Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  In 656 numbers of Arab troops in the provinces mutinied, complaining of corruption and inequality, and many marched to Medina: they hoped to make their case to the caliph, who after all had been one of Muhammad’s earliest adherents, and was known, despite what later apologists would call his ‘excusable errors’, for his piety. Prominent among the marchers were those from the milch-cow of Egypt. Uthman acceded to their demands and sent them home. Here the story turns nasty: he had given the Egyptian Arabs’ leaders a letter, and on opening this they are said to have found orders that they, the bearers, were to be seized and put to death on their return to the land of the Nile. Instead, they did an about-turn, marched on Medina, rather than just to it, besieged Uthman in his house and eventually, in June 656, killed him.

  Such a sequence of events – creeping corruption and nepotism, the inertia and silence of the majority, the noisy disaffection of the few, confrontation, placation, double-dealing, the violent end that will beget more violence . . . it is hardly restricted to Arab history. But the extraordinarily monist nature of Islam had now given it an extra dimension: Allah is One, Allah is Truth, therefore Truth is One. This was the blunt syllogism with which disputants had begun to belabour each other, each convinced that he was utterly, unshakeably right. The pattern runs through history and is multiply visible around the Arab world today; I can see it here, in my adoptive land.

  ‘The killing of Caliph Uthman,’ Adonis has written,

  was the signal for the life of Islam to enter a struggle in which each side [of an argument] rejected the other. Politics and culture were characterized less by debate . . . than by denial, with each side believing that it acted according to absolute Truth, while its opponent was utterly in the wrong.

  But if the claims to Truth were new, the events leading up to the killing of Uthman also follow the classic cycle of the wheel of fire: a fall-out over spoils, a split in the hub of the wheel, the split radiating out, an end to unity. In this case the split was magnified in direct proportion to Muhammad’s success in forging that first great unity. The split has run through time right up to the present, and in looking at neat dichotomies of dogma like Sunnah/Shi’ah we are only examining symptoms. The root problem is who gets the power – and the cash, the kudos and everything else that goes with it.

  That question dominated the next four years of Arab history. Part of the problem was that the new caliph – Muhammad’s first cousin and son-in-law, Ali – was apparently not interested in cash or power. Like Umar, he set about the fair redistribution of wealth, but unlike Umar, he emptied the coffers doing so; he also reversed land-grants made by Uthman to his cronies. Again like Umar, he had a firm grasp on the sacred implications of Islam; but, better than any of his contemporaries, he could express these implications in words. ‘How far is it from earth to heaven?’ he was asked. ‘An answered prayer.’ ‘And from East to West?’ ‘A day’s journey for the sun.’ Islam, Ali meant, had brought heaven close and revealed the smallness of the world in its cosmic context. But Islam had also sparked off a vast and growing worldly empire, awash with wealth, in which heavenly matters were not at the top of the agenda. Ali was the perfect candidate to rule what Ibn Khaldun was to call that ‘rare and remote . . . hypothesis’, the ideal city of the philosophers. Others, however, aspired to run what was looking more like Quraysh plc.

  Two of those others, Talhah and al-Zubayr, were prominent in al-Mas’udi’s Rich List of Muhammad’s companions who amassed fortunes. The third was Muhammad’s favourite wife, A’ishah the daughter of Abu Bakr. They too had been unhappy with Uthman’s rule, but had kept aloof from the violence against him. Now they could wield accusations of complicity in the old leader’s murder against Ali, who had unwisely let himself be elected to the caliphate by a group including some of his predecessor’s killers. A’ishah, Talhah and al-Zubayr now called for islah, ‘reform’ – that woolly but potent watchword of solidarity-creators down the ages – gathered a band of followers, and set out for Iraq, there to set up a power-base. Ali pursued them, and it all ended in more violence, for which the adjective ‘internecine’ might have been coined.

  The climax of that violence, the so-called Day of the Camel in December 656, set Muhammad’s favourite cousin, the widower of his favourite daughter, against his favourite wife, the daughter of his best friend. The Day takes its name from A’ishah’s presence in the thick of the fighting, in the tradition of pre-Islamic seeresses, ‘on a camel in a litter made of wooden boards covered with thick hair cloth and cattle-hides, under which was a layer of felt, the whole covered with chain-mail’. By the end of the battle, ‘seventy men’s hands had been severed as they tried to grab the camel’s halter . . . and the litter was so stuck about with darts and arrows that it looked like a porcupine’. News of the battle flew back to Medina – literally, it is said, in the form of one of those severed hands, wearing the signet-ring of its owner and carried by a vulture. But the people of the capital were kept in suspense over the outcome. On the battlefield, however, it was clear: among the 7,000 dead – a ‘conservative’ estimate – were Talhah and al-Zubayr. The feisty A’ishah lived on, but not to fight another day. (She did however attempt soon after the battle to intervene in another dispute, riding into the thick of it on a mule. But one of the Medinans gently took her aside and said, ‘By Allah, we haven’t yet washed the dust of the Day of the Camel from our heads, and they’ll soon be talking about the Day of the Mule.’ And A’ishah laughed and rode away.)

  For the time being, it was a victory for Ali; perhaps for the more egalitarian aspects of Islam over older vested interests. Was it also the defeat of a possible resurgence of female authority? Certainly, women had wielded greater public power in pre-Islamic times; even in the ‘Apostasy’, the prophetess Sajah had gathered an impressive following. In the case of A’ishah, the question is the merest speculation. But that speculation seems to have been current at the time: one report has a fighter on A’ishah’s side saying, as he died, that he had been ‘duped by the woman who wanted to be Commander of the Faithful.’

  A female caliph . . . now there’s a what-if if ever there was.

  QUR’ANS ON LANCES

  In the end, it would not be the spirit of pre-Islamic matriarchy that won the leadership title, but the favourite son of the pre-Islamic Meccan oligarchy. Mu’awiyah – the son of Abu Sufyan, ‘who only yesterday’, as the older generation had been at pains to remind the younger, ‘ . . . was the lord of Quraysh’ – was already firmly ensconced as governor of Syria. Now he demanded vengeance for his Umayyad kinsman Uthman’s killing, to which he considered Ali a party. Forget, for the moment, later dogmas and doctrines, Sunnah and Shi’ah: it was an old-fashioned clan blood-feud, magnified – super-clans have super-feuds. It was also a downside to Muhammad’s miracle: the greater the coming together, the worse the falling apart. For the caliphal title fight would make the hardest-fought ancient ‘Days of the Arabs’ seem like gentlemanly tiffs in comparison, and the crucial battles and raids that founded the Islamic state sandpit scuffles. Beside it, the Day of the Camel would look like a preliminary scrimmage. Even the decisive, empire-busting routs of al-Yarmuk and al-Qadisiyyah were less bloody.

  The battle of Siffin was fought over nearly four months in 657, on the right bank of the Euphrates across from al-Raqqah. It began like one of those ancient tiffs, with skirmishes and poetic wind-ups. Ali, for example, taunted Mu’awiyah (and his notorious liver-gnawing mother, Hind):

  Where’s that Mu’awiyah? I fight and mean

  To beat him; but he’s nowhere to be seen.

  Where is the slit-eyed fat-gut? None can tell:

  His mother hurled him, and herself, to Hell!

  It soon got desperate: it was a fight over what was already a vast empire. ‘There was such fighting,’ al-Mas’udi says,

  . . . as had never taken place before. I found in a certain written account of the events at Siffin that Hashim al-Mirqal, having been thrown to the ground . . . saw Ubayd Allah ibn Um
ar prostrate and wounded near him. Hashim crawled over to him and, deprived of weapons and of strength, began to gnaw at his nipples until he sank his teeth into one of them. He was found thus, dead, on top of Ubayd Allah.

  That is the sort of detail that would be hard to invent. Other details – that Ali, for example, personally killed 523 of the enemy in a day and a night – sound more questionable. But as the battle raged on towards its climax all detail was lost in a descending darkness:

  Dawn broke and they were still fighting. Then the sun was eclipsed, and the dust rose, and the banners and standards were cut down, and they no longer knew the times of prayer.

  With the ‘colours’ and the light gone, so too was tribal and even personal identity. The enlightenment of faith, the passage of time itself, were annulled. The darkness clings there still: it is a millennial theatre of war, from the clashes between Babylonians and Assyrians down to only yesterday, when distant, mutant offspring of Ali and Mu’awiyah – a Shi’ah-dominated Iraqi state and a hyper-Sunni ‘Islamic State’ – were slogging it out on the endless dusty plains and missiles were slamming into al-Raqqah, the ‘Islamic State’s’ capital in Syria.

  Places, when you reflect on them, resemble men:

  Some are inclined to happiness, others to grief.

  It is hard to see through the murk, but Mu’awiyah was probably losing. And then he remembered a weapon in his armoury that was as yet unused: the Book of Allah. Every man on Mu’awiyah’s side who had a copy of the Qur’an – 500 of them – tied it to his lance and raised it high. (The idea recurs to Arab leaders, however lightly worn their faith. You can still find pictures, peeled and faded, of our former president here in Yemen, flourishing a copy.) In Mu’awiyah’s case, given the large size of surviving early Qur’ans, it seems unlikely that ‘pocket editions’ existed and that the warriors could have tied whole copies of the book to their weapons. The more probable sense is that individual leaves or sections, kept as amulets, were suspended from the lances. In any case, Ali was unimpressed: ‘They are not people of religion and the Qur’an,’ he pointed out. But his men were set on submitting to arbitration by the Book of Allah, and Ali deferred to them. As ever, the conquering Arabic word had won: it trumped the force of arms on Ali’s side, and the force of argument. And the scene on the battlefield of Siffin foreshadows the conflicting claims to truth that would in time be wielded by Sunnah and Shi’ah: on one side rhetorical truth, the sacred word, as much amulet or talisman as meaning; on the other, apostolic truth, authority vested in a live person, a living imam.

  When the dust of Siffin finally settled, 70,000 – the most commonly given number – were found to have been killed over 110 days of fighting, 45,000 on Mu’awiyah’s side, 25,000 on Ali’s. Some authorities, however, put the total slaughter at over half as much again. As ever, all the figures are questionable; but there is no doubt that Siffin was astonishingly bloody, and that it was the climax of a long series of encounters between the opponents. It is claimed that Mu’awiyah’s deployment of the Word of Allah ended the fighting; just as likely, it was that tireless promoter of peace – exhaustion.

  Ali, under pressure of many on his own side, all of whom were convinced of the truth of his claim, acquiesced in the idea of arbitration: using the Qur’an as their guide, two judges would decide who should be caliph. The whole business was inconclusive: ‘The arbiters,’ as the most succinct verdict puts it, ‘agreed on nothing.’ The Syrian Arabs acknowledged Mu’awiyah as caliph; the Iraqis fumed, and some now went against Ali for his alleged sell-out. With the ranks of the opposition split, recognition of Mu’awiyah’s caliphate became more general.

  At least the slaughter had ended, for the moment. But that miraculous first and last Arab unity, empowered by Islam, had now been permanently wrecked. The splits would follow tribal and sectarian lines – not that the two are always distinguishable: a sect is often a metaphor for a tribe. Muhammad is said to have prophesied that his community would divide into seventy-three sects. It is a conservative figure: what may have been the longest poem in Arabic, a lost ninth-century ode of 4,000 lines ending in the numbing monorhyme -nā, was a catalogue of sects and sectarians. Sad to say, this may be another candidate for the role of national epic.

  That tactical deployment of the Word had won Mu’awiyah a reprieve in the battle of Siffin; his eventual victory in the battle for the caliphate had little to do with faith, truth, right or even perhaps with might. It was a victory of the old over the new, of the ancien régime of Quraysh over a slightly less ancien branch of the regime; of – as the Arabic equivalent of an English saying puts it – the jinni you know over the human you don’t. Mu’awiyah knew the simple fact behind this crucial swing in Arab history: ‘Quraysh,’ he said, ‘liked me more than Ali.’

  Less than thirty years before, Mu’awiyah’s father had witnessed that extraordinary unity in Medina. Now the body of Islam had undergone its first great cell-division, the start of a process of decay and regeneration. There have been mutations over time, but the general outlines remain the same, and have given their own unity to Arab-Islamic history, if not to Arabs themselves. Looking at an early account like al-Mas’udi’s, you sometimes wonder if you are reading history or current events. Sunnis fight Shi’is over the same ground, literal and metaphorical, as they do today. Opposing sides, beneath banners black or white, green or striped, claim the same monopolies on authenticity, on truth. Ordinary people suffer and die.

  George Santayana’s famous maxim has it that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Sometimes, however, the problem is not forgetting history; or fixating on its least edifying chapters. It is a problem not just in Mesopotamia but also in Ulster and Kosovo; the banners can be orange or can bear white eagles as well as black script. Then again, the other option – sweeping the dirt of the past under the carpet – can be unhealthy too. Arab schoolchildren know about al-Yarmuk and al-Qadisiyyah, but the Day of the Camel and Siffin may well be met with blank looks. The bright faith is propagated, the darker truth is buried.

  In many places, heritage is a tourist attraction; in the Arab world, ‘heritage . . . is a socio-political problem’. It is rarely examined with detachment, with irony; how can you do a post-mortem when the subject is alive? In countries like the United States and Britain, where history is alleged to have ended, enthusiasts can for the moment safely revive it: ‘re-enactment’ groups, neo-Cavaliers and neo-Confederates, neo-Unionists and neo-Roundheads, equipped with period arms and Kensington Gore, fight the battles of past civil wars. So do the enthusiasts of Siffin – but the blood is real, and the weapons are bang up to date.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE KINGDOM OF

  DAMASCUS

  UMAYYAD RULE

  A GATHERING OF HEADS

  Towards the end of 691 Abd al-Malik, Mu’awiyyah’s fourth successor as Umayyad caliph, travelled from his capital, Damascus, to the Iraqi city of al-Kufah. Mus’ab, brother and general of the Umayyads’ longstanding rival, the Meccan anti-caliph Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, had been killed in battle nearby. Now, in the audience hall of the governor’s palace, Abd al-Malik stood contemplating Mus’ab’s severed head. One of the Kufans accompanying him later recalled,

  Abd al-Malik noticed that I was perturbed, and asked me the reason. ’O Commander of the Faithful,’ I said, ‘I came to this palace and saw the head of al-Husayn placed before Ibn Ziyad on this very spot. Then I came here again and saw the head of Ibn Ziyad placed before al-Mukhtar on this same spot. Then I came again and saw the head of al-Mukhtar placed before Mus’ab ibn al-Zubayr. And now here is the head of Mus’ab placed before you – may Allah protect you from evil, O Commander of the Faithful!’ At this, the caliph sprang up and ordered that the vault over the hall be destroyed.

  The anecdote crams a lot of eventful Umayyad history into a nutshell; or four nutshells. The owner of the first head, al-Husayn, was the son of Caliph Ali; his death in 680 during an ill-planned bid to rally support against
the Umayyad dynasty provided the ‘party’ of his late father, shi’at ‘Ali – the Shi’ah, in short – with their greatest martyr. Al-Husayn was avenged when his nemesis, the Umayyad governor Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad, met his own death in 686 in a rising led by the early Shi’i extremist, al-Mukhtar. Al-Mukhtar was killed in the following year when large parts of Iraq fell under the rule of Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, who had set up a rival caliphate, based in Mecca, to that of the Umayyads. Now, in October 691, Abd Allah’s brother and governor in Iraq, Mus’ab, had gone down fighting despite offers of reconciliation with Damascus. It was all a far cry from the year three decades before when the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty, Mu’awiyah, had finally emerged from the troubled and bloody struggle for succession as the most widely acknowledged leader of Arabdom. That year, 661, was remembered – ironically, it now looked – as ’Am al-Jama’ah, the Year of Unity.

  THE NOSE OF THE ARABS

  ‘The Year of Unity’ was wishful thinking from the start. What it meant was that the pre-Muhammadan Meccan Establishment had revived and reasserted itself in Mu’awiyah, son of the most prominent leader in pagan Mecca, albeit relocated to Damascus, and that most people simply acquiesced in the return to the status quo ante. A generation earlier, the tables had been turned by Muhammad. Now they were turned back again; the revolution of Islam had gone through a full 360 degrees, and Arabs were going forward in time into their own past.