filled with its roar!

  The forty-year roar was only ended by the utter exhaustion of the combatants and the intervention of the Lakhmid king.

  The great Egyptian critic, Taha Husayn, thought that much of the account of the war was back-projected from Islamic-era squabbles. Whether he is right or not, the War of al-Basus and other such conflicts (like the War of Dahis, which was sparked off by alleged cheating in a horse race) mirror the chronic social fragility and disunity that haunted the pre-Islamic century. And as a second epic-in-miniature of pre-Islamic Arabdom, it reveals the destructive downside of the Marib Dam diaspora: settled people set out on their trek to pastures new – and then killed each other over the right to graze those pastures. The father of Jassas, the killer of Kulayb, realized the deep and divisive significance of the murder: ‘You have sundered the union of your people . . . By Allah, never will the tribe of Wa’il be one, not after what you’ve done.’

  In a sense, the War of al-Basus still isn’t over. It is a cautionary tale whose lessons have yet to sink in. It foreshadows a disunity that has proved all but perennial and, 1,500 years on, lights the present with flashes of déjà vu. Then, al-Basus tore her headscarf in protest; now the women still do the same, or burn them. Kulayb (whose name means ‘Little Dog’) is the model of the successful and beloved chief, the ‘benign dictator’, who loses his grip and becomes, as they always do if they last long enough, malign. And the vendetta between our own once-‘benign’ dictator and those who encroached on his pastures has been called, by more than one friend of mine, always with a sad shake of the head, ‘the War of al-Basus, again’.

  THE WANDERING KING

  Just as the ‘father’ tribe of Wa’il split into the opposing ‘brother’ tribes of Taghlib and Bakr, a tendency towards division sundered other groups that had enjoyed at least an imagined unity of origin. Nor does the phenomenon apply only to bedouin tribes: the historian-geographer al-Hamdani gives a list of towns divided into two opposing factions, Arabian Montagues and Capulets. The fissile tendency gives rise to a further scenario that recurs down the centuries: tribes or other factions of a single notional origin fall out; they call in – or have imposed upon them – a leader from outside their own factional milieu; this new leader brings about a new unity; the factions soon tire of living amicably, throw out the new leader and return to their factionalism. The even more unhappy ending is when the eventual successors of the new leader fall to fighting among themselves.

  The most notable example of this in the long sixth century is that of Kindah and its relations with the tribes of the centre and north of the peninsula. Kindah’s own origins are probably in central Arabia, where from the old trading town of Qaryat Dhat Kahl, as we have seen, they cultivated relations with the settled south. Towards the end of the fifth century, the rulers of Himyar-Saba backed the Kindah leader Hujr as a client-king over the fissile tribes to the north. The unity Hujr brought about ended with his death, but from about 500 his grandson, al-Harith, re-established Kindah’s leadership of the tribes, and even ousted the Persians’ Lakhmid client-king of al-Hirah for a time. The Lakhmids, however, regained their kingdom, and al-Harith was killed. From then on, things went very wrong for al-Harith’s family: before his death, he had appointed his five sons as rulers over the five main constituent tribes. Two of these sons now went to war with each other, supported by their respective tribesmen, while a third of the tribes rose and killed a third brother. The unity of the northern tribes, needless to say, went to pot again.

  From this background of collapse emerged a remarkable figure. When news of that third brother’s assassination reached his estranged and prodigal son, exiled for chasing women and then publishing his amours in poetry, he happened to be as drunk as a lord could get before the Islamic alcohol ban. ‘Today I can’t be sober,’ he is said to have slurred, ‘but tomorrow, drinking’s over. Today’s for booze; tomorrow’s for business.’ He would never see the business through, but the attempt to avenge his murdered father has given Arab history its first fully rounded tragic hero – the poet-prince Imru’ al-Qays. In one sense the obscurities of his life are so deep that he can never outrun his own legend. In another, as Muhammad al-Jabiri said, he is still here on the stage today, Hamlet soliloquizing in the chaos of the sixth century.

  That makes him sound like a very ‘modern’ man, and in a sense he is. Part of him was an old-fashioned sha’ir-sayyid, a tribal poet-lord, with an old-fashioned name (‘Imru’ al-Qays’ is probably ‘the Servant of [the sky-god] Qays’). But he is also his own poet, who loved and celebrated women like she of the ‘breastbone burnished like a looking-glass’ . . .

  And hair cascading black to grace her back, intensely black

  and hanging dense and tangled as the bunches of the palm-tree fruit,

  The tresses at her crown piled high in plaits –

  a maze of straight and twisted ways where hairpins stray . . .

  ‘Imru’ al-Qays is the forerunner of the poets,’ said Caliph Umar. ‘He dug down to the wellspring of poetry, and made it flow.’ The caliph was thinking not of the ancient cursing, battling bards, but of poets much more in the sense in which we know them now.

  But Imru’ al-Qays’s fame as a poet also eclipses the fact that he may also have been ‘the last ruler of the state that made the last attempt to unify the Arab tribes of the peninsula, before Islam’. This is perhaps to credit him with a grander design than he ever consciously contemplated. What is in no doubt is that he courted Byzantine support in his attempt to regain power. Although the exact dates are unknown, the attempt was made not many years before Sayf ibn Dh
i Yazan, the Himyari noble, sought and gained Persian help against the Byzantine-allied Ethiopian occupiers of his land. As Sayf found to his cost – in the form of an Ethiopian assassin’s dagger and the subsequent Persian takeover of the South – to play the Great Game was to play with fire. Imru’ al-Qays never got his Byzantine backing, and died disappointed – supposedly from the effects of a poisoned robe, his come-uppance for courting not only Byzantine political support but also a Byzantine princess.

  It is hard to disentangle fiction from non-fiction (in the absence of concrete evidence, to say ‘fact’ is to claim too much). Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, would-be restorer of the fortunes of Himyar, became a hero of fanciful folktales; Imru’ al-Qays, would-be restorer of the fortunes of Kindah, might-have-been uniter of Arab tribes, is seen today almost exclusively as a literary lion. In their political efforts, both had become embroiled with the superpowers, the prowling imperial lions, and both had fallen foul of them. But where the patriot and the poet had failed, a prophet would soon succeed – founding a new, and thoroughly Arabian, superpower.