Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  and what are the a’rab? The curse of Allah upon the a’rab! I gathered you up as the chaff of the harvest-time is gathered, from the places where wormwood and southernwood grow, from the places where the shower-tree grows, from the island of Abarkawan. You rode on cattle and lived on animal-fodder. And I have mounted you on horses and girded you with weapons, that by your efforts Allah might make this land inviolable and pile up its booty!

  The team-building rhetoric worked, and in the first part of the eighth century Qutaybah led his forces across the River Oxus and into the rich lands of Transoxania. Eventually, success went to his head: he wrote to the newly installed Caliph Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik, threatening to ‘cast off allegiance like a pair of sandals’, and to send an army against him. But none of his men would back him, and Qutaybah was killed in 715.

  The next governor of Khurasan, Yazid ibn al-Muhallab, was one of that earlier governor’s 300 offspring. Immensely capable, he had already succeeded once to the governorship but had fallen from grace, been gaoled, and subsequently escaped. Now restored to the post, he set about redeeming his reputation by further enlarging the realm, particularly in the regions bordering the Caspian. As so often, the problem was the division of the spoils: he was accused by Damascus of holding on to booty, was jailed again, escaped again – and this time hit back, like Qutaybah, by casting off allegiance to the Umayyads. Defeated in 720, according to some accounts Yazid had intended making a bid for the caliphate itself. Whether the allegation was true or not, it would not be the last time that Khurasan was a springboard to revolt. Next time, however, the revolt would succeed spectacularly, and would found a new ruling dynasty.

  The beginnings of that new dynasty, the Abbasids, and the end of the Umayyads, are bound up with the third of those severed heads in the audience hall at al-Kufah, that of the proto-Shi’i al-Mukhtar. In his brief but bloody uprising in Iraq, al-Mukhtar had promoted as imam the martyred al-Husayn ibn Ali’s half-brother Muhammad, known after his mother as Ibn al-Hanafiyyah. On Ibn al-Hanafiyyah’s death in the first decade of the eighth century, the notional imamate had passed to his son, Abu Hashim. It was in the name of the latter that a revolutionary movement called the Hashimiyyah took root over the east of the empire, and especially in Khurasan, always a fertile land for faction. Abu Hashim died in 716 or 717 without leaving any sons; however, he magnanimously bequeathed the imamate to the living head of another branch of the family – the one that descended from al-Abbas, paternal uncle of both his grandfather Ali and of the Prophet Muhammad . . . or that, at least, was what the rulers of the Abbasid branch later asserted. The claim about the ‘bequest’ may be an attempt to cover the usual naked bid for power with a fig-leaf of legitimacy.

  Whatever the truth, it was in the name of the Hashimiyyah that the Abbasid campaign began in Khurasan in 747. It was a revolution that brought together a whole stew of discontents – hardline Hashimis, Persian peasants and nobles (mostly still un-islamized), second- and third-generation persianized Arabs, more recent Arab arrivals from that other hotbed, Iraq, all of them fed up with their absentee landlords in distant Damascus – and it was masterminded by a mawla, Abu Muslim. It is unclear whether Abu Muslim was of Persian, Arab or perhaps Kurdish origin, but he was bilingual in Arabic and Persian and, most likely, began as a Persian slave. In any case, he was another of those complex products of imperial blurring, one of the hybrid actors who were beginning to inherit the Arab impetus, and the old Arab eloquence. When Abu ’l-Abbas, the eventual first Abbasid caliph, praised his role in the revolution, Abu Muslim would invariably reply in impeccable Arabic verse:

  I have achieved by resolution and discretion that

  which all the gathered kings of Marwan’s line have failed to do.

  All along, I strove for their destruction by my efforts,

  while they, that heedless lot in Syria, were slumbering.

  Until at last I struck them with my sword – and they awoke

  from sleep the like of which no one has ever slept.

  Let a shepherd graze his sheep in lion-ridden lands

  and then nod off: he’ll find the lion does the shepherding.

  At the time, the Umayyads’ governor in Khurasan tried to awaken his master to the danger – also in that most pointed medium, verse, also using the metaphor of sleep, but mixed with that of fire:

  Among the ashes I see embers glowing

  that, likely, will be coaxed to flame.

  Fire’s kindled with two firesticks,

  war with words –

  And if no men of sense extinguish it,

  its fuel will be of corpses and of heads.

  I say, amazed at the Umayyads: would that I knew

  if they’re awake or slumbering.

  For if they’re yet asleep, then tell them

  that the time is come to wake and rise!

  The wake-up call went unheard. Far from slumbering, however, Caliph Marwan II ibn Muhammad was busy trying to douse a Khariji uprising in northern Iraq, and to cope with several other outbreaks in that incendiary land. Meanwhile, from Khurasan, the fire of greater revolution spread until it was too late to stamp it out.

  In little over two years, the rebel armies wiped out Umayyad rule in Persia and Iraq. In a last attempt to save his realm, Marwan II confronted them in January 750 on the Greater Zab, a tributary of the Tigris. Mu’awiyah, first of the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus, had emerged from the apocalyptic darkness of the fight with Ali at Siffin on the Euphrates. Now, with grim symmetry, darkness descended on the last of Mu’awiyah’s heirs in a battle by a river on the other side of the Mesopotamian plain. The revolutionaries had chosen black as their colour, and

  in their vanguard black banners flew, borne by men mounted on Bactrian camels . . . Marwan said to those near him, ‘Do you see how their lances are as thick as palm-trunks? Do you see the standards on their camels, black as pieces of stormcloud?’ As he was speaking, a number of black birds flew from some nearby gardens and alighted together on the first of the banners of Abd Allah ibn Ali [the Abbasid general] . . . Marwan took this as an ill omen and said, ‘Do you not see how black is joined to black, and how those birds are as black as thunderclouds?’ He then turned to his fighters, and they too had sensed the grief and the dread and the doom. ‘You are a fine force indeed,’ he said. ‘But what use is a force, when time has run its course?’

  Everything was being subverted: darkness had dawned from the east, and the fact that it had done so on the backs of those outlandish two-humped camels underlines how alien were the forces ranged against Marwan. Arabs themselves had been divided, at times by reality, at others by propaganda, into those northern and southern Arabian blocs. Their empire, however, now ran on that different, Afro-Eurasian axis: conflicts tended to oppose east to west – Ali in Iraq to Mu’awiyah in Syria, Abbasids in Khurasan to Umayyads in the Levant; later, Abbasids in Baghdad versus new anti-caliphates in both Egypt and al-Andalus. It would be from both west and east that eventual nemesis would descend on the Arab empire – the lesser nemesis of the Crusades, then the darker fate, looming from the east, of the Mongols. Even today conflict, real or imaginary, tends to run along an east–west axis. The Umayyads had never realigned themselves to face the new threats, the frightening plurality.

  There were of course multiple reasons for their fall. One of the few survivors of the family listed some of them with great frankness: love of luxury, oppression of the people and the people’s consequent unwillingness to pay taxes, emptying of the treasury, unpaid troops enticed to the revolutionary side . . . altogether, a template for dynastic decline and fall. But above all, the unnamed survivor admitted, the Umayyads’ collapse was due to their detachment from reality: ‘For one of the most potent causes of our downfall was the fact that no one told us what was happening.’ Or rather, they did tell them, with those warnings of fire and heads and corpses; but only when it was too late.

  Reality had caught up with Marwan II in the form of defeat on the Zab. It now pu
rsued him to Egypt, where he tried unsuccessfully to bury the regalia of the caliphate – robe, sceptre and staff; they were found, and so was he. His head was sent to Abu ’l-Abbas, who had proclaimed his caliphate in al-Kufah. Another head; another symmetry. Abu ’l-Abbas, meanwhile, had made the first of many breaks with the past by adopting a caliphal title, ‘al-Saffah’. It is a strangely appropriate title, as it foreshadows all the asymmetries, the self-contradictions that would characterize his dynasty, for it means both ‘the Giver of Gifts’ and ‘the Shedder of Blood’. (Arabic being what it is, it can also mean ‘the Wielder of Words’.)

  What is in some ways the most ‘Arab’ period of Arab history – the Umayyad – had also been the briefest, little more than a human lifetime long. But it was a period in which, by the legerdemain of pedigree, the South Arabians were attached to the tribal tree and all Arabians were defined, finally and irrevocably, as Arabs; a period in which their now vast empire was still grounded in the varied landscape of their subcontinental home. As for the Umayyads themselves,

  They were the mother-lode of monarchy, and only

  under them could Arabs live as proper Arabs.

  Al-Jahiz, the great ‘arabologist’ who quotes this verse, should have the last word on the Umayyads. The Abbasid dynasty, under whom he lived, was

  ’ajamiyyah khurasaniyyah, non-Arab and Khurasani. The [Umayyad]

  dynasty . . . was ’arabiyyah a’rabiyyah, Arab and bedouin-Arab.

  You can’t get more Arab than that.

  HISHAM’S PALACE

  The Umayyads had also been a deeply divisive dynasty, as the four heads at the beginning of this chapter bear witness – not to mention the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of other heads that fell over their ninety years in power. The divisions would extend deep into the future.

  North of the Palestinian town of Jericho is another of those hunting boxes or rural palaces, like Qusayr Amrah with its heavenly vault and frescoed emperors. The Jericho monument is called Khirbat al-Mafjar but is popularly known as ‘Hisham’s Palace’. No inscriptions or documents actually link the place with Hisham, but its rich decorations would have suited that poetry- and luxury-loving caliph, seen above draped in red silk, dripping with musk and surrounded by marble and gold. Today, the ruins of the palace face those of a more recent structure – a Palestinian refugee camp, al-Nuway’imah. It might be the perfect illustration of the bathos of history. That is how one observer, Sharif S. Elmusa, sees it: ‘A more poignant image of the contrast between the state of the Arabs then and now could not have been dreamed up by the wildest poet.’ Elmusa should know: he himself is a poet, and he grew up in al-Nuway’imah camp. But the spores of the decline – the family, clan, tribal, sectarian rivalries – were present even before the palace was built. The camp may be a contrast architecturally, but it belongs historically to a continuum of disunity of which the palace is also part. The Umayyads built palaces; but they also built up political camps, including those ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ blocs, whose rivalries they were happy to use and abuse. Playing one side against the other had helped to set their dynasty up. It had saved it from the anti-caliph in Mecca. But it had also ultimately contributed to the unrest in Khurasan and to their undoing. ‘North–South’ disunity proved longer-lived than any dynasty, and as damaging in its way as those other rivalries, sometimes connected with it, which ran along the east–west axis. ‘In Lebanon and Palestine,’ Hitti has pointed out,

  the [‘North–South’] issue seems to have remained a living one until modern times, for we know of pitched battles fought between the two parties as late as the early part of the eighteenth century.

  Nor has the issue gone away. It lives on under other names, and the deepest underlying issue – the dialogue of badw and hadar – is far from over. Hisham’s Palace and al-Nuway’imah Camp are an image of contrast, but also of continuity, two points on the sliding scale from luxury to misery.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE EMPIRE OF

  BAGHDAD

  ABBASID SOVEREIGNTY

  AT THE MID-POINT OF THE WORLD

  In the year 871, ‘seized by a sudden desire’, an adventurous citizen of al-Basrah called Ibn Wahb sailed to China. On arrival he was seized by another desire, and made his way to the imperial capital, Chang’an, to call on the Tang emperor. After a long wait, the writing of many petitions and, eventually, the making of inquiries by the imperial court, Ibn Wahb’s persistence paid off, and he was admitted to the emperor’s presence. Royalty being obsessed with its own precedence, one of the first questions the emperor asked his visitor was,

  ‘How are all the kings ranked according to you Arabs?’ Ibn Wahb tactfully feigned ignorance, and replied,

  ‘I know nothing about them.’

  Then the king said to his interpreter, ‘Tell him we count five kings as great. The one with the most extensive realm is he who rules Iraq, for he is at the centre of the world, and the other kings are ranged around him; we know him by the name “the King of Kings.” Next comes this king of ours . . .’

  meaning himself. Then came the kings of the Turks, of India and of Byzantium.

  The emperor’s answer is astonishing. Was not China the Middle Kingdom, and Chang’an the mid-point of the civilized world? Would the Tang emperor really have regarded the Abbasid caliph in barbarian ‘Bangda’ – Baghdad – as more important than himself? It all seems highly unlikely. Moreover, the wise infidel king who makes pointed comments about one’s own society is a recurring literary character: al-Mas’udi, for example, who himself repeats this Chinese anecdote, also has the Christian king of the Nubians pronouncing a blistering critique of the Abbasids’ predecessors, the Umayyads, and their irreligiosity. But whether the audience in Chang’an actually took place or not, the point it makes is no less valid. Baghdad controlled the biggest empire in the world; and it does indeed lie exactly half-way along a line drawn from the far west of Africa to the far east of China – the extremes of the busiest band of habitation and trade on the Afro-Eurasian megacontinent, a clime that includes Egypt, the Levant, Persia, northern India and China itself. Baghdad’s seaport, Ibn Wahb’s native al-Basrah, lies down the Tigris and just inland from the head of the Gulf, which sits half-way round the Indian Ocean rim and is also the spot where the rich littoral of the Old World’s greatest trading ‘pond’ penetrates deepest into its landmass.

  A small but tangible piece of evidence that the Arab empire was now at the centre of the Old World, and more than just geographically, comes from that world’s far north-western corner. There, in England in 774, King Offa issued a gold coinage in imitation of the dinars of the first great Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur: in addition to the rest of the Arabic inscription, the centre of the coin bears the words ‘OFFA REX’ sandwiched in Roman characters upside-down between the Arabic,

  ‘Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’. The Islamic creed jingled in English purses; even the Latinate name of the coin, mancus, is possibly from the Arabic manqush, ‘inscribed, minted’. It was not that the Anglo-Saxons of Mercia had suddenly converted to Islam; but it was graphic acknowledgement that the Abbasid dinar was the US dollar of its day – that there was now a new superpower, a new superculture, and that the old Classical age had finally ended. Admittedly, it is probably the Arabic that is notionally upside-down: a mint master in the English Midlands was hardly likely to have known which way up the script went, let alone what it meant. But if that reflects a more general incomprehension of the new cultural power, then the reflection is accurate.

  ROUND WORLD, ROUND CITY

  In the 740s the Abbasids had begun, as did all power-seekers, by forging a new ’asabiyyah, a new wheel of fire. As the Umayyad governor of their power-base in Khurasan had warned,

  Fire’s kindled with two firesticks,

  war with words –

  And if no men of sense extinguish it,

  its fuel will be of corpses and of heads.

  The fire had fanned out from the east and consumed
everything in its path. Soon, however, it would begin to consume itself: ever since the primeval Titan, Cronus, castrated his father, then went on to swallow his own offspring, revolutions have tended to devour their children. Sure enough, the Abbasids would exclude from power their fellow revolutionaries – the Hashimiyyah, and the pro-Ali faction in general – and then go on to turn violently against them. Once more, a small sub-clan of the Meccan tribe of Quraysh had taken the mould-breaking message of Islam and remoulded it to monopolize power to its own ends. Once more, the ideal, universal unity of Islam was subverted by a particular unity, loyalty to an earthly power.

  There was, however, a difference. The Umayyads had been the Establishment before Muhammad, and for almost a century of the new Islamic era they had ruled largely in the manner of ancient Arab kings; their rigidity, their resistance to plurality, had been a large part of their undoing. The Abbasids were made of more flexible stuff. Their ancestor and eponym, Muhammad’s paternal uncle al-Abbas, had been one of the Prophet’s opponents and had fought against him at the battle of Badr. When it was clear that victory was Muhammad’s, however, al-Abbas’s sons had entered wholeheartedly into his ever-expanding venture: they ended up, as we have seen, scattered from North Africa to Central Asia. As for the stay-at-home son Abd Allah, great-grandfather of the first two Abbasid caliphs, he is remembered as the first interpreter of Islamic scripture. The Abbasids did not merely toe the line of Islam: they followed it wherever it led them, into the paths of scholarship or conquest. Their flexibility endured, and would guarantee the survival of their own line – even if, paradoxically, it meant the end of the line for Arab power. It also meant that, as a dynasty, they would be multiply self-contradictory. Although they would cling on to the caliphate for three-quarters of a millennium, they would rule for only a century; they would reign for four more, and live out the rest of their time in a gilded cage in Cairo. The greatest Arab dynasty, they would also be the last great Arab dynasty, and in many ways the least Arab.