Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  CHAPTER TEN

  COUNTER-CULTURES,

  COUNTER-CALIPHS

  THE EMPIRE BREAKS UP

  MEDALLION MAN

  In late September 938, a decade and a half after the killing of the visionary al-Hallaj, the tutor of Caliph al-Radi went to pay his respects to his former pupil. It was the day of Mihrajan, a pre-Islamic Persian festival celebrated by the pleasure-loving Baghdadis. ‘I went by boat along the Tigris,’ the tutor recalled,

  and as I passed the residence of Bajkam the Turk, I saw there such scenes of wanton and frivolous merrymaking as I had never before witnessed. Going on to al-Radi bi ’llah, I found him alone and immersed in gloom. I hesitated to approach him; but he told me to come closer, and when I did so I saw that he was holding a gold dinar and a silver dirham. Each was several times the usual weight, and each bore an image of Bajkam, bristling with weapons and encircled by the words,

  Know ye: all power’s a sham,

  Save mine – Amir I am,

  Great lord of men, Bajkam.

  On the reverse of the coins was another portrait of Bajkam, but showing him seated in his audience hall, looking contemplative and inscrutable. Al-Radi said, ‘Do you not see what this . . . this person is doing? How high his ambition is reaching? How far his pride is taking him?’ And I could say nothing in reply.

  There was nothing to say. The coins, a Mihrajan present from Bajkam, said it all: beware the Turks bearing gifts. For not only had a Turkish slave-soldier – supposedly there to guard the caliph – pushed himself on to the currency, the preserve of sovereignty. He had also done so in person, in a portrait, in contrast with the chaste calligraphic coinage that for a quarter of a millennium had been a symbol of Arab power and had been imitated even in the English Midlands. He had enlarged the coins and turned them into flashy medallions. And to add aural insult to visual injury, he had replaced the godly legends of Arab coinage with a crass jingle celebrating himself, Bajkam . . . The alien name ends the rhyming Arabic with a thump: to Arabic hearing it sounds both comical and faintly sinister – perhaps something like ‘Boojum’ or ‘Bogyman’ to English ears. It means in Turkic, ‘Horsetail’ or ‘Yaktail’. The caliph’s regnal name ‘al-Radi bi ’llah’ is, in contrast – and appropriately for someone who had no one else to turn to – ‘he who is content with Allah’.

  As their shared festival of Mihrajan showed, Arabs and those archetypal non-Arabs, the Persians, had come to an accommodation. Turks, however, still seemed to come from beyond the fringe of the acceptable. Portraits of other early Turkic warriors on surviving medals show them armed, appraising the viewer through narrow and alien eyes; to be akhzar, ‘slit-eyed’, as all Turks were popularly supposed to be, was to be physically as un-Arab as possible. Turks were not just another kind of non-Arab, but a sort of anti-Arab, and the past resounded with warnings about them. The Abbasids’ ancestor, Ali ibn Abd Allah ibn al-Abbas, had supposedly predicted that his descendants would inherit Arab rule, but only ‘until the time when their slaves shall own them, slaves with small eyes and broad faces, faces like hammered shields’.

  From earlier still, a saying attributed to Muhammad went ‘utruku ’l-turka ma tarakukum’, ‘Leave the Turks alone as long as they leave you alone.’ It has the proverbial sense of ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’. But, far from leaving them alone, the Arab rulers of the empire had stirred them up, taken them on as caliphal guard dogs, taken them into the centre of power, the eye of the Round City – and then watched powerless as they had taken over. From now on, in one form or another, Turks would dominate most of Arabdom for most of the next thousand years.

  That day of Mihrajan, the caliph’s tutor tried to console him with historical precedents of rulers getting pushed aside by their own followers but then reasserting themselves; this did nothing to lighten al-Radi’s depression. He only perked up when the tutor reminded him in verse that, after all, it was a festival, and that if he couldn’t beat Bajkam he could at least emulate him by opening a bottle or two of the finest vintage with a few friends. Friends and bottles multiplied until the caliph’s party rivalled the Turkish shindig along the Tigris. But for al-Radi, his Abbasid dynasty, and the Arab masters of the empire, the party was a final farewell to real power.

  ‘And so,’ said the historian al-Mas’udi, now writing not history but current events, ‘the Arabs fell, and passed away. Their power disappeared and their rank was lost.’ It was just three centuries since those miraculous few years in which they had set out from their Island and taken on two empires.

  A DIMMING RADIANCE

  Under the Abbasids, the wheel of fire – the old cycle of unity and disunity that for centuries had repeatedly welded Arabs together, then ignited them against each other – had grown into something much bigger and, for a time, apparently more stable: something more like a solar system, pulling ever more peoples into the gravitational field of Arabic culture and Islam. At the same time, the whole nature of Arab rule had changed. Muhammad’s original successors had governed in the manner of pre-Islamic Arab shaykhs and the Umayyads in that of pre-Islamic Arab kings. The Abbasids had made themselves more like the pre-Islamic Persian shahanshahs, kings of kings, crowned, enthroned, elevated on a stage and concealed behind a curtain like players in a royal drama, yet ruling over an empire so huge that even the added gravity of Islam could not hold it together for long. The stability was thus short-lived: the radiance of the caliph at the centre of the Round City progressively dimmed, and Arabs themselves were pushed out into ever more distant orbits. As we shall see, some of those Arabs at the edges gained in strength, forming the nuclei of their own new systems.

  In the meantime, the power at the original centre, the caliphate, was being hollowed out by the very people who had been brought in to preserve it – Turkic slave-praetorians like Bajkam. They were proving the most successful challengers to Arab power. But earlier threats had already undermined the whole notion of Arab primacy, an idea grounded in Arabs’ sense of their own right to rule: from Arabia, they argued, had come both the prophet whose inspiration and revolution had sparked off the empire in the first place, and the language that held it all together. With the complexities of empire under the Abbasids, however, friction between Arabs and others was inevitable. Sometimes it would be expressed in words; at other times the fight would be bloody.

  SLAVES AND PEASANTS

  The first and in some ways the most shocking blow to Arab notions of supremacy was the so-called Zanj Rebellion of 869–83. It was all very well for Arabs to fight each other; they had done so since the year dot, and it seemed they would do till Doomsday. But the depradations of the Zanj – the usual name for black East Africans – seemed to overturn the natural order. They were slaves, and not even military slaves like the Turks, but plantation slaves; and yet they caused truly frightening destruction to the Iraqi heart of empire. Ibn Wahb, whom we met in the previous chapter in audience with the emperor of China, was in fact a refugee from the ruins of his native city, al-Basrah: the Zanj had devastated it.

  At the domestic level, slavery had always been a feature of Arab society. The problems came with the conquests, and the desire to exploit great tracts of land with cheap manpower that was, in theory, easily controlled. Revenues from agriculture in southern Iraq had fallen dramatically under the Umayyads, and slave-labour was seen as the quickest way of upping profits again. The rich merchants of al-Basrah therefore invested in tens of thousands of East African slaves and put them to draining the marshlands near the city. But exploitation of land meant exploitation of men: their conditions were appalling, and in time the slaves rebelled. They were joined by others opposed to the Arab monopoly over power, money, land, life, and were united by an ambiguous figure called Ali ibn Muhammad – perhaps Iranian, perhaps Arab, perhaps even a descendant of the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, as he claimed. No one seemed to be sure. There was no doubt, however, that it was he who channelled the seething discontents of the region into violent and successful insurrect
ion.

  Statistics about the destruction caused by the rebellion are uncertain. Al-Mas’udi’s supposedly conservative estimate of the total number of victims was 500,000, including 300,000 alone in the sack of al-Basrah; but he admitted that no one knew the true figures, and it may be that a stray zero has crept in. What is not in doubt is that the Zanj caused a temporary inversion of the order of things: slaves became slave-masters, buying and selling freeborn Arabs for a few coins, using female descendants of Muhammad as concubines and making them work as maids to their own womenfolk. When one of these Arab sharifahs, noblewomen, dared to complain that she had been misused by her own former slave, she was told, ‘He’s your mawla now!’ – a nice irony, as mawla is a ‘bipolar’ word that means both ‘dependant, client’ and ‘master’. The vocabulary of society, of slaves and masters, remained the same; its polarity was overturned.

  The revolt was eventually put down by forces from Baghdad led by commanders from the caliphal family, but at great cost in life and treasure. Discontent, however, seemed now to be endemic in the flatlands of southern Iraq – a region long raided by Arabs before Islam, ruled bloodily and ruined agriculturally by them in the first Islamic century, and most recently racked by revolt. Only a few years after the Zanj were suppressed, the region’s long-suffering indigenous ‘Nabataean’ peasants rose under the leadership of another demagogue, Hamdan Qarmat. Of probable Iranian origin, he too was opposed to Arab supremacy and monopoly over the life and wealth of the empire; he found in the growing Isma’ili branch of Shi’ism, which had split in the later eighth century from the main shi’at Ali because of a disagreement over which of Ali’s descendants should inherit the leadership, a vehicle for radical revolution. The motive force of revolt he found in the over-taxed and marginalized peasantry, now shaken out of centuries of servility by the example of the slave uprising. His following gathered more groups, including Arabs in eastern Arabia who had long felt themselves sidelined by the imperial project. It was also in eastern Arabia that the Qarmatis founded a republic that claimed, and possibly achieved, a level of egalitarianism unknown elsewhere in the Arab empire: visitors admired its civil institutions, which included the provision of social security for citizens. ‘There are mills,’ wrote an eleventh-century traveller from Iran, ‘that belong to the authorities and grind grain for the people free of charge. The authorities bear the expense of their upkeep and the wages of the millers’. Later ages may not admire the reliance on imported African slave labour that underpinned it all.

  The republic was to survive well into the eleventh century. But in its most active early decades, from the end of the ninth century on, Qarmatis managed to cause havoc further afield – in Iraq, the Levant, and over much of the Arabian Peninsula. Their most daring coup (or most dastardly crime) was a raid on Mecca in 930 in which they stole the sacred Black Stone from the Ka’bah, the dark gem at the navel of Creation. It was to remain in their hands for twenty years, until the rising Fatimid counter-caliph persuaded them to return it. (As we shall see, both the Fatimids and the Qarmatis were Isma’ili Shi’is, but the Fatimids claimed descent from Muhammad and, as supposedly born of the line of the Quraysh, were bound to respect the sacred centrality of their ancestral shrine in Mecca. To them the Qarmatis were wayward schismatics, the ‘loony left’ of the Isma’ilis.) But the point had been made: the looting/liberation of the Stone had shaken the empire to its core, for it suggested – even if symbolically and temporarily – that the Qurashi axis of the whole cultic and cultural system was not inviolable.

  Furthermore, the Qarmatis called into question not just the centrality to Islam of Quraysh, but also the essential arabness of its whole cultural edifice, so recently enshrined for all time in the Age of Setting Down. Under their auspices, a group called Ikhwan al-Safa’, ‘the Brethren of Purity’, compiled in the last third of the tenth century an encyclopaedic collection of treatises that attempted to bring together all the sciences then existing in the known world. The treatises, or ‘epistles’, were intended for higher instruction among the Qarmatis and their Isma’ili co-sectarians. The Brethren’s interests resembled those of the open-minded Caliph al-Ma’mun in the previous century, but drew on an even wider range of influences. In philosophy, Greek sources predominate, and include the Pythagoreans, Aristotle, Plato and the Neoplatonists, but in other fields the range of influences is wider: astrological ideas, for example, come from Persia, India and ancient Babylon, while the treatises on divine revelation draw on both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament; shades of the cult of Mithraism have been detected too. The Brethren’s mode of expression was the Arabic language; their range of sources, however, was global. As with their hijacking of the Black Stone, the Qarmatis had shown – this time through their intellectual wing – that the old Arab-centred world could be made to wobble on its axis.

  THE LEVELLERS

  Throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, there were other challenges to Arab supremacy. In contrast to those of the Zanj and the Qarmatis, they were generally bloodless; but they were still bitter, and in one form or another they would spring up across the empire from Spain to Transoxania, endangering the newly implanted arabness of that tricontinental tranche of the globe.

  The discontents arose first with the Persians. They had enjoyed a special, love–hate–love relationship with Arabs since the beginning of Islam: the conquests that followed Muhammad’s revolution had joined Arabs and Persians in a kind of marriage – often literal marriage, as when the three captured Persian princesses had been wedded to the three most prominent young men of the new Medinan nobility. But the relationship was unequal, a joining of conqueror and captive, dominant male and supposedly submissive female, and so it would remain. The story of Harun al-Rashid reversing the usual roles by giving his sister in marriage to his Persian bosom friend, Ja’far al-Barmaki, then executing him when the couple dared to consummate the union, may have no basis in fact; but it is a powerful parable about Arab–Persian relations, and Arab fears.

  It was thus not only the physically exploited and the economically maltreated, the slaves and the peasants, who kicked against the Arab pricks: so too did educated Iranians, who soon tired of Arabs always being the ones on top. As the Abbasid age progressed, and Arabic and then Islam began to spread more widely through the old Sasanian domains, their discontent increased. Ever more Persians were now joined to Arabs by a script, a scripture and a faith that proclaimed the equality of all believers. Had not the Prophet himself, in the sermon he preached on his Farewell Pilgrimage – perhaps Muhammad’s equivalent of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount – declared, ‘Nor is any Arab superior to any non-Arab, except in piety’?

  The backlash began in early Abbasid times. Bashshar ibn Burd, the first great non-Arab Arabic poet, celebrated his non-arabness by declaring,

  My father never urged

  a scabby camel with a song;

  . . .

  I never dug for, never ate

  a lizard from the rocks,

  and after many more such bedouin-bashing verses ended by celebrating Islam – but as a Persian Muslim with his own glorious past:

  Our wrath is a most worthy wrath

  for God and for Islam.

  I, son of double Persian stock,

  defend it zealously.

  We bear our crowns and own our strong,

  disdainful sovereignty.

  As the eighth century turned into the ninth, such sentiments spread and inspired a movement with a name: Ahl al-Taswiyyah, the Levellers, because they demanded equality with Arabs. But they soon came to be known by another name, one with more dimensions – the Shu’ubiyyah. The immediate word-association is with that seminal Qur’anic verse that tells how Allah

  created you from male and female, and made you into peoples [shu’ub] and tribes [qaba’il], that you may know one another.

  In the same spirit as Muhammad’s final sermon, it continues,

  The most honourable of you in Allah’s sight are the most pious.r />
  By evoking the verse through their name, the Shu’ubiyyah were therefore identifying themselves as ‘peoples’, societies joined by shared geography like the ancient South Arabians, not by alleged ancestry like the tribal northern Arabs. But other associations hover: they are settled peoples, ‘civilized’ in the most basic sense; but they are also ‘civilized’ in that they do not serenade scabby camels or nibble lizards.

  While Arabs were polishing their own self-image as natural leaders sprung from rough, tough but innately noble stock (compare imperial Rome’s pride in its own rustic heroes of earlier times, and Hollywood’s in the frontiersmen of the American West), the Shu’ubiyyah were doing their best to smear it. The Arab ancestors, they said, were no noble savages; they were savages, tout court, and their roughness still clung to them like the whiff of their animals:

  You were herdsmen living among camels, sheep and goats . . . and because you were so long accustomed to speaking to your camels, your speech became harsh and your vocal organs coarse. Now, even when you are speaking to people in the same room, you sound as if you are addressing the deaf.

  Very little of the Shu’ubis’ own words has survived; but as that quotation (preserved by one of their main foes) suggests, a lot of their invective probably centred on the force that had shaped so much of Arab history, the Arabic language. The Shu’ubis were a literary movement: most of them came from the large and growing class of Arabic-literate non-Arabs, who had made the written language virtually their own. Arabs had formed the spoken language and its rhetoric, and had themselves been shaped and united by them. But it was non-Arabs who, as we have seen, took the infant written language – a language that was still, so to speak, learning its letters – and pressed it into the service of their imperial masters. An almost entirely oral culture of poetry and incantation had made it into ink with the Qur’an, at first the only regularly written Arabic; then, under the Umayyads, largely non-Arab scribes had begun to use written Arabic for record-keeping. It was only in Abbasid times that Arabic prose began to appear as written literature. Its most important pioneer was a Persian, Ibn al-Muqaffa’, and Persians and other non-Arabs would be instrumental in its development. These literate non-Arabs thus felt that, just as they were sharers in Islam, they now had a stake in Arabic equal to that of its original owners. Arabs disagreed. Thus began a struggle in which, even if no blood was spilled, plenty of ink was shed.