Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  As with the War of al-Basus, Taha Husayn thought a lot of Imru’ al-Qays’s biography was back-projected, particularly from that of an Islamic-period exile and would-be father-avenger and leader of Kindah, Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn al-Ash’ath. Again, he may be right. But just as the War of al-Basus distils the internecine violence of the sixth century into one event, so Imru’ al-Qays, the poet-prince who ends up an outcast – the so-called ‘Wandering King’ – embodies in one person the many dislocations of the restless pre-Islamic age. He moves from ode to ode, from woman to woman, and from Hadramawt to Asia Minor to Bahrain. His is a life and a century in motion, in search of the unattainable.

  Have I not worn out my mounts in every wind-blown waste,

  far of horizon, glittering of mirage?

  PUSHERS TO THE FARTHEST BOUNDS

  The young Imru’ al-Qays, the libertine sent packing by his severe father, had for a time gathered round himself a band of su’luks, ‘brigands’ or ‘vagabonds’. It is worth looking briefly at this exceptional group. Like Imru’ al-Qays, many of them were poets; they too are emblematic of a restless, atomistic age; and they are a brilliant last burst of absolute individuality and pluralism that would be extinguished, at least in theory, by the communalism and monism of Islam. It is tempting to romanticize the ‘vagabonds’, and present-day Arab intellectuals tend to do so. They are doubly free, both as poets – poetry, as Adonis has written, is where the Arabic mind is free from ideology – and as outcasts from their tribes. They are one of ‘the most notable Arab examples of antinomianism for the sake of discovering truth’ (the other example being that of Sufism, the spiritual current in Islam). But there is something Romantic about their individualism, their intense emotion, their closeness to the natural world, even if their Romanticism is of the hard-bitten, hobo sort. At the risk of further anachronism, Hunter S. Thompson might have had the su’luks in mind when he advised his admirers to ‘Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget that you come from a long line of truth-seekers, lovers and warriors.’

  The Arabic that the su’luks learned to speak was the high language of rhetoric and poetry. Most Arabs who used this elevated register were the word-gatherers, mouthpieces and leaders of their tribes; the su’luks were the refuseniks, regarded as outcasts because of crimes against honour and thus against ’asabiyyah, the binding solidarity of the tribe. Some were extreme in their rejection of norms. When the early sixth-century brigand-poet Ta’abbata Sharran was killed in a fight, his kinfolk

  rode to the place where his body lay, meaning to take it away for burial. When they reached the spot they found the body surrounded by the corpses of wild animals, birds of prey and vermin that had gnawed at his flesh.

  His entire body had become poisonous, it was claimed, from living on a toxic diet of vipers and colocynth. The most famous and eloquent rejection of tribal values is the resounding ode of Ta’abbata Sharran’s contemporary al-Shanfara, whom the former described as

                   a sayer of words

  strong and sound, a pusher to the farthest bounds . . .

  Al-Shanfara’s ode begins:

  Sons of my mother, get your camels up!

  For I choose other company than you.

  . . .

  I have some nearer kin than you: swift wolf,

  Smooth-coated leopard, jackal with long hair . . .

  It continues in the same powerful tone of rejection. As the nineteenth-century Arabist Gifford Palgrave wrote, it is ‘the absolute individualism of a mind defying its age and all around it’.

  Many su’luks, however, lived and raided in bands or, as we have seen in the case of Urwah ibn al-Ward, would gather disadvantaged individuals from the edges of tribal society and take them off raiding to support themselves. While rejecting their own tribe, they therefore often formed alter-native non-tribal groups of their own. Urwah’s alternative society was founded, if we are to believe the sentiments of his poetry, on social justice:

  All those wealthy chiefs can never rule by wealth

  alone: their rule rests only on their deeds.

  If my friend has plenty, I do not compete with him

  in wealth, nor do I spurn him if his fortunes change.

  If I am rich, my gain will be my neighbour’s

  gain, my fortune his, that is my guarantee.

  And if I’m poor, you’ll never see me seeking favours from

  my brother – for his favour’s in my hand before I ask.

  The su’luks were the exception that proved the Arab tribal rule – and, at least in some cases and senses, a precursor of the alternative, non-tribal and socially equitable community that the Prophet Muhammad was about to found.

  But only in some cases and senses. That absolute individualism of the su’luks, their Quixotic, Whitmanesque assertion of what is usually thought of as a ‘modern’ type of selfhood, would be negated by the eventual totalitarian nature, both theological and political, of that coming society. It would also be negated by the concept of sunnah in its Islamic form – the idea that there is one perfect individual whose practices must be imitated by all. For the sixth-century time being, however, the su’luks provided an alternative to tribal mores and to religious norms, such as they were. They were the seers and celebrants of a man-centred universe. Like Whitman, they saw ‘eternity in men and women’.

  POLITICS AND POETICS

  There often seems to be something Titanic about the century before Islam: great warriors, great poets, archaic heroes stride and ride over the vast stage of the subcontinent, clashing in the violence of battle and of verse, ravishing and lavishing. The impression is partly misleading, for it is Titanism in a teacup: the heroics are almost entirely to do with squabbles over camels, and for the unseen majority beyond the limelight life was a matter of survival: finding that bit of pasture where the first rain had fallen in years; keeping your meagre possessions and your daughters safe from Axumite or Sasanian troops; not being raided or ravished by the tribe next door; not dying in too much agony. All the same, the ‘heroic’ martial ethos of the times does have a certain reality. Raiding (and thus fighting) was a way of life, a major economic activity, and the poetry that celebrated it was not the luxury and rarity it has become for us: for example, the most famous ode by Amr ibn Kulthum (great-nephew of Kulayb, whose killing began the War of al-Basus) ‘was so revered by the tribe of Taghlib that all of them, young and old, could recite it’, an impressive feat, given that the poem is over a hundred lines long.

  For Arabs to be unified politically was beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. But it was in this sixth century that Arabs were unified poetically, and inseparably, in a cultural coalition that has survived all the Days, the numberless wars, ever since. It is now that Imru’ al-Qays can speak of the women he woos as ‘Arab’; it is in this same sense that the Qur’an will speak of Muhammad as ‘Arab’ – not as an a’rabi defined by his nomadism, which Muhammad was most definitely not – but as a member of a subcontinental culture whose members were all joined by the same high over-arching tongue. Not all could use the tongue themselves, by any means, or even understand it in its complex entirety; but all could appreciate it, aspire to it, and respond to it. It was this shared response that made them Arab.

  Today, the shared response still links Arabs everywhere: they inhabit the same united Kulturnation; they love its language, even if they hate having to learn its grammar. Political union is still unthinkable: as T.E. Lawrence told Robert Graves, ‘Arab unity is a madman’s notion – for this [twentieth] century or next probably. English-speaking unity is a fair parallel’. But Arabs remain a single people in the realm of rhetoric, whether nationalist or Islamic, even if an abyss of disappointment gapes between the politics and the poetics.

  Of course, our view is skewed towards the importance of poetry: it is almost the only Arab artefact, literary or otherwise, that survives from before Islam (as opposed to all the artefacts of sett
led South Arabian culture – the dams, idols, ibex-friezes, inscriptions and so on). That does not necessarily put historians at a disadvantage. In many other cultures which have left few written texts, or none, we understand the past via archaeology, by excavating built structures and examining their remaining contents. In ’arab Arabia, ancient physical buildings are rare; but Arabic poems are metaphorical structures, dwellings made of metrical units called asbab (‘tent ropes’) and awtad (‘tent pegs’), which in turn make up hemistichs called simply shutur (‘halves’) or masari’ (‘leaves of double doors’), two of which together build a line of poetry, a bayt (‘tent, room, house’). As a group, the ancient Arabic poems are thus the Knossos, the Pompeii of pre-Islamic Arabia. This was realized early on: the Persians left a permanent record of their past, al-Jahiz wrote, in their buildings; Arabs left their record in poems, which may in the end be more lasting, as succeeding generations often demolish the physical monuments of those who came before them. What is more, poetic structures echo audibly with the voices of their time. ‘A line of poetry is like a building,’ said the eleventh-century analyst of poetics Ibn Rashiq, extending the structural metaphor, ‘its basis is natural talent, its roof is the ability to transmit poetry [from earlier poets], its pillars are knowledge, its door is practice, and its inhabitant is meaning. A “house” that is uninhabited is no good.’

  Given the vagaries of memory and the forgeries of later transmitters, it is of course possible that little of the ancient poetry has survived in its original condition. A few critics, like Taha Husayn, dismiss all but a few lines as later fakes: such critics spike, so to speak, the entire canon. This is going too far. Reading pre-Islamic poetry may in fact be rather like looking at English Gothic churches, zealously but artfully ‘restored’ in a more recent past: some is undoubtedly original, some a clever Abbasid/Victorian pastiche, and the joins are hard to see. To dismiss it all and demolish those structures built of words or stones is vandalism. Other than that oldest Arabic book, the Qur’an, and a few glimpses from non-Arab observers, the archaeology of poetry provides the best – almost the only – picture of pre-Islamic Arab life, belief and events.

  IMAGINE THERE’S NO HEAVEN

  In that picture, time is ephemeral, not eternal like Islamic time: we come out of a void and end in nothingness. We pay or receive dues on our deeds – but in the way we are remembered, not in heaven or hell. And without that blur of eternity shadowing its edges, life is often pictured in the sharpest focus:

  the descriptions of nature, of the life of the desert, of night-journeyings and day-journeyings, with their various incidents, of hunting, and stalking, and lurking for game, of the tending of camels, of the gathering of wild honey, and similar occupations, are most admirable.

  The poet Imru’ al-Qays, for example, recalled heading towards the firelight of a friend,

                        one hungry chilly dusk,

  While the old big-humped she-camel padded into the falling night,

  deaf to the soft calls of the milkers in the fold.

  It is a totally unremarkable scene; but preserved pristine, like the illuminations of rural life in medieval European Books of Hours.

  The world of the pre-Islamic poets comes over as savage, politically parochial, but marvellously mobile in other ways, covering great physical distances and also lurching across the moral gamut, from lust and drunkenness to sternest application of muru’ah – virtus, honour (‘Today’s for booze; tomorrow’s for business’). Organized religion is absent, but there is a binding ethical code that enjoins generosity, bravery, hospitality, and loyalty to family, tribe and ancestors. People who honoured this code could be memorialized for posterity, as Imru’ al-Qays did for those who, like the clan of Banu Thu’al, gave him protection in his wanderings. To infringe against the code could, equally, condemn one to a different sort of posterity: ‘Himyari,’ said Imru’ al-Qays of a man who had failed to protect his murdered uncle,

            was not faithful, and neither was Udas –

  And neither was the arse of a donkey itching from the crupper.

  Poets performed the role of the recording angels of Islam, and while there may have been no heaven and no hell, there was still an afterlife in which one’s memory, if not one’s soul, would be rewarded or punished. Whatever one’s nasab, one’s genealogical ancestry, commemoration of noble or ignoble acts added up to the parallel idea of hasab, a sort of genealogy of good and bad deeds that would be passed on to future generations.

  All these features of Arab belief were prominent by the sixth century; they would survive, and still do, at least in the realm of the ideal. So too would such concepts as din, the obligation to follow the ways of one’s ancestors, and sunnah, the practices of those ancestors. Islam would move din on to a different plane, and make it a set of obligations to Allah – ‘religion’, in short (similarly, the first sense of Latin religio is ‘obligation’); sunnah would become specifically the practices of the Prophet Muhammad. For the pre-Islamic time being, however, the terms were to do with conduct and duty, not doctrine. When trying to understand what din was, one has to forget the associations that spring from the English word ‘religion’, connected as they are with Judaeo-Christian-Platonic thought – with the ‘quaint Alexandrian tutti-frutti’, as Norman Douglas called eventual Christianity. Din, rather like Buddhist dharma, is originally a matter not of theology but of keeping society on track: the track is that of the ancestors. And it would be equally wrong to conflate the later and earlier senses of din and to think in terms of pre-Islamic Arab ancestor ‘worship’; but when one remembers the writers of those ancient Safaitic graffiti recording the names of their ancestors over fifteen generations or more, and when one finds that Quraysh, Muhammad’s tribe, hung portraits of all their ancestors in the pre-Islamic Ka’bah (did it resemble a Chinese ancestral shrine?), one can begin to understand something of the reverence paid to the progenitors.

  The older senses of din and sunnah may underlie the thinking of many (particularly Arab) Muslims even today: the extraordinary rootedness in the past of that thought, the obligation to the ancestors, the equally extraordinary devotion to Muhammad – a man who, despite all his insistence that he was just another human being, was clothed with the mantle of the founding hero-ancestor of the new super-tribe, the ummah of Islam. The twentieth-century poet Muhammad Iqbal went as far as to say, ‘You can deny God but you cannot deny the Prophet’ – and when God is so deliberately non-human as He is in Islam, it is not surprising that the feelings of devotion should be transferred to the slightly more approachable figure. Denying God is a matter of theology; denying the Prophet goes against something much older and deeper. To see ‘religion’ in that ancient light might explain a lot.

  THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY

  Poetry too is still largely rooted in the past. The literary traditions laid down in the sixth century have endured: they include the form of the qasidah, an ode in a single rhyme which in its fullest form begins with a prelude on love and loss, then takes the listener on a journey, including descriptions of the poet-rider’s mounts and of the landscape through which he passes, and finally gets to the ‘destination’ – panegyric, elegy or whatever. And some of those traditions have much older roots: Imru’ al-Qays, at the start of his most famous ode, recalls

                        a love and a lodging

  by the rim of the twisted sands between Ed-Dakhool and

  Haumal, Toodih and El-Mikrát, whose trace is not yet effaced

  for all the spinning of the south winds and the northern blasts

  . . .

  what is there left to lean on where the trace is obliterated?

  But already, in many of the Safaitic graffiti, half a millennium older than those lines, the writers record their sadness on returning to an abandoned campsite and finding traces there of the passing of loved ones.

  Nostalgia i
s only one of the moods of the sixth-century poets. Above, we have seen Imru’ al-Qays celebrating present beauty as well as past love. The late pre-Islamic poet al-A’sha was himself so celebrated for his descriptions of female beauty that he was in demand as a ‘marriage bureau’, producing airbrushed poetic advertisements for plainer girls. As the sixth century progressed, poets themselves gained in celebrity: when, towards the end of the century, Muhammad’s tribe of Quraysh founded the pan-Arabian fair of Ukaz on the main trade-route leading into Meccan territory from the south, poetic competitions were the biggest attraction. Contestants arrived on the most expensive mounts and, wearing their flashiest clothes, duelled in verse. Poets were the pop-stars of the time. And the importance of places like Ukaz was more than literary: they were places of truce, where warring tribes could meet without the ever-present pressure to pursue feuds and extract vengeance. In a chronically divided land, the inter-tribal fairs were enclaves of peace and temporary unity.

  Even today, traditional poets still compose qasidahs. The idea of poetic duels has never died, and the celebrity version has been revived with the Abu Dhabi TV show Sha’ir al-Maliyun, ‘Millionaire Poet’, which even has its own dedicated channel. Like Ukaz, it is more than some greenery-yallery eisteddfod: in a land where rulers attack their enemies with odes, poetry is still portentous and powerful.

  There were other wielders of words, however, preachers who would do the rounds of the great gathering places and would prove even more influential for the Arab future. The most charismatic of these in the period just before Islam was Quss ibn Sa’idah, who would preach on morality and mortality in rhyming prose; he would frequent fairs like Ukaz and other inter-tribal meeting places such as Najran, like Mecca a cultic centre, and his customary pulpit was the back of his camel. ‘Where now are Thamud and Ad?’ he would ask, as would the Qur’an, of the long-extinct ancient tribes