Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  He is Allah, One . . .

  It is one of the shortest chapters, but it is the one most often recited after the opening chapter, and the purest distillation of Qur’anic theology.

  Under this combined monotheistic pressure from without and within, paganism was looking more and more parochial; the old divinities were losing their powers. They were liable to rough treatment if they didn’t do their job. In the mid-sixth century the poet Imru’ al-Qays, for example, is said to have sought the sanction of the god Dhu ’l-Khalasah for avenging his father’s blood, but when the god’s divinatory arrows repeatedly said, ‘Don’t Do It’, the poet lost his temper and snapped them. Similarly, the tribe of Banu Hanifah had an idol moulded from a mixture of dates, flour and ghee: when the deity refused to answer their prayers in a famine, they ate him. The growing impotence of the old idols meant that some strange consortiums appeared. Ibn al-Kalbi, for instance, mentions an oath to which the witnesses were that divinatory deity Dhu ’l-Khalasah, Allah and, to make assurance triply sure, the Christian God. Flexibility and eclecticism were the order of the dying pagan day.

  For Meccans, however, Allah was the default deity. Their oaths were sworn,

  By al-Lat and al-Uzza and those who in them Believe,

  And by Allah, verily He is greater than both.

  Assuming the lines are genuine, this and other similar oaths show how the Meccans, even if goddesses like al-Lat and al-Uzza and other deities were a fall-back, looked to Allah as their high god. As the Qur’an says of the pagan Meccans,

  And if you ask them who created them they will surely say, ‘Allah’.

  Also,

  And if you were to ask them who sends down water from the sky and gives life therewith to the earth after its death, they would surely answer, ‘Allah’.

  Allah’s primacy in Mecca was even confirmed by the offer – if not the actual execution, in a famous recorded case – of human sacrifice. Muhammad’s grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, had vowed to Allah that if he fathered ten sons who lived to maturity, he would sacrifice one of them. The prayer was answered, lots were drawn, and Muhammad’s father Abd Allah was chosen as victim – but, in the nick of time, ransomed by the substitute sacrifice of a hundred camels. The Abrahamic echoes are loud, even if inflation had raised the ransom from the ancient single ram.

  Already in the centuries before Islam, Allah’s supreme status in Mecca, and the town’s sanctity, meant that He enjoyed a wide reputation among Arabs as a whole. It is impossible to assess rankings among the shifting pantheon of ancient Arabia, but He may have occupied a place similar to Zeus/Jupiter and Brahma among their own pantheons – the acknowledged but rather distant chairman of the board, whom most people felt happier approaching via intermediaries. Muhammad’s achievement was to get so many Arabs to see Allah not just as the super-god, but the only God. And with theological unitarianism came both the idea of political unity, and the means of achieving it. But maybe, in this also, the revelation wasn’t as revolutionary as it seemed.

  MOST BEAUTIFUL NAMES

  The old South Arabians, as we have seen, had for many centuries held notions of political unity deriving from worship of a shared deity. Saba, for example, was the core sha’b or ‘people’ of a wider commonwealth: other peoples who wanted to join this larger unity had to pay homage to the Sabaean ‘national’ deity, Ilmaqah, in an annual pilgrimage. It is likely that the Islamic idea of unity is an heir to these old notions, and perhaps even a descendant of them, at least collateral if not direct. That the Qur’anic concept of habl Allah, Allah’s uniting and binding covenant, is the same as the Sabaean term for a divine covenant, hbl, is more than circumstantial evidence. So too is the shared concept of the ancient sha’bs being the children of their patron deities, and of the Meccans being āl Allah, the folk or family of Allah, as both the pre-Islamic Abd al-Muttalib and his grandson Muhammad put it.

  There is no proof positive for the link; but the similarities between the South Arabian and Islamic systems are certainly more than coincidental, if probably less than conscious. A possibly conscious import from the South, however, is the most important alternative name for Allah, ‘al-Rahman’ (‘the Merciful, the Most Gracious’), which had already been in use by southern monotheists for at least three centuries. Muhammad began to receive verses including this name about two years into the revelations. At first the Meccans were unhappy, but a verse descended to give the usage Allah’s imprimatur:

  Say: ‘Invoke “Allah” or invoke “al-Rahman”. By whatever name you invoke Him [it is the same], for to Him belong the Most Beautiful Names.’

  ‘Al-Rahman’, together with its cognate ‘al-Rahim’, were given pole position as part of what would be the opening verse of the whole Qur’an:

  In the name of Allah, al-Rahman, al-Rahim.

  The formula is still used at the head of all texts written by Muslims that have any pretence to being formal or official, and before all sorts of acts from getting married to having breakfast. That the divine name ‘al-Rahman’ was used first in South Arabia is undeniable. So too, perhaps, were some of the other ‘Most Beautiful Names’ mentioned in the Qur’anic verse, which highlight aspects of Allah’s nature: ‘Al-Bari’ ‘ (‘the Creator’), ‘al-Mughith’ (‘the Reliever’), ‘al-Khaliq’ (also ‘the Creator’) and others appear in pre-Islamic South Arabian inscriptions as attributes of the One God. Was the adoption by the old Meccan high god of the names and attributes of His South Arabian self part of a conscious policy – to draw the southerners into Muhammad’s unifying mission? It is a reasonable hypothesis, but again unprovable.

  Even more debatable would be the idea of any conscious inspiration for Muhammad’s project from the neighbouring empires of the north, those of the Byzantines and Sasanians. But it should be remembered that they, too, were increasingly promoting political union through religious orthodoxy, Christian and Zoroastrian. It is unlikely that Muhammad was aware of these trends in any detail. But within a few years of his death, his followers would absorb vast areas of those empires, and with them vast numbers of people who were used to being told that obedience to God and to Caesar, or to Ahura Mazda and the Shah, were same thing. For them, Islamic ideas about toeing a single sacred-secular line would not have seemed strange; equally, the still highly malleable Islam may itself have been shaped further by Byzantine and Persian ideas about orthodoxy, political and theological.

  This was yet to come. For the moment, all the ingredients of what would be Islam were sourced locally. The genius of Muhammad (or, if you like, Allah) put them together in a heady cocktail, in which the political theology of South Arabia was mixed with the metaphysical theology of imported Christianity and Judaism, and poured out together in the supernatural, spellbinding language of the old ’arab poets and seers. The mixture coursed around Arabia along the arteries of trade and raid, and reached the parts no other ideas could have reached. No wonder people had their hearing stunned and their minds disabled, as al-Mas’udi put it. And it all went even further – to an ultimate unity both in heaven and on earth. To understand that this unitarianism works at both levels, as Adonis realized, is to grasp the key to Arab history: Muhammad gathered the word not only of Arabs, but of angels and of Allah Himself.

  People being what they are, the earthly unity was doomed. ‘And if your Lord had so willed,’ the Qur’an admits,

  He could surely have made mankind one community. But they will not cease to disagree.

  And yet the tension between heavenly ideal and earthly reality is one of the great forces driving human history.

  FIRST FANS, FIRST FOES

  The power of the Qur’an is evident in the way it magnetized from very early on a small but fervent, and growing, body of believers. Long before organized worship began, they would spend much of the night awake in prayer vigils. The Quraysh ancien régime was at first amused by this excess of zeal, then – as the implications of Muhammad’s message sank in – horrified. It was precisely the pluralism of worship at
Mecca that had made it so attractive to so many Arabians – that one-stop shop for idolators, marketing itself with all the acumen of the traders who had developed it. Here was someone preaching directly against that pluralism, as had Zayd ibn Amr, the campaigning hanif; they had run him out of town. And Muhammad’s mission was going even further: many of the ‘economic’ messages in the Qur’an are truly revolutionary. For example,

  Woe to every slanderer and backbiter

  Who has gathered wealth and counted it:

  He thinks his wealth will make him last for ever.

  Far from it: he will be cast into the crushing Fire!

  Muhammad’s biographer Ibn Hisham narrates how the Qurashi Establishment warned their fellow townspeople that Muhammad’s revelations were sihr, ‘[black] magic’, that would force apart fathers and sons and thus destroy the community. On the latter point they were quite right. Muhammad, the orphan since before his birth, had no father to be estranged; but a whole chapter of the Qur’an descended to curse his paternal uncle Abu Lahab and his wife and consign them to the eternal estrangement of hellfire. And when a son of Abu Bakr, one of Muhammad’s first followers, fought against his own father in the coming Raid of Badr, it was far from the only case of its kind. The Qurashi old guard had foreseen, accurately, how their ’asabiyyah would be dismantled, their comfortable and prosperous community destroyed.

  But another community would be born. The wheel of fire was turning again, and it would be its biggest revolution ever. The spin-offs – lesser cycles of unity, meltdown and re-formation – still turn today and, in various degrees, affect us all.

  CHAPTER SIX

  GOD AND CAESAR

  THE STATE OF MEDINA

  SEVERANCE

  Abu Sufyan, the pagan merchant-prince of Mecca, was astonished by the sight of the praying ranks at Medina. Never had he seen such discipline, he said, ‘not among the noble Persians, nor the Byzantines with their braided locks!’ Another onlooker, Urwah ibn Mas’ud, was equally amazed. He had visited the rulers of Ethiopia, Persia and Byzantium, he said,

  But I have never seen people more obedient . . . They stand around [Muhammad, as motionless] as if birds were perched upon their heads. At the mere gesture of a command from him they hasten to act. When he performs the ritual ablution they divide the [used] water among themselves [considering it blessed]. When he expectorates they rub their faces, their beards, and their skins with his sputum.

  Muhammad was no longer just a harmless hanif – a monotheist devotee – or even, as he had more recently become in Meccan eyes, a subversive dissident preaching not just against Mecca’s pagan traditions but also against its merchant plutocracy. Having realized that he was a prophet, prompted to speak by a force beyond his self and his control, he had also discovered, like all prophets, that he was without honour in his own country. He had found the logical, if extreme, solution: hijrah, a move to another country. And in that other country he had found not just honour, but obedience and adulation: he had created a super-’asabiyyah, a sense of solidarity and unity like none before.

  The strength and potential of this new unity were obvious to Abu Sufyan and Urwah a few years after the hijrah, the move to distant Medina. But at first Muhammad’s kinsmen, seeing how he was destroying their old ’asabiyyah – dismantling the social structure of pagan Mecca – had been far from impressed. ‘O Allah,’ the Meccan Abu Jahl would soon cry out as he fought against Muhammad’s raiders at Badr, ‘bring woe upon him who more than any of us has severed the ties of blood!’ The word hijrah was later to gain more meanings; but ‘severance’ is what it meant to the Meccans, and in a tribal setting where kinship ties real or imagined were the main defence against societal dissolution and anarchy, Muhammad’s schism was shocking. Moving to a far land was what you did if you had committed murder within the tribe.

  It was also the first step on a journey that would give Arabs a definitively active voice in the ‘grammar’ of world history. Although hijrah meant severance, it also came to mean mobility, exertion, salvation – not unlike the ethos of the old dissident refuseniks of tribalism, the su’luks or ‘vagabonds’, but translated into a mass movement. Hijrah was immediately equated so closely with Islam that some early activists believed ‘you cannot be a Muslim if you do not undertake hijrah’. Muhammad himself dismissed the idea, and said you could be a Muslim wherever you lived. But as we shall see, soon after his death when the far expeditions of conquest began, hijrah was again billed – this time officially – as a virtual prerequisite to Islam. Conversely, to return to one’s old home and old ways – ta’arrub, literally ‘(re-)arabization’ – was seen almost as apostasy. A whole redefinition of being Arab would come about: Arab mobility would be blown wide open; Arabs would be severed from their tribes, their roots, their ancestral pathways and pastures, even from their ‘island’ of Arabia, from everything that had always made them Arab.

  That, at least, was the theory.

  YATHRIB

  With their hijrah of 622, however, Muhammad and his few score followers were following ancient practice by taking themselves off and forming an alliance with another tribal grouping. As it became clear that the Meccan old guard were planning to silence him – by exile, perhaps, or worse – Muhammad had first opened negotiations with the people of al-Ta’if with a view to moving there, but these had fallen through. With the inhabitants of Yathrib, a town 350 kilometres north of Mecca, he was successful. He already had a useful connection with the place: his father’s father, Abd al-Muttalib, had been brought up there in his own Yathribi mother’s house. That connection may have been significant to the people of Yathrib, many of whom (including Muhammad’s great-grandmother’s family) were of South Arabian origin and perhaps less fervently patrilineal than the Meccans; there is evidence that women played a much more independent role in ancient South Arabia than they did in northern, tribal societies. The Yathribis may also have been less fervently polytheist. Certainly that was the case with the other main ingredient of Yathrib’s population – several tribes of judaized Arabs, or perhaps arabized Jews.

  Several months after an advance party of his fellow hanifs made it to Yathrib, Muhammad arrived there in September 622. It is the first definite date in his life, and literally epochal (although the official epoch was actually made to start on 16 July 622, the beginning of the lunar year). The migrants found themselves in a place that was very different from their home town: whereas Mecca was hemmed in by hills, hidebound by ritual and crowded with gods and pilgrims, Yathrib was a much more open place, a sort of loose garden city whose diverse inhabitants lived in hamlets among the fields and date groves on which their livelihood depended. In place of natural defences or city walls, the landscape was punctuated by many small towers in which the people could take shelter from attack. Yathrib was open to incomers, too: its two main tribes, Aws and Khazraj, were themselves originally migrants from South Arabia; the Jews were also immigrants, possibly of varied origins, although legend sees them as refugees from the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar’s campaigns early in the sixth century BC.

  Pious tradition asserts that Muhammad was given a hero’s welcome in Yathrib. ‘The full moon has risen over us!’ the Yathribis chanted, as people still do to bridegrooms when they arrive at their wedding parties. The citizens vied with one another to host him, and immediately put him in charge of their town. Why they should have treated the leader of a small band of refugees in this way – let alone rubbed themselves with his sputum – is not immediately obvious. It is reason enough for pious tradition, of course, that Muhammad was who he was; no further explanation is needed. But Muhammad himself offered an explanation, saying, ‘Medina was conquered by the Qur’an.’ The claim makes sense: Yathrib – or Medina, as it was about to become – was one of the most literate places in Arabia beyond the old Lakhmid and Ghassanid spheres, and it is more than likely that the vanguard of Muhammad’s followers had been busy not only broadcasting the mesmeric messages of the Qur’an’s Meccan chapters
to the Yathribis, but also delivering them in their written form – the unprecedented form of Arabic holy scripture – in preparation for Muhammad’s arrival. But it may not be wholly cynical to imagine that Mammon influenced the Yathribis as well as God. Muhammad was, after all, a Meccan, from the boomtown of Arabian commerce. One of his first acts would be to declare the market of Yathrib a tax-free zone; the traditional market-day there was Friday, the day he now earmarked for congregational prayers. It did not become a ‘sabbath’ of shuttered shops: instead, the influx of worshippers would fuel a brisk Friday trade in the suq. The simple mosque Muhammad established, with its palm-tree columns and palm-frond awnings, also became Yathrib’s new political headquarters. As they always had in pagan Mecca, political, commercial and spiritual spheres intersected.

  In Yathrib, that third sphere began to take on distinctive form and colour. At first, the impressionistic content of Muhammad’s monotheism began to take firmer doctrinal shape; much of its shape is comparable to that of material in Christian and, particularly, Jewish scripture. The Qur’an itself declares that it confirms the book of Moses in the Arabic tongue. The people of Moses evidently agreed: even later in the seventh century in a Jewish document, widely circulated, ‘Muhammad’s message was described as an act of God’s mercy – i.e., a true religion’.

  As time went on, however, and Yathrib became known as Madinat al-Nabi, ‘the City of the Prophet’ (or simply as al-Madinah/Medina, the City), the Qur’an grew away from other monotheistic beliefs. The need to build a community, and to give it ‘brand recognition’, was most easily fulfilled by saying what that community was not – certainly not like the polytheists; but also not quite like the Jews or the Christians. Islamic identity solidified, as had Arab identity, through contact with others: through attraction, then repulsion. It was around this time that ‘Muslim’ started to be used as the official name for adherents of Muhammad’s monotheism, rather than the broad-church old term, hanif. The realities of worldly rule were pulling against the universalist ideals of monotheism: the One God joins mankind together; men, in their quest for earthly powers, inevitably pull themselves – and their God – asunder.