As we have seen in the preceding chapter, Arabs had now become the masters of a huge tranche of the civilized world, from Portugal to the Pamirs and from Aden to Azerbaijan; they needed not just the recent unifying ideology of Islam, nor even that far older unifying factor, the high Arabic language, but also firm and ancient foundation myths with which they could stake out their claims among the longer-established civilizations. This was the age when stories from the distant pre-Islamic past were fully articulated: Mu’awiyah would listen not only to accounts of the ayyam al-’arab, the ancient ‘battle days’ of the bedouins, but also to oral historians from the old settled south like Abid ibn Sharyah. Abid’s narratives of the Marib damburst and the subsequent migrations co-opted southerners into a wider Arabian – now Arab – history. As part of this process of co-optation, myths were elaborated according to which the South Arabian conquests were taken far beyond their actual limits (central and eastern Arabia) and extended to Samarqand and the borders of China. The imaginary ancient empire thus mirrored the actual empire of Alexander, and fore-mirrored that of Islam. Listening to a richly embroidered account from Abid of how the Himyaris got to Kabul and beyond, Mu’awiyah said, ‘Allah has made us heirs of all that empire of theirs. Today it is ours’.
THE LEGEND OF ISMA’IL
Arabs became heirs not just of other peoples’ empires, but also of other peoples’ ancestors. One of these was destined – if one can be destined in retrospect – to unite Arabs and make them a ‘race’. As we have seen, the earliest sense of ’arab may well be that of ‘a mixed people’. This seems to reflect reality: genealogically, Arabs are not a family tree growing from a single stem, but its water-mirrored reflection; or rather the river itself, fed by multiple tributaries. Under the Umayyads, the search was on for the ultimate source of the river. They found it in Isma’il, the wandering exile.
The Romans of the new imperial age had also needed a source, a founding father. They discovered him in Aeneas, the immigrant from Troy, the exile who both connects to and differentiates from another older culture, who inaugurates a new line and a new unity in a foreign land. Similarly, Arabs needed stories of migration, of founding fathers, acculturation and unification, to rationalize their own historic diversity. And just as Augustus claimed descent from Aeneas, so too was Muhammad’s origin traced back to Isma’il.
It was in the Umayyad age that all the elements of the legend finally came together. It tells how the northern Arabs were descended from Isma’il/Ishmael the son of Ibrahim/Abraham by his slave-concubine Hagar; Hagar herself came, according to tradition, from a village in Sinai called Umm al-’Arab, ‘the Mother of the Arabs’. We have already seen how Hagar and Isma’il were exiled in Islamic legend to Mecca, where they almost died of thirst but were saved by the miraculous spring of Zamzam. We have also seen how Isma’il, not originally an Arabic speaker, was taught the language by South Arabians living in Mecca, and how he married into the community of southerners. The story so far, inspired by impressionistic appearances of Isma’il in the Qur’an, back-projects a provenance for several features in the sacred landscape of Mecca. In Umayyad times, however, the account was developed in full, and provided in addition a provenance for Arabs themselves and for their major prophet who, as we have also seen, had discouraged speculation about his more distant ancestry. It was now – probably at some time around or during the short caliphate of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz – that full pedigrees were elaborated, directly linking a more recent ancestor of Muhammad and the northern tribes, Adnan, with the biblical/Qur’anic Isma’il.
That there are at least three different versions of the line of descent from Isma’il to Adnan hardly inspires confidence. And yet the Isma’il legend works for many reasons: it grafts Muhammad on to the monotheistic family tree; it grafts the South Arabians on to the linguistic tree (thus avoiding the problem that they didn’t actually speak Arabic); it backdates by millennia the alliance between the peoples of northern and southern Arabia; it offers in Isma’il a paradigm for the wanderer who settles (useful in an age when bedouins were being turned into colonists); and, most important, it acculturates not just peoples, but a whole past – Judaic and monotheistic – and makes it Arab. If Arabs wanted to assert their place in that wider community of kings and cultures depicted graphically in al-Walid’s desert palace, then Isma’il’s was a perfect ancestral persona to adopt.
Other ancestors were conjured out of even thinner air. The South Arabians were given a spectral forebear called Ya’rub, which means ‘He-Speaks-Arabic’. His original tongue was supposedly, like that of Isma’il, ‘Syriac’, but he was miraculously converted to the language of heaven by a great wind that blew from Babel: the whole family of actual South Arabian languages, Sabaic and its siblings, was thus blown to oblivion. Furthermore, Ya’rub was deemed to be the grandson of the Qur’anic figure Hud, an ancient Arabian prophet who had been sent to warn the impious tribe of Ad of their coming extinction; the southerners, too, got their own share of inherited prophetic honour. Finally, to tie the knot neatly, the descent lines of both Isma’il and Ya’rub were taken back to join at the son of Noah, Sam/Shem.
All of this is hardly history; it is inspired and inventive autobiography. But it has become part of deep-level Arab collective memory. Nowadays, Isma’il only features in the general Arab conscious as a minor Qur’anic prophet; Ya’rub, if at all, as a dubious invention of the early genealogists. But between them they embody the forces that have created and held together an expanding Arab world. Thus, legendary or even imaginary as they are, they are as important to the story of Arab unity as solidly historical figures like Muhammad or, more recently, Egypt’s President Nasser. A recent commentator, stressing the importance of the Isma’il legend, has said that it created ‘a unifying “ethnic” identity for the Arabs, which had not existed before’. To be more exact, it gave an alleged biological basis to an ethnic identity that had begun to form long before, in the first millennium BC. What took place was something like the age-old assimilation of outsiders into a supposedly descent-based tribe, but on a massive scale: just as, say, an ex-slave of Persian origin could become affiliated to an Arab tribe, first adopting its language and customs and then its ancestral name, so too could entire non-Arab peoples – in this case, the settled Himyaris, Sabaeans and others of the South. In a process that began centuries before Islam, they had already become Arabs by language and culture; now they had the ultimate imprimatur, a place in the tribal Debrett’s or Burke’s. But as part of the process, the historic languages and diversity of these peoples were denied; they were ‘tribalized’, fitted into a system in which political unity derived from shared human ancestors, not just from a shared deity. In a sense, it was the triumph of the qabilah over the sha’b, of the tribe over the people.
It was also a denial of that basic idea of Muhammad’s revolution, that of unity in plurality, or at least in duality:
O mankind, We have created you from male and female, and made you into peoples and tribes, that you may know one another . . .
The need for Arab national unity to control the earthly Arab empire ran counter to Muhammad’s vision of the super-tribal, supra-national unity of Islam. But in either case, unity was doomed. The branches of a family tree inevitably grow apart, competing for the light. Similarly, all roads might lead to Mecca and oneness in Allah, but when the pilgrimage is over the pilgrims take their ever-forking paths, and earthly realities reverse the heavenly ideal.
At least all Arabians were now, in the later Umayyad age, automatic Arabs. They needed to be: despite that supposed equality under Islam, Arabs were in practice the master-race of a ballooning empire, and without the southerners there would not be enough masters to go round; as we have seen, the first Caliph Umar had been painfully aware of the shortfall. One poet said of the southerners,
Were it not for the swords and lances of Ya’rub,
ears would never have heard the cry, Allahu akbar!
He may not have been exaggerating very
much. The sons of Ya’rub, the old South Arabians, were the vital reinforcements without whom the whole imperial project would have failed.
DASHING PENS
By the careful elaboration of legend, Arabians were themselves arabized and arabicized under the Umayyads. But so was something else that would have equally far-reaching consequences.
The Umayyads had picked up where the pre-Islamic Ghassanid dynasty left off. But there was a major difference: unlike the Ghassanids, or the Lakhmids in the old Persian orbit, the Umayyads weren’t mere client-kings – they were in charge. At first they adopted imperial know-how from the Byzantine and Persian systems. Their administration was conducted in Greek and, in ex-Sasanian areas, the old Persian language, Pahlavi; Byzantine and Persian coinage provided their currency. But they were not content to camp out for ever in the bureaucratic ruins of their predecessors. They had a vision, a mission, and if it wasn’t an islamicizing mission, it was an arabicizing one.
In the year 700, Caliph Abd al-Malik – his own head, despite the curse of all those decapitations at al-Kufah, still firmly on his shoulders and running the empire with aplomb – took a decision with far-reaching results: he had a new coinage struck that bore Arabic legends and, more important still, he decreed that the empire be administered not in the local languages but in Arabic. From now on, across a swathe of two continents, if you wanted to get on in life you had to knuckle down and learn that infuriatingly difficult but infinitely rewarding tongue.
One of those dubious-sounding but hard-to-invent stories explains the change in the language of administration:
The reason was that one of the Byzantine scribes needed to write something and, finding no water [to thin the ink], he urinated in the inkwell. Abd al-Malik heard of this, punished the scribe and gave orders . . . to change the records [to Arabic].
Whether writers of Arabic are less likely to urinate in inkwells than writers of Greek is a moot point; besides, it must be hard to urinate in an inkwell. But the story should not be dismissed because of its illogicality or triviality: chaos theory can apply to history as much to other disciplines. (Perhaps Borges was right to suggest that ‘there is no event, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects’.) What is not in doubt is the repercussions of Abd al-Malik’s decree. It was at this point, Ibn Khaldun writes – with some truth, even if he simplifies, compresses and generalizes a much longer process – that ‘People turned from the low standard of desert life to the splendour of sedentary culture and from the simplicity of illiteracy to the sophistication of literacy’. As a more recent commentator put it, the caliphal decree ‘both reined in and enriched a language of poetry, oratory and proverbs, and changed it into a language of civilization and science’.
Not everyone benefited, however. When Abd al-Malik told his chief scribe, Sergius, of the decision,
it troubled him, and he left the caliph’s presence in a state of depression. Some of the Byzantine scribes found him thus, and he said to them, ‘Go and look for some other means of livelihood, for God has deprived you of this profession.’
Others were more adaptable, and could slip into the new system: there were already people in the northern Fertile Crescent – that junction of languages and cultures – with a multilingual, multiliteral background, like the young Hassan al-Tanukhi, a Christian Arab fluent in speaking and writing Persian, Syriac and Arabic who would serve the state as a scribe and translator. One simply had to change or lose out.
The changes came fast. The older, more angular Arabic script, later known generically as ‘Kufic’, had resembled its Nabataean parent. Now, the sudden need to write much more, and much more quickly, gave birth to a new and rounded form of cursive script, essentially the same as most of the hands and typefaces used today. ‘It can be written with a swiftness that is impossible in other scripts’, noted the philosopher al-Kindi of the new and dashing style. To make reading easier and quicker, diacritical marks also began to be used more; inherited from Syriac, they had already appeared in Arabic at least as early as a dated papyrus of AH 22/AD 643.
As we shall see, arabicizing the administration was also to have other repercussions. The need for a mass of people suddenly to learn the intricacies of a very tricky language kick-started the formal analysis of that language. Grammar, syntax and philology were the first formal Arab sciences, and they shaped the entire Arab ‘scientific method’ – a whole way of looking at and understanding complex systems. Contrast this with the beginnings of the classical scientific method, in the observation of and speculation about ‘the nature of things’ from Anaximander on, and the scene is set for divergence: two angles from which to regard the universe, one rhetorical, relying on the authority of words, of texts; the other empirical, relying Nullius In Verba, as the motto of the Royal Society would put it, ‘on no one’s word’.
As for the coinage, Abd al-Malik issued a new Arabic, aniconic currency bearing pious phrases in place of the Byzantine coins used before. His decision, Ibn Khaldun says, was ‘because eloquent words alone were obviously more congenial to the Arabs’ than images – as if, for Arabs, the saying about the relative worth of words and pictures is inverted. Congenial images, of course, covered the walls of Umayyad palaces and mosques; but it has been suggested that a 695 Byzantine issue of gold coins bearing the face of Jesus must have clashed too obviously with Islamic strictures on the depiction of prophets. Al-Baladhuri, however, explains the new issue with another dubious but not incredible story. The ‘lead-ins’, or visible outer ends, of papyrus scrolls exported as writing material to Constantinople from Egypt had, before the Arab invasion, always borne crosses and other Christian symbols and words. The new Arab rulers of Egypt had these changed to Islamic messages, such as the anti-trinitarian Qur’anic verse,
Say, ‘He is Allah, One . . .’
In retaliation, the Byzantines threatened to include anti-Muhammad legends on the dinars they supplied to Damascus – hence Abd al-Malik’s decision to mint his own.
LINGUA SACRA, LINGUA FRANCA
Abd al-Malik’s arabicization of bureaucracy and coinage was as important to the founding of a durable Arabic culture as the Qur’an had been: it was the second chapter of a written revolution. The Qur’an had been the first chapter: it was the first book and almost certainly still, at the beginning of the eighth century, the only physical one. Now, however, writing – based on the only written Arabic in general circulation, the high Arabic of the Qur’an – would proliferate as the red tape spooled out. (The third chapter would be the paper revolution that began later in the eighth century, when expensive parchment and papyrus were replaced with the much cheaper new writing material originating in China.) Without Abd al-Malik’s decree, the Qur’an would have remained a revered holy text, but one that would gradually have detached itself from the mainstream life of the community it had helped to found. The high Qur’anic and poetic version of the language would, like Latin, have suffered a long, inevitable decline – ultimately to become, if not exactly a dead language, then a beautiful zombie, dedicated like Sanskrit to the service of a priestly caste. Indeed, without that sudden and intensive arabicization, today’s Arab world – really the Arabic world, a world defined by words – might never have come about. Empires that insist on administration in the language of the imperial masters can be immensely long-lived, like that of the Chinese, or can have a healthy afterlife, like that of the British; empires that make do with the languages of their subject-peoples have a tendency, like that of the Mongols, to break up and melt away.
The longevity of the Arabic world – of the Arabic word – is astonishing. No other comparable diasporic groups – Scythians, Turks, Mongols – have had such a strong and long-lasting sociolinguistic ‘glue’. The Greek of the Hellenic world and the Latin of the Roman (and the Roman Catholic) dissolved in time. The standard English of the British empire is dissolving now. A present-day inhabitant of Kingston, Jamaica, would probably have
little in common, linguistically or otherwise, with a seventh-century tribesman from Anglo-Saxon Northumbria; in contrast, despite the similarity of distance in time and space, a literate member of the black Moroccan Gnaoua in Tangier could hold a conversation with a seventh-century Meccan. Linguistic links are more powerful than genetic ones; ink is thicker than blood. For this we have to thank Islam, which never had a Pentecost, a revelation in many tongues. We have to thank too the amsar, the colonial new towns that were linguistic hotspots. Perhaps we also have to thank that nameless Byzantine scribe, short of ink, caught short and caught out.
The Arabic lingua sacra became also the lingua franca, and over an ever-widening region. Long-lived, far-flung cultures, however, can also exact a price: as we shall see in more detail later, the conquered tend to appropriate the language of the conquerors, infiltrate their ranks, and ultimately overwhelm them. An early and outstanding example of such an infiltrator is Hammad al-Rawiyah (Hammad ‘the Copious Reciter’), a native of Daylam south of the Caspian, already seen helping Caliph Hisham by identifying the author of a pre-Islamic verse. A human search-engine when it came to ancient Arabic poetry and the battle-days of old Arabia, Hammad is said to have been able to recite 2,900 pre-Islamic odes – a hundred for each letter of the alphabet (that is, a hundred in which the rhyme-letter is alif, a hundred for ba’ and so on). Whether or not this many genuine ancient poems had survived is questionable. What matters more is that, whereas traditional Arab transmitters of poetry only preserved the poems of their own tribes, Hammad and other non-Arabs preserved those of all the tribes together. In doing so, ironically, non-Arabs further developed the idea of Arabs as a cultural whole. As in the formative pre-Islamic years, when non-Arab imperial neighbours had shaped Arabs’ definitions of themselves, the Other was moulding the Self. (But perhaps it is not ironical, for it can be argued that it is precisely the existence of others that gives us – as people or as peoples – the sense of who we are.)
Arabs Page 31
