We do not know the sister’s reaction to the news of her premature widowhood. But al-Ash’ath’s reaction to Muhammad’s death was the same as that of most Arabs: he broke off all allegiance to Medina. Many in his native Hadramawt were delighted: Islamic historians particularly mention ‘the Harlots of Hadramawt’, a group of women who sang and danced in celebration of the break. Apparently of noble families, one of the women is said to have been Jewish; the others were perhaps priestesses of the ancient cults, ‘married’ to their deities (hence the accusation of harlotry). They and the other Kindis may have thought themselves safe in their secluded wadi, 1,500 kilometres from Medina – until, with remarkable swiftness, an army from the distant city descended on them and exacted revenge from the disobedient Hadramis. The ‘harlots’ had their hands severed and, in an old form of punishment for subversive orators, their front teeth knocked out. Al-Ash’ath himself was besieged, but surrendered under guarantee of safe conduct. It was nearly his last deed: he forgot to put his own name in the document of surrender. Saved at the last moment, he was taken to Medina, where Muhammad’s successor Abu Bakr pardoned him and married him, as one did in polite circles, to his sister.
Following this slalom-like series of twists in fate and allegiance, al-Ash’ath entered the long straight out of Arabia. Momentum took him far. In 636 he fought (and lost an eye) at al-Yarmuk, the gloriously decisive Arab battle against the Byzantines. Soon after, he fought at al-Qadisiyyah, the gloriously decisive Arab battle against the Persians. He settled at al-Kufah, the new garrison town in southern Iraq, and from there went on a successful expedition to Azerbaijan in 646–7, where he may have acted for a time as governor. Following the great schism that would split Arab ranks, he took the part of Muhammad’s first cousin and son-in-law Ali against Mu’awiyah, leader of the Meccan ancien régime, and in 657 fought for Ali in the ingloriously indecisive inter-Arab battle of Siffin. In the wake of the slaughter, he was one of those who persuaded Ali to submit to the farrago of fudge that posed as arbitration between the foes. Al-Ash’ath died in al-Kufah in 661, and because of his disastrous advice has been reviled by the pro-Ali faction – the so-called Shi’ah, or Party, of Ali – ever since.
‘Typical’ is thus perhaps not the word for Ma’dikarib the Tousled; rather, he is a microcosm of Arabdom at its most active moment in history. Few other Arabs packed quite as much into a single lifetime, but within a couple of generations the lives of many were changed beyond recognition. At the end of the eventful first Islamic century, an Arab of the old school was still able to define happiness as ‘a pretty spouse, a spacious house, a fine horse tethered in the yard’. His son, however, had a new definition. Happiness was ‘flags that fly, thrones on high, people to cry, “Hail to our lord!”’ Arabs had always failed – al-Ash’ath’s would-be master-tribe of Kindah is a case in point – in their attempts to rule each other; in other words, to impose unity on themselves. It seemed to be easier to rule non-Arabs, and they quickly acquired a taste for it; not that the pretty women and horses were forgotten. But life became more complicated in other ways. Tribal Arabs had always sat on the democratic, or at least levelling, ground. Sitting on thrones may have been the new fashion, but thrones have to be competed for, and the more elevated the seat, the greater the danger of falls. It may not be coincidental that the usual word for a throne in Arabic, ’arsh, can also mean a bier for a corpse.
OVERWHELMED WITH VULTURES
The one great exception to the perennial failure of Arab attempts to unify themselves had been that of Muhammad. Now, on his death, his companions had to try to see his project through.
The first question was about the choice and nature of a leader to succeed the Prophet. His tribe, Quraysh, put their heads together and chose one of themselves: admittedly their choice, Abu Bakr, was not one of the Qurashi Establishment, but he was Muhammad’s closest companion, and the Prophet’s own choice to lead the community’s prayers in his final illness. (The very idea of a candidate from among the non-Qurashi native population of Medina seems to have been dismissed out of hand.) Abu Bakr’s ‘election’ was, like so much else, a continuation of pre-Islamic tribal practice; so too was his role as arbiter, not autocrat. But his title was new – khalifah, ‘successor’, hence the English ‘caliph’, to the Messenger of Allah – and in practice he would wield more authority than the old tribal sayyids. Also in practice, Abu Bakr took over and was then agreed upon: it was an election after the fact, a rubber-stamp, and a smudged one at that. For by no means all of Muhammad’s prominent companions accepted the result: Ali and other members of Muhammad’s Hashimi branch of Quraysh withheld their approval of the non-Hashimi Abu Bakr for six months. It was not the first contested change of rule in Arab history, and it would not be the last.
The second question came on the heels of the first, and was even more pressing: would there be anyone left to be led? For within a week or two of Muhammad’s death, as news of it began to do the rounds of the Arabian network, that unprecedented unity, the great socio-politico-religious caravan of ideas that he had set in motion and to which tribes across the peninsula had tagged on with apparent enthusiasm, began to fall apart. Like al-Ash’ath and his tribe of Kindah in Hadramawt, most of them thoroughly rejected the whole idea of any sort of central rule now that Muhammad was gone.
It was not that they particularly missed their old gods. Muhammad had realized that the chances of Arabs backsliding into a pagan past were real, but remote: ‘This world shall not pass away,’ he is claimed to have said, ‘until the buttocks of the women of Daws wiggle [again] around [the idol] Dhu ’l-Khalasah and they worship it as they were wont to do.’ In the mean time, the stone that represented Dhu ’l-Khalasah had been turned into the threshold of a mosque, to be trodden underfoot. Other pagan pockets had been summarily dealt with. In an Exorcist-like end, the goddess al-Uzza is supposed to have appeared to the Muslim hero Khalid ibn al-Walid, materializing as a ranting and dishevelled Abyssinian woman. Khalid cut her head in two, and she crumbled to dust and ashes before his eyes. Islamic legend not only deals her a death-blow, but de-arabizes her and makes her an Abyssinian. She is blackened literally as well as metaphorically.
Many Arabs had enjoyed a pragmatic and at times cavalier relationship with their old deities. If the gods didn’t come up with the goods, you snapped their divinatory arrows as the poet Imru’ al-Qays had done, or you called them bastards, like the sacrilegious bedouin in their rain hymn quoted in the previous chapter. On the move, you picked up cooking-pot-stones and a god-stone, and when you struck camp you left them behind. There was little love lost between the idols and their worshippers. So the problem following Muhammad’s death was not doctrinal. Rather, it was that most Arabs who had signed up to his project simply hadn’t grasped the political implications of the deal. The most important function of the old gods had been their political role: they had served as ‘totems’ for tribes or, on a much wider and more formal scale, for the sha’bs or peoples of the South. Now, Allah was the totem of a super-tribe, a total tribe, one that demanded totalitarian discipline – and taxes. It was precisely at the time when all these implications were sinking in that the news of Muhammad’s death spread. With few exceptions, the old tribes and peoples of Arabia quietly reasserted their autonomy of centuries that Muhammad had persuaded them to renounce for the past year or two. Often they continued to pray in the Muslim way; it was obviously a good idea to keep in with the supreme deity. As for paying taxes to His representatives on earth, they let the matter quietly drop.
This clearly wouldn’t do for the captains of Quraysh who had inherited Muhammad’s project. To give an idea of what was happening, it is worth quoting in full an exchange that is said to have taken place in AH 11 between the heroic exorcist of pre-Islamic goddesses, Khalid ibn al-Walid, and a prominent alleged ‘apostate’, Malik ibn Nuwayrah, a leader of the tribe of Yarbu’ (and the smiling chieftain described in Chapter 2). Different versions of the story exist, but the most usual one says th
at Malik had been one of the delegates visiting the Prophet, who appointed him to collect the alms-tax of his tribe. After the Prophet’s death, tribal leaders, including Malik, withheld taxes and thus ‘went back [on their agreement]’ (in its later sense, the verb irtadda would mean ‘apostasized’). Khalid ibn al-Walid was sent to threaten the defaulters, and confronted Malik.
‘I still perform the [Islamic] prayers,’ Malik said, ‘even if I do not pay the taxes.’
Khalid said, ‘Do you not know that prayers and taxes go together? Neither is acceptable without the other.’ To which Malik said,
‘That is what your companion [Muhammad] used to say.’
And Khalid replied, ‘Do you not then consider him your companion too? By Allah, you make me want to cut your head off!’ They wrangled at length in this way, until at last Khalid said,
‘I am indeed going to kill you.’ At which Malik said, ‘I suppose your companion ordered to do that as well.’
Khalid said, ‘You add insult to injury! Now I really am going to kill you.’
Before one of Khalid’s men struck his head off, Malik
turned to his wife, Umm Mutammim, and said to Khalid, ‘It is she who is the death of me,’ for she was an exceedingly beautiful woman.
Khalid’s ‘sentence’ was carried out; he used Malik’s head as the support for a cooking-pot until it was burned beyond recognition (another posthumous blackening); and, as Malik had foreseen, he took Umm Mutammim as his wife. Admittedly, the affair caused scandal in Medina: Malik had performed his devotions, even if he had not paid his dues, and had asserted to the last that he was still a Muslim. But the caliph, Abu Bakr, refused to punish Khalid. He was simply too valuable a commander to be alienated, and he was about to prove his worth in the greatest struggle for the life of the nascent state.
Other tribes went on praying but not paying. They were used to wearing religion lightly; but paying allegiance, let alone cash – or, rather, for most of Arabia, camels and other animals – was a much heavier and more distasteful burden. (At least if you lost camels in a tribal raid, you had a chance of getting them back; with a centralized, camel-taking state, the odds were stacked against you.) In their rebellion they often had forceful and inspiring leaders. These were not only old-fashioned tribal chiefs like Malik ibn Nuwayrah, but also a newly empowered kind of leader. For one aspect of Muhammad’s mission had been almost too successful, and the main danger to his project was not from old false idols, but from new false prophets. In one sense they were the sincerest form of flattery; in another, since the new ‘prophets’ were invariably old-style kahins, one can only imagine how piqued they had been by a man they saw as one of their own kind – Muhammad – doing so well. The great, bright wheel of fire that he had set in motion now began to give birth to numerous incendiary spin-offs.
The most prominent of the imitators was Musaylimah, known to Islamic historians as ‘the Liar’ – the false prophet par excellence. He gained a huge following in the east of the peninsula; like Muhammad, he had a muezzin to call his followers to prayer, and a ‘Qur’an’ for them to recite. This aped the inimitable rhythmic and rhyming prose of the original, but supposedly with very different content. The few alleged surviving passages from the book have the look, again, of black propaganda. For example,
Frog, daughter of two frogs! / Croak! What are you croaking? / Your top half in the water soaking, / your lower half in the mud poking! / The drinker you rile not, / the water you soil not. / We have half the earth and Quraysh the other half, but Quraysh are a hostile lot.
That last verse, however, was for a time not so far from the truth, at least in the confined world of the peninsula. It began as wishful thinking by Musaylimah, who suggested to Muhammad early in 632 that they should split Arabia 50:50; alternatively, Musaylimah would give his allegiance on condition that he should eventually take over from Muhammad. Given the totalitarian nature of Muhammad’s ideology, this cut no ice. The True Prophet’s death, however, was a fillip to the False Prophet’s cause, and at one point Musaylimah looked as if he would be a serious and ineradicable rival to the state of Medina. Abu Bakr despatched his tireless troubleshooter, Khalid ibn al-Walid. In the final clash, Musaylimah was killed, but so too were many Muslims – 700 or 1,700, according to different accounts.
Musaylimah’s cause had also been boosted when he joined forces – not just in warfare but also in worship and even in wedlock, by some accounts – with Sajah, a false prophetess in her own right. It is difficult to disentangle the broadsheet truth from the tabloid details with which historians of the winning side recorded this union, but Sajah may have been Christian, or at least influenced by the Christianity of her tribe. Whatever the case, she became a good Muslim on Musaylimah’s defeat. So too did Tulayhah, yet another soi-disant prophet with yet another ‘Qur’an’, when he too met defeat. Tulayhah, however, differed from his co-‘prophets’ in that he had started out as a nomadic tribal leader as well as a kahin; Musaylimah and Sajah were from settled hadar backgrounds that had long been infused with monotheistic ideas. Musaylimah, if his pseudo-Qur’an is to be believed, disdained nomads: ‘You are better,’ he told his followers, ‘than the dwellers in tents of hair . . . Your cultivated fields, defend them!’ Conversely, Tulayhah’s prophetic pretences were disdained by his own bedouins, who simply wanted to escape having to pay camels to Medina. In the light of these failures, it is clear once again how much the success of Muhammad’s project was due to the way in which it brought together both hadar and badw, settled people and nomads, however shaky the equilibrium between them.
The south of the peninsula also had its own would-be prophet, the kahin al-Aswad al-’Ansi. His given name is disputed, so he is generally known by his black nickname (‘al-Aswad’ means ‘the Black One’). He was also known as Dhu ’l-Khimar, the One With The Veil – that sartorial feature of old-style hero-leaders. Islamic polemic would remove a letter-dot from this and make him Dhu ’l-Himar, the One With The Donkey, and would explain the name by making his most prominent follower a donkey that prostrated itself to him; it further characterized him as a conjuror, ‘who captivated hearts by his discourse’. Al-Aswad, like Musaylimah, scored some notable successes: he expelled the Muslim representative, and persecuted the Persian occupiers of the south who had so readily accepted Islam. (It is for this reason that the Marxist ideologues of the short-lived People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen would, in the 1970s, rehabilitate al-Aswad as an Arab nationalist. One man’s false prophet is another man’s freedom fighter; one man’s captivated heart is another man’s disabled mind.) In the end, Medina collaborated with the Persians of the south, and al-Aswad was defeated and subsequently killed by his own Persian wife, à la Mata Hari.
The Riddah, the ‘Backsliding’ on the deal with Medina (the ‘Apostasy’ in theocratic parlance), had spread around Arabia like wildfire. Just as swiftly, the forces from Medina went about stamping it out. We should not think in terms of generalized armed conflict: in the war in which I find myself today, thousands of tribesmen in thousands of square kilometres of difficult country have held out against the latest airborne, laser- and GPS-guided weaponry for over three years, so far; for the Medina regime to have subdued, militarily, not thousands but millions of square kilometres in under two years with the weaponry, transport and communications then available was utterly out of the question. Rather, there were a few high-profile military defeats, like that of Musaylimah; a few cases of exemplary punishment, like that of the ‘Harlots of Hadramawt’; a few of assassination, like that of al-Aswad; and the odd case of stormtrooper tactics, as in Bahrain, publicized in bloody verses to terrify others who might wish to resist:
We left Shurayh dead, striped in gore
like the dyed streaks of the border of a robe from Yemen.
We made the mother of Ghadban weep for her son,
and broke our lance in Habtar’s eye-socket.
We left Musma’ thrown down upon the ground,
hostage to hyenas
, overwhelmed with vultures.
Otherwise, deals were done, chiefs were cowed or coaxed, and that time-honoured but often forgotten factor of history – the apathy and inertia of the vast majority – did the rest. Allah was clearly on the side of His people.
Those spin-offs of Islamic unity had never got far off the ground. Muhammad’s caravan was back on track. Moreover, its Qurashi leaders were now both battle-hardened generals and experienced negotiators who could set their sights beyond their immediate ‘island’, into the further, northern part of the subcontinent, and into the future. Abu Bakr, no doubt sensing that the newly subdued Arabs needed a swift joint action to cement their renewed unity, activated the new communications technology once more and sent letters across Arabia summoning people to fight the Byzantines. His summons would have unimaginable success, but he himself did not live to see it. He died of natural causes in August 634.
Arabs Page 24
