Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  I have mentioned an aim of ‘de-islamizing’ Arab history. To do so would, in Samir Kassir’s opinion, free Arabs of a ‘millstone’ and reclaim their history from its current malaise. Looking at Muhammad in Medina, I realize it is not possible fully to do so. As one commentator has written, ‘Islam is a religion, but it is also a form of religious nationalism . . . Some have gone so far as to call Arabism and Islam “unseparated Siamese twins”’. Separation can be bloody, as with the severance of those ancestral Meccan twins Hashim and Abd Shams, as with Muhammad’s hijrah. And sometimes it seems that Arab and Islamic history are conjoined not just at the hip, but at the heart. That said, what we can and should still do is to see Islam not as the start of it all, but as a part of it all. Not only is the ‘millstone’ no monolith; it was also carved from much more ancient and variegated rock than might at first appear.

  THE SMILING GUARDIANS

  Mecca capitulated in January 630. Medina had gained the military upper hand, but had not scored the decisive victory; there had been parleys and truces; there had been that reconciling of hearts and minds with the proceeds of raiding, and very little fighting for the previous two years. In the end, the Qurashi old guard knew that even if they might be able to beat Muhammad eventually, it would probably be more profitable on balance to join him. It would not be the last time in Arab history that an ancien régime, in order to prolong its life, threw itself into the arms of a young ideology. In more recent times the example of Al Sa’ud and the Wahhabis comes to mind.

  By joining Muhammad’s revolution, the Meccan Establishment had not exactly hijacked it; but they had hacked into it, and were probably happy for it to serve their own ends. Allah alone knows the true intentions of Abu Sufyan, his son the future caliph Mu’awiyah, and all the others who came over to Muhammad’s side. But it is hardly unlikely that the main chance played a part in their decision, as well as the spiritual message (and that ready money to reconcile hearts). After all, two great figures of the Meccan past had made the city a successful pilgrimage centre – Amr ibn Luhayy and Qusayy, who between them had brought the gods of the Levant and Arabia together in one place; Muhammad, in a sense, was taking their idea one stage further, by bringing those gods together in one God. The old Meccan chiefs may have sensed that, in an age when monotheism was eclipsing the ancient pantheons, Muhammad’s plan would draw ever more pilgrims – and cash – to their city. What is clear is that the pagan Meccans had made a wise decision: their recognition of Muhammad, and Muhammad’s confirmation of the Ka’bah’s centrality, have ensured the prosperity of their city ever since, and for the foreseeable part of eternity.

  With Mecca as the shrine of the ultimate monotheism, the pilgrimage destination was streamlined and rebranded, but the management remained the same. In one department it has remained the same ever since. The Qurashi clan of Banu Shaybah, who started out as the sacristans of the goddess al-Uzza and then were granted the keys to the Ka’bah, still hold the keys to the Ka’bah today. An old Meccan saying went, ‘The Shaybah clan are wreathed in smiles: this must be a day for opening the Ka’bah’, because, of course, they charged entrance fees. After so long, the smiles must be part of their genetic make-up, a risus sardonicus. In other senses, too, Muhammad’s revolution turned out to be more in the nature of evolution. Mecca’s ruling clans had undergone a shake-up, and the city’s wealth would be redistributed, to some extent, across the branches of the Quraysh family tree. But life went on, pilgrims circumambulated the Ka’bah as ever, and trade circulated along Mecca’s mercantile arteries. For the city’s people, the Annus Hegirae, the Year Zero, was far from being a Khmer Rouge-style reset of history.

  But in yet another sense, the revolution had only just begun. Muhammad, who united in himself the old voices of kahin, khatib, sha’ir and sayyid but also transcended them, now went on to unite perennially dissonant Arab voices like no one else before or since.

  MEDINA MEDIA

  Even before Mecca’s capitulation, a truce with the pagan city in 628 had enabled Muhammad to focus his burgeoning forces on more distant Arabian horizons. At times, the force was military. Traditional raiding tactics only went so far; in the case of al-Taif, the fortified urban centre of a fertile area south-east of Mecca and power base of the tribe of Thaqif, heavier weaponry was needed. A siege catapult and a cow-hide dabbabah – a testudo or shelter for sappers – were used to invest the town in 631. They show how much the state of Medina had grown in confidence, and how it had opened to military innovation (dabbabah, literally ‘crawler’, is now the word for ‘tank’ in the military sense). But other campaigns were also afoot, using other tactics and technologies. At least for the moment, Islam would conquer most of Arabia without the use of arms.

  Over the preceding century, Muhammad’s Qurashi ancestors had spun a web of commerce across much of the peninsula. In this web, a warp of trade routes combined with a weft of tribal alliances; the balance of complementary interests – those of nomad carriers and guards on the one hand, and of the merchant masterminds of Quraysh on the other – gave the system tensile strength and durability. It was this web that Muhammad used to spread his message, ultimately realigning the network towards himself, in a way comparable, perhaps, to that in which the early twentieth-century Bolsheviks used their close contacts with workers on the imperial rail network to spread their ideology across the Tsar’s domains.

  Muhammad achieved this realignment by diplomacy, and also with the help of technology. As he was also doing with the Qur’an, the supposedly ‘illiterate’ prophet was harnessing the media, and especially the barely exploited development of Arabic writing, to communicate with distant tribes and peoples. ‘The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant’, wrote Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system’. Muhammad already understood the possibilities of writing as a tool of control: in his Meccan days, written public announcements (like that of his grandfather’s tribal alliance) had sometimes been fixed to the wall of the Ka’bah – presumably not in the expectation that anyone other than the score or so of literate Meccans could actually read them, but rather as a form of official proclamation, like publication in a gazette. But for most Arabs, especially tribal Arabs, writing in any form was a new and even more powerful phenomenon, invested with magic and mana. Its political potential was enormous, and Muhammad made full use of it.

  Medina also had a recent tradition of literacy, and Muhammad set about enhancing it. In addition to his own Muslim Meccan scribes, already at work recording Allah’s words in the scriptorium of Qur’anic revelation, he gave orders that each literate pagan captive from the Raid of Badr should have his ransom commuted into teaching ten Medinan boys how to write. Alleged originals of documents issued by Muhammad and supposed to have survived into later centuries give an idea of the ends to which he used writing. Apart from divine revelation, there was an example of his own wisdom preserved on the spot – a hadith about the nature of faith, dictated to his cousin and son-in-law Ali. But other documents were more prosaic, such as a land-grant written on the stem of a palm-branch, demands for tribute from a Jewish community and from the Kindi ruler of Dumah, and a letter to the Hadramis, telling them to pray to Allah and pay their dues to Medina. Many texts of letters like this last one survive, and if some are pious fabrications, they probably do reflect the output of the Medina secretariat. Such missives, written in a script that was regarded with supernatural awe, recited by eloquent missionaries, must have had an impressive effect on their recipients. To the Yemenis, who had used the archaic South Arabian script but are supposed to have abandoned it by the time of Islam, Muhammad sent not only letters, but a teacher of Arabic letters: ‘I have sent you a scribe,’ he said to them of his envoy Mu’adh ibn Jabal.

  Less clear is the part played in this campaign of integration by the supreme example of the scripted supernatural, the Qur’an. Muhammad has already been quoted say
ing that Medina was ‘conquered’ by it. Clearly, the Qur’an was also being broadcast further afield in some form. Its language was accessible to most Arabs, whatever their everyday dialect, as it is the same as the high language of poetry that had been infiltrating every corner of the peninsula for centuries: as al-Mas’udi said, it ‘stunned their hearing and disabled their minds’. But to begin with, it probably stunned them in bits and pieces, orally transmitted, particularly the shortest, earliest, most powerful chapters. The text as a whole is too diffuse, and often too difficult, to work as propaganda, besides which, there was no text-as-a-whole, no collected edition, until well after Muhammad’s death. But Muhammad had yet more words to deploy in his media campaign.

  Observing events outside my window, and wondering about the extreme rapidity with which people have been converted to a new cause, it is clear that what has stunned them into belief in it is not long and subtle holy texts – and certainly not logical argument – but a blunter instrument: the slogan. Here we have the Iranian-origin sarkhah, the ‘yell’:

  Allah is great!

  Death to America!

  Death to Israel!

  The curse of Allah upon the Jews!

  Victory to Islam!

  Belted out en masse at public occasions – Friday prayers, rallies, funerals – it is ‘gathering the word’ by brute force. (The Arabic for ‘missile’, sarukh, ‘yeller, screamer’, is cognate with sarkhah.)

  It may not always be sound practice to extrapolate backwards, but I suspect that if Medina was conquered by the Qur’an, most Arabs were conquered by slogans and sound-bites that were more eloquent and meaningful than the ones I hear today. First of all there was

  Allahu akbar

  Allah is great/the greatest

  (i.e., your old tribal deities are puny). Then there was the mellifluous, memorable,

  La illaha illa ’llah

  There is no god but Allah

  (so in fact your tribal deities don’t exist at all). And then,

  Muhammadun rasulu ’llah

  Muhammad is Allah’s messenger

  (so everything he says is unquestionable). The devil may have all the best tunes, but Allah has even better lyrics.

  The lyrics have had an amazingly long run. Those same slogans still work perfectly today, and the community is still ‘on message’: the first words a newborn Muslim hears are the second and third phrases above, whispered into the right ear; they are also whispered into the ear of a dying Muslim. Christians are summoned to worship by bells, joyful but meaningless; Muslims are summoned to their more frequent prayers by words – including those of the three phrases above, now amplified (4,000 loudspeakers in the new system recently installed at the Meccan mosque, and audible 9 kilometres away). They are uttered constantly as interjections. They appear on the flag of Saudi Arabia and on the piratical-looking black and white banner of the so-called Islamic State. Over his life, a Muslim will hear and pronounce them countless times: if he had just one mosque within earshot and lived to seventy, he would be told that God is great three-quarters of a million times. It is almost as hard to stop believing as it is to stop breathing.

  Muhammad was thus the messenger of Allah, and also His messager. He and his followers disseminated the word of Allah in writing, and also distilled it into oral/aural slogans. These were innovative ways of creating an unprecedented esprit de corps among Arabs, a super-’asabiyyah. And the slogans have played their part not just in maintaining ’asabiyyah but also in preserving ’arabiyyah, the Arabic language. As the eleventh-century observer of non-Arabs, al-Biruni (himself Iranian in origin), noted,

  How often have tribes of subjects congregated together, in order to impart a non-Arabic character to the state. But they could not succeed in their aim, and as long as the call to worship sounds in their ears five times a day . . . they have got to submit.

  Muhammad’s media, spoken, written and sound-bitten, poured out of his Medina. Qur’anic chapters and sacred slogans did the rounds of the Arabian network. So too did written invitations, or summonses, delivered by literate envoys to tribal chiefs. The chiefs were intrigued, responded to the call and went to Medina. There, like Abu Sufyan and Urwah, they were magnetized by Muhammad’s power and personality – and, in a hierarchical society, if you magnetize the chief you attract the whole tribe. It was all perhaps less a matter of Muhammad ‘gathering the word’ than of his occupying the silence with his own words, his messages. Nothing quite like them had been heard before. To use Martin Nowak’s expression again, language enables dominance through the insertion of ideas, and how much more powerful the ideas will be if, as in early seventh-century Arabia, there are no preconceptions to counter them.

  Delegations flocked to Muhammad from ever further afield, especially in 630–1. Some, notably Christian Arabs from Najran and from north-eastern Arabia, came not to ‘convert’ but to express their allegiance to the rising power: islam, ‘submission’ in more than one sense, was (in some ways still is) as much a matter of politics as of dogma. Diplomatic contacts were established with Christian Ethiopia and Constantinople: the Byzantine emperor sent Muhammad a fur coat, which the Prophet tried on before passing it on to the Negus, who probably had more need of it in his chilly Abyssinian highlands. Tribes and peoples from afar became allied with Muhammad, including by numerous marriages. Something of the tension between the rising and falling powers of Arabia comes out in an anecdote about Muhammad’s wedding night with Asma’, a daughter of the old ruling family of Kindah. When invited to the nuptial bed, she replied at first, ‘Does royalty give itself to trade?’ But the prophetic charisma worked on her too.

  It seemed to work on everyone. More and more Arabians entered the contract to pray and pay – to pray to Allah, to pay allegiance on earth to His prophet, and to pay the dues of membership. It is unclear how much the latter amounted to at the beginning; rules concerning the amount of zakah, ‘alms tax’, were only formulated later. But sums were probably not great. Still, the very idea of any payment at all was anathema to many Arabians – certainly to badw – and the fact that they agreed to it shows just how forceful Muhammad’s character was. And if that force was not enough by itself, he could always fall back on using one group to put pressure on another: in particular, he employed nomad tribes like Hawazin, who had long roamed the western and central peninsula, as persuaders.

  Little persuasion was needed. Success bred success, and then the fear of being left behind by the bandwagon – although in the generally wheelless world of the peninsula, the bandwagon was a caravan. Chief after chief, tribe after tribe, they tagged on to the ever-lengthening line that snaked around Arabia, knowing that the short term offered safety in numbers, and the longer term a chance of profit, whether earthly or heavenly. The caravan effect worked brilliantly, and peninsular Arabia was united for the first time in its history. It would also be the last time.

  A PERSIAN FACTOR?

  There is an alluring possibility about the ultimate reason behind this unprecedented unity: that the state of Medina was a response to Persian encroachment on the Arabian subcontinent. This has been mooted by at least one recent historian, and at first sight it is a perfectly plausible idea. The Persians had a powerful presence – a viceroy, no less – in the south-west, in Yemen; they had long been active and influential in the east, in the region of Bahrain; recently they had been scoring notable successes against the Byzantines in the north, in the Levant and even Egypt. It does all look like a triple-pronged attack – not unlike how Shi’i Iran’s influence in Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain and now Yemen feels to the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the states of the Gulf littoral. Further odd pieces of evidence may support the idea of widespread Persian penetration, like the claim that Khalid ibn Sinan al-Absi (acknowledged by Muhammad as the last prophet before himself) saved Arabia from wholesale conversion to the Persian state religion, Zoroastrianism: he had gone the rounds of the peninsula’s growing number of Zoroastrian fire-temples, snuffing out the sacred flames which wer
e the focuses of their worship.

  The idea that Muhammad’s unitary state was a closing of Arab ranks in the face of Persia’s forward policy may, therefore, not be unfounded. The evidence, however, is circumstantial. Like crop circles, the grand designs of geo-politics often only become apparent from the heightened perspective of future historians; at the time, on the ground, they can be invisible. Also like crop circles, the grand designs may never have been what they are claimed to be. In Muhammad’s mind, standing up to the Persians may well have been a factor in his design of a new state. He had a clear aim to unite the tribes, as Kindah had tried to do, and also to forge a greater unity that took in the peoples of the old southern civilizations. Part of the new, all-embracing Arab identity had been expressed in the apposition of ’arab to ’ajam, of Arabs to non-Arabs, and especially to Persians. And there is a hint in the main piece of evidence, the Qur’an, to support the idea of the anti-Persian beginnings of Medina – a statement that Muslims will rejoice at a coming victory of the Byzantines, presumably over their main, Sasanian Persian foes. In the end, however, it is only a hint. Moreover, Muhammad’s successor Abu Bakr would actively court the Persian interlopers in Yemen, and use them against his Arab opponent, al-Aswad. On the ground, in real time, realpolitik is what counts, not grand designs.

  THE WORST IN UNBELIEF

  Within the unprecedented unity Muhammad was creating there were inbuilt dangers. The new community inherited the strengths of the Meccans’ trans-Arabian network, that compact between urban traders and nomad traffickers; it also inherited its tensions. The a’rab, the badw proper, had always been distinguished by their love of autonomy: it has been called the basic premise of their life. But that clearly would not fit happily into the new, all-encompassing ummah with its total obedience to Allah’s will as expressed by Muhammad.