Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  There is a sequel. Ghoulishly, al-Muntasir took to sitting on the carpet, his father’s first shroud – until it was pointed out to him that it depicted an ancient Persian prince who had killed his own father, the shah; this earlier parricide, an inscription on the carpet said, had lived only six months after his crime. And so it was with al-Muntasir. Apparently he died of a chill caught from sleeping in the lower chamber of a wind-tower after a sweaty game of polo. But rumour had it that his death might have been accelerated by another Turkish plot – unwisely, he had tried to assert his authority over his fellow conspirators – and a poisoned scalpel.

  More wisely, al-Muntasir’s sidelined brother, al-Mu’tazz, kept out of the fray of succession. Even when his mother thrust his father’s bloodstained shirt in his face and urged him to take vengeance on the Turks, he could only say, ‘Mother, give up, or you’ll have two shirts instead of one’ – the second, of course, his own. For the time being a cousin, al-Musta’in, was placed on the caliphal perch. Power was in the hands of the two Turkish commanders, Bugha the Younger, mastermind of al-Mutawakkil’s murder, and a fellow general, Wasif. Of these two, a contemporary poet said,

  Bugha and Wasif

  Beggar all belief:

  They’re masters of the age;

  The caliph’s in a cage!

  He meekly talks their talk,

  A polly-parrot’s squawk.

  But blood would soon flow again, and Abbasid annals turn into a drawn-out version of the end of Titus Andronicus. Al-Mas’udi, who was born in Baghdad in the middle of the drama and witnessed some of its later acts, does not skimp on the sensational details and suq rumours. Particularly valuable, however, are the contemporary verses he quotes: poets were the pamphleteers of the age, reflecting and shaping reaction to events. When the Turks eventually forced al-Musta’in to abdicate – and then for good measure beheaded him – al-Mas’udi quotes another outspoken verse:

  How marvellous to see the Turkish horde

  fend off cruel fate’s advances with the sword –

  Then use that sword for their next regicide,

  thus spreading fear and terror far and wide!

  They’ve carved a realm up, too, its ruler’s fate

  to be their guest in his own caliphate.

  Violence begat violence. Al-Mu’tazz, the parricide al-Muntasir’s brother, was at last persuaded by the Turks to overcome his squeamishness about high office. They installed him in the gilded caliphal cage but soon appeared to contemplate replacing him with another brother, al-Mu’ayyad, who at the time was out of harm’s way in prison. Moving quickly, al-Mu’tazz had this brother smothered in a poisoned bedsheet. Now fearing that Bugha the Turk would ‘swoop down on him from the sky or rise up at him from the ground’, al-Mu’tazz employed a band of North African slave-soldiers to assassinate him. At first the other Turks seemed stunned. But they eventually regrouped and deposed al-Mu’tazz, too; he was killed in gaol a few days later.

  The next caliph would also fall to the Turks, but for different reasons. Despite (or because of) being the son of al-Wathiq, the louche anti-hero of William Beckford’s Gothic-Saracenic novel Vathek, al-Mu’tazz’s cousin al-Muhtadi was that rarity among Abbasids – a puritan; he tried to model himself on Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, the pious exception to that dynasty of black sheep, the Umayyads. Raised to the throne, he soon managed to shock public immorality. It was all very well for him to whitewash over the figurative murals in the palace and to disband the orchestra, to do away with the caliphal fighting cocks and fighting rams, and to slaughter the beasts in the menagerie; if he chose to sleep, as he did, in a hair shirt, that was his own business. But to try to ban alcohol and singing slave-girls throughout his territories was going too far; for one thing, except in name the territories were no more his. According to al-Mas’udi, some of his more sybaritic subjects arranged the now usual solution with the real rulers, the Turkish guard. In fact, there seems to have been a complex power-struggle involving the caliph and different Turkish factions. Whatever the cause, the end was the same: the ascetic caliph was killed by a drunken Turk, who allegedly drank his victim’s blood.

  Earlier, al-Muhtadi had been asked why he was trying to implement such unpopular reforms.

  He replied, ‘I wish to guide the people on the path of the Prophet of Allah – peace and blessings be upon him – and of his family and the four right-guided caliphs.’ To which the response was, ‘The Prophet of Allah – peace and blessings be upon him – was surrounded by people who had renounced this world out of desire for the world to come . . . Your men are Turks, Khazars, Farghanans, Maghribis and other species of non-Arab . . . whose only aim is to get what they can from this world, and as quickly as possible.

  The retort, cynical but truthful, shows once more how far Arabs had come since leaving their ‘Island’ less than 250 years before, how lost some of them now were in the wider world – and how that older, smaller world was itself a lost ideal. Al-Muhtadi would not be the last Arab to want to recreate the ideal.

  For a time there was relative stability. Al-Muhtadi’s cousin, al-Mu’tamid, survived an extraordinary twenty-two years as caliph. The latter’s nephew, al-Mu’tadid, lasted ten, and actually managed to restore some of the territory and authority that had been lost in the Zanj and Qarmati upheavals, but only within Iraq. Anywhere further afield – Persia, Egypt and elsewhere – had by now, as we shall see, slipped for ever from the rule of Baghdad. After the six-year reign of al-Mu’tadid’s son, however, succession problems resumed with a vengeance. Some of the Turkish praetorians, dissatisfied with the official appointee, al-Mu’tadid’s grandson, got hold of his uncle, al-Mu’tazz’s son Abd Allah, and installed him as their candidate. Ibn al-Mu’tazz (he didn’t last long enough to acquire a regnal name) was a connoisseur of rare vintages and fine verses, and himself a first-growth modernist poet. One imagines him dragged complaining at dawn from his ivory tower:

  Another glass!

  A cock crow buries the night.

  Naked horizons rise of a plundered morning.

  Above night roads: Canopus,

  Harem warder of stars.

  For Ibn al-Mu’tazz, the caliphate was the usual poisoned chalice, but one he was able at least to down in a single draught: as if to make up for the two long reigns before him, he lasted less than a day before being strangled by the partisans of his nephew.

  Ironically, Ibn al-Mu’tazz had himself commented, in his refined poetic voice, on the caliphate’s decadence. Other, earthier voices continued also to versify their thoughts about the mayhem at the palace. Ibn Bassam, for one, did not mince words. Having attacked the regent al-Muwaffaq and every important officer of state by name in a swingeing ode, he could only conclude,

  Let’s chuck this age in: let the villains reap its benefit –

  Till God consigns them, with His curses, to the fiery pit.

  It might be the voice of the man in the suq today: We want justice! But we know it will always be postponed, post mortem.

  Turks and other foreign power-holders did not escape the venom of Ibn Bassam’s verse. They included

  Our alien amir,

  Called Donkey, son of Ass.

  When he took over here,

  Islam took flight, alas!

  The donkeys, nevertheless, were firmly in control. By the time of Bajkam, minter of medallions, the fact had been recognized in the title he held: amir al-umara’, amir of amirs or Generalissimo. His nominal master, al-Radi, faded away of dropsy at the age of thirty-one. But with al-Radi’s brother and successor al-Muttaqi, relations with the Turks turned nasty again and the Grand Guignol resumed. Deposed after a few years in office, he was blinded while drums were beaten to drown his screams. ‘That,’ said his uncle al-Qahir, an earlier caliph who had also been deposed and blinded, ‘makes two of us. Now we need a third.’ Sure enough, al-Muttaqi’s cousin and successor al-Mustakfi was dethroned and blinded too – though not by Turks, but by a band of Iranian hillmen. In the repetitive chronic
les of the Abbasid decline, it comes almost as a refreshing change.

  At last it seemed the Turkish hold on power might have been broken. It would soon become clear, however, that one species of cuckoo in the caliph’s nest had merely been replaced by another, equally voracious for power.

  IRANIAN INTERMEZZO

  The three Buwayhid brothers who took over swathes of western Iran, Iraq and, from 945, the caliphal capital of Baghdad, came from the mountains of Daylam, south of the Caspian. Politically, however, they seemed to come from nowhere. Stories arose to explain their sudden appearance. The most usual account said that they came from humble origins – their father, Buwayh or Buyah, who gave them their dynastic name, was a fisherman – but that their fortunes had changed when one of them found a hoard of buried treasure. Whatever the truth of the legends, the brothers were recent converts who used their Islamic label as a ticket to rule, first serving in the armies of rising local powers in Iran, and then manoeuvring their way to even greater power themselves.

  That their Islam was of the Shi’i sort was to be expected. Precipitous Daylam and the damp, squelchy Caspian coast skirting it were fertile ground for Shi’i missionaries, prevented from propagating their beliefs in more congenial parts. In any case, the Shi’i affiliation made little difference. Some of the Buwayhids’ bitterest enemies were the Hamdanids, an Arab dynasty in northern Iraq and Syria, who were themselves generally pro-Shi’ah. Besides, the Buwayhids did not try to impose their sectarian beliefs – probably woolly at best – on Baghdad, which was always a second city to them; their main capital was Shiraz in south-western Iran. In fact, as heterodox bosses of the Sunni centre, they were in a perfect position: they could let the caliph enjoy his pretence of holding sway over the world of orthodox Sunni Islam and, as Shi’is, feel no moral onus to respect his authority – an authority that, in any case, was by now purely theoretical. Ultimately, sectarian labels mattered little. Religion, as so often, was a bloated red herring that hid a lean and power-hungry shark.

  In their policy towards the last great symbol of Arab rule, the Abbasid caliph, the Buwayhids carried on where the Turks had left off. Their first tame caliph was another brother of al-Radi, aptly entitled al-Muti’, ‘the Obedient’ – nominally to Allah, but in reality to whomever Allah placed in charge over him. In this case it was Fanakhusraw ibn Buwayh, to whom the caliph gave the title Mu’izz al-Dawlah, ‘Strengthener of the State’. In fact, the caliph did not have the option not to grant the title: the fount of honour issued titles and offices, but others controlled the flow. ‘Al-Muti’,’ wrote al-Mas’udi in a late post-scriptum to his history, ‘was in Mu’izz al-Dawlah’s hand, with no power to command or forbid.’

  Like most of the Turkish amirs before him, Mu’izz al-Dawlah the Daylamite spoke no Arabic. But, as their -id suffix shows, the Buwayhids managed to found a dynasty and to become, as one scholar has put it, part of an ‘Iranian intermezzo’ between the Turkic warlords and the Turkic dynasts to come. They were thus around long enough to be conquered, like so many others, by the Arabic language: Adud al-Dawlah (‘Strongarm of the State’), the second-generation Buwayhid ruler of Baghdad, was fluent enough to compose Arabic verses in praise of wine. Interloping power-grabbers had once more been cemented into established society by the glue of language. But the relationship would be short-lived: within a generation of the Buwayhid takeover of Baghdad, a new wave of Turks loomed from the north-east. Far from being slave-soldiers, these were their own men, and they were approaching under their own ever-growing power.

  EMPEROR OF THE WORLD

  The Saljuqs were a clan of the great Oghuz super-tribe of Turks, who can be traced back to the eighth century and the region of Lake Baykal. By the early tenth century, they were leading a nomadic life between the Volga and the Aral Sea. Then, like the Buwayhids and at about the same time, they adopted Islam and used it as a ticket to military service in the rising Muslim states further south – and as a passport to power for themselves. Unlike the Buwayhids, however, they were in no hurry: they entered caliphal territory around 970, and only reached Baghdad in 1055. Also unlike the Buwayhids, their Islam bore a Sunni label. They could therefore justify their seizure of the caliph’s city by airing the increasingly rotten red herring of sectarianism. They were good orthodox believers, they said, saving the caliphate from the Buwayhid Shi’i heretics.

  There was another difference from their predecessors as ‘protectors’ of the caliphate. Like his Buwayhid forerunner Mu’izz al-Dawlah, Tughril, the first Saljuq ruler in Baghdad, could only speak to the caliph via an interpreter. But during their slow but thorough takeover of the old Iranian realm, the Saljuqs had adopted newly renascent Persian as their cultural first language. It seemed now that, except as an archaic liturgical tongue, the days of the ancient high Arabic, last vestige of Arab primacy in the expanding world of Islam, might be numbered. Unexpectedly, as we shall see, it was under the Saljuqs that Arabic and its whole cultural empire would get the biggest boost imaginable.

  First, however, Arab prestige had yet more waning to do. Tughril was so powerful that he was able to cross that ancient red line, impenetrable since at least the time of the pre-Islamic Lakhmid kings half a millennium before: he, a narrow-eyed, flat-faced Turk, forced himself into marriage with the caliph’s daughter, a pure-blooded Qurashi maiden and first cousin, if rather removed, of Muhammad (in the patriline; on the female side, of course, 400 years of slave-concubines from across the Old World had made her gloriously intercontinental). If any act could symbolize the fall of Arabdom, it was this. Even Alp Arslan, Tughril’s nephew and eventual successor, was embarrassed; he sheepishly returned the daughter to her father after his uncle’s death. Alp Arslan, however, himself penetrated another barrier, both symbolic and material: he was the first Turk to cross the Euphrates – the border, the psychological maidenhead, of the Arabs’ inviolate ‘Island’. And if there was any remaining doubt about the power of this all-conquering clan from the far Asian steppe, then Alp Arslan’s son and successor dispelled it. Malikshah, a Turk whose name appropriately unites the Arabic and Persian words for ‘king’, who bore the honorific name Abu ’l-Fath, ‘Father of Victory’,

  ruled an empire such as none of the kings of Islam had ruled since the days of the former caliphs. It was an empire that encompassed the whole of Transoxania, of the lands of the White Huns of the Oxus, of the Gate of Gates [the eastern Caucasus], of Anatolia and Diyar Bakr, of Mesopotamia and the Levant. Prayers were raised for him as ruler from all the pulpits of Islam, save only those of the Maghrib, for he ruled a realm that stretched in length from Kashghar, a city in the furthest lands of the Turks, to Jerusalem, and in breadth from Constantinople to the lands of the Khazars and shores of the Indian Ocean. Such was the extent of his dominions that he was reckoned emperor of the world.

  If there had been any doubt before that Arabs had passed on the baton of imperial rule, there was none now.

  As for the caliph, he had ‘nothing but his title’. Under the Saljuqs, however, in contrast to the earlier Turkic praetorians, he usually got to keep his life as well (an exception was the killing in 1138 of Caliph al-Mustarshid by Ghiyath al-Din, the Saljuq sultan). But however negligible or disposable its holders were, the actual office of khalifah – that whole link with the Arab past through khilafah, succession, from Muhammad – was still of great symbolic importance. It was their title that enabled caliphs to crown Saljuq princes and invest them with other symbols of temporal authority, including the ceremonial armlets that would be shared with European monarchy. In not dissimilar circumstances, Otto, warlord from the far German north, had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 962 by an impotent pope. But the parallel is not precise: the Saljuqs’ own title – the now official one of sultan, ‘power’ – had no tint of holiness. Sultans, particularly alien ones from the steppe, needed the touch of sanctity still conferred by quasi-apostolic succession from the Arab Prophet.

  The caliphate, and Arabdom, had lost their temporal power. But t
hat residue of spiritual power remained. Further afield and later on – in the twelfth-century Syria and Egypt of the Turkmen Zangids and Kurdish Saladin, even in the fourteenth-century India of the Turco-Mongol Delhi sultans – Abbasids would remain useful as Arab-Islamic mascots, a living link with ancient Mecca. But they were little more than that. ‘The non-Arab rulers,’ Ibn Khaldun was to write, ‘. . . showed obedience to the caliph in order to enjoy the blessings [involved in that], but royal authority belonged to them with all its titles and attributes. The caliph had no share in it.’ Furthermore, the caliphs’ loss of earthly power was another symptom, and perhaps the decisive one, of nothing less than ‘the disappearance of Arab group feeling [’asabiyyah] and the annihilation of the race and complete destruction of arabness’. Elsewhere, however, Ibn Khaldun revises that melodramatic diagnosis: what happened with the Saljuq takeover was that ‘Arabs turned in on themselves’. As events long after Ibn Khaldun would prove, this was the juster judgement. Moreover, that turning inward was the latest twist of introspection that had begun in the first Abbasid century when Arabs, lost in the empire they had created, first looked back into themselves and into their past. The reverse futuhat, the counter-conquests, now seemed complete: conquered peoples, above all Turks, had got their own back. Except that the old Arab conquest, the first one of all, was not yet over.

  ARROWS TO THE THRONE OF GOD

  From the middle of the eleventh century, persianized Saljuq Turks were the political masters of the old Arab empire’s centre and of most of its vast Asian wing. Beyond the edge of Saljuq rule, too, Iranian culture was beginning to rebuild itself. Firdawsi dedicated his late tenth-century Shahnameh, The Book of Kings, the first great work of the Persian renaissance, to Mahmud of Ghaznah in today’s Afghanistan. But Arabic language and culture were about to have their own revival – in a movement that began in the east, too, but would spread over the coming centuries across the former Arab empire and beyond. It would ensure the survival of the old high Arabic as more than just a language of worship. Ultimately, more than four centuries after Ibn Khaldun had looked back on the annihilation of arabness, it was that dormant but still living language and its culture that would spark off the resurrection of Arabs as a ‘race’.