Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  never to shy away from admitting the value of truth [al-haqq] and acquiring it for ourselves, wherever it may come from – even if it comes from races who are distant from us and societies quite different from our own.

  Only in a society and culture sure of its own strength could such an idea have been thought, let alone expressed.

  The influence of this new and cosmopolitan superculture spread not just to Chinese emperors and Anglo-Saxon coinage. In the shrinking rump of the classical world too, in Constantinople, they were imitating Baghdadi architecture and dress: the emperor Theophilus, who fought Arabs on the battlefield in the 830s, built a Baghdad-style palace by the Bosporus, while wealthy Byzantines went about à l’arabe, in turbans and kaftans. Even on the streets of Tang-era Guangzhou, the Arab-style kaftan or hufu, ‘foreigner’s robe’, was in fashion. But, while the world was becoming ever smaller and more Arabic – both in the words it spoke and wrote, and in the modes of its life and dress – it was becoming, at least to the traditionally minded, ever less Arab.

  THE LONG ECLIPSE BEGINS

  The last Umayyad governor of Khurasan had warned his masters in Damascus of the Abbasid revolution. If they failed to extinguish it now, his poetic fire alarm concluded, then ‘to Islam and to the Arabs – farewell!’ The Abbasid victory had not brought about the end of Islam; instead, it had enriched it in many ways. But what about arabness? As we have seen, the great arabologist al-Jahiz, writing a century after the Abbasid takeover, branded the Abbasid dynasty as ’ajamiyyah khurasaniyyah, non-Arab and Khurasani. Certainly, their revolution had begun in Khurasan, and they had always used troops from that region; they were ‘Khurasani’ in that sense. But ’ajami? Surely al-Jahiz was overstating a rhetorical point: ’ajami had always served as the opposite – in language, but also in ancestral origin, lifestyle and every other way imaginable – by which ’arabi defined itself.

  The Abbasids were of course still Arabs in language and in the all-important male lineage. But in lifestyle they had come a long way in a short time. Al-Mughirah, that epitome of rough bedouin arabness, parleying with the shah’s viceroy a little over a century before the Abbasid rise, had vandalized the Persian’s precious carpet and thrust himself on to the viceregal throne. Now the Abbasids were the ones with carpets and thrones. The Arab ‘kings of kings’, as the Chinese emperor called them, even if they had not officially adopted that persianesque title, had embraced Persian ‘ornamentalism’. In contrast to the accessibility of old Arab and most early Islamic rulers, the first Abbasid caliph, al-Saffah, had adopted the Persian custom of sitting behind a curtain when in public audience. Admittedly some of the Umayyads had done so too. But the later Abbasids went much further. They began to wear the taj, a Persian word for ‘crown’ but perhaps, for the Abbasids, a turban adorned with gems. They employed court astrologers – in al-Mansur’s case a Zoroastrian, who gave him a veneer of legitimacy in the land of the ‘Magi’, where the majority still clung to the old religion. And policy was persianized as well: al-Mansur’s assassination of Abu Muslim is said to have been inspired by a similar killing of a trusted lieutenant by one of the Sasanian shahs. It was a deed that would hardly have been imaginable under the Umayyads who, even if they fought their enemies to the death, were generally more loyal to their friends.

  A metaphorical curtain was coming down between the rulers and their origins, between the new, cosmopolitan Arab and the old-style a’rabi. The disconnect is revealed in a story about the third Abbasid caliph, al-Mahdi, getting lost while hunting in the wilderness and taking refuge with a bedouin. The bedouin plies him with wine and, cup by cup, the caliph gradually reveals who he is: first that he is from the court; then that he is one of the caliph’s commanders; then that he is the caliph himself. The bedouin, meanwhile, looks on askance.

  ‘Bedouin,’ al-Mahdi said, ‘pour another cup.’

  The man replied, ‘No, by Allah, I won’t let you drink another drop.’

  ‘Why?’ the caliph asked . . .

  ‘Because I’m afraid that if you have a fourth, you’ll be telling me you’re the Prophet of Allah.’ When he heard this, al-Mahdi laughed.

  At this point the caliph’s distraught escort finally find him. The bedouin is at first aghast, then collects himself and says to the caliph,

  ‘So you were telling the truth. But if you’d made the fourth claim – and the fifth – you’d have been going too far.’ And al-Mahdi laughed so much at ‘the fourth claim – and the fifth’ that he nearly fell off his horse.

  The fifth claim being, presumably, that the caliph was God . . . In conclusion,

  Al-Mahdi commanded that the bedouin be paid a pension, and took him into his circle of close companions.

  It reads like a parable about the transformation, begun with Islam and now gathering pace, of old-style Arabs into city-dwellers: the a’rabi, the peripheral, the outsider from the wilderness (albeit a wilderness well supplied with wine), is taken into the eye of the circle – admitted behind the caliphal curtain, transported into the heart of the new urban society. It also feels like the end of an era. The future of caliph-hood would be not that of al-Mahdi unknown in the wilds, but that of his son al-Rashid in his fabulous Thousand and One Nights persona, incognito in the urban wilds of Baghdad; not disbelieved in the desert but disguised in town.

  As to lifestyle, then, al-Jahiz was right: the Abbasids, throughout their long era the first family of arabhood and the prime symbol of Arab solidarity, were far removed from traditional Arab existence. But even in those two spheres where they might still have seemed purely Arab, in language and lineage, their arabness was being undermined; or to be precise, their language and lineage were also being removed from the old environment. Umayyad caliphs may have made mistakes in the case-endings of high Arabic; much worse, al-Mahdi’s grandson, al-Mu’tasim, admitted that he was ‘illiterate’ when he didn’t know the meaning of the word kala’ – it is the most important word in traditional Arab life after ma’, water, for it means ‘pasture’. And although the patriline was now the one that mattered, descent on the mother’s side had been of almost equal importance in old Arab society. In pre-Islamic times, the children of slaves often went unacknowledged by their fathers, unless they were sons who had produced their own offspring. But of the thirty-seven Abbasid caliphs over the 500 years until their effective extinction by the Mongols, only three would have free-born Arab mothers. The other mothers were slave-concubines of hugely varied origin, including Afghan, Khwarizmian, Byzantine, Slav, Berber, Persian, Turkish, Armenian and Abyssinian. ‘The world has intermingled,’ the eleventh-century poet al-Ma’arri noted, ‘the people of the plain with the daughters of the mountain; the mother of the race of Numayr is a Turk; she of ‘Uqayl is a slave from Samarkand.’ It was all an accurate reflection of the complex diversity of empire, but very far from the home life of the old Arabian subcontinent.

  Hadarah, the successful, settled coexistence of diversity, had prevailed for the time being over badawah, ‘bedouinism’; the sha’b or ‘people’ in its broadest, cosmopolitan-Islamic sense had reduced the qabilah, or tribe, to a minor and marginal role. Society – the part of society that mattered – was no longer tribal; genealogy might still have been important for some, but people with widely different genes could still live together within the family of Islam. Importantly, non-Arabs were no longer just clients or clerks or concubines, but were becoming people of importance in their own right.

  Under the Abbasids, the wazir or ‘vizier’ would increasingly be in charge of the hands-on running of the empire. Foremost among the wazirs of the earlier Abbasids were those of the Persian Barmak family, whose ancestors had been hereditary sacristans of the temple of Nawbahar at Balkh, in what is now northern Afghanistan (‘Barmak’ is Sanskrit parmak, ‘superior, chief’, ‘Nawbahar’ the new vihāra or Buddhist monastery). Three generations of the family served the Abbasids in various capacities, most famously Ja’far, the companion of Harun al-Rashid in the story collection that became T
he Thousand and One Nights. The relationship of the two was close; so close, according to legend, that al-Rashid had a special ‘Siamese-twin’ garment that accommodated both of them, their heads poking out of individual collars. (Is this the origin of a proverbial expression for a close friendship, ‘Two pairs of buttocks in one pair of drawers’?)

  The legends do not end there: the coming together of Persian and Arab was said to be so close that the old taboo – as old as the pre-Islamic Lakhmid kings – was broken, and al-Rashid married Ja’far to his sister, Abbasah. And then, the story goes, things went wrong: the union, meant to be a mariage blanc, was consummated, and a son born. Al-Rashid, enraged at the thought of the Persian ‘paper groom’, bosom pal or not, sullying his sister’s Arab purity, had Ja’far executed, imprisoned the rest of the family and confiscated their stupendously valuable properties.

  Is the story true? Probably not. Ibn Khaldun, for one, dismisses it as ridiculous – then rather undermines his case by asking of Abbasah, ‘How could she . . . stain her Arab nobility with a Persian client?’ Ibn Khaldun may be the father of sociology; he is shakier on what happens in the bedroom. More persuasively, he then goes on to suggest that the Barmak family were in fact planning a coup against al-Rashid. There is no clear evidence to support this, and yet the pro-Barmak elegies that have survived may include coded references to it. One, for example, includes the lines,

  When you were here, the whole world was a bride;

  now it is bereft of husband, and of child.

  Ja’far’s marriage was not just to the caliph’s sister, this implies, but to his realm. Now the Persian wedding to the world was off.

  The fall of the house of Barmak has never been explained. Vicious court rivalries were in play, especially between the Barmaks and another close aide of al-Rashid, al-Fadl ibn al-Rabi’. But perhaps in the end it was a resurfacing in al-Rashid of the ancient fear – that of the ’ajami being the one on top, whether in bed or on the throne. It may not be insignificant that in Arabic the two items of furniture can be expressed by one word, sarir (as we have seen, another word for ‘throne’, ’arsh, also means ‘bier’). It may also not be insignificant that, just before his move against the Barmaks, the caliph had been on the pilgrimage to Mecca, that ritual reconnection with Arabian roots. He was the last Abbasid caliph to renew that ancient link.

  The fear of the Other, even if ancient, was justified: Arab supremacy would soon be lost. Persians – Turks, even – were about to assert their dominance not over Arab women’s bodies and thus Arab ‘honour’, but over the whole Arab body-politic. Their climb to power would begin in earnest in the next caliphal generation; within only one more generation after that, those non-Arabs would turn into an incubus of a thousand years.

  THE BARRENNESS OF KINGSHIP

  Big declines and falls – that of the dinosaurs excepted, perhaps – always have many causes, often so trivial as to evade detection; but sometimes among them are tragic flaws, twists of character or of circumstance from which disaster spirals out. ‘When Allah Almighty intends a people’s destruction,’ wrote Ubayd Allah ibn Sulayman, ‘and the end of their happiness, He provides reasons for it’. In other words, He does not play dice. With Arabs, the usual suspect – the perennial, internecine disunity they brought with them out of Arabia – goes a long way to explain their fall from power.

  It does not need to be said that ruling-family rivalry is not an exclusively Arab flaw: the Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty ‘united and flourished, then disunited and perished’, according to the confidant of their founder, Saladin; similarly, their near contemporaries in India, the Turkic Delhi Sultans, ‘united to destroy their enemies and disunited to destroy themselves’. Nor is it a flaw peculiar to Muslim ruling families: it would set Pedro of Castile and his illegitimate brother Henry of Trastámara against each other in Spain, and pitch the cousin-houses of York and Lancaster into the Wars of the Roses. Infighting is part of dynastic dynamics. But it is exacerbated by polygamy, concubinage and the resulting multiplicity of stepmothers and half-brothers. And in the Abbasid case, with Arabs as a whole already dispersed and disunited, when the last great symbol of their solidarity and continuity – the caliphal family – was split apart by sibling rivalry, the consequences would be direr than ever before.

  Al-Ma’mun, philosopher-caliph, patron of the sciences, had got where he was by the time-honoured means of a fight to the death with his nearest, if not his dearest; neither Abbasids nor Arabs would ever recover from it. Between the ‘golden prime’ of Harun al-Rashid and the intellectual golden age of his son al-Ma’mun lay a war in which the unity of the whole empire was shaken. Rather as the legend of the bloody separation of the conjoined twins Hashim and Abd Shams foretold the split within their ancestral clan of Quraysh, so too is an anecdote about the young Abd Allah (al-Ma’mun) and his brother Muhammad (al-Amin) an omen of their future falling out. The scholar al-Kisa’i was visiting al-Rashid, and the doting caliph summoned his two young sons to show off their recitation of Qur’anic passages and poetry. The unremarkable couplet Muhammad recited was about wealth, generosity and honour. Abd Allah’s piece was different. It was about fate and patience in adversity, and ended with a strange image:

  You will see the shaft of my lance, when gripped

  by the bite of the straightening-vice, slow to break.

  Al-Kisa’i was full of praise and prayers for the boys. But, he recalled,

  Al-Rashid drew them together to himself and held them tight. When he loosened his hold I saw that tears were coursing down on to his chest. He sent the boys away, and when they left he came close to me and said, ‘It is as if your presence has brought on their fate, called down their destinies from the heavens, and taken what is written to its conclusion. For their word, once gathered, has now diverged, their ways have forked, their enmity is made plain. Thus they will remain, until blood has been shed, until many lie dead, until the veils of the women are torn, until many living wish that they had not been born.’

  Whatever the truth of the story – and of the rumoured existence of a book, alluded to by al-Rashid, in which the fate of the entire Abbasid dynasty was predicted – there does indeed seem to be an inevitability about the princes’ falling out. Muhammad al-Amin’s mother Zubaydah (‘Butter-pat’), a patroness of grand charitable works and lover of gemstones (she even wore gem-studded boots), was one of those very few caliphal wives who were both free-born and Arab; she was herself a member of the Abbasid family. Worried for the future of the dynasty when her growing son showed a marked preference for slave-boys to slave-girls, she began dressing the latter in boys’ clothes – and sparked off a fashion for ghulamiyyat, ‘gamines’, as well as for diamanté heels. Abd Allah al-Ma’mun, slightly the elder of the two, had been born in the more usual way to a slave-concubine. There was no love lost between the two mothers: the Sarah versus Hagar, Isaac-and-Ishmael syndrome was at play. As so often in Arab history, the existence of rival mothers, and the absence of the blunt but serviceable instrument of primogeniture, would complicate the transfer of power. In this case al-Rashid hit on a disastrous ‘solution’, worthy of King Lear: he made al-Amin the first heir to the caliphate and al-Ma’mun the second, but also divided responsibility for the empire between them and a third brother, al-Mu’tamin. Al-Amin was given Baghdad and overall power; al-Ma’mun was appointed to run the original Abbasid powerhouse, Khurasan; al-Mu’tamin was put in charge of the Byzantine marches. In an act of great symbolism with parallels to the pre-Islamic practice of the Abbasids’ tribe of Quraysh, a document promulgating the division was hung up in the Ka’bah at Mecca. And in another ominous scene, it is said that, as the proclamation was being raised up, it fell down.

  Al-Rashid’s division of the empire needed no omens to fail. On his death, al-Amin succeeded to the caliphate, and then (the gamines having had their effect) appointed his infant son to be his heir, in place of his brother al-Ma’mun and in opposition to their father’s wishes. Many were shocked. So alien was the concep
t of primogeniture and infant crown-princedom that a poet could say,

  Most astonishing of all, that we

  should swear allegiance to a little child

  Who hasn’t learned to wipe his nose!

  Al-Ma’mun was already ensconced in Khurasan, that breeding-ground of wars, and from there his forces marched on Baghdad where his half-brother was ill-prepared for martial exertions (he was more interested in interior decoration and ornamental fish, his favourite being adorned with gold gill-rings). A long and brutal urban war began. It ground on for more than a year: ‘Brother fought brother, and son father, Aminists against Ma’munists. Houses were destroyed, palaces burned, goods looted.’ Poets, the war-artists of the time, record stark images of dissolution, of a whole society falling apart: ‘Severed,’ one ode begins,

  are the birth-bonds that joined kin together.

  . . .

  Baghdad might have never been the finest sight,

  the loveliest resort that eyes beheld.

  Thus it was; but now its beauty’s gone,

  its harmony destroyed by fate’s decree.

  Theirs now the fate that once befell the people of the past:

  they too are tales told to others near and far.

  Those ‘people of the past’ are all those who were doomed by disunity – back, the poet hints, to the ancient people of Saba who in the Qur’an became ‘as tales once told’. Looking at Baghdad today, and Damascus, and out of my own window, it is clear that the tales are not yet over.

  In the end al-Amin was captured while trying to escape by boat. His last hours were recorded by a fellow captive, an old mawla of his named Ahmad:

  Al-Amin said, ‘Come near me. Hug me. I feel a dreadful loneliness.’