Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  Today, this other world underlies the visible one. Even in the Arabian-Gotham urban settings of Doha and Dubai, poet-princes still celebrate heroic bedouinness. To say, as Fouad Ajami did, that desert nostalgia is ‘strange to the culture’ is astonishing: desert nostalgia has been embedded in the culture since Abbasid times. The ‘traditional’ Arab self-image is much closer to that in the 1,700 Days than to its urbanized, persianized version in The Thousand and One Nights.

  The whole of Arab history since the Abbasids has been haunted by a sense of disjuncture with the rest of the world and where it is going, and by a chronic harking back – at times to the supposed uncomplexity of Islam before it left Arabia, at times to that narrow, nostalgic view of the deeper Arab past. This mass nostalgia is not altogether bad: it offers a kind of unity, prolonging the life of the Kulturnation, and is another reason why we can write ‘Histories of the Arabs’ but not of the Anglophone world (which has supposedly abandoned its national myths and come to grips with the global). But, like language, nostalgia is a bond in both senses – of brotherhood, but also of servitude. It is the reason why the poet Nizar Qabbani could say,

  . . . I am exhausted by my arabness.

  Is arabness a curse, a punishment?

  GUARDIANS OF THE LEXICON

  Under the Abbasids, Islam was looking forwards, to ever broader horizons; the view back into the Arab past continued to narrow. The vigour of expansion was spent, and Arabs began to focus on their own national myth. Thus Arab personality advanced rapidly from adulthood to middle age, to the climacteric, the age when all will begin to decline and decay. As with the ‘gigantic bluff’ that was the British empire, when the small and rag-tag population of a marginal island (or in the Arab case, peninsula) get to rule a large slice of the world for a couple of hundred years, they need to have tales about heroic pasts; all the more so when their rule is under threat from others.

  It should not come as a surprise that the scholars who retrieved this past, philologists and others, were mostly non-Arabs. A recent commentator has put it bluntly: by collecting and organizing knowledge of the past, ‘the non-Arab mawali [mawlas] were the ones who actually constructed Arab identity for the Arab community’. ‘Reconstructed’ would be more accurate. But in either case it is a statement with which Ibn Khaldun agreed: he devoted a chapter to the monopoly of scholarship by non-Arabs. Yet again, as when the old non-Arab empires created a first sense of Arab selfhood by creating ‘kings of the Arabs’, Arab identity was being shaped by others.

  This shaping was also affecting that constant and major player in Arab history, the Arabic language. Arabic had been greatly enriched by the translation movement; but little of the richness made its way into the dictionaries that were now beginning to be compiled. Urban intellectuals looked outwards to the peoples of the empire and its further neighbours in India, China and Constantinople; linguists looked backwards to the world of the bedouin, who tended not to bandy about Sanskrit-derived mathematical terms or Graecisms such as sūlūjismus, ‘syllogism’, while they were milking their camels. Moreover, the philologists and other guardians of the lexicon further narrowed the language by ironing out the many variants that existed between the speech of different tribes. An example of such variants was given by al-Asma’i, an antiquarian and philologist of tribal Arab descent, famous for his prodigious memory, who died in 828:

  Two [bedouin] men differed over the word for ‘falcon’. One said it was ṣaqr, with an [emphatic] ṣ, the other that it was saqr, with a [non-emphatic] s. They agreed to abide by the decision of the first person who came along. When someone appeared, they put their dispute to him. He said, ‘I don’t agree with either of you. It’s zaqr.’

  In the end, only sṣaqr has got into the dictionary. This is because the philologists’ policy was to see what the majority usage was, then brand it as the only acceptable one.

  In the real world, then, Arabic was expanding and changing: it had always existed in many tribal variants, as well as in the high speech of poets and prophets; with conquest and racial intermingling it had further branched off into new dialects; the written vocabulary of the intellectuals had also been expanded by translation and the growth of new sciences. But now written high Arabic was contracting. The term for it, fusha, is from the word fasih, meaning pure milk, free from froth. The milk is still rich, but ever since the age of setting down it has been homogenized and pasteurized.

  Written Arabic is thus a construct, and by synthesizing this pan-Arab language, linguists further enhanced the idea of the diverse tribes and peoples being a single race – ‘the Arabs’. The race, like the language, is a construct.

  A GOD MADE OF LETTERS

  For a time, the old national dress of language had been variegated with new colours. But the language scholars were countering the trend and making Arabic a uniform in the limited earth-colours of the bedouins. In time, it would become a straitjacket that would restrict literary movement, and even thought itself.

  By arabicizing government, the Umayyads had already inspired a mass of non-Arabs to learn their difficult tongue. This had meant that the language had to be analysed; thus, grammar, syntax and the other linguistic studies became the first formal Arab sciences. Now, when other Arabic-Islamic – as opposed to imported – studies developed under the Abbasids, they grew along the lines of those linguistic sciences, rather than the lines of the physical and speculative sciences of the non-Arab ‘ancients’ that had inspired al-Ma’mun. The rules of grammar were applied in particular to fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence, and would shape its whole thought-world. Al-Ma’mun, al-Kindi and their like had engaged with a whole world of thought; al-Ma’mun, indeed, had measured the world. After them, however, faced with that fork in the intellectual path, Arabic civilization took the route of textual truth, and remained on it. There would, of course, be many great empirical Arabic minds, unrestrained by the language they thought in, but they operated in isolation or at the margins. In general, thought would remain shackled to the study of texts, and truth rhetorical rather than empirical. Abd al-Samad ibn al-Fadl, for example, whose ancestors had been hereditary orators at the Persian court, could deliver three long and brilliant lectures on the mosquito; but the brilliance was in the eloquence, not in the observation. That would have to wait for Hooke and the microscope.

  Anyone who doubts the intense, introverted and navel-gazing centrality of the Arabic language to Arabic thought should reflect on the fact that, ‘from the period between 750 and 1500 we know the names of more than 4,000 grammarians’. Even with a language as rich as Arabic, few of them had anything new to say: most merely recycled what had been said before, a wheel of words. Naturalists, physicians, chemists, astronomers, geographers and others might all amount to as many as three figures over the same period; but they are far outstripped by grammarians. Of al-Sahib ibn Abbad’s 400-camel-load library mentioned above, no fewer than sixty camel-loads were books on Arabic philology. Why this obsession?

  By Abbasid times it was rare for anyone to use high Arabic without an enormous effort – except for the few remaining linguistically ‘uncontaminated’ and much-researched bedouins, and then only when they were reciting poetry. Even in polite court circles, the effort had been abandoned by about the year 900. In less elevated settings, high Arabic was unknown: a philologist using high-flown words in the suq was thought to be possessed by a jinni speaking ‘Indian’; a poet declaiming his high Arabic verses by the Nile was pushed in and drowned by a yob, for supposedly casting a spell on the river; a grammarian conjugating aloud in a palm-grove the imperatives of a rare form of verb was attacked by the date-picking peasants for, as they thought, parodying the Qur’an. This last anecdote gives a clue as to why there were so many grammarians. In a culture where even the least educated were inculcated with the idea of truth residing in texts, one text in particular, the Qur’an, was believed to contain the sum of all truth: now, as high and low Arabic diverged, the language-scholars were the only ones who could give access t
o the high language. Increasingly, therefore, ‘grammaratchiks’ monopolized truth, became sole mediators with a text-based God, and began to occupy a place not unlike that of the priesthood in a Christian setting. Indeed, like a priesthood, from Abbasid times onwards the scholars were treated as a class apart, distinguished by their dress; it often included a particularly voluminous turban, and a waist-sash in which a pen-box would be stuck at a jaunty angle, like a dagger. They were priests not of the spirit, but of the letter. The development was not inappropriate, considering that the Abbasids themselves were descended from Abd Allah ibn Abbas, the first great exegete of the Qur’an.

  Crucial to the growth of this new ‘hierarchy’ – and to the whole future of Arabic intellectual history – was the about-turn in dogma under al-Ma’mun’s third successor, al-Mutawakkil. Probably to curry popular favour via the support enjoyed by traditionalist scholars, under him the Mu’tazilah intellectuals and their debates and discussions were banned, the very idea of the Qur’an as a created book open to interpretation by the individual became anathema, and the principle of taqlid, or ‘imitation’, was imposed; from now on, one could only understand the word of God according to officially recognized interpretations. Nazar and ra’y – two words that mean ‘looking’ but had come to mean ‘speculating and forming an opinion’ – were now tainted with the suspicion of heresy. It was another case of narrowing: just as lexicographers were acting as verbal bouncers, banishing anything they regarded as outré from the dictionary, so ‘the gate of ijtihad,’ the individual struggle to extrapolate meaning from God’s revelation, was closing. And, as a recent commentator has put it, ‘To shut the gate of meaning is to shut down thought’. As often, alleged sayings of Muhammad turned up in support of the policy change. One of these states, for example, that

  He who interprets the Qur’an on the basis of his own opinion will be wrong, even if his interpretation happens to be right.

  Some poets, Sufis and sectarians have always flown beneath, or above, the dogmatic radar and made their own attempts to understand the word of Allah without interpreters, without intermediaries. By and large, however, the community of Islam, which has always prided itself on having no priests, has since the middle of the Abbasid age approached the divine via that hierarchy of linguists, exegetes and other authorities, most of whom died well over a thousand years ago. Meaning was mummified.

  Those old authorities were usually diligent and subtle scholars. But often God is in the detail, and the subtlety is lost with time and repetition. An example is that of the Fatihah, the opening chapter of the Qur’an. The equivalent in some ways of the Lord’s Prayer for Christians, it is repeated several times by worshippers in each of the five formal daily prayers and on many other occasions, and concludes by asking Allah to

  Guide us to the straight way.

  The way of those on whom You have bestowed Your grace, not of those who earned Your anger, nor of those who went astray.

  My edition of the Qur’an with a parallel English text and commentary – an edition much relied on by Muslims who do not know Arabic (even if they can recite the sounds of it) – goes,

  Guide us to the Straight Way.

  The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who earned Your anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians).

  A footnote explains the glosses about the Jews and the Christians as deriving from an alleged statement by Muhammad quoted in the works of two ninth-century authorities, al-Tirmidhi and Abu Dawud. All well and good: the authorities are both excellent. But the very fact that the glosses have crept into the body of the English text of holy scripture, even between brackets, gives them near-divine status. And in practice, as I find on quizzing Muslim friends, the brackets are usually forgotten, and so are the words ‘such as’. Even with purely arabophone Muslims, so effectively has the gloss covered the underlying substance that the two groups simply are the Jews and the Christians. To suggest, for example, that terrorists who kill people in the name of Islam might well be equally worthy of inclusion among those who incur Allah’s anger and have gone astray is usually met with bemused surprise.

  From the age of setting down, then, but especially that of al-Mutawakkil’s dogmatic volte-face, written texts and the guardians of their meanings began to gain an increasingly powerful grip on the mind of Arabic civilization. Of the three great conquests in Arab history, the first – that of the Arabic language – was also proving to be the most relentless, writing roughshod, so to speak, over the empire it had helped to win. As for that first, inimitable text, it was now the official line to regard the Qur’an as uncreated and coeval with Allah, the Logos as literally literal logoi – words inscribed since before the beginning of time on the ‘Preserved Tablet’ mentioned in the Qur’an. One of the most extreme proponents of the idea of Qur’anic apotheosis, an eighth-century Shi’i of hermetic leanings named al-Mughirah ibn Sa’id al-Bajali, had gone so far as to conceive the inconceivable Deity as having ‘members of the number and form of the letters of the [Arabic] alphabet’.

  The Word was with God, as the Gospel puts it, and the Word was God. That was an admittedly extreme and shocking view. But in the new Abbasid orthodoxy of the tenth century, the Letter had prevailed over the Spirit. Those who were moved by the Spirit had to beware how far it took them.

  THE DEATH OF AL-HALLAJ

  The two-hundred-year flash flood of Arabs had ebbed, or been absorbed into the lands it had covered. But it had left behind it a rich layer of language. It was this, then, that the Abbasid state aimed to control. Theirs was a new version of the old policy of ‘gathering the word’, and it sought to unify not just voices, but also meanings and thoughts.

  Dissident voices and minds were raised against the newly gathered word, one of them that of the early tenth-century nonconformist al-Hallaj, who would be executed in 922. Al-Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj was in several ways a man of his times. Born in Fars in 857 or 858, it seems his first language was Arabic, but his ancestry is ambiguous – he may have been Arab, but no one is sure. Like his contemporary al-Mas’udi, he took advantage of the mobility of the age and travelled, spending time in India; also like al-Mas’udi he was culturally adventurous, observing Buddhist and Hindu societies.

  So why did al-Hallaj pay the ultimate penalty? His famous declaration, ‘I am al-Haqq!’ – taken to be a claim of hulul, ‘indwelling’, by the deity under His appellation of al-Haqq, the Truly-existing – was certainly enough to make dogmatists stretch their eyes. But there is perhaps a more than subliminal, etymological suggestion in al-Hallaj’s exclamation that he was asserting his haqq, his ‘right’, to speak ‘the truth’, al-haqq, as he himself experienced it – that he was breaking the rulers’ and scholars’ monopoly on what was true. In the 920s, truth was no longer to be revealed in a caliph’s dreams about Aristotle, or adopted, as al-Kindi had suggested, ‘from races who are distant from us and societies quite different from our own’. That had been possible a hundred years earlier, when Arab identity was less in question; now, as it dissolved, that identity clung to ever-narrowing definitions of its language, its history, its religion, even of truth itself. Truth subsisted alone in al-Haqq, the Truly-existing God, and access to it was strictly controlled. Lone voices and thoughts were dangerous. ‘Indwelling’ meant anarchy.

  There was another reason, however, why al-Hallaj incurred the wrath of the authorities. He advocated the practice of a symbolic, substitute Pilgrimage that anyone unable to go to Mecca could perform in his own home, circumambulating any object he chose (like the old bedouins did with their god-stones), and then feeding and clothing thirty orphans. Pragmatic, indeed laudable though this sounds, in one sense it was the ultimate heresy for, like his notorious declaration of indwelling, it asserted the individual over the corporate: it undermined the physical enactment of unity-in-the-divine that went back via Mecca to the most ancient pre-Islamic pilgrimages such as the South Arabian one to Marib, centuries b
efore Muhammad. As Christians express their unity in breaking bread together, Muslims and pre-Muslims do so most powerfully in the sacrament of travelling together. Al-Hallaj’s promotion of the individual – the idea that God could ‘visit’ a particular person, and that people could visit Him on a personal, spiritual pilgrimage – was seen as subversion of the most dangerous sort.

  Al-Hallaj remained a controversial figure long after his killing: views differed over him, Ibn Khallikan wrote 350 years later, as they did over Jesus. At times, he was also a protean figure. During his final imprisonment, the slave who attended him recalled,

  ‘One day I took him his plate of food as I did every day, and when I went into his cell I found that he had filled it with himself from ceiling to floor and from wall to wall, leaving no empty space. I was terrified, and threw down the plate and ran.’ The terror of what the slave had seen brought on a fever in him which lasted a long time, but he was disbelieved . . .

  It does sound incredible, except in terms of the altered physics of Alice in Wonderland. Or did al-Hallaj possess powers of mesmerism? ‘One day,’ al-Ma’arri wrote, ‘al-Hallaj moved his hand, whereupon the odor of musk spread to the people. Another time he moved it and dirhams were scattered . . .’, just as with the ‘godmen’ of India, whom we might guess he had observed.

  Shaykh or charlatan, martyr or mage, al-Hallaj undermined the Abbasid order. As an individual voice raised, he would not have seemed so dangerous in the days of the pre-Islamic su’luks, or ‘vagabond’ poets. But he would be regarded as equally subversive if he were alive in the Arabic world today, when truth is still what it is instructed to be, and those who speak independently – like the Sudanese visionary Mahmud Muhammad Taha – can still pay with their lives.

  Truth has always been seen to disrupt social order, way back via Oedipus solving the riddle of the Sphinx to the original scrumping of the Tree of Knowledge. But there were even more present dangers to Abbasid society than from maverick divines. To return to the beginning of this chapter, Ibn Wahb – the Basran who met the emperor of China – was not travelling entirely on a whim, ‘a sudden desire’: he was, in fact, a refugee from the heartland of the empire. The Arab King of Kings may have reached the top of the international royal rankings, but his realm was not just flaking away at the edges: it was already rotting from the inside.