Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  As for the Fatimids, even their ancestral arabness is in doubt. Their dynastic name declared that they were not just Arabs, but Qurashis and descendants of Muhammad through the marriage of his daughter Fatimah to his first cousin Ali. Few outside their domains believed in the pedigree, however. These critics were well aware that arabness, and especially membership of Quraysh, was another useful red herring: like sectarian affiliation, it could be a lure to get a hook on power. Existing power-holders naturally did their best to unhook rivals by subverting their supposed lineages, and this is what may have happened with the Fatimids. The story was circulated that their ancestor was not only a Persian but, to boot, from al-Ahwaz – the nearest part of ’ajamdom to Arabia, for whose inhabitants long familiarity had bred particular Arab contempt. Another version claimed that the Fatimid dynastic founder, Ubayd Allah, was in fact the stepson of his alleged father, and that his actual father was a Jew. There is also an anecdote which, if true, insinuates that the Fatimids themselves were touchy about the subject. On his arrival in newly founded Cairo – al-Qahirah, ‘the Victorious’ – the Fatimid ruler al-Mu’izz soon became aware of the whisperings about his family tree:

  When he was securely installed in the citadel, he summoned the people to a general assembly . . . He half-drew his sword and said, ‘This is my pedigree.’ Then he scattered large amounts of gold among them and said, ‘And this is the record of my noble deeds.’ And they all cried out, ‘We hear and obey!’

  Admittedly, the story might itself be a piece of black propaganda. In the end, the only conceivable way to clear the Fatimid name – or perhaps to cloud it for ever – would be the miraculous discovery of some lost Fatimid tomb (none is known to survive) containing genetic material, and then the comparison of the genes with those of (supposedly) undoubted living Alid–Fatimid descendants. But who would dare to open that can of DNA?

  Once established in Cairo, the sword and the gold, the control and the cash mattered for the Fatimids more than their name. With power, an obedient populace and, importantly, the wealth and commerce of Egypt in their hands, they could set themselves up as rivals to the unfortunate, Turk-ridden Abbasids. They affected the full caliphal look, complete with jewelled turban. The title of caliph they had used since Ubayd Allah’s Tunisian days. Given that yet another claimant to the office – a tit-for-tat title in response to Ubayd Allah’s assumption of it – was, as we shall see, at large in the far west wing of the empire, there were now three simultaneous caliphs. For a time it seemed as if the Fatimids were easily the most active of them; having secured comfortable, enervating Egypt, however, Fatimid forward policy flagged. They degenerated into a dynasty of dilettantes, variously into books, gemstones, alcohol, racing pigeons, weird alternative medicine, unorthodox sex and downright sadism. The business of everyday rule they left to a succession of viziers of varied ethnic origin. In sectarian matters, although themselves Isma’ili Shi’is, they were rarely rigorous, letting the Sunni majority get on with their lives. The laid-back attitude extended to those of other faiths: one of their viziers, for example, was an Armenian who doubled as Commander-in-Chief and as a result sported the title, though he was Christian, of Sayf al-Islam, ‘the Sword of Islam’.

  Despite the questions about their antecedents, the Fatimids contributed enduringly to the future of Arabic civilization. Not only did they create Cairo, still, today, called Umm al-Dunya, the Arabic ‘Mother of the World’, if now a somewhat frowzy dame; they also founded its great teaching mosque, al-Azhar, nowadays the nearest thing to a Vatican in priestless Sunni Islam. But their most important contribution to the future of the Arabic world was unplanned. Among their less obedient subjects was a huge, semi-nomadic and rowdy Arab tribe, the Banu Hilal. Long before, they had roamed Najd in central Arabia, but had moved to Egypt at some time in the eighth century. Later they proved disruptive, abetting those mobile and troublesome schismatics, the Qarmatis. As a result, the Banu Hilal were sent up the river to Upper Egypt. For the Fatimids, this was not far enough, and in the eleventh century they banished them further still, inflicting them on points further west. With this forced migration and that of another unruly tribe, the Banu Sulaym, came a belated but far-reaching arabization of North Africa, until then still almost entirely Berber in speech and culture outside the Arab-founded towns. As Ibn Khaldun put it, ‘The Arabs outnumbered and overpowered the Berbers [and] stripped them of most of their lands.’

  ‘Outnumbered’ is an exaggeration: even if the Arab mass migrations numbered a (highly unlikely) million – including the sparser ones of early Islamic times – as contemporary sources claimed, there were still a lot more Berbers. But overpower the region they did, both militarily and linguistically, in a slow but unstoppable flood that took a couple of centuries to roll to the far west of Algeria; the Berber languages survived, but only in highland areas above the reach of Arabs and Arabic. It was all a contrast to the flash flood of the seventh-century conquests, and much more like the creeping arab(ic)ization of the Arabian peninsular south that had taken place in the centuries before Islam. But in all three cases the Arabic tongue proved as complete a conqueror as Arab arms. If the principle of survival of the fittest can be applied to languages, then Arabic is among the fittest of them all: it had added to its conquests the whole blunt end of a continent.

  With the advent of the Banu Hilal, the Banu Sulaym and other groups, the old settled life of North Africa was permanently disrupted. Ibn Khaldun remarks that,

  Formerly, the whole region between the Land of the Blacks and the Mediterranean was settled. This is attested by the relics of civilization there, such as monuments, architectural sculpture, and the visible remains of villages and hamlets.

  With the coming of Arab nomads, however, the region was, ‘depopulated and laid in ruin’. The Khaldunian verdict is harsh. Other factors such as climate change had also affected the region. Even so, there is no doubt that along with their language the incomers brought with them the ancient bane of raiding. It would stalk the region for centuries to come. The late thirteenth-century Moroccan pilgrim al-Abdari, for example, complained that ‘the traveller, from the time he leaves the territory of Morocco until his arrival in Alexandria, never ceases to face death at the hands of malefactors’. Those malefactors were tribal Arab raiders. Given that the Mediterranean was equally malefic – when it was created, it supposedly threatened to drown God-fearing travellers and was thus cursed by Allah – those travelling between the far west and the central Arab lands faced a Hobson’s choice, between the badw and the deep blue sea. Ibn Khaldun himself entrusted his family to the latter when they travelled from the west, intending to join him in Cairo: the ship sank, and his wife and five daughters were drowned.

  The long westward swell of migration would roll on. Another big nomad conglomeration, that of al-Ma’qil, also passed through Egypt early on and went the way of the Hilal and Sulaym tribes. But they went further: from the fifteenth century, they began infiltrating Mauritania and soon came to dominate there. Arab migrations were thus reaching their high tideline at the far end of the Old World as European migrations were taking to the water and making for the New: another imperial baton passed on. And this last pushing of the boundaries of the Arab world completes a historical arc as well as a geographical trajectory. Al-Ma’qil, whose descendants are known in Mauritania as Hassanis, trace their ancestry back ultimately to the great Arabian grouping called Madhhij – that ancient and peripatetic tribe, well known from both the South Arabian inscriptions and the seminal Arabic epigraph of al-Namarah. And, for me, their spoken Arabic completes a linguistic circle: I strain to catch the urban patois of Morocco; in the Hassani speech of Mauritania, spiced though it is with Berber and Wolof speech, I hear the rhythms and timbres of Arabia, and realize I am understanding.

  But by the time of the hijrah of al-Ma’qil to the far west, the days of the great tribal migrations were past. A different sort of mobility had taken over – one which, during centuries of Arab introversion would,
as we shall see, help keep the Kulturnation alive, and expand it in new and surprising directions: the mobility of merchants and missionaries. But there was still one other land in the west, another ‘island’ in which Arab culture flourished.

  THE FALCON AND THE PEACOCK

  If the Fatimids’ Qurashi Arab origins were in doubt, there was no question about those of their rivals in the farthest west. In the latter part of the tenth century, the third of the three caliphs, the ruler of Cordova and of most of the Iberian peninsula, received a letter from his Fatimid rival in Cairo. It was a most undiplomatic letter, venomous and scornful. The caliph of Cordova did not waste words in his reply: ‘Sir: You know who we are, and have satirized us. If we knew who you were, we would have replied in kind. Greetings.’ Arabic being so snappy, the original is only half the length of the English. Perhaps a better translation would be that down-the-nose put-down of English snobbery, ‘Do we know you?’

  Admittedly, if anyone in the western Arab world could have been justified in looking down his nose, it was the Umayyad caliph of Cordova. Some 250 years earlier, his ancestors had been almost entirely liquidated by the Abbasids. But one young survivor – Abd al-Rahman, grandson of the Syrian silk- and musk-loving Umayyad Caliph Hisham – escaped with his life and made it to the fringe of empire in Spain. His pluck and his far flight earned the admiration even of his enemies: al-Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph, called the young prince ‘the Falcon of Quraysh’. For nearly two centuries, the Falcon’s descendants were busy enlarging and feathering their western nest. In the 920s, however, the Fatimid state, still based in Tunisia, began to threaten Spain: it was in response to this, and in high dudgeon at the Fatimids’ presumptuous use of the title of ‘caliph’, that in 929 Abd al-Rahman III of the Umayyad line of Cordova staked his own claim to the hallowed office. This meant there were now three concurrent caliphates – and by a semantic quirk the Arabic plural, khilafat, ‘caliphates’, also means ‘controversies’.

  Seen from Baghdad, which still regarded itself as the eye of empire, al-Andalus was the back of beyond. Moreover, there was an old notion that the map of the inhabited world was ‘in the shape of a bird, with the eastern lands forming its head, the south and the north its wings and the lands between them its body, while the west is its tail’. Western Arabs travelling to the east, and particularly those from al-Andalus, were not allowed to forget that they came from the bird’s backside. But one victim of this low teasing had a response: ‘Shame on you! Do you not know what kind of bird it is to which the world has been compared? It is a peacock, and its finest part is its tail.’

  He had a point: the descendants of the Falcon of Quraysh flaunted their Arabic culture with a peacock’s pride. Rather as British Columbia and other tail-ends of the British empire preserve the concentrated essence of the old home country, al-Andalus became more Arab in some respects than Arabia. The arabness was genuine: in contrast to most of North Africa, fertile Spain drew Arabs in the mobile early centuries of Islam, and Tariq ibn Ziyad’s largely Berber incursion had soon been followed by a wave of Arab settlers. The indexes of Arabic works on al-Andalus are thus rich in the names of tribes and peoples from the peninsula, and especially from its south, who had colonized Spain – Azd, al-Aws, al-Harith, Himyar, al-Khazraj, Khawlan, to look only at the first few Arabic letters of one such list. Just as Canada attracted Scots settlers, so the Arab New World drew colonists from the Arabian ‘Celtic’ fringe of the south.

  Unlike the mass movements of Banu Hilal, Arab migration to Spain usually took place in fits and starts. Ibn Khaldun’s own family history illustrates the sort of patterns of motion that emerged. His distant ancestor Wa’il ibn Hujr was from Hadramawt in South Arabia, and thus a descendant of the legendary southern progenitor Qahtan. With the first migrations of Islam, this Wa’il ended up in the southern Iraqi new town of al-Kufah; a seventh-generation descendant moved from there to Spain, where his own descendants joined communities with shared if distant Hadrami origins, first in Carmona, then in nearby Seville. They also negotiated the maze of politics, surviving several regime changes as public servants. Later, with the Christian takeover of Seville in 1248, Ibn Khaldun’s more recent ancestors shifted to North Africa. It is all a microcosm of Arab mobility over six centuries and three continents.

  The arabicized came too, drawn by the increasing prosperity of al-Andalus. They included those who transplanted to the west the seeds of the new Abbasid Perso-Arab urban culture, like Ziryab, ‘Goldwater’, a famously hip ninth-century Persian lutenist and musical innovator, the Mozart or Prince of the age, who moved from the court of Baghdad to that of Cordova. (Cordova’s music-loving monarch, Abd al-Rahman II, also sent the female director of his orchestra, Qalam, ‘Reed-pen’, a slave from Navarre, to study at the conservatoire in Medina.) And with the increased glamour of the newly proclaimed caliphate in the tenth century, other cosmopolitan figures flocked to Spain. One such was the famous philologist al-Qali, born in Armenia, educated in Baghdad, and imbued with an encyclopaedic knowledge of high Arabic as spoken by all the tribes of the old Arabian homeland. His knowledge was in demand: the interest of Spanish Arabs in their ancestral lands and language was insatiable and led to some remarkable feats of long-distance publishing and book-buying. One such was when the caliph of Cordova commissioned works on ancient Arab history and genealogy from the Baghdad scholar al-Isfahani, and books and payments travelled back and forth across the 4,500 kilometres that separated the two capitals. But tastes in scholarship were cosmopolitan too: like the earlier al-Ma’mun in Baghdad, the second Spanish caliph, al-Hakam, ordered books from Byzantium – including, for example, a fine copy of Dioscorides’s famous De materia medica. Also,

  he had agents in Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus and Alexandria whose task it was to commission copies of all worthwhile books, whether old or recent. His palace was so full of books and bookmen that it seemed to be a factory in which none but copyists, binders and illuminators were to be seen.

  Al-Hakam’s library was said eventually to have contained 400,000 volumes which, if true, was an astonishing number: the British Library, for example, did not reach that figure until the second half of the nineteenth century. Nor was bookishness the preserve of the caliph. Cordova, a city with 113,000 households, is said to have been served by innumerable bookshops and no fewer than seventy libraries.

  This intellectual high summer continued even after the fall of the Cordova caliphate and its replacement, from about 1030, with a jigsaw of Muslim statelets ruled by an eclectic lot known as the Party Kings. In fact, just as earlier in the east, competition between rival rulers probably increased levels of literary patronage. But in contrast to the east, where free-thinking was discouraged after its brief season under al-Ma’mun and his immediate successors, scholarly openness prevailed in Spain. Rationalism and individualism flourished, for example, in the thinking and writing of the eleventh-century Ibn Hazm, who believed that ‘every individual has the power of forming his own judgement, according to his particular abilities’, and that even the untutored ‘common folk’ were not obliged to follow accepted authority. In the following century, too, the revolutionary thinker Ibn Rushd investigated the old duality of truth – the truth of faith and the truth of reason – and accepted their amicable coexistence. Latinized as ‘Averroes’, he was to gain a following in Christian Europe, where his thinking would reverberate down the centuries and into the European Renaissance.

  The history of Arabs in Spain would last almost 800 years, from the mawla-general Tariq ibn Ziyad’s footfall on his eponymous rock, Gibraltar, until the loss of the last foot-hold in Granada. Throughout this time ran a deep vein of nostalgia for the old country, the Arabian subcontinent. The Falcon of Quraysh himself is said to have confided in a fellow ‘exile’ – a lone date-palm in his Spanish garden. ‘O Palm,’ Nicholson’s version goes,

  thou art a stranger in the West,

  Far from thy Orient home, like me unblest.

  Weep! But thou canst not.
Dumb, dejected tree,

  Thou art not made to sympathize with me.

  Ah, thou wouldst weep, if thou hadst tears to pour,

  For thy companions on Euphrates’ shore;

  But yonder tall groves thou rememberest not,

  As I, in hating foes, have my old friends forgot.

  Andalusian nostalgia was to express itself in countless verses memorializing the Arabian past, and in the curious genre of letters addressed to Muhammad in his tomb at Medina, a virtual crossing of time and space; the actual Arabian pilgrimages of Spanish Muslims would give rise to a rich travel literature. But relatively few were able to undertake the journey, and Iberian Arabs suffered from a chronic longing for that other peninsula, for its sanctity and its lore. Their tail-end of the world may have been gorgeous, but beyond it there was nothing but the Lands of the Franks in one direction, and in the other the Circumambient Ocean. Bounded by the dangerous and the unknown, they looked back fondly to what was old and familiar.

  Nostalgia combined with an outpost mentality made al-Andalus a bastion of arabness. Despite the racial and denominational mix on the ground, an alchemy of arabization was at work that was even more potent than its Egyptian equivalent. In a strange inversion of King Offa’s Arabic coinage, the earliest gold pieces minted by Muslims in Spain had borne a Latin legend: In Nomine Domini: Non Deus Nisi Deus Solus, ‘In the Name of the Lord [God]’ – that is, the Arabic invocation, Bismi ’llah, plus that greatest of all slogans, lumpish in Latin and English but hypnotic in Arabic,

  La illaha illa ’llah,