Muhammad was wary of the a’rab. It is claimed that he said, ‘I have never heard tell of an a’rabi whom I wished to set eyes on, unless it be Antarah’, a famous poet and hero, son of a black slave mother. Muhammad and his ummah needed the raiding capabilities of the a’rab in order to expand; at the same time, these capabilities had to be carefully controlled so as not to threaten the ummah itself. To put the dilemma another way, the bedouin a’rab were dynamic, but also potentially disruptive and destructive; the settled members of the ummah contributed security and stability, but also the likelihood of stasis. The two forces pulled in different directions, and the danger was that the ummah would be pulled apart. Muhammad’s close companion and second successor, Umar, would describe the bedouins as, ‘the origin of the Arabs and the material of Islam’. But much of that material was raw and very volatile. Allah Himself had described them in the Qur’an as
the worst in unbelief and hypocrisy.
In contrast, Muhammad said that, ‘faith is Yamani, wisdom is Yamani’, and by ‘Yamani’ he was almost certainly referring to the traditional antithesis of the a’rab, the settled, civilized peoples of al-Yaman, the South.
BELONGING AND BELIEVING
The a’rab exasperated Muhammad because they added another tension to his unifying project – between islam and iman, ‘submission’ and ‘belief’:
The a’rab say, ‘We are believers.’ Say [to them, Muhammad], ‘You are not “believers.” Say instead, “We have submitted [aslamna],” for belief has not yet entered your hearts.’
The idea of belief-less or faith-less a’rab recurs throughout the Islamic half of Arab history. Sometimes it takes a comic turn. For example, a group of bedouin were overheard early in the eighth century praying, in verse, for rain:
Between us, Lord, things really should better –
Like old times, when You made our weather wetter.
So send us rain, O You with no begetter!
In the last verse, the rude bedouins are casting aspersions on God’s parentage: ‘You with no begetter!’ means, bluntly, ‘you bastard!’ (They are also, of course, hitting the theological nail on the head: God is uncreated, unbegotten.) In recent years, too, far from the idea that life in the wilderness inspires contemplation of the eternal, there was a general assumption among many urban Muslims that the wilder nomad Arabs may have been nominally Muslim but had as much sense of the divine as the wilder beasts.
To return to the Qur’anic verse, while it is revealing about attitudes to the bedouins, it also has a further and very surprising import: that one could apparently be a muslim, a ‘submitter’, without being a mu’min, a ‘believer’. Islam, it implies, is outward, public, impersonal, to do with society and politics; iman, dwelling in the heart, is inward and private, to do with one’s personal relationship with Allah. Muhammad, building a community and a state, was well aware of the two-track nature of religion. It has even been said, perhaps justly, that ‘It is very doubtful that Muhammad ever thought of the socioreligious community he founded in Medina as a universal religion’. Plenty of Qur’anic verses show that Jews and Christians were believed to share in iman, in that heartfelt belief, by virtue of their monotheism; they could also become tribute-paying associates of the Islamic state. The faith-less bedouin, conversely, could be full, ‘card-carrying’ members of that state as muslims, submitters, without believing inwardly in its spiritual truths. But perhaps even to describe the community of Medina as ‘socioreligious’ could be misleading, given the resonances of the English word ‘religion’: scholars who have studied the reaction to Muhammad’s revolution by contemporary poets – the nearest thing to objective observers – see the majority of them as considering Islam to be ‘a social and political movement rather than a profound spiritual experience’.
Islam began as a profound spiritual experience with Muhammad’s Meccan revelations. Given time and space, it was to regain that spirit. But during the first state-forming decade at Medina in particular, material considerations could at times outweigh spiritual ones: the important thing was to get everyone, including the Meccan aristocracy and the a’rab, on your side – whether by subduing them, subsidizing them, or suborning them with the lure of booty – whatever they believed in their heart of hearts. It didn’t matter that the spirit was weak as long as the flesh was willing. Provided public conduct was correct, joining the praying ranks, saying ‘Yes’ to the earthly leader as well as saying ‘Amen’ to God, conscience could remain a private matter. It is the converse of the state of affairs in the individualist ‘West’ today, where institutional religion has nose-dived, but where many individuals keep up a deep spirituality. The sociologist Grace Davie has described their condition as that of ‘believing without belonging’. In Muhammad’s Arabia, the a’rab of that Qur’anic verse belonged without believing.
There is an even greater difference, however, between seventh-century Arabia – perhaps between the past of the world as a whole – and the ‘West’ now. In the former, belonging and believing were contrapuntal but complementary terms, two poles of the same globe; between the poles lay a sliding scale, from politics to piety. Arabic din, Sanskrit dharma, Latin religio, might all be rendered by the English ‘religion’, but that last word, with its post-Protestant focus on personal piety, skews the English reader to one of the two poles, to seeing religion as primarily a matter of belief. Believing is only part of it. Belonging is the other part, and humans have been saying ‘Amen’ to God and ‘Yes’ to Caesar in the same breath as long as gods and caesars have existed. Islam, with its doctrine of total political and theological tawhid, unitarianism, is only a heightened example of the phenomenon.
THE DEATH OF MUHAMMAD
A doctrine of unitarianism, however, is not the same as a durable unity. Muhammad was to leave a degree of social and political cohesion unparalleled in all the already long history of Arabs. But he also left a question hanging – that of a successor. Answered unequivocally, it might have guaranteed the unity for at least some of the equally long Arab history after him. The question remains unanswered still.
Towards the end of February 632, Muhammad led his followers from Medina to his Meccan birthplace in what came to be known as the Farewell Pilgrimage. The sermon he preached at its culmination – from camel-back, in the style of his old inspiration, the itinerant preacher Quss ibn Sa’idah – began with a premonition of his own death: ‘I do not know if shall meet you in this place again, after this year.’ His sermon went on speak of the sacrosanctity of blood and property, and of matters such as marital relations and legacies. But perhaps its most striking passage is this:
By Allah I bear witness, O my people, that your Lord is one, and that your father is one: for you are all the children of Adam, and Adam is of dust. The most noble of you in the sight of Allah is he who is most pious. Allah is the Most Knowing, the Omniscient. Nor is any Arab superior to any non-Arab, except in piety.
Some versions add, ‘nor is black superior to white’. If Muhammad had not always thought of the community he founded as universal, then perhaps this was another premonition – that his message would one day reach around the globe. Then again, the community of Medina was already heterogeneous, and included Persian and black slaves and freedmen. Whatever else it means, it is a clear statement of inclusiveness.
Despite that first intimation, of mortality, the matter Muhammad did not touch on in his sermon was that of succession. It arose all too soon and too suddenly: two months after his return to Medina, he fell ill with the fever that would kill him. During his last ten days he was unable to lead prayers, but said that his companion Abu Bakr should do so in his place. This, and the fact that this same, closest companion had also led the pilgrimage the previous year, were taken by most as evidence that Muhammad wished Abu Bakr to succeed him at the head of the community. Not everyone was to agree immediately, however, and although the lines of contention within the community were at first no more than hairline cracks, and soon concealed by the nee
d for consensus, in less than thirty years the craquelure would widen into chasms.
Muhammad died in the arms of his youngest wife, Abu Bakr’s daughter A’ishah. In view of all the pious memories that would spiral out of his life – those potential million traditions – it would be hard to write a thoroughly objective obituary of Muhammad the prophet. It is almost harder to obituarize Muhammad the man, except in fragments: he was a fan of horse-racing, but didn’t mind losing; he would eat sitting on the ground, and would lick his fingers; he never beat a slave; he was never seen to laugh with fully open mouth. Regarding the last point, he did not lack a sense of humour, and rather dry humour. Once an old woman asked him if Allah let old women into paradise, and when he told her that He didn’t, she wept – at which Muhammad said, ‘He changes them first into nubile virgins!’ Muhammad also had a sense of fun, and was once spotted on all fours with his little grandsons al-Hasan and al-Husayn on his back, calling out to them, ‘O what a fine camel you’ve got!’ These glimpses have the feel of anecdotes that one couldn’t, and wouldn’t, make up. But many of the less impressionistic elements of the picture are missing – even how old he was. Suggestions as to his age at death varied between sixty and sixty-five lunar years, but doubts about the dating of the Day of the Elephant could mean that he was older.
It is said that, like some of the famous pre-Islamic warriors, Muhammad rarely appeared in public unveiled. With time he has become ever more invisible, veiled in ever denser layers of piety. For most Muslims the very idea of physically portraying him is sacrilege. Even in the looser tradition of Shi’i Iran, other prophets may be depicted, but Muhammad’s face is always shown as a blank.
LEGACY
One scholar who has studied the subject at length has claimed that ‘the concept of ’arab [had been] on the verge of disappearing altogether’ before Muhammad. And yet the concept hadn’t disappeared: it was aired regularly if infrequently in pre-Islamic poetry; it was a rarely articulated concept, but by no means a dying one. ’Arab, tribal nomads, and Arabians in general, had already become Arabs, an ethnic group with a language and an identity; contact with ’ajam, those who could not speak Arabic, had given them solidarity by reflex; and now prophecy had – at least for the time being – given them unity, a collective will guided, as in the old South Arabian non-tribal peoples, by a shared deity.
What Muhammad did was to give that Arab identity, whose deepest foundation was language, a new and durable prominence. His greatest legacy, the Qur’an, reminds its hearers time and again that Allah’s final word to mankind is in the Arabic tongue. Muhammad had ‘gathered the Arabs together upon the word of Islam’, and had gathered the political word of Arabs like no one before or since. In turn, this unified word and united will gave Arabs the potential, at last, to rule others. As yet, however, the potential was unrealized; perhaps even unrecognized. Muhammad is said to have prayed for the fall of Ghassan and Kindah, but not for the fall of Persia and Byzantium. However broad his spiritual horizons were, his political purview seems to have been limited to the arabophone world.
The question now was what would happen next. As was the case with the bedouin a’rab, by no means all of those who had answered Muhammad’s call had embraced the spiritual ‘faith’ – iman – that gave rise to this call. But they had all signed up to a social contract. It was not a secular contract as described by Europeans of the Enlightenment, in which citizens surrender liberties in return for protection by state institutions, but rather a contract with Allah: He would protect and direct His people, acting as their collective will, in return for their surrender – islam – to Him of their individual will, and for their payment of dues in the form of prayers, pilgrimages and property taxes.
The idea of habl Allah, that sacred social contract, or covenant, with a supreme deity, had worked reasonably well for centuries in the old Sabaean south. There, allied peoples signing up to it were allowed to hold on to their own identity and independence in the form of their old gods: it was a theocratic state, but theologically loose and decentralized. The covenant of the Jews with Jehovah, too, had worked tolerably efficiently: the deity was unassailably One, but as long as the Jews had an independent political state He inspired a series of spokesmen and spokeswomen – prophets – to reveal His will to His people through changing times and circumstances. What Muhammad had founded was different: it was a theocratic state, and not only rigorously monotheistic but also monoprophetic. Muhammad was the Seal of the Prophets, and if revelation had started with Adam, it had stopped with him. In the relay of revelation, he was the last recipient of the baton. There was no concept of a Holy Spirit to inspire the community world without end and to reinterpret revelation through successive and changing ages. Muhammad’s state was thus extraordinarily centralized, not geographically but temporally. History, in a sense, had ended, or entered an eternal present that would become an ever-present past. As with Francis Fukuyama’s more recent pronouncements, however, rumours of the end of history are usually exaggerated. With the end of revelation, a major theme of history – God’s relationship with His creation – had indeed ended. But earthly events continued. The clock had stopped, but time went on.
Ibn Khaldun was to write with 750 years of hindsight that ‘Arabs can only attain kingship through prophecy’. So far, that kingship extended no further than the central western Arabian region of the Hijaz, albeit with a web of treaty relationships extending over much of the rest of the Arabs’ ‘island’. And since Muhammad was the prophet to end all prophecy, would even that kingship die with him? It nearly did. For the immediate moment, however, things didn’t fall apart. Neither did history end. But it might be said to have held its breath: for it was clear that a change had come over Arabdom, even if the change might not have seemed as radical then as it did to the later developers and definers of Islam.
Something of the nature of the change could and can still be seen one hundred metres from where I’m writing this.
OUT OF THE RUINS
The Great Mosque of San’a was built in 627, by Muhammad’s express command, in the Persian viceroy’s garden. The viceregal residence loomed over it – the multi-storey Sabaean palace of Ghumdan, itself already 400 years old, with its alabaster windows and hollow bronze birds and beasts on its parapets that shrieked and roared when the wind blew through them. The Great Mosque incorporated material from the dismantled Great Church of San’a, built by the Christian Ethiopian occupiers a century before (mosaics and columns from the church would also be reused in the Meccan Ka’bah). Much of that architectural salvage material was itself inspired by Byzantine models, with acanthus capitals and other classical motifs; one capital still bears a discreet Christian cross. Muhammad fixed the limit of the San’a mosque at a stone called al-Mulamlamah, now buried beneath the floor by later accumulations and extensions but still indicated by a marker. Presumably the stone had some ancient significance to have been given a name that was known as far away as Mecca. The mosque also incorporated the tomb of a revered local monotheist, Hanzalah ibn Safwan, supposedly a prophet sent to the Sabaeans. The building and its orientation to Mecca were new. But it was constructed among, and from, the remains of empires – those of the Byzantine-aligned Ethiopians and the Sasanian Persians. Moreover, it was also founded on, and both delimited and overshadowed by, an old and indigenous Arabian past. The San’a mosque is a scale model of the change wrought by Muhammad: it is a structure to accommodate a whole new society, but built from ancient materials and in a familiar setting.
To return to Medina, to the prototype of that new-old mosque, and to the bowing ranks that had amazed Abu Sufyan and Urwah: what had struck them so forcibly was neither the strangeness of some alien rite, nor the materials of its setting, but the new zeal activating and uniting their own Arab people – people who had been divided ever since they had existed. Perhaps those two observers had also both sensed how these newly united and energized Arabs might even build their own imperium out of the ruins of their neighbours�
�� actual, territorial empires, those of ‘the noble Persians and the Byzantines with their braided locks’. If so, they had sensed a basic motive force of history – how a shared ideology makes a society much more effective at conquering others. What they could never have guessed was just how quickly it would all happen, or how their local cult of Allah would become a culture, and then a global cultural hegemony that would long outlive any empire.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CRESCADERS
OPENINGS-UP
THE HARLOTS OF HADRAMAWT
It does not need saying that Muhammad is the dominant figure of the mid-point of Arab history, and a towering figure in human history as a whole. What must be said is that he is not a typical Arab: he was the product of his background, but he went beyond it; he has been carried so much further still, by the collective devotion over time of billions of followers, that he stands with one foot in history and the other in make-believe. Given their diversity from the start, and the fluidity of what their name actually means, ‘typical Arabs’ are hard to pin down. But the current of events that surged around and past Muhammad’s life swept many of his Arabian contemporaries along with it and set them on similar courses into new lives, often far in every way from their origins. Such journeys scattered them physically, but gave them a unity of experience: in a comparable way, the sons of poor Scots crofts and of rich English manors would share in the same British imperial experience. It is hard to capture the process but, occasionally, one Arab seems to summarize in a single life the journeys of many.
One such figure was al-Ash’ath, ‘the Tousled’. He was born in the southern Arabian region of Hadramawt, probably towards the end of the sixth century. Like the great poet of that earlier century, Imru’ al Qays, al-Ash’ath (or Ma’dikarib ibn Qays, to give him his proper but rarely used name) belonged to the ruling line of the tribe of Kindah. After its wanderings about the peninsula, its long semi-settled period in and around the mid-Arabian caravan town of Qaryat, its own pre-Islamic attempts to weld and to lead a union of Arabian tribes, and the final failure of these efforts, most of Kindah had migrated south and settled in Hadramawt. Here, in a complex of canyons sunk deep into a plateau of lunar barrenness, they began to lead a life cut off from Arabian events – until Muhammad’s envoys arrived. Inspired by the Prophet’s summons to join the growing tribal union, al-Ash’ath accompanied the envoys back to Medina in 631, that ‘Year of Delegations’, at the head of a group from Kindah and, like so many others, fell for the prophetic charisma. Also like many others, he agreed to marry his sister to Muhammad. The Prophet died, however, before the bridal caravan had even left Hadramawt.
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