Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  This last point highlights the fact that the one piece of kit Arab soldiers usually didn’t take at first was their womenfolk. A badawi, asked by his wife if she could take to the road with him, replied in verse,

  If you travel, saddle-soreness will make you lose your wits.

  The miles will tenderize you thighs and make you do the splits,

  And you’ll feel a cock was crowing down among your nether bits.

  Commanders sometimes took their wives along, especially, as we have seen in the case of Hind the wife of Abu Sufyan, if they could turn a good verse or two to egg on the warriors in battle. But in general the conquerors left their women at home. They didn’t need to take them: there were plenty to be had out there.

  Arab armies travelled light, and it is clear that they were also light in numbers. As with the alleged disproportion of ten to one or even twenty to one at al-Qadisiyyah, the giant-killer syndrome has led Islamic historians to exaggerate the size of enemy forces. In fact, Arab strategists had to cope with the reciprocal and very real problem of a continual and general shortfall on their own side. After the collapse of the main Persian army at al-Qadisiyyah, Arab forces drew breath for a few years. They secured the Sawad and the rest of the lowlands of Iraq for themselves; up on the Iranian plateau, however, Yazdgard the resolute shah was trying to muster support to safeguard the remainder of his empire. The second decisive showdown would take place at Nihawand, a key position that would unlock the Iranian plateau and lands far to the east; in the end, the battle there in 642 proved indeed to be the vital victory that opened further Asia to Arab forces. But for a time Caliph Umar was at a loss as to how he could take on another big Persian army. He considered mobilizing men from Syria and Yemen but realized that this could leave those two lands open to reconquest by, respectively, the Byzantines and the Ethiopians. In the end, he scraped together enough warriors from the garrison towns of newly conquered Iraq. It was a perennial problem of these years of expansion, in which the men of the thinly peopled peninsula set themselves against the armies of more populous lands: there were never enough Arab boots on the ground, or sandals in the sand. Garrisons were established in the main centres of new territory, but the Arab presence elsewhere was usually patchy at best. The answer, as we shall see, was to manufacture more Arabs by various means. But even then, there weren’t enough to go round. It was why what are billed as blockbusting conquests were often little more than raids that never got consolidated, and at least partly why the temporal Arab empire would also be a temporary one.

  A single generation of Arabs was scattered ‘fanwise’, as Philip Hitti nicely put it, across 6,000 kilometres of the Old World; but the material of the fan was painfully thin. According to one ‘very tentative’ estimate, perhaps half a million people emigrated from the peninsula in the first dozen or so years of the conquests. That sounds high. Ibn Khaldun gives a figure of 150,000 as the total number of northern and southern Arabian tribesmen in the time of Muhammad. That may be more accurate for the adult male population, but perhaps does not take into account all the settled southerners. Then again, by no means all of that number emigrated. If it is true that Umar managed to field 30,000 men at the battle of Nihawand, and that he was throwing into it as many men from the Iraqi garrisons as he could spare, then it is clear that he was not troop-rich. It is almost certain that those early conquests involved the movement from the peninsula of a six-figure total of people, nearly all of them men. More than that it is hard to say.

  It was the size of the fan itself and the suddenness of its opening that were remarkable. By no means unique were five of Muhammad’s first cousins, all sons of his uncle al-Abbas by the same mother, Umm al-Fadl: they died variously in Medina, al-Ta’if, Syria, Tunisia and Samarqand. ‘How far between his birth and his death,’ said a less-travelled sibling of that last brother, Qutham. (Qutham was to have a far-reaching posthumous existence, too: known locally as Shah-i-Zinda, ‘the Living King’, his tomb-complex is still the major destination in the city at the end of the golden road.) The sons of al-Abbas not only went forth, from western Arabia to North Africa and Central Asia, but also multiplied: in AH 200 al-Abbas’s descendants were found to number 33,000 – a creditable but credible figure. In those first Islamic centuries, Arabs made up for their lack of numbers. But they did so almost exclusively by concubinage and marriage with women of the conquered lands – Berbers, Copts, Aramaeans, Iranians, Kurds, Turks and many others. The label of ‘Arab’ was passed down the patriline but, generation by generation, the material of the ‘fan’ became even thinner.

  The five Abbasid brothers were especially memorable: their patronymic was that of a future 500-year dynasty. But even of the others who were scattered over huge areas, we can still follow ‘footprints’ of one sort or another. Most often the traces are bloodlines, religiously remembered, that link present generations in Borneo or Brooklyn with seventh-century Mecca. Sometimes there are fainter tracks to follow, linguistic ley lines: the same very unusual dialect feature, for example, found isolated in the present-day Arabic of Uzbekistan and in a region by Lake Chad, originates from a small area of eastern Arabia, and almost certainly from the time of the seventh-century migrations.

  The migrations took place almost entirely on dry land: Caliph Umar had warned his generals to go nowhere that could not be reached by camel. But there were occasional sea expeditions, including in the late 630s a short-cut from Oman across the Arabian Sea to Sind, the lowland regions of present-day Pakistan. Umar was not pleased by the news, and said that men on ships are nothing but ‘dud ’ala ’ud’, ‘ticks on sticks’. That first attempt on Sind was repulsed, but it would be taken and held early in the eighth century. Elsewhere the diaphanous Arab fan would continue to unfold until, by the middle of the eighth century, its tips reached the Central Asian borders of China and penetrated, briefly, those of France.

  Arabs may have been miraculously motivated, but they were not invulnerable. An Arab army of 10,000 was wiped out in the 660s in the gorges of Tabaristan, south of the Caspian. Sixty years later, an Arab expedition had a notable success against Turkish forces in Central Asia, but failed to follow it up and was repulsed. The reason, according to a satire of the Arab commander, was that he and his men were too busy with the female captives:

  You fought the foe, then fun and games allured you double-quick:

  Your sword stayed in its scabbard while, instead, you drew your prick.

  The ultimate reason for Arab failures in Central Asia would be disunity, swords drawn against each other. But despite the breaks for rest and recreation, in that first heady burst of expansion the only serious barriers there, and at the far western end of the known world, would be physical. ‘O Lord,’ the Qurashi general Uqbah ibn Nafi’ is said to have exclaimed as he rode his horse into the Atlantic surf in Morocco in the 680s, ‘if the sea did not stop me, I would go through the lands like Dhu ’l-Qarnayn, defending your faith and fighting the unbelievers!’ Dhu ’l-Qarnayn, ‘the Two-Horned One’, is an obscure figure who appears in the Qur’an, sometimes taken to be an ancient South Arabian king who achieved legendary far conquests, sometimes associated with Alexander the Great. Whatever his real identity, the seventh-century Qurashi commander was drawing his inspiration from a potent past – the South Arabian past that underlies Islam, and perhaps also the Hellenistic past to which Arabs were becoming heirs, geographically and culturally.

  At its greatest, the Arab empire was as big as Alexander’s ephemeral imperium; as big as or bigger than the Roman. It had also become something more complex in form and more organic in nature than Hitti’s unfolding fan: it had grown into that vigorous, vegetal ataurique or ‘arabesque’, throwing out new growths but also sending down new roots into other cultures, hybridizing across the Old World.

  READING AL-BALADHURI

  The fertile complexity and hybridity would come later. For the moment, despite the rhetoric of Uqbah at his Atlantic Ne Plus Ultra, the earlier accounts of the Arab eruption have li
ttle to do with faith, and more to do with taxing unbelievers than fighting them.

  Writing had played an important part in the initial phases of Muhammad’s project. But the great secular writing revolution would take place only from the second Islamic century onwards, so there is little contemporary documentation of the conquests in Arabic. Third-century historians, however, claim to have preserved oral records. One of the most thorough writers was al-Baladhuri, who died in Baghdad in AD 892 (and got his surname from an addiction to baladhur, a tropical nut supposed to increase powers of memory). His contents page begins with Muhammad’s move from Mecca to Medina, follows the Prophet’s own campaigns and then the post-Muhammadan battles of the War of Apostasy in their vortex-like flourish around the peninsula, before that fanwise unfolding across two continents and the corner of a third: the Levant, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, then the eastward unfurling through the Persian empire into Azerbaijan and Khurasan, to Sind.

  When Uqbah said he was ‘defending the faith’, he was actually bending the truth back on itself: he was, after all, speaking at the westward limit of the longest concerted offensive campaign since those of Alexander, a thousand years before. ‘Propagating the faith’ might have been nearer the mark; but when one gets into al-Baladhuri’s text, it is remarkable how little the fight against the unbelievers aimed to unite them in one true universal religion, and how much it was to do with raiding them and imposing taxes. The conquests were less a matter of hearts and minds than of pockets and purses. Four centuries and more on, the ethical system symbolized by the Cross would have little enough, in all conscience, to do with the so-called ‘Crusades’ of the European states. (Bedouin Arabs have no monopoly on raiding and booty. Of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, which the civilized Venetian merchants turned into a sack of their fellow Christians at Constantinople, Geoffrey of Villehardouin wrote: ‘Never since the world was created had so much booty been won in any city’ – and that may be no exaggeration.) It is the same with the Crescent and what might be called – if a little anachronistically, as the crescent moon only became closely associated with Islam later on – the ‘Crescades’.

  The alleged text of the protection agreement imposed by Iyad ibn Ghanm on the Christians of al-Raqqah in northern Syria in 639 or 640 gives an idea of the conquerors’ priorities:

  In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful. This is what Iyad ibn Ghanm has granted to the people of al-Raqqah on the day he entered the city: He has granted them security for their persons, and their properties and churches shall likewise neither be destroyed nor occupied, provided they pay the poll-tax imposed on them, and provided they do not behave treacherously, and provided they do not build any new church or monastery and do not openly use prayer-clappers, or celebrate Easter, or display crosses. Allah is witness to this. ‘And Allah is sufficient as a witness.’

  Al-Baladhuri adds that the annual poll-tax was four gold dinars per adult male. (Exactly the same tax – four dinars’ weight or 17 grammes of gold, worth about $650 – was reimposed on Christians in the area by the so-called ‘Islamic State’ in 2014. They too have read their Baladhuri, even if they have not been so scrupulous about granting security.) To withhold tax after agreeing to pay it is often termed kafara. The verb has a more general sense, ‘to be a non-Muslim’ (and is the origin of the South African derogatory term ‘Kaffir’). But the fact that, in early accounts, it is usually to do with non-tax-paying rather than non-conversion shows where the conquerors’ interests lay.

  The pragmatism of the system is clear from occasional tax exemptions. For example, the Mardaite Christians of northern Syria, who agreed to raid alongside the Muslims, were excused the poll-tax. So too were the Christian Arab tribe of Taghlib, who successfully argued that, as Arabs, they should not have to pay the tribute imposed on conquered barbarians. Islam in its expansive period had as much to do with economics and ethnicity as with ethics. And Arabs were more often than not ‘religious’ – in the other, older sense of ‘scrupulous’ – in the application of their rules: the value of masonry taken from Christian al-Hirah to be reused in the nearby new town of al-Kufah was regarded as tax-deductible. Equally, physical violence to civilians (as opposed to economic violence, including enslavement, because of resistance or non-payment of taxes) was exceptional. One of the rare exceptions was Istakhr, the capital of the Persian heartland of Fars, which surrendered, then revolted and resisted long and hard. Supposedly, 40,000 of its inhabitants were massacred. But in general, Arabs knew perfectly well about geese and golden eggs.

  It would be unfair to call the conquests a mob protection racket on a massive scale. But that, in large part, is the nature of conquest and empire. To be cynical, it is also the nature of the social contract in its Enlightenment sense: you pay taxes, the state protects you; you do not pay taxes, the state punishes you (but probably does not kill or enslave you). Moreover, the Arabic terminology invites the comparison as, technically speaking, poll-tax-paying non-Muslims are ahl al-dhimmah, ‘protected people’. For that matter, the whole business of religion in its developed, ‘political’ form is underpinned by the notion of dues and payments: din, ‘religion’, is a cognate of dayn, ‘debt’.

  But there were more sophisticated ways of making money from the conquests than imposing poll-tax. There was also kharaj, a tax on agricultural land. A large-scale example of such taxation was that imposed on the rich date-producing Sawad of Iraq, with its ancient and carefully maintained irrigation system and its half a million non-Arab, ‘Nabataean’ peasant farmers – a number perhaps not far off that of the entire Arab population. Magnet of raiders from the days of Babylon to the battle of al-Qadisiyyah, the Sawad was given special treatment as public kharaj land. Caliph Umar, who knew the propensities of tribal Arabs all too well, said, ‘I fear that if I divided the Sawad up, you would squabble over the water’. Ali ibn Abi Talib put it to them even more bluntly: ‘I would have divided the Sawad between you, if you weren’t going to smash each other’s faces in.’ As it was, the annual revenue of the region plunged from a hundred million dirhams at the time of the conquest to forty million at the end of the seventh century.

  The conquerors also employed other more sustainable means of generating income and maximizing profits. The very first priority on ‘opening’, that is, conquering, a town was often that of opening a market in concert with the townsfolk. For example, the people of al-Ruha, now Urfa in south-eastern Turkey, ‘opened the gates of the city, and set up a market for the Muslims at the [main] gate’. This, as we shall see later in the founding of the new Arab towns, was an important stage in the long and still ongoing process of social engineering by which pastoral nomads turn into settled traders, bedouins become businessmen. It was a process that had been in train at least since the time of that third-century bedouin emporium, Qaryat Dhat Kahl. Now it had been given new impetus, and was the other ‘conversion’, less obvious but no less important than the religious one, brought about by Islam. Muhammad, after all, came from mercantile Mecca – the Qur’anic umm al-qura, the Mother of All Emporia – and was himself a merchant, a prophet who knew about profits. Markets and mosques sat side by side from Medina onwards.

  Booty remained hugely important too. Caliph Umar managed to mobilize extra tribal forces for the Iraq campaign by tempting them with percentages: he offered the chief of the tribe of Bajilah, Jarir, a third of the loot (of course, after the customary caliphal fifth had been deducted). This same Jarir and another Arab chief would squabble violently over who had dealt the mortal blow to a Persian commander in the battle of al-Nakhilah – the killer had the right to despoil the corpse. Very occasionally, loftier motives are put forward: al-Mughirah, who vandalized Rustam’s precious carpet, is said to have told the Persian general that he didn’t want his money – only that Rustam and his people should embrace Islam; but if they refused, he went on, they would be fought, ‘until they pay the poll-tax with willing submission and are humbled’. Often the booty came in human form,
as many as ‘40,000 head’ of slaves, for example, taken in a thirty-month period in the Iranian region of Sistan. And just how far the business of raiding had gone beyond its parochial, peninsular origins can be seen in the figures from the second, successful Sind expedition, masterminded in the early eighth century by al-Hajjaj, the governor of Iraq. He admitted that the campaign had cost sixty million dirhams, but it netted twice as much: ‘We have cooled our rage’, he said, ‘and taken our revenge, and profited by sixty million dirhams and Dahir’s head’, Dahir being the defeated ruler of Sind. Raiding had become a multinational industry; revenge was less important than revenue.

  Arab schoolchildren today learn that the futuhat, the conquests or ‘openings-up’, were about ‘spreading Islam’. That is the rhetoric, and it was indeed one end result of that extraordinary era. The reality on the ground, at the time, was that there wasn’t much incentive to spread Islam, at least in the sense of getting other people to convert; instead, Islam acted as a unifying ideology empowering Arab conquest and colonialism. Al-Hajjaj, ever keen to store up treasure on earth if not in heaven, actively dissuaded Sawad peasants from converting. On one occasion he even expelled converts from the Arab new towns, and made them pay the poll-tax of the unbeliever. Admittedly, the particularly horrible al-Hajjaj is not typical of administrators in the first Islamic century. Neither, however, was the saintly Umayyad Caliph Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, whose humility, piety and choice of good governors inspired major conversions both in post-conquest Sind and among the Berbers of North Africa. They are the extremes, the exceptions; the rule that lies between them is that trade follows raid in swift succession, while faith lags far behind. According to one figure, by AD 750 only about 10 per cent of the inhabitants of the conquered lands had embraced Islam. That figure is admittedly conjectural. What is not in doubt is that one will search al-Baladhuri’s 450-page history of the conquests largely in vain for claims to moral or spiritual motivation. Perhaps that motivation is meant to be taken as read; perhaps it simply wasn’t there.