Thus revealed as Lucifer, dark bringer of light, he continued:
I come bearing evil for evil, weight for weight. I measure the sandals of evil by their footprints. I reward evil with evil. And I see heads ripe for the picking, heads that are mine to pluck. I see blood oozing between turbans and beards . . .
Armed men guarded the exits, waiting to shed that blood.
Often he would begin a speech softly, almost inaudibly, and then rise in a crescendo until he terrified those in the furthest corners of the mosque. It was not all blood and thunder, however. He could be so suavely persuasive, one of his listeners said, that you would end up thinking that it was he who had been personally mistreated by the Iraqis, and that his harvest of heads was quite justified. In other words, he possessed the ultimate qualification of the rhetorician: he could make you believe a rhetorical truth that was the diametric opposite of observable fact. ‘That enemy of Allah,’ another contemporary noted after his fall,
would put on the gaudy garb of a whore, and mount the pulpit and speak the fine words of fine men – and then, when he descended, would act the pharaoh. He lied in his speech worse than the Antichrist.
Acting the pharaoh in Iraq involved putting to death, by some estimates, 120,000 Kharijis and other opponents of the Umayyads in cold blood. Then there were the victims – 50,000 men and 30,000 women – who died in his gaols, and the numberless ones killed in fighting. Are the figures exaggerated? Even reduced by a factor of ten, they would still be terrifying.
Like some other schoolmasters and dictators, al-Hajjaj enjoyed his reputation as a bogeyman: ‘I am iron-hearted and malevolent, cruel and jealous’, he once admitted. As an orator-despot, he was a darker version of the old tribal sayyids and khatibs who ruled with words, and his heady mix of eloquence and violence has exercised a dark fascination: in Ibn Khallikan’s great thirteenth-century biographical dictionary of the Arabic world, the thirteen-page entry on al-Hajjaj, the man you love to hate, is one of the longest. The fascination lives on. He was a role-model for the recent ruler of Iraq, Saddam Husayn, and, like that twentieth-century disciple, has plenty of admirers today. ‘No one but al-Hajjaj and Saddam could keep those dreadful Iraqis under control!’ is a sentiment I have heard more than once.
Al-Hajjaj, for all his cruelty, was one of the greatest Arab orators in history. Only one person is on record as having silenced him – the wife of Caliph al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik who, while al-Hajjaj was ensconced with her husband, sent a maidservant to the latter with the message, ‘How can you sit with this a’rabi bristling with weapons, when you are wearing nothing but a light tunic?’ When the caliph sent a message back to say that the a’rabi was in fact al-Hajjaj, his governor of Iraq, ‘she was horrified, and told him, “By Allah, I don’t like you being alone with a mass-murderer!”’ Overhearing the exchanges with the maid, al-Hajjaj gave the caliph a lecture on the importance of not listening to women’s prattle. This was passed back to al-Walid’s wife, and the following day she summoned al-Hajjaj to pay his respects. He was kept waiting; finally admitted to her veiled presence, he was kept standing – and given a lecture in return that began,
If Allah had not made you the most miserable of His creation, he would not have chosen you to be the one to bombard the Ka’bah!
On it went, concluding with aspersions on his manhood. Al-Hajjaj fled to the caliph and admitted,
‘She did not stop until I wished the earth would swallow me up.’ And al-Walid laughed so much that he pawed at the ground with his feet.
The man who had caused so many deaths was himself destined to die in bed. But there is a chilling twist to his end. Feeling that it was approaching, al-Hajjaj is said to have summoned an astrologer and asked if he divined the imminent death of a ruler.
‘I do,’ said the astrologer, ‘but it is not you . . . because the one who is to die is called “Kulayb”.’ And al-Hajjaj replied, ‘No; it is I. For that is what my mother used to call me.’
If another anecdote can be believed, it was the infancy of Kulayb, ‘Puppy’, that influenced his future career. Having refused to suck his mother’s milk or that of wet-nurses, he was made to lick on successive days the blood of two black lambs, a black kid and a black snake. The remedy worked, ‘but thereafter he could never resist the shedding of blood, because of what had befallen him at the beginning of his life’.
Al-Hajjaj left Iraq a legacy of blood, added to that which the war between Mu’awiyah and Ali had bequeathed. He also left a legacy of division. As we have seen, the originally cosmopolitan new cities of Iraq, the amsar, were turned at his orders into apartheid reserves, forbidden to non-arabophones. When al-Hajjaj founded his own new town, Wasit, ‘Midway’ – because it was half-way between al-Basrah and al-Kufah – a simpleton is said to have spoken the truth no one else dared to utter:
Al-Hajjaj is a fool. He built the city of Wasit in the country of the [native] Nabat, then told them not to enter it!
It was all part of the doomed attempt at social engineering, at keeping Arabs as the ruling caste. But al-Hajjaj and his Umayyad overlords were trying to stem an irresistible tide.
MONGREL SPEECH
The flood-tide was nowhere more visible – or, rather, audible – than in the way spoken Arabic was changing. Non-Arabs were learning the secrets of the old high language; at the same time, Arabs themselves were losing the voice that had given them the nearest thing to unity for the longest part of their history. At first, keeping Arabs together in the amsar had ensured that they kept their language: having new and thriving cities that were concentrated cores of arabness in Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia meant that, in time, the people outside were arabicized, rather than the Arabs being persianized, copticized or berberized. The locals adopted the language of the powerful group. The opposite happened in regions where there were no amsar: in the vast eastern province of Khurasan, for example, by the mid-eighth century most ethnic Arabs spoke Persian.
But in the hearts of the amsar, in their inmost chambers, Arabic was changing. Apart from the high Arabic of poetry and the Qur’an, everyday Arabic had always existed in different varieties, but these had been easily mutually intelligible across Arabia. What was happening now was that the language was becoming muwallad, mongrel – because even if you could keep the native men out of the amsar, you couldn’t keep the native women out. Arabhood came from the patriline, but what went for Arabic came as often as not from the other side of the family tree; the term ‘mother-tongue’ speaks for itself. Further add to the mangled language of concubine-mothers the kitchen-Arabic of wet-nurses and household slaves, and the tongue of angels will fall to earth.
Al-Jahiz collected a chapterful of choice malapropisms. These include the Persian mother of the poet Jarir’s sons trying to tell one of them that rats (jirdhān) had got at her dough (ʿajīn) – except that it came out as ‘two troops of horsemen (jurdān) have got at my backside (ʿijān)’. The boys asked her to remain silent if they had guests. Another famous blunder was that of a Persian client of Mu’awiyah’s governor of Iraq, Ziyad, who needed a donkey (Ḥimār) but, falling into the perennial Ḥ/h trap, asked him for a meaningless ‘himār’.
‘What the hell are you saying?’ Ziyad asked.
‘I asked you to give me an ayr,’ the man said,
pleased at having come up with a synonym; except that instead of ’ayr, ‘an ass’, with a twanging letter ’ayn, he had asked for a twangless ayr, ‘a penis’:
‘The second is worse than the first,’ said Ziyad.
Indeed, Arabic was going from bad to worse. The very genders were bending: Jarir’s concubine might have held her tongue when guests came to dinner, but, he sighed,
The first I hear from her, when with the sun I rise,
is feminines made masculine and masculines that feminize.
It was as if the British in India, originally speaking their own regional varieties of English – Scots, Irish, Cockney and so on – but all understanding each other and all writing a standard King�
��s English, had not only never sent their sons home to school in Blighty, but had also failed to keep themselves aloof from the native women. Succeeding generations of Kims would have grown ever darker-skinned and wallowed ever deeper in a Hobson-Jobson in which not only the vocabulary but the most basic grammar was pidginized.
Even the King’s Arabic was slipping. Al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik was prone to making slips because, as mentioned, he never had his elocution lessons in the customary bedouin ‘finishing school’. His lapses, a listener complained, undermined his dignity. This is probably no exaggeration in the case of one of his most famous faux-pas, when he meant to ask someone,
‘Man khatanuka?’ ‘Who is your father-in-law?’
but asked instead,
‘Man khatanaka?’ ‘Who circumcised you?’
MORE LOST THAN ORPHANS
If Arabs themselves were losing their grip on their own silver but slippery tongue, non-Arabs were sharpening their pens and taking to the high and increasingly written language with alacrity. Arabic was joining the exclusive club of great world languages. In terms of geographical spread it was to leave its jaded fellow members, Greek and Latin, far behind. It was also leaving Arabs behind; not only that, but the whole business of being Arab was beginning to run away with itself.
Arabicization didn’t always mean islamization: there were, and still are, plenty of Arabic-speakers who were not Muslims. To begin with, however, becoming a Muslim did usually entail becoming an ‘Arab’, in the sense of having to be attached to an Arab tribe as a mawla. But becoming a tribal affiliate didn’t suddenly turn you into an Arabian tribal person: mawlas had their own ‘constant inner worlds’, to use V.S. Naipaul’s phrase again, and mawlas were the majority. What was happening was that Arabic and Islam were bringing about a new cultural unity, but of the sort aspired to in the old motto of the United States (and of the Gentleman’s Magazine) – E Pluribus Unum, ‘unity out of diversity’. Arabs had long defined themselves in contrast to others, especially in terms of language – ’arab versus ’ajam – but now the others were including themselves in the definition, bewildering it with added meanings. An early example of bewilderment is that of Ziyad, the Umayyad governor of Iraq already mentioned. He is usually known to historians as Ziyad ‘ibn Abihi’ – ‘the son of His Father [implying, whoever his father might have been]’. His nominal father was a Persian slave; it was alleged that his real begetter was the old pagan chief of Mecca, Mu’awiyah’s father Abu Sufyan, and indeed Mu’awiyah did later acknowledge Ziyad as his half-brother. Whatever the truth of the allegation, in Ziyad’s case it was his gift of speech that gave him the power he would wield:
By Allah, if this lad were of Quraysh, he would drive the Arabs before him with his stick,
said a Qurashi who heard him speak as a youth. In the end, Ziyad not only wangled his way into the Prophet’s tribe, but finished up as the caliph’s brother and viceroy – and above all because of ‘his noble character and eloquence’.
Arabic had unified Arabs ethnically even before Muhammad gathered their word politically; after him, it soon began to dissolve them. In the words of a supposedly ancient prediction, sayyid al-kalam – Arabic, ‘the master of speech’ – was making masters of its people; but it was also empowering others. The traditional solution was to adopt these others into the tribal system, if not as actual brothers, then as affiliated mawlas. That worked on the old Arabian level, until the time of Ziyad and his brothers. It didn’t work when the newly empowered of the conquered lands began to outnumber the conquerors. With the master-race divided among themselves, and its ruling dynasty set on maintaining traditional notions of arabness and kingship, how could they cope with the plurality of an empire?
Many could not cope, and took refuge in that redoubt of embattled empires, chauvinism. Despite Muhammad’s famous declaration in his Farewell Sermon, that no Arab is superior to any non-Arab except in piety, some peoples who were not notably impious came in for especial opprobrium:
Berbers and Slavs [barabirah wa-saqalibah], Jarmaqis and Jarjumis [jaramiqah wa-jarajimah: Persian desert-dwellers and Antiochian marsh-men], Copts and Nabataeans [aqbat wa-anbat], and the dregs of humanity . . .
as one Arab warrior dismissed them in a fit of jingling jingoism. This is hauteur speaking, but also fear.
The fear was well founded. The empire was growing ever bigger and more plural: the super-raid had developed its own momentum, a chain reaction of conquest, and increasingly the raiders were non-Arabs. The conqueror of Spain, to give a particularly egregious example, was Tariq ibn Ziyad, and he was the mawla of a mawla. His story began, indirectly, when in the 630s the Qurashi commander Khalid ibn al-Walid raided a church in Iraq and gathered a remarkable flock of captives: they included the grandfather of Muhammad’s most famous biographer, the future founder of the art of Islamic dream-interpretation, and an Arab Christian called Nusayr. The latter became a slave and then a freed mawla of the Umayyad clan; his son, Musa ibn Nusayr, was thus a mawla by heritage. Musa was to lead the forces that raided across the top of Africa, getting as far as Tangier in the first decade of the eighth century. His Arab warriors seemed to be on an unstoppable roll – except that, by now, they had both reached the end of the known world, and had gathered so many Berbers along the way that the force could hardly be called ‘Arab’ any more. And there was another problem: all the extra raiders had to be paid, or at least be given bed, board and booty (and bedfellows). Inevitably Musa’s gaze turned north, across the strait to Spain, and it was his Berber lieutenant and mawla, Tariq ibn Ziyad, whom he sent over the water in 711 to wrest the Iberian Peninsula from the Visigoths. (En route, Tariq gave his name to the shark-fin mountain in the sea, ‘Jabal Tariq’, garbled by Spanish tongues into ‘Gibraltar’.) The long and glorious history of Arab-Muslim al-Andalus thus began with a Berber ex-slave of the son of a Christian ex-slave. Rather as the Arab minorities of the present-day Gulf states leave the hands-on business of running their countries and expanding their economies to non-Arab masses, mostly from South Asia, Arabs of the Umayyad age were subcontracting the business of imperial expansion.
It seems unlikely, although not impossible, that Tariq the Berber could have delivered the high Arabic speech that is put in his mouth before the decisive battle with the Visigoth king, Roderick (one of those rulers depicted in the Umayyads’ desert palace of Qusayr Amrah). But it is worth quoting, for it shows how historians retrospectively arabized the conquest of Spain:
Men, where can you fly when the sea is behind you and the enemy before you? All you can do is be true and steadfast. For you must know that in this island [i.e. the Iberian Peninsula] you are more lost than orphans at the feasts of evil men . . .
It soon slips into that most anciently Arabian form of high speech, rhythmic, rhyming prose:
. . . You have heard of the lovely houris whom this isle has brought forth, / daughters of the Greeks [sic] by birth, / maidens trailing pearls and gems / and cloth-of-gold from heads to hems, / secluded in their palaces where kings wear diadems. / [The caliph] al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik has chosen each of you as an Arab knight / from among his champions for the fight, / is pleased that you and the royal ladies of this island will unite, / and trusts the penetration will delight . . .
That last phrase refers both to the penetration with steel in battle of Roderick’s men, and of the secluded ‘daughters of the Greeks’ in bed afterwards. The pun, if made in reality, would have passed over the Berber troops’ heads; so too would the entire speech. But the speech is not a matter of reality: it is an imaginary arabization not only, probably, of Tariq, now an old-style Arabian leader-orator, but certainly also of his Berber troops, converted into ‘Arab knights’. In order to conquer and control the empire, South Arabians had already been turned into Arabs; historians, in retrospect, manufactured even more Arabs, and from ever more distantly sourced materials.
It was all very well for Arabs to outsource their further conquests and pass on the imperial impetus to oth
ers: spread along so many fronts, there were simply not enough Arabs to keep the impetus up themselves. It was a shortage that had been felt in the first years of the conquests, when that second, Persian front had been added to the original Syrian one. But it meant that Arabs themselves were becoming ever more isolated in their own expanding empire. In the coming centuries, as the distinction between ersatz- and echt-Arabs blurred, and as blatant non-Arabs – Daylamites and Turks – took over not just the impetus but the imperium itself, those original Arabs would be more than just isolated in the new world they had created: they would be lost, more lost than orphans.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF UMAYYAH
In first part of the eighth century, with the conquest of Spain, the Arabic world had finished realigning itself on a completely new axis. It was no longer orientated north–south, from one Fertile Crescent to another. Instead, it ran east–west, Mashriq to Maghrib, from the land of the rising sun to that of its going down. It was the orientation of a bigger, older stage of history, the vast Afro-Eurasian theatre of events, and the cast of players was similarly intercontintental. Its rulers, the house of Umayyah, were thus at the pinnacle of their power – and they were soon to plunge from it, headlong. For the threats were multiplying: the anti-caliphate in Mecca may have been dealt with, but in the simmering lowlands of Iraq, pro- and anti-Ali factions posed a double danger to the rule of Damascus that even the bloody al-Hajjaj had not been able to contain. And way to the east, beyond the central Iranian desert and hard by Afghanistan, the temperature was rising in another hotbed of revolt, the province of Khurasan.
As early as the caliphate of Mu’awiyah, Arabs in Khurasan had been unwilling to hand over the spoils that piled up from its conquest. Khurasan seemed a world in itself, hemmed in by river, desert and mountain, and an independent-minded leader there could rule the land virtually as his own mega-fief. It helped in building up a core of loyal support when, like one governor of the late seventh century, al-Muhallab, you fathered 300 children; they formed a whole Arab sub-tribe, the Mahalibah. A subsequent governor, Qutaybah ibn Muslim, found it less exhausting to import his support than to father it. Like al-Muhallab but unlike the more malleable contemporary commanders of the west of the empire, Qutaybah was a peninsular Arab by origin, and many of the men under him were raw newcomers from the Gulf region – ‘A’rab,’ Qutaybah called them, haranguing them and banging them into shape as a fighting force:
Arabs Page 33
