Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  A question hangs over this intensely formative period for Islam, and for the whole of Arab history: what part did the originally South Arabian element of Yathrib/Medina’s people play in it all? The two tribes, Aws and Khazraj, are always seen by traditional history in an ancillary role, as the Ansar, the ‘Helpers’, of Allah and Muhammad. There are hints, however, that they too may have influenced the development of Islamic practice. Ritual ablutions, for example, had been part of ancient South Arabian worship, with channels and cisterns incorporated into temples at Marib and elsewhere; it seems the southerners had brought the practice with them to Yathrib. This may be another case – as with the divine name ‘al-Rahman’ and the whole idea of unifying ‘political theology’, the habl or binding covenant with a god – where old South Arabian practice accords with what was, or became, Islamic custom. The most successful of all attempts to unite Arabs – the Islamic state of Medina – may have its deepest roots in the non-Arab past of the old South, roots buried beneath the ground zero of the new era, the year AH 0.

  The usual ‘Orientalist’ take is that there was an arabianization of Islam at Medina ‘in direct response to the Jews’ rejection’ of Muhammad. But the arabianization was more accurately a de-judaization. Islam was already firmly planted in its Arabian setting, and was shaped by it all along.

  THE SUPER-SOCIETY

  The political shape of Medina was also moulded by traditional Arabian models. The new polity resembled the sort of tribal alliances that had been formed in the pre-Islamic past, and gave Muhammad paramountcy in resolving disagreements and taking decisions. Before, most such alliances had been sealed by oaths and rituals performed around fire; Muhammad, who knew so well the power of writing, had his alliance between the old groups of Yathrib society and the new incomers from Mecca set down in documents known today as the Constitution of Medina. Even in this, however, he was following tradition: his grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, is said to have drawn up a written document of alliance with the tribe of Khuza’ah and to have hung it up in the Ka’bah.

  But the new ummah, or community, that Muhammad founded went beyond the old model of tribal alliance. It was a super-tribe, owing its unity not to an ancestor real or imagined, but to the super-deity, Allah. The pagan Meccans had seen themselves as ‘the family of Allah’; the old South Arabian peoples had been the ‘children’ of their respective patron deities. Allah in His Islamic guise is Creator but – heaven forfend! – not Procreator. Instead, the new community is fathered symbolically upon Abraham, the first monotheist; Muhammad’s own wives are the ‘mothers’ of the community, and the individuality of its members is displaced by the person of Muhammad, who is

  closer to the believers than their own selves.

  There were, however, a few unfraternal disunities. Not all the tribesmen of Aws and Khazraj were in favour of the incomers, and these dissidents built their own rival mosque-headquarters. Their leader, Abu Amir, was swiftly ousted; he escaped to pagan Mecca and from there to Syria, where he is said to have adopted Christianity. But to begin with, the community was generally pragmatic and inclusive: Muhammad’s original Constitution took in not only the Jews of Medina and but even its polytheists.

  Seen in isolation it might look revolutionary, a new start from that Year Zero. Looked at in context, against the longue durée, the state of Medina can be seen emerging from its Arabian background. True, everything about Muhammad and his community was superlative: he was a super-soothsayer with a super-daemon – the Archangel Gabriel, no less – to inspire him; Allah was the super-deity, and the ummah was Muhammad’s super-tribe, Allah’s super-sha’b; they had a super-’asabiyyah, and very soon it would take them on super-raids, to rustle not camels but empires. And yet it was all a superlative version of something that had been there in the Arabian past. This is something Arab historians themselves recognize: while non-Arab histories of Arabs tend to start with their subjects suddenly bursting in full cry on to the stage of world history with the new-born phenomenon of Islam, Arab historians tend to take a longer view that takes in the pre-Muhammadan millennia and sees ‘the Island of the Arabs’ as part of an archipelago of cultures and empires. In fact they usually take the longest durée possible and start with the Creation.

  There was one major point of departure from the Arabian past, however. We do not know how much authority was wielded by the heads of the old South Arabian sha’b-commonwealths, the mkrbs, but it seems unlikely that their rule was absolute. In the tribal tradition of the north, to which the new community was a more direct heir, the rule of chiefs was rarely autocratic – they governed by consent, and made decisions on the basis of consultation with fellow elders. To assume dictatorial powers – as did Kulayb, who shot the fateful arrow that set off the War of the Camel’s Udder – was to invite nemesis. Muhammad, in contrast, speaking on behalf of Allah, could exercise not just a super- but a hyper-authority, and it soon become clear that there could be no opposition to it. When the question of who could use the traditional tribal grazing grounds came up, for example, he declared that from now on they belonged to Allah and His prophet; that is to say, they were for the use of the whole community, the ummah. In the cognate modern-day term, he had ammama, or ‘nationalized’, them.

  As totality of control was established, everything that rejected it became an opponent, an Other that shaped the new community by reflex. The original pluralism of the ummah withered, and a culture of opposition, even antagonism, grew in its place. The opposition was literal: for Muhammad and his hanifs in the early days at Yathrib, the direction of prayer had been towards Jerusalem. Now, in the second year after the hijrah, there was a volte face of almost 180 degrees and the newly designated Muslims, ‘Submitters’, turned their backs on Zion and submitted their faces instead to Allah, the Lord of the Meccan Ka’bah. It was a ‘conversion’ in the most basic sense: a turning around. But it was also a turning back: the Arabianness of the new ideology was reasserting itself.

  Antagonism increased towards other versions of monotheism. In contrast to early conciliatory pronouncements, new, more strident Qur’anic verses descended:

  O you who believe, take not the Jews and Christians as friends. They are but friends of each other, and if any among you take them [as friends], then surely he is one of them.

  On the ground in Medina, the antagonism came to a head with the expulsion in 626 of one of the two Jewish tribes, Banu al-Nadir, and the seizure of their property. In the following year, 600 of the other Jewish tribe, Banu Qurayzah, were killed for allegedly acting as a fifth column for the pagan Meccans who, having realized how dangerous a rival Medina was becoming, had sent an army to besiege the city; the survivors were expelled. Qur’anic verses descended in justification.

  Regarding this last point, it is clear that while the form of revelation remained as elevated as ever, the content moved distinctly down to earth in the Medina period. The need to decide who should belong in the new community, and then to build that community, called for constant divine intervention. Some editions of the Qur’an implicitly admit this change in the nature of revelation by labelling chapters ‘Meccan’ or ‘Medinan’. A rare recent revisionist and visionary, the Sudanese Mahmud Muhammad Taha, went as far as claiming that ‘The latter are clearly historical in nature and content and have no relevance to modern conditions’. He was hanged for apostasy in Khartum in 1985, in his mid-seventies. He still provokes strong reactions: the anniversary of his execution, 18 January, is commemorated (by some) as Arab Human Rights Day; conversely, I have been in a room that emptied at the mere whiff of some of his ideas.

  With the shift from Mecca to Medina, Muhammad had come face to face with the challenges of founding a community and building it into a state headed by himself. Where previous religious figures, famously Jesus during his time in the wilderness, had rejected tempting offers of earthly power, Muhammad embraced it and made it part of his mission. Jesus was king of the Jews only in the sardonic inscription on the Cross; when Muhammad died, he wa
s de facto lord of the Arabians – their sayyid, a courtesy title his descendants still accord themselves. The inevitable questions about power-building and power-holding in Medina had been answered by divine revelation: thus, while the Qur’an’s core messages are worthy of the Prince of Peace, it can also touch on matters for The Prince of Machiavelli. This, and not the rejection of beliefs about the Crucifixion or the Trinity, is the biggest point of difference with Christianity. It has also left an enduring legacy. For most Islamic moralists, the business of gaining and keeping power has never in itself been tainted with suspicions of sin; they let rulers get on with it, and acquiesce in what often looks like moral ambiguity. Figures like Thomas Becket and Thomas More are rare enough in Christendom; they are all but unknown in Islam.

  COMING WITH A SWORD

  As the new state expanded, however, Muhammad was happy for Jews elsewhere to stay where they were – especially when they could work the land as sharecroppers, as they did at Khaybar, 150 kilometres north of Medina. And there were other continuities from before. One of these was on the military-economic front. At first, when Muhammad was militarily weak, Allah told him to

  overlook their [i.e. the unbelievers’] faults with gracious forgiveness.

  With his gathering strength in Medina, this soon changed. ‘Anthropology’, Daniel Varisco points out, ‘has . . . played a role in showing where Islam definitely does not come from’, namely, not from ‘the desert’, with its ‘never-ending cycle of feuds and raids that define the newer monotheism as violent and uncivil’. History confirms this: Islam comes from the urban setting of Mecca, and – as I hope I have shown – owes something to the ancient and eminently civilized, if not always non-violent, South Arabian past. Islam comes from all this, and within it from a deep fount of spirituality, from a sense of almost inexpressible wonder at the majesty of creation, the mystery of eternity, and the perfect oneness of the divine originator of it all. The most vehement atheist would be hard put to deny the presence of something supernatural in the earliest revelations; the most violent cynic is disarmed by the beauty of holiness, ‘never – nowhere – aught so solemn, so impressive as this’, declared the arch-cynic Richard Burton on first contemplating the Ka’bah. Islam comes from this, and it will return to that perfect oneness of its origin: ‘Whatsoever is on it [i.e. earth] will perish,’ the Qur’an says of the end of time,

  And the face of your Lord will remain.

  So far on this great return journey, however, it has passed through periods in which, being a sociopolitical ideology as well as a faith, it has made use of the military option. One of these periods began a couple of years after the hijrah.

  Along with the power of the Qur’an, the personal magnetism of Muhammad, and the shuttling of envoys, the successful use of raiding tactics was a reason behind the rise of Medina as a power. It was in that light that the earliest Arabic sources view that rise: the earliest biographies of Muhammad are called kutub al-maghazi, ‘books of raids’, and they are serial accounts of his armed expeditions. There were almost thirty major operations, and Muhammad took an active part in about a third of them. There is more to the ‘books of raids’ than derring do, but in essence they belong to the tradition of the ‘Days of the Arabs’, the accounts of pre-Islamic battle days that constitute the oldest Arab historiography.

  The first major encounter was in many ways the most fateful, and it was Muhammad’s success in it against superior numbers that convinced him and his people that Allah was on their side, militarily as well as morally. A rich Meccan caravan was returning from Syria in AH 2 under the leadership of Abu Sufyan (the pagan grandee who would be so amazed at Muslim discipline). Muhammad, with about 300 men, decided to hit the Meccans where it hurt – in the main artery of their most lucrative trade. He set out to intercept the caravan at a watering-place called Badr, on the trade route from Mecca to Syria, south-west of Medina; but Abu Sufyan got wind of the planned attack and sent ahead to Mecca for reinforcements. By the time the Meccan force of more than 900 arrived at Badr, Abu Sufyan had taken the caravan by a different route; the Meccan reinforcements decided, however, that they should teach the dissidents of Medina a lesson. It all went horribly wrong for them. Seventy were killed and about the same number captured, to Muhammad’s losses of fifteen dead. The sense of righteous triumph on the Medinan side may be imagined. AH 0 was the start of the epoch; AH 2, the year of Badr, the turning-point of Muhammad’s fortunes, was the true beginning of the epic.

  Popular memory views such battles in black and white, goodies versus baddies. But, as ever, the reality was more complex. As already mentioned, a son of Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s right-hand man, fought on the pagan Meccan side. So did al-Abbas, Muhammad’s uncle and eponymous ancestor of the future five-hundred-year dynasty of caliphs. And there were other elisions between the pagan past and the Islamic future. Just as in the pre-Islamic Days of the Arabs, battle poetry played a part on both sides at Badr and in later confrontations. In the encounter at Uhud in AH 3 or 4, a rare setback for the Muslims, part of the pagan Meccans’ success was due to Abu Sufyan’s wife Hind, mother of the first caliph of the future Umayyad dynasty. ‘We are the Tariq girls,’ she chanted (the meaning of ‘Tariq’ here is uncertain), egging the Meccans on,

  We walk on carpets fair

  Our necks are hung with pearls

  And musk is in our hair

  If you advance we’ll hug you

  Or if you flee we’ll shun you

  And we’ll no longer love you.

  Lest she come over as a bobby-soxed cheer-leader, it must be added that Islamic tradition presents her in a more ghoulish light: another uncle of Muhammad, Hamzah, was killed at Uhud fighting for his nephew, and Hind is said to have mutilated his corpse and gnawed his liver. On Muhammad’s side, the most famous poet was Hassan ibn Thabit, already celebrated for his odes in praise of the Ghassanid kings. As the prophet and his revelation, so the poet and his rhymes: the angel Gabriel, who acted as medium for the transmission of the Qur’an, is said to have doubled as Hassan’s poetic daemon or muse in the battle poems instead of an outmoded jinni. We do not know what Muhammad made of other continuities, like Hassan eulogizing him with a traditional image of fine wine and kisses, although the Prophet is supposed to have said, ‘Throw dust in the faces of the panegyrists.’ Another would-be panegyrist, A’sha Qays – encountered earlier, improving girls’ marriage prospects with airbrushed poetic descriptions – was dissuaded from working for Muhammad by the pagan Meccans, who bought him off with camels and frightened him off with warnings about the teetotalitarian life of Medina.

  There was yet another continuity with the Arabian past. The raids were not unproductive of booty; Muhammad, as a traditional raiding-redistributing chief, controlled a fifth of the proceeds and handed shares of it to his kin, the descendants of Hashim. He is said to have made a point of declaring that he was the only prophet for whom booty had been made licit. But it was all sanctioned in any case by Arabian tradition, and further sanctified by the Qur’an, for example by its chapter called ‘The Spoils of War’. The business of shares and distribution was all carefully controlled: warnings of hellfire descended to ensure that no one cheated. Sensibly, Muhammad also earmarked substantial sums from his chief’s fifth to distribute to opponents, in order to bring them round to his cause –

  those whose hearts are reconciled,

  as the Qur’an describes them.

  ‘Do prophets come with a sword?’ asked a ninth-century Christian Iraqi commentator, thinking of the generally quietist beginnings of his own faith and comparing them with those of the two other great monotheisms. That writer’s answer was a clear ‘No’. A fairer answer in Muhammad’s case, however, is that he didn’t come with a sword at first, but that the precedents of the Arabian past, the pressures of the present, and the promises of the future, all conspired to place a sword in his hand; and that perhaps other more apparently pacific prophets would have taken up swords if they had left their countries, lands whe
re they were without honour, and had gone on their own hijrahs – in other words, if they had seen their revolutions through. For the hijrah was a severance, but also a transition from spiritual and moral activism to political action. At the time, political action meant, as it still usually means in the region, forming a new ’asabiyyah, a new solidarity group, taking up arms, taking over as much as you could and holding it for as long as you could. Indeed, very soon the word hijrah would come to mean the resettlement of tribesmen in garrison towns. One authority bluntly glosses hijrah itself as ‘military service’. In one sense, a religion is a cult with an army; but while most cults take a while to get hold of one, Islam got its army almost straight away.

  That Muhammad was so successful in his political and military roles at Medina should never cause anyone, whether Muslim or not, to forget the spiritual and moral underpinnings of his mission, the Meccan years. They are the heart of the faith of Islam; they are what will last. Those few eventful years at Medina brought about the development of Islam as a sociopolitical phenomenon. But they also form the second of the three instalments of the Arab national roman-fleuve, along with the legendary migrations from the ancient South, and with the coming conquests across three continents. It is a drama in, and on, three stages – Marib, Medina and the world – and it is part of what now inspires some young European Muslims to migrate from the lands of the heathen and make, via the ‘Islamic State’ and dreams of world conquest, for the fourth, final and eternal stage: heaven.