Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  Mu’awiyah reasserted his family’s hereditary dominance by appointing his son as his successor. The idea of a crown prince clashed with Islamic precedent, such as it was (so far, various forms of election or appointment, but never of a member of the previous incumbent’s immediate family). However, opposition to the appointment came in appeals not to as-yet-hazy Islamic ideals, but to the solid old-fashioned notion of nobility. ‘So,’ the eventual anti-caliph Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr complained to Mu’awiyah,

  ‘you would promote your son over those who are better than him?’

  ‘Meaning yourself, I suppose,’ Mu’awiyah said.

  ‘Well, among the lineages of Mecca, my son’s line is superior to yours.’

  ‘But,’ Ibn al-Zubayr replied, ‘with the coming of Islam, Allah exalted certain lines. My line is one of those which He exalted.’

  ‘True,’ said Mu’awiyah. ‘Along with the line of Hatib ibn Abi Balta’ah.’

  Mu’awiyah’s final retort is triple-barbed: not only was this Hatib of South Arabian origin, and thus in Qurashi terms socially challenged to begin with, but he had acknowledged his inferiority by making himself a client and thus a dependant of Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr’s father. Most pointed of all, however, is his name, which sounds even sillier in Arabic than it does translated into English: ‘Firewood-gatherer, son of the father of Scold’.

  In theory – at least in later theory – Muhammad’s revolution had shifted the whole foundation and focus of Arab society from tribal to theocratic. Din had shifted in meaning from honouring ancestors and tribal deities to worshipping the One God, and sunnah from emulating tribal heroes to emulating God’s prophet. The revolution had set off mass migrations and great victories. It had brought the peoples of South Arabia under its aegis, and made Persians and Egyptians members of the family of Islam. It had made these peoples equal with Arabs, and Arabs with each other. Superiority, nobility could only come from piety, not parentage. And yet here were two members of the same small tribe arguing about whose immediate family was posher. It was the same argument that the Qurashi ancestors Hashim and Umayyah had had, back in the pre-Islamic ‘Ignorance’, the same dispute that down the centuries had fuelled posturing poems and blood feuds between cousins. The revolution of Islam might have turned things upside-down around the periphery; the motion at the hub of Quraysh had been far less. It is not unlike V.S. Naipaul’s Durkheimian notion of a ‘constant inner world’ – in his case, of India, where a whole existence remains the same while Mughals and British, Buddhism and imperialism, come and go. There are inner worlds within inner worlds, too, and the inmost one can be quite small, and can turn on questions of who’s a nob and who’s a pleb.

  Muhammad had foreseen what would happen to his revolution. ‘After me,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘there will be a caliphate for thirty years, and then there will be a king or kings’. Such alleged statements may of course be influenced by the anti-Umayyad sentiments of later writers. (Written Arabic history would only take off under the Abbasids, who pilloried and demonized their Umayyad cousins and predecessors.) But it cannot be denied that Mu’awiyah took the ’asabiyyah created by Muhammad and recentred it on himself, as the head not of the inclusive and egalitarian theocratic commonwealth that was the Islamic ideal, but as an old-fashioned Arab king. Indeed, the Umayyads, the first of the Islamic dynasties, might be thought of equally as the last of the pre-Islamic Arab dynasties. The elision shows in a legend about Mu’awiyah’s mother Hind, the liver-eating harridan: accused of adultery by her first husband, she was declared innocent by a kahin, who then went on to predict that she would give birth to a king. The annunciation would prove true; it only overlooks the circumstances of that kingship, the intervening matter of Islam.

  King Mu’awiyah picked up where the pre-Islamic Ghassanid royal dynasty had left off. (Meanwhile the last Ghassanid king, Jabalah, whom we have seen embracing and then forsaking Islam, elided into Byzantium: he fathered a line which would produce the emperor Nicephorus I.) Mu’awiyah’s subjects in Syria were the same, largely Aramaic-speaking, largely Christian populace whom the Ghassanids had ruled under their Byzantine suzerains; further east, the people were equally un-islamized and un-arabized. Mu’awiyah and his successors toed the line of Muhammad’s ideology, of course: it was, after all, what had empowered the whole imperial venture and what gave the Umayyads legitimacy at the head of it all. But the ideological line could be very elastic, and many of the Umayyads enjoyed un-Islamic pleasures such as ‘the daughter of the grape’ – Caliph al-Walid ibn Yazid, for example, is supposed on one occasion to have been so overcome by alcohol and emotion at hearing a song that he insisted on kissing every member of the singer’s body, including his penis. Al-Walid, however, crossed the line of propriety when he allegedly shot darts at a copy of the Qur’an and called Muhammad a charlatan. Not for nothing was he called the khali’ of Banu Umayyah, the black sheep of an already dark dynasty. When judging the Umayyads, one must always factor in the way they were retrospectively demonized. But there is no doubt that, on balance, the temporal side of their rule outweighed the spiritual. Religion had a place in that rule, but it was a duty rather than a pleasure. Among the caliph’s chores, for example, was the preaching of a sermon at Friday prayers, and when Abd al-Malik – seen above contemplating Mus’ab’s severed head – complained that ‘exposing his intellect’ thus once a week to the populace had made his own head go prematurely grey, one feels he was being honest. (If there was one area in which religion did become a pleasure – even a passion – it was, as we shall see, in the built monuments of Umayyad Islamic legitimacy.)

  Compared with his successors, Mu’awiyah was happier in his public role; but it was the role of traditional Arab leader, not head of a spiritual state. Historians who look askance at the Umayyads cannot deny that the first of their dynasty was a capable, hands-on ruler. He slept little, and constantly listened to edifying tales from ancient Arab history; even while eating, he heard the complaints of his subjects; and he possessed a quality found in only the most successful chiefs – hilm, a cocktail of forbearance, justice, wisdom, sedateness and moderation, akin to the Romans’ gravitas. And Mu’awiyah’s rule elided not only with the pre-Islamic Arab past: to a Christian monk from Mesopotamia, it brought back memories of Byzantine rule in its good old days:

  Justice flourished in his time, and there was great peace . . . The peace throughout the world was such that we have never heard, either from our fathers or from our grandfathers.

  The Umayyads are chiefly remembered, as Patricia Crone puts it, for their ‘impious deviation from an established tradition’, the tradition of Islam. And yet that ‘established tradition’ was less than three decades old when Mu’awiyah came to power; it was still feeling its way. The tradition of Arab kingship, from which he and his house did not deviate, went back well over three centuries, to the beginning of the Lakhmid dynasty of al-Hirah. And he is also part of an even longer continuum. Mu’awiyah might have been the first Muslim dynast and the fifth caliph or successor of Muhammad; but he was also anf al-’arab, ‘the nose of the Arabs’ – their most prominent feature, their chief – and Arab history under him followed through from long before, as naturally as one follows one’s nose.

  BY THE FIGS AND THE OLIVES

  Like the Ghassanids, the Umayyads had a foot in each world, that of the badw and that of the hadar. Al-Jabiyah, the Ghassanid tented capital in the Golan, became an Umayyad power-base too; the same nomad Arab tribes of the Syrian desert who, before Islam, had fought for the Ghassanids – and against the Muslims at the battle of al-Yarmuk – provided the Umayyads with their military backbone. Umayyad recreations included the bedouin pursuits of the racetrack and the chase. Among their built monuments are a number of voluptuous ‘hunting-boxes’, miniature pleasure palaces with bath houses and frescos (including the occasional naked lady), plonked, as if by wish-fulfilling jinn, at points across the Greater Syrian steppe. In these, too, they had been anticipated by the Gha
ssanids. But an Umayyad desert palace like Qusayr Amrah shows how much wider horizons had now become. Built in the first part of the eighth century by al-Walid, the son and successor of Abd al-Malik, its mural paintings are labelled in both Arabic and Greek; they show not only the allegorical figures of History, Poetry, Philosophy and Victory, but also the emperors of Byzantium and Abyssinia, the long-defunct shah of Persia, and the very recently defeated Roderick, king of the Visigoths in Spain. The dome of the bath house calidarium displays even wider horizons, for it depicts the vault of heaven. Qusayr Amrah is a man-made oasis in which to banquet and to bathe while hunting. But it also acts as a kind of camera obscura, for it projects a panorama of the Arab empire in the process of headlong expansion, and shows how Arabs were now members, under heaven, of the international club of kings and cultures past and present.

  The Umayyads’ weight, however, was on the other, urban foot – in Damascus, the ancient metropolis set in its immense oasis, the Ghutah. Muhammad is said to have reached the outskirts of the city on a trading trip, but to have recoiled from setting foot in its fleshpots. Now his khalifahs, his successors, had rushed in where prophets feared to tread. Compared with Muhammad’s Medina, Damascus was Cockaigne or Las Vegas, an earthly parody of paradise. One of Mu’awiyah’s commanders against Ali at the battle of Siffin, al-Nu’man ibn Jabalah, expressed this in a wry allusion to the Qur’an: ‘By the figs and the olives . . .’, one of its early Meccan chapters swears,

  We created man in the finest stature,

  Then we reduced him to the lowest of the low;

  Save those who believe and do righteous deeds. They shall have reward without end.

  Sensing that he might miss out on that endless reward in heaven by siding with the worldlier of the two rivals, al-Nu’man said to Mu’awiyah, ‘We’ll fight for the figs and the olives of al-Ghutah, since we’ve deprived ourselves of the fruits and rivers of Paradise.’ Another of those with his eye on the earthly temptations offered by the Umayyads was Amr ibn al-As, conqueror of the milch-cow of Egypt but subsequently sacked from its governorship.

  ‘I will never give up any of my heavenly reward for you,’ he said to Mu’awiyah, who was bargaining for his support, ‘unless I get a share of your worldly wealth.’

  Mu’awiyah asked him to be more specific. Amr replied, ‘Bait your hook with Egypt.’

  He was reinstated as its governor.

  Imperial governors knew they had to keep the funds flowing to Damascus. Ziyad, Mu’awiyah’s governor in Iraq, told the caliph, ‘I have subdued Iraq for you, and harvested the taxes of its land and sea, and brought you its inmost substance and hidden treasure.’ The treasure had to pay for a court lifestyle that was far from the modest lives led by Muhammad and his first successors. An expert on pre-Islamic poetry, Hammad al-Rawiyah, recalled being summoned all the way from Iraq to Damascus by Caliph Hisham:

  I found him in a spacious palace paved with marble, each slab bordered by a strip of gold. Hisham was sitting on a red carpet, robed in red silk and dripping with musk and ambergris. I greeted him, and he returned my greeting and told me to draw near. I did so, and kissed his foot. He had two slave girls the like of whom I had never seen, wearing two earrings in each ear, each earring blazing with a pearl . . . The caliph said, ‘Do you know why I sent for you?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I sent for you because a line of poetry occurred to me, and I do not know who the poet is.’ I said, ‘What is the line?’ And he recited,

  ‘They called one day for the morning-draught, and there came

  a singing-slave who held in her right hand a pitcher.’

  Fortunately, given that the caliphal whim had brought him on a two-week journey, Hammad knew not only the poet but also the rest of the poem. (And if he hadn’t, knowing Hammad he would have made it up on the spot.)

  In ancient Arab royal tradition, the Umayyads were also patrons of contemporary poets; some of these became virtual laureates, like the hard-drinking, Christian bedouin al-Akhtal, court poet to Abd al-Malik. Vigorous, traditional verse flourished; but the Umayyad age was also one of transition. Emblematic of the change was the chronically love-lorn Jamil. He could compose a verse of which the first half was described as ‘an a’rabi in a ragged loin-cloth, out in the sticks’ –

  Come on, you sleeping camel-riders, up and off!

  – and the second half,

  that I may haply ask you: Might a man be killed – by love?

  as ‘dizzy and effeminate’. Not all poets could slip so effortlessly from campsite to ‘camp’; but Arab culture as a whole had begun its migration from the harsh badiyah to a softer, urban setting.

  As well as that major Arab cultural heritage of poetry, the Umayyads were now heirs by adoption to other traditions. Prominent among these, as we have seen, were the architectural and figurative traditions taken over by the caliphs in their desert palaces. But artistic adaptation reached its climax in the religious monuments of the Umayyads, of which the greatest is the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus. The site – previously that of the temple of Damascene Jupiter, and before that of his local counterpart, Hadad – had more recently become that of the city’s main church. Following the defeat of the Byzantines, Muslim and Christian worshippers shared the sacred precinct for no less than seventy years. In 708, however, the Christians moved to a new church nearby, and Caliph al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik began seven years of building. The culmination was the decoration of the walls around the mosque’s now immense courtyard with mosaics, for which thousands of Byzantine artists and craftsmen were employed. The millions of scintillating tesserae – pixels of gold, green, purple and many other colours – turned the walls into a gleaming dreamscape of villas and villages, streams and meads. Given Islamic strictures on images, at least in a place of worship, it is empty of people and animals, but planted profusely with trees. Among the mosaic figs and olives in this simulacrum of heaven on earth, al-Walid made a place where the here and the hereafter intersected.

  It was the worldly aspect that impressed a Byzantine delegation to Damascus only a few years after the mosque had been completed. On his accession in 717, the new caliph, the ascetic and pious Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz (whom we have seen inspiring conversion to Islam in South Asia and North Africa), was said to have resolved on removing the mosaics and using the copious amounts of gold in them for charity. Just in time, the Byzantine envoys arrived and were shown around the mosque. Their reaction made Umar change his mind: ‘Their leader looked about and turned pale. “We Byzantines imagined that you Arabs would not endure long. Now I have seen otherwise.”’ The newcomers were here to stay. Moreover, their aniconic Islamic take on Byzantine style may have fed back into the tastes of their neighbours. It is not known whether the Byzantine period of iconoclasm owes anything directly to the Islamic dislike of portraying living things, but when in the mid-eighth century the iconoclast emperor Constantine V removed from the Blachernae church mosaics that show human figures, he replaced them with trees and landscapes that might have been transplanted direct from Damascus.

  The mosaics of Damascus are glorious, and also symptomatic of the Umayyad relationship with Islam: it was to be celebrated publicly and fulsomely, for it had got them where they were; but, ultimately, its glory was superficial, a glittering veneer. A recent commentator put it more exactly when he described the Umayyad state as consisting of ‘an Islamic layer with a pre-Islamic essence, all given a Byzantine imperial gloss’. If that saintly exception, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, had seen through to the true worth of the faith, the gold that gave the glitter to that specious surface, he too realized that surfaces were what mattered to most people.

  Umar’s sainted caliphate did not endure. He sent a return deputation to Constantinople, where his pious reputation was well known. As it happened, while the Arab envoys were in the Byzantine capital, news reached the emperor that the caliph had died. The Arab ambassadors were as yet unaware; the emperor summoned them, received them – ‘he had descended from his throne and removed the crow
n from his head; his features had changed . . . as if he had suffered a calamity’ – and told them the news. On hearing it, the envoys wept. ‘Do not weep for Umar,’ the emperor said,

  Weep for yourselves and for what has befallen you. For he has gone to a better place than that which he has left . . . What amazes me is this: that the world should have lain beneath his feet, and yet that he remained aloof from it, and became like a monk. Good men can sojourn only a little while among evil men.

  Umar’s monastic caliphate had lasted a little over two years, and had done little to change the temporal tenor of Umayyad rule. Whether the encomium is a true verbatim report is questionable, although it does seem there was a particular mutual respect between the imperial neighbours during his brief tenure. And Umar’s monk-like mien is attested by other accounts. Observing him deliver a Friday sermon, one of those present took note of the quality of his clothes – kaftan, turban, shirt, drawers, shoulder-cloth, soft boots, cap – and estimated that together they were worth no more than a bargain-basement twelve dirhams. There could have been no greater contrast to Hisham’s red silk; or to Caliph Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik, who would spend the morning pondering which turban to preach in, and even dressed his cooks in richly coloured livery. Nearly two centuries later, the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid owned a collection of Umayyad caliphal robes: the sleeves of those that had belonged to Sulayman were still stained with grease, from his habit of delving in roasted rams to get at their kidneys.

  As ever, we must beware of retrospective blackening, or smearing. And it is equally dangerous to see the sainted Umar as the white sheep, the exception who shows up the other Umayyads as deviants from Islamic tradition. Once again: that tradition had not yet taken shape. The Qur’an existed as the canonical text; but a whole theological, legal and moral superstructure had yet to be built on it. Islam’s basic ‘pillars’ – profession of faith, prayer, pilgrimage, fasting and alms-giving – were religiously upheld; its extant lore and legend were carefully orally preserved, and sometimes written down; but the sayings and doings of Muhammad and his companions had not yet been put into any order, let alone synthesized into an ethical system. The earliest of the synthesizers, the great Islamic doctors of the law, Malik ibn Anas, was born while the Umayyad Mosque was being built, and only came to prominence after the fall of the dynasty. Like their high-profile buildings which helped to establish Arabs as an international presence, the Umayyads were more concerned with what might be called ethnic architecture – building Arab identity to fit its new role and environment – than with promoting ethical structures in which that identity would be lost.