The acculturated were defining the culture they had joined. But they were also beginning to add to it. Non-Arabs began to represent not just transmitters of poetry, but also poets in their own right. Even a slave from Sind, Abu Ata, could learn the ancient magic and become a poet patronized by the later Umayyad caliphs. Caught off his guard, his pronunciation could be appalling. But Arabic language, even mispronounced, made up for lack of Arab lineage. As the black slave and poet Nusayb ibn Rabah said,
Some are raised up by their lineage;
The lines of my poems are my lineage.
Now it was not only the old South Arabian peoples who were being acculturated by the Arabic language. The futuhat – the ‘openings-up’ or conquests – were going into reverse; the whole cultural empire of Arabs was being occupied by outsiders. Nor, as we shall see, did it help Arabs that their ranks were never truly closed: for despite the unifying rhetoric of Islam, and the efforts to synthesize Arabians in all their diversity and make them into Arabs, the old fissile tendency was back at work.
THE ‘NORTH–SOUTH’ SPLIT
It is always easy to picture things in contrasting pairs, and that of ‘Northern Arabs’ and ‘South Arabians’ has been useful so far. It is, however, shorthand for something much more complex. In genealogical terms, there is little basis to it. As we saw above, a theory of two major groupings had developed – that of the descendants of Isma’il (often called Adnanis or Nizaris, after ancestors higher up the family tree who may personify actual tribes) and those of Ya’rub (often called Qahtanis, for the same reason). But this was a rationalization of a much more involved reality, and by Islamic times trying to classify Arabs as ‘northern’ Adnanis or ‘southern’ Qahtanis was about as profitless as trying to sort the twenty-first-century population of the United Kingdom into Celts and Anglo-Saxons. There had of course been a linguistic division, but that had all but disappeared with the slow and steady victory of Arabic over the South Arabian languages. In purely geographical terms there was not much basis to the split: there were South Arabian groups like Ghassan in the far north of the Arabian subcontinent, and Northern Arabs had long infiltrated and settled the south. All of them, in any case, seem to have originated in the northern Fertile Crescent not long before the start of recorded Arabian history – that is, by the end of the second millennium BC.
Where the North–South split had greatest reality was in the way topography and climate had affected society from early on, producing the duality of badw and hadar, of qaba’il, tribes, and shu’ub, peoples. This sociological split resurfaced in Islamic times. ‘What are you Yemenis?’ asked a northerner of a southerner in a dispute in eighth-century Baghdad.
I’ll tell you. You’re nothing but tanners of hides, weavers of striped shirting, trainers of monkeys and riders of nags. You were drowned by a rat and ruled by a woman, and people had never even heard of Yemen until a hoopoe told them about it.
The rat is the one supposed to have gnawed away at the Marib Dam. The woman is the Queen of Saba/Sheba, brought to Solomon’s notice in the Qur’anic account by a talking hoopoe. The monkeys are the baboons that frequent the southern highlands; the ‘nags’ are the sturdy horses, more suited to mountain travel than the thoroughbreds of the Arabian steppe. As for tanning and weaving, the two famous luxury industries of the south may have been the butt of rawhide- and haircloth-clad raiders, but were the mark of a settled society of consumers and exporters. For their part, the southerners saw the northern, tribal Arabs as bellowing gimal – the ‘Himyari’ pronunciation (still current south of where I live) of jimal – ‘gamels’, ‘camels’, who were always trying to order them around: ‘We can’t abide these loud-mouthed gamels: they think they should talk the talk while we walk the walk.’ ‘Trade’ looked down on ‘Raid’, and vice-versa.
It seemed the ancient hadar–badw dialogue still hadn’t got beyond the trading of insults. Most recently and strikingly, Muhammad had brought together North and South: theologically, he had shown the Qurashis’ Allah and al-Rahman, the merciful deity of the southerners, to be one God; politically and socially, he had united the two groups by the ‘brothering’ of the Qurashi migrants and the originally southern Ansar, the native population of Medina. On his death, however, the Ansar had been excluded from any claims to leadership of the new community. That exclusion rankled. The old divisions had already been reinforced during the earliest conquests, when Syrian provinces and Iraqi cantonment cities were parcelled out along pre-Islamic tribal lines. Now, under the Umayyads, all Arabians were Arabs – hadar and badw, southerners and northerners; but some were more Arab than others, and a snobbish northern tribal poet like al-Farazdaq could dismiss Hadramis from the south of the peninsula as mere clients of Quraysh, as second-class tribesmen, like the unfortunate ‘Firewood-gatherer’ of Mu’awiyah’s put-down. In the face of this kind of northern ’asabiyyah, the southerners had maintained something of their own ancient solidarities and social structures: the clan of Dhu ’l-Kala’, for example, descended from a line of late pre-Islamic qwls or warlords, were a focus of southern unity in Umayyad Syria. But the northern tribal model of society was the dominant one, and such survivals from the old South soon faded away.
If the North–South split of Islamic times opened up ancient – sometimes legendary – fault lines, the movements in these faults were caused by forces in the present. It is not entirely unlike the twenty-first-century present in which the border of Scotland still happens to run, roughly, along the line of Hadrian’s Wall, but in which Scottish Nationalism has more to do with oil revenues, taxation and the European Union than with whether one’s ancestors were Picts, Celts, Romans, Sassenachs, Gaelic-speakers, Jacobites or whatever. The North–South split was a super-clan dispute, the latest and greatest example of that old tendency of units to divide in two – the Hashim versus Umayyah tendency. As we shall see, it exacerbated and was exacerbated by the power-struggles of Umayyad times. And it sparked off wars, far away in place and time – imminently in Khurasan, later in ninth-century India, in eighteenth-century Lebanon, in twentieth-century Oman.
But there were other, more immediately fatal fault lines.
HEARTS AND SWORDS
One rift was fatal at first only to a few of the family and followers – the shi’ah, or party – of Ali. (Seventy years on, however, it would open up and swallow the Umayyad dynasty; another 1,270 years on, it is still undermining Arab and Islamic unity, as fatally as ever.)
After the fudged arbitration that had ended his war with Ali, Mu’awiyah had gained the critical mass of support needed to call himself caliph in fact, not just in theory. The mass went on growing, swollen by the ever-silent majority – all those zeros that in themselves mean nothing, but can turn the ‘1’ at their head into a million. In contrast, Ali’s rival caliphate had shrunk until, by 660, it was limited territorially to little more than the region of al-Kufah. In the following year he was assassinated by a Khariji wielding a poisoned sword: a comrade spurned can be more furious than a woman scorned, and the Kharijis, ‘the Quitters’, loathed Ali for not fighting on against Mu’awiyah. Twenty years later, however, al-Kufah was still the hard core of Ali’s shi’ah. On the death of Mu’awiyah and the accession of his son Yazid to the caliphate, clearly now the hereditary throne, the shi’ah decided to try and nip the dynasty in the bud and start their own. To this end they invited al-Husayn, one of Ali’s two sons by Muhammad’s daughter, Fatimah, to come from Medina and lead a rising.
Al-Husayn’s friends in Medina advised him to send agents and prepare the ground in Iraq before venturing there himself. But he felt sure of his support, and marched off in September 680 with little preparation and only a small force of followers. In the event, the moral support would be there; the martial support would vaporize. As the poet al-Farazdaq is supposed to have said to al-Husayn when the latter asked him about the state of public opinion, ‘Hearts are with you, but swords are against you. Victory is in heaven’. It was, as ever, the swords that would matter.
Al-Husayn and his small band of supporters were wiped out by a force sent by the Umayyads’ governor of Iraq; the head of the Prophet’s grandson became the first of those four grim trophies seen in the governor’s palace at the start of this chapter. Soon after, the head took to the road, as grisly proof that the rising had been crushed, and as a warning to any other would-be rebels. When it arrived in Damascus, Caliph Yazid ibn Mu’awiyah is supposed to have addressed it in verse:
We cleave the heads of men who were beloved
of us – and then tyranically rebelled!
As he did so, he poked his sceptre in the mummified mouth. But one of those present, an older man who had known Muhammad – and this, his grandson al-Husayn, as a child – reproved the caliph: ‘Take your sceptre away from it! By Allah, often did I see the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings upon him, place his mouth against that mouth to kiss it.’
Hearts had not been enough. Having provoked his rising, the Shi’ah of al-Kufah had left al-Husayn in the lurch.
They saw that they had committed a great sin: al-Husayn had summoned them to his aid, and they had not responded; he had been killed right next to them, and they had not gone to help him.
The shi’ah of Ali still mourn their murdered founder and first imam; his son al-Husayn, however, dying gloriously in battle, gave them their protomartyr, their greatest and most enduring piece of propaganda. When boys I know are blown to bits in our present war – Martyrs Unite The Homeland!, says the slogan, a drugged cocktail of the nationalism and political Islam poured out on TV screens and in text messages – it is all a re-enactment of that sacrifice in 680. The continuing Shi’i sense of tragedy is due not only to loss, but also to a burden comparable to Peter’s betrayal of Jesus before the last cockcrow. It is a collective burden, and a heritable one. To witness, for example, Iranian pilgrims in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, kissing and weeping over a spot where al-Husayn’s head is said to have rested on its long Via Dolorosa (perhaps to Cairo, perhaps back to Iraq; no one knows for sure), is to watch an enduring play of passions and emotions, among which is ineradicable guilt.
CALIPH–ANTI-CALIPH
Collective guilt drove collective revenge, and eventually the head of the Umayyads’ governor was displayed in his own palace. But another challenge to Umayyad rule was rising far to the south-west in Mecca. Less fateful in the long term than the threat from Ali’s supporters, in the immediate present it posed a much greater danger. Fifty years after the death of Muhammad – the man whose revolution had offered liberty from the ‘Ignorance’ of the past, equality under Allah, and fraternity with all mankind – Arabs were back in their old cycle, the wheel of fire. Worse, the wheel was now powered by competing claims to a single, ultimate truth, a divine right – claims that had begun to clash with the killing of Uthman in 656, and had collided so bloodily at the battle of Siffin in the following year; moreover, Arabic makes ‘truth’ and ‘right’ one word, haqq. Al-Husayn had only made an ill-judged bid for leadership; Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, butt of Mu’awiyah’s put-down about ‘Firewood-gatherer, son of the father of Scold’, actually managed to set himself up as rival caliph with Mecca as his capital. He also managed to take control of a swathe of the empire, including much of the land that had emerged as its crux, Iraq – the pivot between Arabia and Persia, between the subcontinent and Eurasia; his caliphate was even acknowledged in parts of the Umayyad heartland, Syria. He was able to achieve this, in large part, by taking artful advantage of that fault line between ‘North’ and ‘South’: Mu’awiyah had been brought to power largely by the southerners in Syria; Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr courted the northerners and won their backing.
Mu’awiyah, on his deathbed, admitted that Ibn al-Zubayr would need more than jibes to neutralize him. The crown prince, Yazid, was not present, but Mu’awiyah said,
Tell Yazid from me . . . Ibn al-Zubayr is khabb wa-dabb: he’ll delude you like a wizard and elude you like a lizard . . . If you get hold of him, chop him up limb from limb.
These were the dying caliph-king’s last words.
Ibn al-Zubayr’s reptilian counterpart, the dabb, is a lizard eaten by old-fashioned Arabs but notoriously hard to catch: it retreats head-first into its hole and can only be pulled by its spiny and flail-like tail, which it uses as a painful weapon. The anti-caliph would prove similarly hard to prise out of his stronghold of Mecca. Mu’awiyah had already sent an army against the holy city under the anti-caliph’s own brother, Amr ibn al-Zubayr. This had been defeated, and Amr stripped and whipped to death at the gate of the Ka’bah precinct. The new caliph in Damascus, Yazid, despatched a much bigger force. Mecca was besieged again; this time the Ka’bah itself was the victim, bombarded to bits by mangonels and burned by incendiaries. While this was happening, Yazid and then his own son and successor Mu’awiyah II died in rapid succession, both of natural causes. Undeterred by these ominous events, the Umayyad family conclave chose a rather distant but powerful cousin, Marwan ibn al-Hakam, as the new head of the dynasty, while the anti-caliph rebuilt the focal shrine of Islam. Marwan’s caliphate, however, lasted only a matter of months: it was rumoured that he died of poison administered by his wife Fakhitah (‘Turtle-dove’) – she had previously been married to Yazid, and her son by him had been excluded from the succession. If so, the murder was to no avail: all the Umayyad caliphs to come were descendants of Marwan, and are thus often known as Marwanids.
For a time, disorder was the order of the day. Once again, the extraordinary unity achieved by Muhammad’s revolution had been reduced, like its symbol, the Ka’bah, to rubble. And even if the anti-caliph was rebuilding that ‘navel of the earth’, it seemed the symbol would never again reflect reality: for example, in one year, 688, there were four separate Mecca pilgrimages by supporters of, respectively, the caliph, the anti-caliph, a proto-Shi’i group that revered the memory of Ali, and a Khariji group that reviled it. A final stake was driven into the heart of unity when Marwan’s son, the new Damascene Caliph Abd al-Malik, actually forbade pilgrimage to Mecca: the anti-caliph had allegedly begun to force Mecca pilgrims to pledge allegiance to himself. Abd al-Malik declared Jerusalem the substitute destination and, as the focus of the redirected pilgrimage, built the Dome of the Rock, completed in 691. That golden architectural icon of Islam, founded on the vacant temple mount of the Jews and decorated by Christian Byzantine craftsmen, arose from Arab disunity.
The Dome of the Rock, however, was destined almost immediately to become a gorgeous folly. For it was now, in 692, that Abd al-Malik mounted another huge offensive against the lizard in his Meccan lair. The Ka’bah was bombarded again, but this time the city fell too, and the head of Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr duly made its way to Damascus. The united Mecca pilgrimage was back on track. And, ironically, given that it was now once more the single focus of pilgrims’ piety, the peninsula was sidelined politically and in every other way until the discovery there of oil 1,300 years later.
The year of the anti-caliph’s defeat is remembered as the second Umayyad ‘Year of Unity’ . . . Like the first one, three decades earlier, the wish was father to the name. For the Meccan anti-caliphate had bred disunities that continued long after it was suppressed. In particular, it exacerbated the ‘North–South’ split, which would soon resurface far away, but with disastrous consequences, in the eastern province of Khurasan.
Already, however, problems were bubbling away nearer home, in that crucial land, the crucible of Iraq.
THE TYRANT WITH THE SILVER TONGUE
Not only were the main losers in the first great schism, the shi’ah of Ali, gathering their strength again in Iraq. So too were their even bolshier arch-enemies, the Kharijis – the ‘Quitters’ who had backed Ali, then turned against him. The presence of both groups not only made the idea of unity a phantasm, but also posed a direct threat to the stability of the Umayyad caliphate. So Abd al-Malik unleashed on them his imperial rottweiler, al-Hajjaj, a viceroy whose bite was quite as bad as his bark.
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p; Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf had begun life as a schoolmaster of the flogging sort; later, however, he found his true vocation as a soldier and a gauleiter. Already notorious for his harshness, it was he who had masterminded the defeat of the anti-caliph. Over the following couple of years, he acted as a roving troubleshooter, putting down opposition to the Umayyads in various parts of the peninsula. Now, at the end of 694, Abd al-Malik sent him to sort out that most troublesome land of all, Iraq.
The new viceroy was also notorious for his rhetoric. Al-Hajjaj in the pulpit – the mosque, as ever, being the political hub – can make Hitler at the Nuremberg Rallies seem mealy-mouthed. His keynote speech was delivered on his arrival, incognito, in al-Kufah, which at the time was a focus of Khariji dissidence. He ascended the steps of the pulpit veiled in a red Khariji-style turban, surveyed all the other red turbans before him, and began with a line of poetry:
I am the son of brightness, climber of the folded mountain passes:
when I unveil myself – you will know me!
Arabs Page 32
