Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  There is no god but Allah.

  By the middle of the ninth century, however, the tables had turned completely: the Christians were totally arabicized – ‘intoxicated’, as one of them wrote, ‘with Arab eloquence’ – and studying alongside Muslims in the splendid new mosque of Cordova. Soon, they could no longer read their Latin scripture, and an Arabic Bible had to be produced for the Christian ‘Mozarab’ population. That term, a Hispanic garbling of musta’rib, ‘arab(ic)ized’, is the same one that was used for the anciently arabicized peoples of that other peninsula, Arabia. Arabic was continuing to conquer, to absorb.

  The Arabic conquest of Spain has proved lasting. Islam was extirpated, but its holy language still haunts the land and its speech. Along with about 4,000 undoubted Arabic loan words in Spanish, the name of the ancient tribal god of Quraysh may even persist in the most stereotypically Spanish of settings. As the matador (itself from Spanish matar, ‘to kill’, perhaps in turn from Arabic mata, ‘to die’) dances with his victim and the crowd exclaims, ‘Ole!’, I for one hear the echo of another word: the syllables are nearly the same, the intonation and the awe precisely the same, as those of an Arab football crowd transfixed by some expert striker and exclaiming, ‘Allah!’ But He is the most-knowing, in etymology as in all else.

  A SHIFT IN THE NATURE OF TIME

  Arab identity remained strong in Spain and Egypt; but it was a new sort of identity, urban, linguistic, composite. Old-style Arabs, the raiding, herding badw, had been the leaven of an empire. That empire had risen and, now, had been divided. A flavour of the old arabness lingered in every part, but the substance of it all was much more complex, and much greater. The millions of members of the cosmopolitan Arabic world no longer called themselves ‘Arabs’: the term had reverted to its old sense, that of a marginal, tribal minority, often living more or less nomadic lives. It was losing its capital letter, becoming ’arab again.

  The relationship between these marginal ’arab and the civilized centre had also reverted to something more like it had been in the days of the former empires, Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman, Persian. ’Arab were once again a diverse group defined by their apartness from settled life. If, like the Abbasid caliph al-Qa’im, you found yourself shut out of your own capital while the Turkish slave-soldiers were doing deals with your Fatimid rival, whom did you turn to for asylum in the wilderness? To the local amir of the ’arab, al-Muharish ibn al-Mujalli ibn Alith ibn Qabban. Even his name, which might mean something like ‘Quarrelsome (or Dogfighter) son of Leadinghorse (or Hawkeye) son of Barleybread son of Steelyard’, marks him as alien to the cosmopolitan Islamic persianized civilization from which the caliph came. A void now lay between the vast majority, the ‘linguistic’ Arabs, and the marginal minority of ‘lifestyle’ ’arab. Moreover, while Arabs in the first sense still formed a puissant cultural empire, they were now sidelined from political power almost everywhere: they were culturally central, but politically marginal. In other words, the Arab Staatsnation had reverted to being a Kulturnation – and culture, to paraphrase Emile Enriot, is what people cling to when they have lost all else.

  Moreover, Arabs had entered a new kind of time – a sort of passive eternal present quite different from the distant, ephemeral present of pre-Islamic tribal life, a brutish and short one; but different also from the active, dynamic present of early Islam, a present that had been rife with possibilities for the future. The energy and velocity of that seventh-century expansion had been impossible to keep up: Arabs had slowed to stalling speed and had, as al-Mas’udi put it, fallen. It was not a fall into oblivion, but rather a fall down to earth, to being unexceptional. As Salman Rushdie has said, ‘nations and fictional characters . . . can simply run out of steam’, and in a sense, a nation is itself a fiction.

  But a fiction can, of course, have more than one episode. And in the interim, if the wheels of fire had burned themselves out for the time being, the cultural empire kept on growing outward from the ashes.

  THE LOFTY PALACE OF QABUS

  That growth can be tracked by following Arabic script as it spread across continents in its relentless arabesque. It spread not just on paper, but also on ceramics, textiles, plaster, wood, brick, stone, metalwork, coins, gems, arms, armour, amulets, bindings, buildings. It retained its old rhythms and rhymes too: poems were engraved and embroidered on everything from inkwells to saddles to the sleeves of robes. It made Arabic culture visible, and legible. Script linked non-Arabs to early Arabia in a concatenation of words: just as Nizam al-Mulk tagged on to the ‘camel-train’ of hadith transmitters, so calligraphers would inscribe themselves into ‘genealogies’ of pupils and writing-masters that joined their script to that of Muhammad’s Meccan secretaries and companions, and of the pre-Islamic scribes of al-Hirah. Such lines of descent, not bloodlines but inklines, can still be traced back from the present, back 1,500 years.

  The craft of writing Arabic had some unexpected practitioners. One was Qabus ibn Wushmagir, an Iranian ruler of the region of Jurjan south-east of the Caspian in the late tenth century, who excelled in the arts of tyranny, poetry, astrology and calligraphy. He was as adept at turning Arabic verses as he was at twisting necks; but he shone brightest in Arabic penmanship. On seeing an example of it, al-Sahib ibn Abbad – who as the owner of the famous 400-camel-load library of manuscripts was well qualified to judge – exclaimed, ‘Is this the hand of Qabus, or the wing of a tawus [a peacock]?’ No known examples of his calligraphy on paper remain, but he has one splendid memorial in brick – the Gunbadh-i Qabus, a soaring tower-tomb in which his body was said to have ‘floated’ in mid-air, in a glass coffin hung from the ceiling. The levitating corpse has gone, but the tower remains. Robert Byron, stern and brilliant critic of buildings, wrote of its ‘extraordinary momentum . . . unlike anything else in architecture . . . [It] ranks with the great buildings of the world’.

  A fifty-metre funerary rocket caught in eternal take-off from the Caspian steppe, it was all very far from Arabia, and from the more recent urban Arab world of Damascus or Baghdad or Cairo or Cordova. But it is joined to that world by a band of Kufic script above the door and another far, far up beneath the cornice, both almost certainly designed by Qabus himself. The lower inscription says that the tower is the ‘the lofty palace’ of Qabus and that it was built in AH 397, or the year 375 by the Iranian solar calendar. The AD equivalent is 1006.

  Like his earlier contemporary the philosopher al-Farabi (and like so many others), Qabus was a brilliant example of acculturation into the Arabic world. But the journey was in a different direction: al-Farabi came from the edge and was absorbed into the centre of the culture; people like Qabus were bringing the culture out to the edge. The calligraphic bands that bound his resting place are a part of a vast and widening cultural circumference.

  The circumference would continue to expand, growing ever further from its point of origin in the magical poetical oral culture of ancient Arabia. In one sense, the powerless Caliph al-Radi who began this chapter is the final direct link with that starting point: Arab historians call him ‘the last real caliph’, meaning that he was the last one to deliver the sermon at congregational prayers in the capital of empire. With his death, the orator-leader – khalifah, successor, to the khatibs and kahins, the preachers and seers of pre-Islamic times, as well as to the Prophet Muhammad – had, for the long time being, fallen silent. It is a symptom, minor yet eloquent, of the Arab fall itself.

  The old rhetoric would reverberate on – but now resounding from grandiloquent towers of brick and stone, from the ‘lofty palace’ of Qabus, from the Minaret of Jam in the mountains of Afghanistan, from Delhi’s Qutb Minar, exclamation marks that punctuate the march of Arabic across a continent.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE GENIUS IN THE

  BOTTLE

  THE HORDES CLOSE IN

  SHADOW-FANTASY

  Cairo has always been the screen capital of the Arabic world. High Arabic costume dramas set in early Islamic times have
made it into a Muslim Hollywood, or Mollywood. Egyptian soap-operas have long been the staple tele-fodder of the region. And, surprisingly, the history of the Egyptian screen goes back to the early period of Mamluk rule in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This was the time when The Thousand and One Nights and other story-cycles, performed to live audiences, took the shapes we know today. It was also the period when the popular street entertainment called khayal al-zill, ‘shadow-fantasy’, took off. In this, hinged two-dimensional puppets similar to those already known in South-East Asia (perhaps their original home) were worked behind a brightly lit screen on which their shadows were cast. Surviving scripts are in high Arabic, but they revel in low humour, sharp satire and touches of smut. It is on such a screen that we should view the caliph of the age.

  If the tenth-century Abbasid Caliph al-Radi was ‘the last real caliph’, God’s shadow on earth, then his fourteenth-century successor al-Mustakfi Sulayman was hardly a shadow of the shadow. He was a genuine Abbasid; but the coming of the Mongols to Baghdad in 1258 had, as we shall see, made his family exiles in Egypt. Now the Abbasids were mere shadow-puppets worked by yet more Turks, the military dynasty of the Mamluks. Worse, Sulayman had fallen out with the Mamluk sultan in Cairo and been sent into a second exile in Qus, far up the Nile near Luxor. He had no illusions about his position, and in a rhyming complaint that might have been spoken by one of those Cairene Mr Punches, he said,

  Such as I / live when we die. / The world’s a joke / until we croak. / Those Mamluks won’t disburse / my privy purse. / They pray, ‘God save His Majesty the Caliph!’ / I say, ‘God save My Travesty from the bailiff.’ / The sultan sits enthroned in opulence; / the only wind Sulayman gets of thrones is flatulence.

  Al-Radi and the other later caliphs in Baghdad were impotent, but at least they were on home ground. Sulayman was doubly in exile, and he and his family were so strapped for cash that they had to sell their clothes.

  Islam was on the up; it had gone travelling long since and was crossing new frontiers, especially in a tropical clime that stretched from sub-Saharan West Africa to the East Indian Spice Islands. Arabic was the language of its holy book, and Mecca the Arabian navel of the world for Muslim pilgrims. At the same time, Islam had cut the umbilical cord that had tied it to its Arab parent: it had grown up into a world faith. Arabic culture had a new and hybrid foster-parent – Cairo, that fertile ‘Mother of the World’. The two earlier counter-caliphates were long extinct; but Sulayman the Abbasid was still seen by a few as titular head of the first family of the faith and of Arabdom – of the 600-year dynasty descended from Muhammad’s Meccan uncle. And yet so irrelevant had he become that he could be packed off, penniless, to a Nilotic Siberia. How did this come about?

  A MULTIPLICITY OF THREATS

  Over the two centuries before Abbasids became asylum-seekers, the remains of the Arab empire – fragmented as it was, but much of it still paying at least nominal allegiance to descendants, real or alleged, of its Arab founders – had been under increasing pressure from new forces. There were threats from Christendom at both ends of the Arabic world: the Crusades in the Levant, the Reconquista in Spain. In addition, Arabs in Spain were under a double pressure – Christian Latins from the north, Muslim Berbers from the south. Crusades would also encroach on Egypt which, since the re-persianization of the east and the rise of the Fatimids, had become a new centre of the Arabic world. Unlike the Reconquistadors, the Crusaders would be repulsed; but the upheavals they caused would bring another non-Arab people to the fore, Saladin’s Kurdish dynasty. The Kurds were a tiny ruling minority, and they did not seem out of place: the Levant and, especially, Egypt had long been used to Muslim rulers of all complexions. But after only a century of rule, and in yet another example of the Cuckoo Syndrome, they would be displaced by a further sub-species of Turkic slave-rulers – the shadow-caliph Sulayman’s Mamluk minders. For two and a half centuries from 1250, this self-perpetuating military caste would be the dominant force in the region. Their influence would endure even when their very distant Ottoman Turkish cousins had become the great imperial power (indeed, it would take Napoleon and Muhammad Ali Pasha to remove the Mamluks from the scene once and for all). But even with the Mamluks the list of new forces was not complete: just as they took over, the Mongols loomed out of the east.

  By the time the shadow-caliph Sulayman’s grandfather had fled Baghdad and the Mongols, therefore, the political value of Arabs had already been reduced almost to zero. Sulayman, stuck in his Mamluk gulag 600 kilometres up the Nile from Cairo and civilization, was thus an ironically appropriate figurehead for Arabs in general. Their history had been great when it was mobile, history on the hoof. Now, though, they had been hemmed in by other peoples on the move, all of whom seemed to be converging on the millennially important junctions where Africa and Europe, Africa and Asia, Asia and the Arabian subcontinent meet. With their genius bottled up and stoppered, it seemed that the active Arab days were finally over, and that they would now be the passive spectators of history, and its victims.

  FRANKISH FOES AND FRIENDS

  Looking briefly at those other peoples on the move, the most surprising were the European invaders who would be called Crusaders, generally known in Arabic as Firanj, Franks. In contrast to the waves of nomadic, mostly Turkic, incomers who had headed westward for the northern Fertile Crescent from the wide expanses of inner Asia, the Franks came from a cramped, dead-end continent, fractured by gulfs and mountain chains into statelets whose people tended to be tied, by geography and necessity, to the land. Looking back to the end of the eleventh century, when numbers of them first mobilized and headed east in the name of religion, it is tempting to see the movement as a belated response to the earlier Arab expansion, Crusades as a reflex of Crescades. The reason the Europeans themselves gave – to liberate the Holy Land of Christianity from Muslim rule – seems to confirm the view. It is as if Arabs, even if they were no longer the major motive force of history, were still propelling it at a remove, by setting off an equal and opposite reaction.

  In the event, the Crusades themselves would be far from equal to the Arab expansion. The small and short-lived states that arose from them in the Levant were no re-run of the Arab empire; rather, perhaps, they were a pre-run of later European imperialism. None the less, there are parallels between Arab history in the seventh and eighth centuries and European history in the twelfth and thirteenth, when Europe forged its own wheels of fire. Crusaders shared with Crescaders the use of ‘oppositionalism’ to unite themselves and end baronial wars, the European equivalent (mutatis, as usual, mutandis) of the pre-Islamic tribal wars in Arabia. As godfather of the Crusades Pope Urban II said in 1095, it would be better to redirect ‘against the pagans the fighting which up to now customarily went on among the Christians’. For Urban, Jerusalem was, like Mecca, ‘the navel of the world’, and the riches of that world were to be reaped by Crusaders as they had been won before by Crescaders: ‘The possessions of the enemy, too, will be yours, since you will make spoil of their treasures.’ Religion, again, was serving not only to create a large if temporary unity, but also to provide a fig leaf for naked ambition – for land, plunder and power. The despoiling of treasures, however, was often much more violent than in the time of the Crescaders. European chroniclers themselves admitted, for example, that the taking of al-Ma’arrah in northern Syria at the end of 1098 had involved not only massacre but even cannibalism. The slaughter of Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem in the following year was a shocking contrast to its peaceful occupation by Arab forces, 360 years earlier.

  Resistance was stymied by disunity among the Muslims. When, for example, the people of Damascus sent a delegation to Baghdad in the year of Jerusalem’s fall, the Saljuq sultan was off fighting his own brother in Iran: ‘The sultans were at loggerheads with each other, and this enabled the Franks to occupy the country.’ The caliph made sympathetic noises but was powerless. The conflict, however, was by no means always as simple as Christians vers
us Muslims. A decade or so later, in 1111, another plea arrived in Baghdad, this time from the Crusaders’ co-religionist, the Byzantine emperor Alexius: the Franks had occupied his territory, too, and Alexius wanted Muslim help to expel them. On this occasion the Saljuq sultan mobilized, but his campaign was derailed when another brother, the ruler of Aleppo, refused to join it. Another century on, the Doge Enrico Dandolo notoriously redirected the Fourth Crusade against his fellow Christians in Constantinople and filled the treasuries of Venice with Byzantine gold. The fig leaf had fallen away: lust stood exposed.

  Apart from harvesting heads, lands and gold, however, the Crusades did also manage to sow the seed of new markets. The presence of the Europeans and of their colonies, and the penetration of Levantine trade by foreign merchants, caused an upsurge in traffic across the Mediterranean. While fighters fought and died, merchants bought and sold and – those horrific early massacres apart – the conflicts did not necessarily disrupt civilian life: ‘The men of war were busy with their war, the rest of the people were perfectly happy, and earthly rule went to the winner’, noted Ibn Jubayr, a late twelfth-century observer from Spain who undertook the Mecca pilgrimage (supposedly in expiation for having been forced by his sultan to drink alcohol). Ibn Jubayr also remarked on the generally friendly relations between Christians and Muslims on the ground, including even reciprocal alms-giving. His contemporary, al-Harawi, happily picked the brains of Crusading knights to compile his Islamic pilgrim-guide.

  The frankest Arab observer of the Franks was Usamah ibn Munqidh, foe and friend of the invaders, who belonged to a family of local power-holders in Syria. He was impressed by the Crusaders’ military prowess, but not by their other qualities: ‘They have the qualities of bravery and excellence in fighting, but that is all – just as beasts of burden have the qualities of strength and excellence in carrying loads.’ He admitted, however, that a few of the older Frankish hands who had mixed with Muslims had taken on some of their polish. Usamah became close to one or two of these knights, although at times the friendship was too close for comfort. One of his Frankish companions