Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  THE BRIDES OF MEDINA

  The openings-up would work both ways. As one commentator has put it, playing with the Arabic double meaning, they were not just a fath, a conquest, of lands; they were also a fath, an opening, of Arab minds to the intellectual heritage of those lands. But the reverse or complementary conquest was not only cerebral. Medina, the new bastion of Islamic arabness, was ‘invaded’ by Persian brides – first and most notably, three daughters of the last Sasanian ruler, who were married into the first generation of the new nobility: their husbands were the sons of Abu Bakr, Umar and Ali, the first, second and fourth caliphs. The consequences would be far-reaching. For example, of Muhammad’s two lines of descendants via his grandsons al-Hasan and al-Husayn (the sons of Ali), the entire Husayni line, now millions strong, goes back to that Persian mother. The new blood seemed to revive flagging Qurashi lineages, for the children of those first unions turned out to be ‘the most upright and learned’ people in Medina. Moreover, the marriages set an immediate trend for fathering children on captured Persian women; before, such offspring had been regarded as socially inferior. The flipside was that, in almost no time, the chaste Arabic of Medina and even of Mecca began to be invaded by Persianisms from the interloping mother-tongue. And not only Persian morphemes and Persian mothers began to take over the holies of Arab holies, but also Persian manners – the supposed love of luxury, the unmanning languor of those arch-‘Orientals’:

  When Umar saw that the Emigrants [from Mecca] and the Ansar [the native Medinese] were living luxuriously, and that many of them were aping the Persian way of life, he told them, ‘You must be proper Ma’add Arabs and keep yourselves rough.’

  (Ma’add is one of the blanket names for the ‘northern’, principally bedouin, tribes.) Umar’s plea would be in vain. What he saw as cultural miscegenation at Medina was all a foreshadowing of the Arab–Persian cultural mass marriage that would take place a century later.

  Even at this time, however, another reverse invasion had begun – an infiltration of the Arab tribes, and not just by captured women but by converted men. Almost universally in the early period of Islam, a non-Arab could only become a Muslim by first becoming a mawla, often translated as ‘client’ but more precisely an affiliate, of an Arab tribe. Freed slaves generally became the mawlas of their former owners’ tribes, but the relationship could be entered into by anyone, by mutual agreement. Given the small numbers of tribal Arabs relative to the populations of the lands they had occupied, the mawlas soon came to outnumber the original Arabs. By the end of the seventh century, Arabs in the new Iraqi city of al-Kufah would go about on formal occasions each accompanied by between ten and twenty mawla followers. Mawlas were, in theory, totally assimilated to the tribe as a political structure, sharing in its ’asabiyyah or solidarity. But distinctions of blood were rigorously maintained. Indeed, the distinctions were said to maintain themselves: when a group of Shaybani tribesmen and their mawlas were captured and beheaded by rivals, a witness swore that the pools of tribal and mawla blood had refused to mix. In time, however, the inevitable happened, and even the blood blurred; mawlas and tribesmen, after all, bore the same sort of names – ‘A son of B son of C . . . al-Shaybani’, for example. Within a couple of centuries of its moment of highest definition and greatest visibility, Arab identity – as a group not only with its own distinctive language, but also with a scripture, a mission and unbounded energy – was in flux once more. As Ibn Khaldun was to put it, the South Arabian sha’b peoples had been mixed from the start. As for the supposedly pure-blooded northern Arabs, those tenders of tribal trees and pruners of patrilines, with the growth of Islam and their minglings with Persians and others, ‘the tribes disappeared’.

  Sometimes the process of grafting non-Arabs onto the Arab family tree would be obvious, as with the arrant faking of a pure Arab pedigree by the probably ethnic Persian Yahya ibn Hubayrah, in an attempt to gentrify himself when he landed the job of wazir or chief minister to the later Abbasid Caliph al-Muktafi. In the vast majority of cases, however, the process is invisible – except in flashes of satire such as that of the poet Abu Nuwas, poking fun at an ‘Arab manufactured in the marketplace’, who was a humble mawla in town, but played his role as a ‘genuine’ bedouin to perfection when he was in the country. Occasionally an ‘Arab’s’ non-Arab origin came to light unexpectedly: when the grammarian al-Farra’ discovered ‘something appalling’ in the ancestry of his colleague al-Sikkit – that the poor man’s forebears hailed from the infra-dig Persian province of Khuzistan – he shut himself away for forty days in order to avoid seeing him (it was another case of pots and kettles: al-Farra’ himself was of non-Arab, Daylamite origin). But, in general, being Arab was to become more like being a cives romanus or a citizen of the United States; and in time, when the Others – Daylamites, Turks, Mongols – took over the empire that Arabs had won, being genuinely Arab mattered less and less. Genealogy, one of the great passions of Arabs at least since the days of the Safaitic desert graffiti, would become more an art than a science, and a pretty abstract art at that.

  That said, the Arab–Persian marriage in particular, and the whole relationship of Arabs with others in general, has never been easy or equal. It was largely non-Arabs who would ‘open up’ Islam, incubating it, nurturing it and making it the world faith it has become. In a sense, Arabs have always struggled against this reflexive opening-up, struggled to maintain not some imagined racial ‘purity’, which in reality they have never had, but at least to preserve their primacy and patriarchy – to maintain their missionary position in both of its senses. As with the Persian shah wanting to marry the sister of the Arab king of al-Hirah, it would never do for the non-Arab to be the one on top. The technical term for marriage of an Arab man to a non-Arab woman is hujnah, which suggests mere ‘hybridization’. The term for the opposite union is iqraf, which also means ‘loathsome infection’. At the battle of al-Yarmuk, Hind had egged on the Arab troops by telling them to ‘prune’ the uncircumcised Byzantines with their swords. Another Arab war-poetess, Azdah, went one further in a battle against the Persians: ‘If you lose,’ she cried, ‘the uncircumcised ones will penetrate us!’ She was playing on an old and terrible fear, one that has never quite been laid to rest.

  SKY OF DATES, EARTH OF GOLD

  It was not only the close encounter with others that was changing Arabs. Further changes came from within, and were planned. After the great Arabian ‘Apostasy’ was put down in 633, a conscious policy of social engineering came into play. The Islamic community was an Arab (to begin with) super-tribe unified, like the old South Arabian sha’bs or peoples, by allegiance to a shared deity. Now, hijrah became a form of super-migration, a severance not just from one’s birthplace, but altogether from one’s Arabian roots. The severance enabled far conquest, or super-raids. It was Muhammad’s move to Medina, writ large.

  In fact, very large. The idea of hijrah has some similarities with the modern Zionist idea of mass-migration to a physical Promised Land. But it is that idea blown wide open: all lands are promised. The Wandering Zionist eventually settles in what he looks on as the land of his ancestors; the Wandering Arab forsakes the land of his ancestors and is potentially always on the move. As the Qur’an puts it in one of many passages encouraging travel,

  And Allah has made the earth for you as a carpet spread out,

  That you may go about therein on broad roads.

  In one sense this new and vastly expanded hijrah was a continuation of pre-Islamic tribal migrations; it was all part of an old, ever-extending figure in the unrolling carpet. And it was not haphazard: it was carefully, centrally designed and controlled. Control depended on the increasing use of writing, and on a growing network of posts. Above all, central policy aimed to create tractable masses of people who could be shifted and settled in garrison towns. As we have seen, hijrah was keenly promoted, and its reverse – ta’arrub, ‘re-arabization’ – equated with apostasy. It was even claimed that Muhammad had cursed anyone
who ‘turned bedouin’ (bada) after hijrah. One upshot of all this was that an ancient aspect of being Arab began to wither. You moved from your old dar a’rabiyyah, ‘bedouin home’, to your new dar hijrah, ‘migratory home’: in so doing, you abandoned your ’arab lifestyle, and ceased being of the ’arab in the oldest, herding-raiding sense of the word. In the linguistic sense you were still ’arabi, Arabic-speaking. But, as we shall see, even that was in jeopardy.

  The planned mass resettlements began as soon as Syria was conquered in 636. Arabs already there from pre-Islamic times were relocated within the country, and new nomads were shifted from the peninsula to settled areas. But the movement really took off with the foundation of the new cities called amsar, whose basic sense is that of ‘frontier outposts’. The obvious purpose of the amsar was to serve as bases for extending those frontiers. But an additional aim was to balance further the hadar–badw equation. This was done in two main ways. First, by being sent to the new towns along with other emigrants from the peninsula, the bedouins were ‘collectivized’ and their shawkah – their ‘sting’ or warlike potential – was pointed away from Medina. After the near-collapse of their project in the War of Apostasy, Umar and the other leaders in the Arabian capital must have sighed with relief to see the more troublesome tribesmen disappearing to new conquests beyond the horizon, far from the centre of power. (The policy, of course, spread the seeds of destruction for the future empire; one cannot plan for all contingencies.)

  Second, settlement in the new towns converted bedouin tribes not just from raiding to regular soldiering (or at least to raiding others rather than each other), but also to trading (or at least to getting others to do the trading and then taxing them). In addition to their other senses, the futuhat, as we have seen, were the ‘openings-up’ of new markets. For tribal Arabs, there were now ways of making a living that were more lucrative and more leisurely than rustling camels. The oral promotional literature played on this: according to one enthusiastic report on the new cities of al-Basrah, founded in 638, and its twin or slightly younger sister, al-Kufah, the streets of the amsar were paved with gold: ‘Our thickets are sugar-cane, our rivers are a marvel, the sky above us is fresh dates, the earth beneath us is gold.’ It could not have sounded more different from the parsimonious peninsula. Not, of course, that one could sink into opulent inactivity; not yet. The amsar may have been golden, but they were gilded garrisons. It was de rigueur to teach your sons swimming and horsemanship, and at any time you and they might be sent from relatively balmy al-Kufah to die in sweaty Sind, or from palmy al-Basrah to pine in distant Central Asia. Occasionally, such relocations were on a military-industrial scale: in the biggest, in 671, 50,000 men were moved from overcrowded, under-resourced al-Basrah to Marw, nearly 2,000 kilometres away.

  Relocation, collectivization and mass mobilization smack of Stalin. But the ethos in the new towns – that of militarism combined with market freedom, all in the employ of a young empire – has other parallels. Bernard Lewis felicitously saw al-Kufah, al-Basrah and the other major garrison cities, al-Fustat in Egypt and al-Qayrawan in Tunisia, as the ‘Gibraltars and Singapores’ of Arabs who relied on ‘desert-power’ as the British were to depend on sea-power: Britannia ruled the waves; Arabia ruled the wilds. But, once again, perhaps the Honourable East India Company provides an even closer parallel: the amsar are also inland Bombays and Madrases, functioning like the European factories-cum-fortresses that would spring up round the Indian Ocean rim. A century before the great Arab conquests, Qurashi merchants had come up with the idea of mudarabah, the pooling of capital and the basis, too, of those future European merchant ventures. Now, with the amsar and the addition of military might, expansion was entering a new, imperial phase, as it would do for the Honourable Company.

  For seventh-century Arab leaders, it was all a triumphal outcome of the long-running dialogue between badw and hadar, nomad and settled. And who better than men from Mecca the Mercantile, the Mother of Emporia, to understand that the slash-and-burn approach of a’rab raiders might produce fruitful booty in the short term, but that for sustainable gain you had to cultivate urban markets? It has even been suggested that the developed Islamic usage of the word hijrah – migration to new towns – might have come about under South Arabian influence: the Sabaic root hjr means not ‘severance’, but ‘town’. This is tempting but debatable: every word we use is haunted by semantic ghosts, but some of them are very wispy. It is more likely that influences – economic, not linguistic – came from the other old imperial neighbours. The Meccan merchant elite, now rebranded as the leaders of the Islamic state of Medina, were directing the tremendous energies released by Muhammad’s revolution, and the unprecedented unity it had generated, to remould tribal Arabdom into something that was economically, militarily and even socially more like the former superpowers, Rome/Byzantium and Persia, in their heyday. Now Persia was defunct, Byzantium decimated, and Arabs would succeed them both.

  Looking far ahead to other imperial ventures, we have that parallel to the Arab path in the British empire, and particularly in its joint-stock, mercantile beginnings. Looking even further – and there are, admittedly, a lot of mutatis mutandis – perhaps the Islamic Arab path was also not entirely different from that of Communist China, redirecting its ideological revolution to accommodate the market, repositioning itself to succeed more recent superpowers.

  HOUSES DIVIDED

  At first it all worked. The amsar sprang up at strategic locations. In Iraq, al-Basrah was built not far from the head of the Gulf, al-Kufah in the long fought-over borderland between desert and sown, near the ruins of both ancient Babylon and more recent al-Hirah. In Syria, which had a long-established Arab population and pre-Islamic links with the Meccan aristocracy, the old cities such as Damascus were kept as administrative centres and the land divided into military districts. In Egypt, only retaken from the Persians in 631, the Byzantines were dazed and demoralized by the fate of their comrades in Syria and put up limited resistance when Arab incursions began in 639. The maritime cosmopolis of Alexandria was to hold out longer, but the inland fortress of Babylon (Old Cairo) fell to an Arab force in 641. Nearby, beside the Nile where Upper and Lower Egypt met and the wedge of the Delta penetrated deepest inland, another misr (the singular of amsar) was founded – al-Fustat, ‘the Tent’ in Arabic, or possibly from the Greek fossaton, ‘ditch’. (The word misr is also the Arabic name for Egypt, although chickens and eggs are involved: misr is an ancient Semitic word which means at root ‘border’, and Egypt had been the Semitic misr ‘border(-land)’ long before Arabs founded their misr ‘border(-town)’ there.) Almost immediately, Arab raids penetrated west from Egypt as far as Roman Africa (today’s Tunisia) but a fourth great frontier city would not be founded there until 670. Its name, al-Qayrawan (from Persian karwan), is usually glossed in Arabic as ‘garrison camp’; the mercantile bells rung by the English cognate, ‘caravan’, are however thoroughly appropriate.

  None of the amsar is typical; they all developed differently in their different environments. But to look briefly at the first of them will give some idea of what the others were like. Al-Basrah began as a giant camp, a city that could be ‘struck’: even its public buildings were constructed from enormous reed bundles (like the houses of the nearby ‘Marsh Arabs’) that were easily dismantlable when the garrison went on extended raids. But the city soon became more permanent, and its population swelled and diversified: in the early years, it included not only Persians but many pre-Islamic immigrants of Indian origin, especially ‘Zutt’ or Jhats, who allied themselves with Arab tribes. For a time this much-needed addition to the fighting force was given equal rights and army pay to those of Arabs; later in the seventh century, as the Arab population grew, chauvinism hardened and state coffers emptied, they were expelled. By this time al-Basrah had a population of 80,000 warriors and 120,000 dependants – vast by world standards of the time. And despite the growing ‘Little Arabia’ mindset of its governors and their intolera
nce of non-Arabs, the city was becoming visually cosmopolitan: captives from Afghanistan built a mosque ‘in the Kabul style’ which, at the time, may have meant that it had influences from Buddhist buildings. Not least, al-Basrah’s position on the conjoined Tigris–Euphrates waterway that leads to the nearby head of the Gulf also made it commercially cosmopolitan. A later Basran boasted of ‘our teak and ivory, our brocade and land-taxes, and our rolling river’. It is a neat summary of the hemiglobal sources of the city’s wealth – Indian forests, African elephants, Chinese silk, its own vast palm-groves of the Sawad – and all these products borne by its great watery artery.

  Al-Basrah was blessed by geography. But it shared features with the other amsar – temporary-looking beginnings, tensions between Arab and other inhabitants, inevitable diversification, mushrooming growth. It also shared a design flaw that would hold back the cities’ organic urban development and, much worse, doom the cohesion of their Arab inhabitants. To begin with, Arabs of nomad origin only became superficial ‘townies’: when famine struck in al-Kufah, for example, most people upped sticks and dispersed to forage in the steppelands. For the old survival mechanism to kick in thus was hardly surprising. But they were also, and far more fatefully, only a superficial community: collectivization was never radical enough to erase differences. As early as Abu Bakr’s projected Syrian campaign, troops fought under tribal colours: he ‘ordered the commanders to assign a banner to each tribe, which would stay in their midst’. The banners stayed in their midst in the eventual conquests: each tribe marched under its own colours, while the smallest tribes grouped together under a joint flag – a sort of ‘Minor Counties’ team, or a Black Watch tartan. This comparison is by no means flippant; but it is flawed. The super-tribe of Islam was, and remained, an ideal; the conversion of tribal banners into regimental colours, the sublimation of tribalism into sport – changes like these would take place with the rise of the European territorial nation-state. Arabs never fully achieved them. (Indeed, with the apparent failure of the more recent ideal – that imported nation-state – retribalization is a current trend, at least outside my window.) And tribal banners fluttered not only on the march. The amsar themselves were physically divided: in al-Kufah, for example, Yemenis (‘southerners’, as they were still seen, despite the centuries of blurring) were settled in the east of the city and Nizaris (‘northerners’) in the west; these big divisions were themselves subdivided into tribal cantonments, each tribe having its own mosque. Thus, even on the core ground of the Islamic ideal – congregational prayer – disunity was perpetuated. The house of God had many rooms, and they did not intercommunicate.