Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  THE MOTHER OF EMPORIA

  As with any other permanent settlement in Arabia, Mecca’s location depends on water. In Mecca the water was supplied not by human cooperation, as in the settled South, but by nature – or by God, as the Islamic-period story of Hagar and Isma’il tells. Abraham, the story goes, took the young Isma’il to Mecca and left him there with his concubine mother, Hagar (Hagar’s successful delivery of a child had incurred the jealousy of Abraham’s free-born wife, Sarah, who had so far failed to become pregnant). In their Meccan place of exile, Isma’il became desperately thirsty. His mother searched for water, in vain – until by divine agency the miraculous spring of Zamzam bubbled up. Later, Isma’il married into the tribe of Jurhum, who controlled Mecca; in another version, Jurhum, originally from South Arabia, were given permission by Hagar to settle by the spring of Zamzam when their southern homeland was ruined by drought. In all the versions of the story, Isma’il, originally a speaker of ‘Syriac’ or some other Semitic tongue, learned Arabic, either from Jurhum or through divine inspiration. Confused though the story-lines are, they probably do give some hints about the Meccan past – the town’s links with South Arabia, migration caused by climate change, acculturation to the Arabic language. As for Zamzam, still regarded as a holy well today, it may have been holy early on: Muhammad’s grandfather Abd al-Muttalib is said to have found two gold figures of gazelles in it when digging the well out. They may have been hastily hidden treasure, but they may have been offerings to the well.

  Looking at the less murky and less miraculous Meccan past, it is clear that as a qariyah, a caravan-emporium, the town was a successor to Petra, Palmyra and Kindah’s cognate Qaryat. It stood on an already ancient north–south trade route, at a geographical mid-point between the two Fertile Crescents; it also occupied a cultural mid-point between the more settled west of Arabia and the more nomadic east, between hadar and badw. Its sacred role may be old, too: in Ptolemy’s second-century map of Arabia a toponym, ‘Macoraba’, corresponds roughly with the site of Mecca. It could represent a Sabaic word, mkrb, the vowelling of which is not known, but which seems to mean ‘temple’. ‘Macoraba’, however, might equally represent ‘Maghrabah’, an Arabian toponym for places like Mecca that lie between hills. All that can be said with certainty is that, whether or not we take Mecca’s holy history back as far as Ishmael, Adam, or even the pre-Adamic angels, it is likely to have been a cultic centre for at least several centuries before Muhammad’s time.

  Like other emporia in the pre-Muhammadan centuries, Mecca seems to have led a mercantile life of its own that survived the various periods of ‘protection’ (with the Mafioso shade of meaning) by successive tribes. In the traditional histories, Jurhum and other tribes had fought for control and afterwards, possibly no later than the early third century, conflicts over the town broke out between the tribes of Mudar and Iyad. By this time the Black Stone had entered the scene, and – whatever its significance may have been – was already revered enough to be hidden for its own safety; so well hidden that the hiding-place was, apparently, forgotten. Enter another tribe, Khuza’ah, who just happened to have come across the Stone . . . They would be delighted to return the much-missed relic, they said, on condition that they could be its guardians. Presumably the guardianship was as much to do with money as with love. At any rate it was Khuza’ah, in the later monotheist narrative, who diversified the attractions of Mecca by introducing idolatry into what had been the House of the One God. In particular their leader, Amr ibn Luhayy, imported an idol of the deity Hubal (‘spirit, vapour’ in Aramaic) from Syria. Khuza’ah remained in charge until the fifth century AD, when a new era of Meccan history began. It is an era that has not yet ended.

  The new epoch started with the arrival in Mecca of an Arab man called Qusayy. His origins are obscure, but those who claim descent from him have been in the spotlight ever since: they – the tribe known as ‘Quraysh’, after the supposed name of Qusayy’s own ancestor – are the most successful family in Arab history, perhaps in human history as a whole. No one can be sure about that earlier name; genealogies, as we have seen, tend to be ‘something imaginary and devoid of reality [whose] usefulness consists only in the resulting connection’, and this seems to be true of Qusayy’s pedigree. Qusayy is sometimes known as al-Mujammi’, ‘the Connector, the Uniter’; ‘Quraysh’, as we have also seen, is often said to derive from the verb taqarrasha, ‘to gather people together’. All this suggests that Quraysh may have been a group of mixed origins. Others, however, have derived the name from qarsh, ‘making money’, an activity in which Quraysh were to excel. Yet others go for the most literal derivation, from the common noun quraysh, ‘little shark’. The following verses are attributed to a pre-Islamic Himyari poet called al-Mushamrij ibn Amr:

  A quraysh is that which lives in the sea

  and from it Quraysh were called Quraysh.

  It eats both lean and fat and leaves

  not a feather of any two-winged thing.

  Thus, on land, are the tribe of Quraysh:

  they eat lands up and gobble them down.

  At the end of time a prophet they’ll have –

  many he’ll kill and slap in the face.

  His horsemen and footmen will fill the earth

  and drive the mounts with a crackle of fire.

  Or, perhaps, ‘ . . . with a slither of snakes’. Whatever the truth of the etymology, the poem is almost strange enough to be genuine.

  Whoever he was, Qusayy was able to gain control of the Meccan shrine. The traditional account of how he did so is, like the verses above, unexpected enough almost to be credible: the rather seedy Khuza’i guardian of the time was down on his uppers, and Qusayy simply persuaded him to part with the keys to the Ka’bah for a camel and a skinful of wine. Whether or not the long and still unbroken link of Quraysh with the Meccan shrine did in fact have such bathetic beginnings, according to the traditional record the position of Quraysh as guardians of the Ka’bah and chiefs of Mecca was later confirmed by agreements drawn up with the three Arabian powers, the Ghassanids, Lakhmids and Himyaris. If true, this would place the ultimate origins of the Islamic state in that ancient mesh of Arab relations with foreign superpowers – the Ghassanids’ Byzantine overlords, and the Lakhmids’ Persian suzerains.

  What is certain is that the fate of the neighbouring powers would have a direct effect on the fortunes of Quraysh, who had quickly added trade to shrine-management in their portfolio of activities: pilgrim-routes are ready-made highways of commerce. Their third guarantors, the Himyaris, had been a superpower in their own right, but in the later fifth century they were already in decline. The decay of their southern-based empire was to Quraysh’s advantage, as the newcomers were able to gain more control over the Arabian trade routes in general. Towards the end of the following century, Qurashi trade also benefited from Byzantine–Persian hostilities of the time, which caused a shift of traffic from eastern Arabian routes to western ones, already dominated by Mecca. Throughout, the Qurashis were busy cultivating a network of alliances with the badw tribes, who could be paid and otherwise persuaded to protect Meccan caravans and to keep out or raid those of potential interlopers. The network grew until it covered much of the peninsula. As it did so, probably also towards the end of the sixth century, the new – for Meccans – technology of Arabic writing boosted the book-keeping capabilities that were vital for keeping track of large-scale merchant ventures. Also in this century began a practice that would be crucial for mercantile expansion – mudarabah, the mass pooling of capital for investment in ever bigger caravans trading ever further away. All these developments made Mecca the hub of commerce for the whole Arabian subcontinent. And, as the Dutch, English and French would discover with their East India companies of a thousand years later and their far-ranging fleets, large-scale commercial cooperation could sow the seeds of imperial domination.

  The most famous Meccan caravans were those that went on the ‘winter and summer journeys’ mentio
ned in the Qur’an. The winter caravan headed south to the ancient port of Aden, the summer one north to the Levant and its main port of Gaza, thus linking the traffic of the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean spheres. The link revived already ancient mercantile patterns: long before the turn of the millennium, merchants from the South Arabian state of Ma’in had traded north and south, and had enjoyed particularly close relations with Gaza. Increasingly, however, the Meccans enhanced that other dimension of the pattern – their town’s own attractions as a pilgrimage venue for the peninsula. Trade and pilgrimage both led each other on and fed off each other; Muhammad’s uncle al-Abbas, for example, used to buy perfume in Yemen and sell it in Mecca during the pilgrimage. Equally important, the Meccans’ cosmopolitan trade would shape the patterns of their future imperial expansion. It is no coincidence that Amr ibn al-As, the eventual conqueror and governor of Egypt, used to trade in Gaza, the gateway to the rich land of the Nile. Nor is it surprising that the first ruler of the first dynasty in Islam, the Umayyads, relocated the capital from Medina to Damascus, or at least not when we realize that his wealthy father, Abu Sufyan, had already invested in land in the rich Bekaa Valley, not far from Damascus in what is now Lebanon.

  With commerce abroad and the Ka’bah, a magnet of pagan pilgrimage, at home, the Meccans traded in both goods and gods. They also traded in words. The old everyday dialect of Quraysh had probably been rather far from high Arabic; as late as the end of the sixth century, it may even have had some points of similarity to the old South Arabian tongues. But with their increasingly cosmopolitan connections, the speech of the Meccans was becoming ever nearer to the Arabic lingua franca of travel and trade, and ever richer. Quraysh are said to have ‘selected from the speech and poetry [of visiting delegations of pilgrims and others] the best of the local variants and the purest speech, and these were added to their innate linguistic ability’. This makes the process sound more conscious than it would have been; it is more like the deliberate way in which Arabic would be standardized in later centuries. But there is no doubt that when the high speech was needed for formal public utterances, some Meccans had a way with words: a visiting poet compared their speech to ‘rain on parched earth’.

  As Meccan merchants and Meccan speech grew richer, so the town’s population expanded. If it is true that its inhabitants numbered 15,000–20,000 by the early seventh century, then it would almost certainly have earned its Qur’anic title of umm al-qura, the Mother of Emporia, the Metromarket, on the basis of size alone. But by this time Mecca was also wielding her matriarchy as a cultic as well as a commercial emporium. The little city was comfortable, lucrative, smug; but in world terms it was still peninsular, an appendage to events. No one knew that it was poised to turn from a self-centred market town into an epicentre that would send shock waves around the globe.

  THE NAVEL OF THE EARTH

  At about the time of Muhammad’s birth, Mecca’s sanctity had been boosted by the apparently miraculous way in which the Ethiopians were repulsed, by squadrons of avian fighter-bombers, on the Day of the Elephant; the town’s allure as a pilgrimage centre was increasing. There are hints that the mountain of Arafat, scene of the climax of rites in the Islamic version of the pilgrimage, was the main draw in pre-Islamic times, and that the Ka’bah itself was something of a local side-show. Pilgrims would arrive at Arafat in tribal groups, belting out ritual chants peculiar to each tribe and imitating the cries of the tribe’s particular totemic animal. One interpretation of the scant information has it that sites around the Ka’bah were the centre of an ‘urban’ pilgrimage, mainly for settled hadar people, while a separate badw pilgrimage focused on the area around Mount Arafat; Islam would unite the hadar and badw rites into a single pilgrimage.

  It is impossible to get into the heads of pre-Islamic Arabian tribespeople. But it is likely that, just as the borderline between the spiritual and the political has always been porous, so too was the line in their minds between the spiritual and the commercial. For a badw society in which the main economic institution was raiding, the spiritual draw of Mecca may have been little different from the attractions of shopping and fun at the associated fairs like Ukaz. Peace, too, was another draw: the pilgrimage fell in the middle of an annual three-month truce in which trading replaced raiding, and raid- and feud-weary warriors could breathe easily and listen to duelling poets and camel-borne preachers. The three spheres – political, commercial, spiritual – intersected, and at the very centre of their conjunction was, and is, the Meccan temenos.

  The current focus of that temenos, the Ka’bah, the ‘Cube’, seems sempiternal, archetypal. Muslim geographers called it ‘the navel of the earth’, the same term used by Greeks for their pilgrimage-centre of Delphi (where the precise ‘navel’ was symbolized – perhaps not coincidentally – by a sacred stone); some also compared Mecca to a womb that expands to accommodate ever-growing numbers of pilgrims. The Ka’bah seems almost to have arrived rather than been built, like the black alien monoliths that haunt human history in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the Ka’bah too has been subject to change, decay and rebuilding no less than any other monument. It has also had a shifting population. The idol Hubal, supposedly introduced from Syria at some time before the fifth century, presided over popular and lucrative divinations: at a cost of 100 dirhams or one camel, arrows inscribed with ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and other words would be jiggled in a sacred quiver in front of the god’s image, and visitants given advice on the basis of the arrows drawn. Qusayy, the Qurashi founding father, added to the inhabitants of the shrine by bringing together there the three most popular female deities of Arabia, al-Lat, Manat and al-Uzza, the trio that later featured in the notorious ‘satanic verses’. By the time of Muhammad there was a fair old pantheon, and the attractions of the Ka’bah included a pair of statues called Isaf and Na’ilah, a couple who had allegedly fornicated in the shrine and been turned to stone. By this time the Ka’bah also doubled as a portrait gallery of Quraysh ancestors, while around it were ranged the meeting-houses of the various Qurashi clans, and a house of convocation that brought all the clans together. Not least, from the rebuild of 608 and possibly from earlier, the shrine contained an image of Jesus and Mary, later spared by Muhammad from his mass destruction of pre-Islamic paraphernalia.

  The Ka’bah of Mecca, however, was not alone. There was a Ka’bah of Najran, developed under Ethiopian auspices as the martyrion of the Jewish King Yusuf As’ar’s Christian victims, and also a Ka’bah of Sindad in southern Iraq, about which little seems to be known. But towards the end of the sixth century the Meccan Ka’bah was becoming the major centre of worship and pilgrimage. In those disunited days it offered something for everyone, a one-stop divine shop with Hubal and his divinations as the main draw. Allah was widely recognized, but seems to have been rather parochial in his active cult. He was regarded as the patron, or paternal, deity of Quraysh: ‘We’ve been the family of Allah since times long past,’ Muhammad’s grandfather Abd al-Muttalib is said to have declared. But all that was about to change.

  MUHAMMAD

  Muhammad’s life straddles the precise mid-point of recorded Arab history. And just as the first, pre-Islamic half of that history is often obscure, so too is the first part of that life. The date of Muhammad’s birth is often given as 570. That is a stab in the dark that has stuck; as we have seen, it depends on the problematic dating of the year of the Day of the Elephant and – like the tale of the blind Sufis and the elephant – we can do no more than feel around the problem. That traditional date of 582 for the boyhood trip to Syria is equally debatable. Only with 610 – usually suggested as the beginning of Muhammad’s revelations – does time firm up. Thereafter, likelier dates begin to dawn: some of Muhammad’s followers went to Ethiopia, perhaps in 616; his first wife, Khadijah, may have died in 619. Muhammad’s relocation from Mecca to Medina in 622 is the first indisputable waymark in his life, and thus the start of the Islamic calendar. From then on the dates are certain: the decisive raid at Badr in
624; the Meccan siege of Medina in 627; the truce with the pagan Meccans in 628; Muhammad’s takeover of Mecca in 630; his death in 632.

  Later piety has not only fleshed out the half-buried bones of a life, but foreseen it in retrospect long before it began. The ‘Comforter’ whom Jesus promised would come to console the world is interpreted by Islam not as the Holy Spirit, but as Muhammad. Prophethood, too, was prophesied. As a boy, Muhammad is supposed to have gone on a trading trip with his uncle, and to have met a Christian Arab monk in southern Syria who saw in him the signs of divine grace. Another story has his friend Abu Bakr going to Yemen and meeting a monk who showed him a portrait of ‘Muhammad, the prophet’; Abu Bakr was bemused, but returned to Mecca to find that Muhammad had indeed declared his prophethood.

  As well as these elisions with the wider Judaeo-Christian past, there are others that bind Muhammad into specifically Arabian tradition. One tradition says that, in the middle of the sixth century Satih, the supposedly boneless seer already mentioned, was consulted about a Persian nobleman’s dream of ‘stubborn camels leading Arab horses’ across the Tigris and spreading through the Sasanian realm. Not surprisingly, Satih predicted the coming fall of the Persian empire to invading Arabs and their unstoppable camel+horse combination; but he also went on to say, ‘Arab fortunes will be raised up high: I believe Muhammad’s birth is nigh’.

  Interpretations of the Gospels and the Qur’an are matters of faith, and thus in a sense beyond scepticism. However, one may well be sceptical about boneless seers and telepathic monkish portraitists. The same goes for biographies of Muhammad. Even when they are not being obviously fanciful, they need to be approached with reserve: nearly all are later than the first Islamic century; they disagree on many points; and, most dubiously, ‘the later the sources are, the more they claim to know about the life of the Prophet’. The hadith literature, too needs a cautious approach. Collectors of hadiths – reports of the speech and deeds of and concerning Muhammad – amassed as many as a million alleged such ‘Traditions’, which works out at about one for each eight minutes of his waking life as a prophet. Of the million, around 5,000 are supposed to be reliable – four or five for each week of his prophethood. That latter figure sounds more possible. But that looming mass of unsound evidence, 200:1 in proportion to the reliable Traditions, is a warning of how piety (or necessity – the need for prophetic precedent) can manufacture the past.