Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  Taha Husayn neatly lists some of the splits that would divide Arabdom all too soon after that first brief unanimity of expansion was spent:

  Adnanis [another term for ‘northerners’] ganged up against Yemenis, Mudar against the rest of the Adnanis, and Rabi’ah against Mudar. Mudar itself split, with Qays, Tamim and Quraysh each having its own ’asabiyyah. Rabi’ah split too, with Taghlib and Bakr forming their own ’asabiyyahs. And the same can be said for the Yemenis – Azd, Himyar and Quda’ah each had their own ’asabiyyah.

  The result was that, ‘in all the amsar of Islam, the Arabs went back to a state of rivalry and competitiveness even more bitter than that of the [pre-Islamic age of] “Ignorance”’. Arab unity was more like a suspension than a solution: as in a salad dressing, the constituents intermingled happily as long as the mixture was kept in motion, by raiding and conquest. But when the motion stopped and the mixture settled, the constituents began to separate out.

  Part of the problem was that the whole moral ethos remained tribal and pre-Islamic. An Islamic moral infrastructure would develop in the new towns and new lands, but only in the following centuries. For the moment, Arabs were so busy trying to chew the territories they were biting off that they had no time to ingest, let alone digest, the ethical implications of Islam – not least the essential equality of Arab and non-Arab, expressed so forcibly in Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon. To put it in terms of Christian history, it was as if the Crusades had taken off in the lifetime of the first Apostles. These factors – continued tribalism, the time-lag between building cities and building civil societies – would mean that old-style, peninsular Arabs would be scattered and lost in the empire they had founded, marginalized in every sense.

  Even then, the Arab story would be far from over. New sorts of Arabs would arise from the imperial multiplicity, as much a mixture as Arabs had always been – and united, both with each other and with the past, by the old catalyst of language. For, among their other roles, the new cities of the conquests were linguistic hotspots from which Arabic radiated outward to become the medium of trade, culture and everyday life. Many conquerors – Goths, Vandals, Mongols, for example – are themselves conquered by the cultures they occupy. With Arabs it would be the other way round: they themselves ‘disappeared’, but their language and culture remained triumphant. Thus the poet Ahmad Shawqi could look back from the early twentieth century and wonder that:

  We know no other races, other tongues like this:

  The people passed away, and yet their language lives!

  The line of Hashim’s frayed, Nizar’s is faded; but

  Their tongue speaks on in never-ending eloquence.

  HOW TO SIT ON THRONES

  Those new, acculturated Arabs were yet to come. For the moment, the exodus of old Arabs from Arabia was not just a severance of people from a land and from their more distant past. It also marked the start of Islam’s own travels away from its Arabian matrix. Arabs and Islam were to travel, as we have seen, at very different rates. At first, Islam lagged behind; but it would catch up, and ultimately go much the further of the two.

  Back home, the effect of the exodus was immediate. The peninsula became a place to be left, a holy land whose sanctity increased with distance. It seems that most of the migration out of Arabia itself was over as early as the time of Caliph Umar’s death in 644; later migrations were secondary, with the amsar in Iraq and Egypt acting as stepping-stones. What is not in doubt is that Arabia had lost a lot of its ‘talent’ in not much more than a decade, and that it suffered cultural desertification. This would accelerate when in the 650s the caliphal capital moved to Damascus in the far north of the Arabian subcontinent. Looking through an overview of Arab(ic) culture such as Ibn Khallikan’s great thirteenth-century biographical dictionary, Wafayat al-a’yan, Notable Deaths, it is striking that the peninsula hardly features in the lives of those who died after the first Islamic century or so, except as a place of pilgrimage. The amsar, and especially al-Basrah and al-Kufah, became the new intellectual as well as military centres: ‘The Arabs have no scholarly tradition except in these two cities’, complained a critic in the tenth century. Even by the early ninth century, the antiquarian and literary critic al-Asma’i could say of Medina, ‘I spent a long time there and found not a single correct ancient ode. All of them were full of errors, or were forgeries.’ Earlier still, and most damning, was the eighth-century Kufan scholar Ibn Shubrumah’s response to the boast of a scholar in Medina:

  ‘Scholarship came out of our city!’

  ‘Yes,’ Ibn Shubrumah said, ‘and it never came back to you.’

  It is clear that Arabia suffered severe cultural depletion. The effect of the exodus on the Arabian gene-pool can only be imagined, not quantified. ‘The souls of the ambitious,’ said an anonymous poet,

  strive to attain high stations,

  while the hapless strive to stay at home.

  Another poet went further: the stay-at-homes, he said, are like, ‘the inhabitants of tombs’. Persian brides may have brought new blood in the first flush of conquest, but from the end of the seventh century most of the Arabs’ island became ever more isolated. There would be genetic minglings at Mecca, with the pilgrimage, and in the outward-looking parts of the Arabian seaboard, the ancient fertile fringe. But the mountains and valleys of the south and east and the steppe of the interior became steadily more inbred and introverted. Peninsular Arabia slipped out of the mainstream histories for the next thousand years and more.

  As for the ambitious souls, a spur to their ambition was almost immediately taken away when Caliph Umar set up a welfare system, with pay and pensions from the copious proceeds of conquest. These were doled out to all Muslims who had played any part in the setting up of the state of Medina, in the wars of the ‘Apostasy’ and, now, in the conquests of further expansion. The amounts mostly ranged between 500 and 1,000 dirhams annually, and were heritable. It is hard to give a modern-day equivalent of their worth, but one could live on them. Not surprisingly, Umar was warned that people would come to depend on hand-outs, to which he replied, with disarming honesty, ‘That is inevitable’. His vision of a welfare state was far-reaching, and included child-support payments; his economic innovations went as far as contemplating the issue of ‘banknotes’ in the form of camel-hide dirhams. If the text of his advice to his successors is genuine, Umar’s intentions were of the best: they show how he intended to carry the revolutionary social and economic aspects of Muhammad’s project forward, by investing in the new cities, and by taxing the rich and redistributing to the poor. He concluded with a Qur’anic quotation:

  ‘Do not let wealth become something to be passed around among the rich.’ And do not shut your door in the people’s faces, lest the strong eat up the weak.

  Umar’s advice was, of course, ignored. The weak may not have been completely eaten up – someone had to be there to do the donkey-work for the strong; but the rich began their inevitable game of pass-the-parcel with the wealth that flooded into the imperial capital, Medina, from conquered lands. (That Qur’anic word for ‘something to be passed around’, dulah, is almost identical with the word soon to be used for ‘dynasty, state’, dawlah.) With so much booty and power involved, the division of the spoils would also cause divisions of loyalties, and corrode the old culture of generosity. Arabs would only remain great, as the sage al-Ahnaf said at about this time, ‘if they strap on their swords, tie on their turbans, and ride off on their horses. And,’ he went on, ‘if . . . they never regard mutual generosity as a vice.’ But the sheer amount of lucre would make victims of the old virtues. Treasure in conquered lands was ‘de-thesaurized’ – taken out of vaults and turned into coinage – and not a little of the cash made its way back to Arabia, and to the capacious pockets of the few. ‘On the day Uthman was killed,’ al-Mas’udi records of Umar’s successor as caliph,

  150,000 [gold] dinars and 1,000,000 [silver] dirhams were in the hands of his treasurer. The value of his estates . . . was
200,000 dinars. The eighth part of the estate of al-Zubayr after his death amounted to 50,000 dinars. He also left 1,000 horses and 1,000 female servants. Talhah’s income from Iraq was 1,000 dinars a day, and his income from the region of al-Sharah was more than that . . .

  And so the list goes on. Uthman, admittedly, had been a well-to-do merchant early in life. But still, these were the revolutionaries who had been in on Muhammad’s project from the start; about them hangs a whiff of what in different circumstances would be called ‘champagne socialism’. (In contrast, Umar, it must be said, shared the Prophet’s disdain of wealth. On one occasion, as caliph, he spent sixteen dinars going on pilgrimage and thought himself extravagant.)

  The parameters of wealth expanded with the horizons of empire. In a different class from the nomenklatura of early Islam, and of a later date, was a ninth-century judge who received a gift of gold and silver from a caliph’s wife. His attitude to it illustrates the change that had come over Arabs. A friend of the judge told him the Prophet said that gifts are to be shared with one’s close friends. ‘Ah,’ said the judge, keeping a tight hold of his present, ‘that was in the days when gifts were sour milk and dates.’ Such tight-fistedness, however, was particularly unwise when your friend was a poet and could record it for posterity:

  ‘Hail, great amir!’ are words I’ll never say

  To you, Zayd. No; you’d sooner find me dead.

  You scoff rich puddings in your private rooms,

  And feed your guests on poor men’s barley bread.

  A sheepskin coat and rawhide sandals once

  Were all the finery you hoped to own.

  All glory be to Him who gave you power

  And taught you how to sit upon a throne!

  MANY BOOKS INTO ONE

  If the equitable ideals of ancient Arabia and recent Islam were victims of the new fashions, their greatest victim would be the unity Muhammad had brought about. The wheel of fire would roll on, and it would be given a good hard shove by that first plutocrat of the Islamic half of recorded Arab history, Uthman.

  Umar was killed in murky circumstances by a slave. With more foresight than his predecessors, the murdered caliph had appointed a committee to nominate a successor. Their choice, Uthman, was a descendant of Umayyah, the sixth-century ancestor of the clan that had run Mecca in the last decades of the ‘Ignorance’. He was thus the first Umayyad caliph, but at least in Sunni circles has escaped the opprobrium that haunts the imminent Umayyad dynasty. He has his own claims to notoriety, as we shall see; but his main claim to fame, and an inestimable contribution to the cause of Arab cultural unity, was to put the Qur’an into the form in which we have it today.

  The first caliph, Abu Bakr, had ‘gathered the Qur’an between boards’ – gathered, but not organized. Uthman and a core editorial team, all of them people who had known Muhammad, now set about arranging, editing, canonizing and broadcasting a unified text of the scriptures. At first the people who for a generation had acted as Qur’an reciters were unhappy. Relying on their memories (supplemented, no doubt, by uncollected, uncanonical written texts), they had exercised control over the Word of God. ‘The Qur’an was many books,’ they said. Now, they complained, ‘you [Uthman] have abandoned all but one’. Their complaints were ignored. Master-copies, probably of large size and certainly written on parchment in the monumental, angular script later called ‘Kufic’, were sent out across the empire; secondary copies were made from these and distributed to mosques, where individuals would bring leaves to be copied piecemeal by in-house scribes. The Arabic publishing industry had so far produced only one book. But the boost to literacy can only be imagined. Just as important, that single authorized text would play the central part in unifying Arabic, if not Arabs: however much they might disagree with one another, the ummah, the super-tribe, now had a standardized written version of their super-dialect in which to do verbal battle.

  All this was necessary because, as we have seen, Arabic was beginning to lose its ‘purity’ – or, to be honest, was continuing to change – even in those bastions of eloquence, Mecca and Medina. The threat of change was greater still for Arabs in the diaspora. Language had given them identity and then, via Muhammad and the Qur’an, unity. But the very success of that unity had spread them far and wide – and thin: they were in danger of being dissolved by their own mobility. Those 33,000 descendants of al-Abbas mentioned above were Arab in the male line, but in their female lines they were bewilderingly multiracial; mother-tongues multiplied down the generations – Aramaic, Persian, Turkish, Coptic, Greek, Berber and more. (We will return to this matter of forking mother-tongues and of hybridity in general.) Uthman’s authorized edition of the Qur’an at least ensured that a unified form of written Arabic, and thus of Arabic culture, would not only survive but also thrive. As Ibn Khaldun would put it, ‘Qur’an and Sunnah . . . preserved the Arabic language’. But preserving the political unity of diaspora Arabs would be a more daunting challenge by far. And, for the moment, the biggest challenge of all would be maintaining unity back home, in Medina.

  CRACKING UP

  As Arab armies cracked on across the continents, the consensus of their leaders in Medina began to crack up. It is neat to see things in dichotomies like Sunnah versus Shi’ah, and to trace reasons back to single ultimate causes like the legendary bloody separation of the conjoined ancestors, Abd Shams and Hashim. In truth, of course, there are countless tributary factors that feed into the approaching disunity; equally, neat dichotomies branch into deltas of dispute. Looking at the early years after Muhammad, however, the main problem was not one of policy or piety, doctrine or dogma; all that was controlled by the beneficent will of Allah. The problem was one about power and authority, about who should be king of the castle.

  There is a story about Muhammad’s first successor, the mature and pious Abu Bakr, that hints at the nature of the coming competition for power. Early in his caliphate, he had reason to remonstrate with Abu Sufyan. Abu Bakr’s father was alive at the time, an old man in his nineties. Hearing his son’s raised voice, he asked,

  ‘Who is my son shouting at?’ He was told, ‘At Abu Sufyan.’ At this the old man went up to Abu Bakr and said, ‘So, Atiq Allah [the name by which his father had always called him], you raise your voice at Abu Sufyan, who only yesterday in the “Ignorance” was the lord of Quraysh? You have overstepped the mark of good behaviour and exceeded your station!’ At these words, Abu Bakr and the Meccans and Medinans who were with him smiled, and Abu Bakr said, ‘Father, with the coming of Islam, Allah has raised some people and humbled others.’

  As it turned out, the temporarily humbled Umayyads would soon be raised back to their former station. But for the moment, it looked as if Islam had levelled the field, even if all the players were drawn from Muhammad’s tribe of Quraysh.

  In his two-year caliphate Abu Bakr, who belonged to the rather distantly related Quraysh clan of Taym, had shown neither particular enmity to the Umayyads nor special partiality to the Hashimis; in fact he had alienated some of the latter by excluding Muhammad’s next of kin from a share in the caliphal fifth share of booty. Umar, who belonged to another collateral line of Quraysh, had also been an impartial ruler. With the wealthy Uthman, first of the Umayyad clan of Quraysh to rise again, things began to change.

  Uthman, although one of the ‘Rightly Guided’ caliphs (as Muhammad’s first four successors are known), seems to have mislaid his sense of direction about half-way through his twelve-year caliphate: his loss at this time of Muhammad’s seal, used for authenticating state documents, which he dropped down a well, has been seen by some as a symbol of that loss of bearings. Portents apart, he allowed corruption to spread, and exiled whistleblowers. Worse, he favoured his own Umayyad kin with plum jobs. The governorship of Syria was already in Umayyad hands, those of Abu Sufyan’s son Mu’awiyah; Uthman also gave the rule of the Iraqi power-bases of al-Basrah and al-Kufah, and of Egypt, to his relatives. In Medina, he surrounded himself with Umayyad advisers.
One might try to defend him on the grounds that he could exercise better control via his own close kin, but neither of his two predecessors as caliphs had felt it necessary to do so, and to many it was blatant nepotism. The wry comment of Amr ibn al-As, mastermind of the conquest of Egypt, sums up the general attitude. Dismissed as governor of Egypt by Umar for extravagant living, Amr was now offered the job of military commander on the Nile, while Uthman’s Umayyad placement would have control of the purse strings. ‘Then,’ Amr said, ‘I’d be like someone holding the cow’s horns while your governor milked her.’ The great Arab conquests were beginning to look like a mega-fief for a small pre-Islamic ruling clan of a single Arab tribe. When one of Uthman’s governors in Iraq described the vast and long-coveted palm groves of the Sawad as ‘the garden of Quraysh’, it hardly corrected the view.