Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  would address me as ‘my brother’, and we enjoyed each other’s company. When he eventually decided to set sail for home, he said to me, ‘My brother, I am going to my homeland, and my wish is that you will send with me your son’ – my son being with me at the time, and fourteen years of age – ‘to come to my country to see our knights, and to learn reason and chivalry. He would then come back as a man of reason.’ These words of his that rang in my ears were not, however, such as would come from the head of a man of reason. For even if my son were to be taken captive in battle, no worse fate could befall him as a captive than precisely that – to be taken away to the land of the Franks. So I replied, ‘By your life, this is exactly what I was hoping myself, except that something prevented me from mentioning it. You see, the boy’s grandmother loves him so much that she won’t even let him go out with me unless she has extracted a solemn promise from me that I’ll bring him safely back to her.’ The knight said, ‘And is your mother alive?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Then do not disobey her.’

  Most Franks, however, remained a people apart, physically present but beyond the cultural pale. Usamah brought some of them into the Arabic fold, nominally: Benedict became ‘Ibn al-Daqiq’, ‘Son of the Slender One’, and Bohemond ‘Abu ’l-Maymun’, ‘Father of the Fortunate One’ (or perhaps ‘of the Ape’). Occasionally they arabicized themselves: the Frankish lord of al-Shaqif, near the Syrian coast, for example, became fluent in the language, studying Arabic histories and even hadiths of Muhammad. And a few Franks would stay on, to become permanently arabicized and to found lines whose names preserve the memory of their foreignness, like the Lebanese families of Dikiz (de Guise), Shanbur (Chambord), Franjieh (Firanjiyyah, ‘the Frankish Woman’), Salibi (‘Crusader’, from salib, ‘cross’) and Bardawil (Baldwin). But by the end of the thirteenth century most of them had gone.

  Arabic and its culture had conquered, absorbed and forcefully embraced one people after another. In the incomers from Latin Christendom, however, it had met, if not its match, then its own like pole. The Franks went back to their cold halls in the north, taking, as we shall see, keepsakes, linguistic and cultural, of the doomed relationship. Perhaps it is the spurning of the embrace, as much as memories of the enmity, that has marked relations since.

  RECONQUISTA

  Meanwhile, at the far end of the Mediterranean, other Latin Christians were piling the pressure on to a fragmenting Muslim Spain. The Umayyad caliphs of Cordova, descendants of the Falcon of Quraysh, had been crowded out of power by their own cuckoos-in-the-nest – in their case, successive influxes of Berber mercenaries. The last Umayyad’s reign had ended in 1031 in a welter of popular revolts, and that motley band of strongmen known as the Party Kings had cut up the caliphal cake of al-Andalus. Some of these rulers were of Arab lineage: the Abbadid mini-dynasty of Seville, for example, were descendants of the pre-Islamic Lakhmid kings of al-Hirah. Others were of Berber origin, or Saqalibah – ‘Slavs’, a term which in Spain meant slaves of European origin. But, perhaps predictably, the party turned into a brawl as the Party Kings started to squabble. Meanwhile the Reconquista pushed down into Iberia. After the fall of Toledo in 1085, when it looked as if Cordova itself would be next, an emergency meeting of Spanish Muslim scholars issued their statement of the obvious: ‘The Franks have conquered the cities of Islam, while our kings are busy fighting each other.’ It was the same cri de coeur that would soon be heard in the Levant. Here in Spain, however, there was no longer a caliph, even an impotent one, to cry out to. So the appeal for help was directed to the only united Muslim power in the region, a conglomeration of Sanhajah Berber tribes across the strait in North Africa. They called themselves al-Murabitun, ‘Defenders of the Frontier Forts’, and, not unlike that of the slightly later Crusading order of the Templars, the name has both holy and warlike resonances.

  Known in English by their Hispanicized name, the Almoravids were the lesser of two evils for Spanish Islam. With their strange tongue and their fashion for male veiling, they seemed as alien to Arab ears and eyes as the Franks. But as the Arab ruler of Seville, al-Mu’tamid ibn Abbad, put it, ‘It is better for our children to herd the camels of the Veiled Ones than the swine of the Franks’. The second option was real: later on in the Reconquista, according to a German visitor, Spanish Christians used the threat of compulsory swineherding to keep their Muslim subjects in line. In the event, a different fate awaited al-Mu’tamid’s heirs when the Almoravids took over and dethroned the Party Kings. His young grandson, who had borne the honorific title Fakhr al-Dawlah, ‘Glory of the State’, became a refugee in Morocco, working the bellows of a goldsmith to keep the family alive. With that boy, one more branch of the 800-year, 4,000-kilometre tree sprung from the ancient Lakhmid ruler Imru’ al-Qays ibn Amr, first ‘king of all the Arabs’, withered into oblivion.

  Spain had been the last major dominion of the Arab empire that had remained under indisputably Arab rulers. Ibn Khaldun was to write of the Almoravid takeover that, with it, ‘Arab rule dwindled to nothing, and the Arab tribes faded away’. It seemed to be the mirror-image of that Arab fall in the east. But in fact the fade-out would end in a small but grand finale: at the tail-end of the world, the successors to the Falcon of Quraysh would have their swan song.

  For the moment, however, not only were Latin Christians and Muslim Berbers between them squeezing Arabs out of Spain. In the last third of the eleventh century, pressure was also increasing on Arabs in Sicily, another outstation of the Arab empire and ‘the daughter of al-Andalus’. Sicily’s recent history had indeed been a microcosm of Spain’s, with an Arab dynasty, the Kalbids, running to seed and being supplanted by a tangled growth of warlords. This time the pressure on them came from that exceptionally mobile race of raiders – perhaps the sea-borne European equivalent to Arabs – the Normans, the former Norsemen (simultaneously, they were taking over a more marginal European island – Britain). The result was that reverse migration accelerated, taking asylum seekers from Spain and Sicily across the water to the urban centres of North Africa where their fellow Arabs were concentrated. The migrants would take with them an almost unbearable load of nostalgia, especially for their lost Andalusian paradise,

  The meadow-land of all the world, for all the rest’s a wilderness . . .

  But if Arabs themselves were in retreat, their culture and language continued to advance across the western part of their old empire.

  TRANSFORMATIONS AND EXHUMATIONS

  The Berber Almoravids did not just occupy Arab territory: they also took over Arab history by genealogically arabianizing themselves. Arab political might had ebbed away, but Arabs still retained a powerful aura, as founders of a great faith and culture: by tapping this numinous force, Berbers – B-team players in history – saw themselves as increasing their own prestige and legitimacy. Picking up loose ends of legends in which pre-Islamic Himyari expeditions had become entangled with Alexander the Great’s conquests and with the even more ancient Phoenician colonization in North Africa, Berbers would weave a web of myth in which they claimed a South Arabian origin. The Almoravid conqueror of Spain, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, is thus always called ‘al-Himyari’ in the traditional histories. Sober historians like Ibn Khaldun would dismiss the claims; the myth of the Arabian-Berber link, however, is still alive in our less sober present.

  In the following century, the Almoravids were followed into Spain and supplanted there by another great Berber conglomeration, also usually known by the Hispanic version of their name, the Almohads. As the Arabic name – al-Muwahhidun, ‘the Unifiers’ or ‘Unitarians’ – reveals, they too used religion to create a strong political bloc: as in early Islam, the main message of the Qur’an, that of tawhid or the unity of the divine, provided them with a totalitarian template for earthly life. By imposing a oneness that was both theological and political, the Almohad founder Muhammad ibn Tumart forged a super-tribal unity among Berbers that attempted to rerun Arab history from the time of Muhammad ibn Abd Allah, the Proph
et. (The template, and even the name, ‘al-Muwahhidun’, would be reused again another 600 years on by the Arabian reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab: his own Unitarians are still active, even if they are usually known today, after their founder, as ‘Wahhabis’.)

  Within a generation, the Almohad movement became a dynasty, and the dynasty a new counter-caliphate: for the first time in its 500-year history, the title of ‘caliph’ was assumed by overt non-Arabs and non-Qurashis. But from their rough origins in tribal Berber North Africa, the Almohads swiftly translated themselves into natural denizens of the urban Arab culture of al-Andalus. In particular Yusuf ibn Abd al-Mu’min, the second Almohad caliph, who ruled 1163–84, was a scholar of hadith and philosophy who mixed with some of the greatest and freest minds of the day. Thus the Almohads were a repeat not just of early Islam, but of 300 years of Arab history, from the tribal fastness of Arabia to the cultivated, cosmopolitan court of al-Ma’mun in Baghdad – but replayed prestissimo. The speed and strangeness of the transformation seemed wondrous to the Berbers themselves. One day, the Berber poet al-Jarawi, who composed in Arabic, and the Berber physician al-Ghumari, went to call on Yusuf. Hearing that they were at his palace gate, the caliph exclaimed,

  ‘Ah, the wonders of the world: a poet from [the Berber tribe of] Jarawah, and a physician from [the Berber tribe of] Ghumarah.’ The comment reached al-Jarawi, and he said [quoting from the Qur’an], ‘“And he puts forth for Us a parable, and forgets his own creation –” for more wonderful still than either of us, by Allah, is a caliph from [the Berber tribe of] Kumyah.’

  Arabs may have become the passive onlookers of history, but their own great past would be plagiarized again and again among the ruins of their empire.

  During Yusuf the Almohad’s reign, in 1169, but at the far end of the Mediterranean, his powerful Kurdish namesake Yusuf ibn Ayyub entered that other great centre of Arab urban culture, Cairo. First his uncle Shirkuh, then, on the latter’s sudden death, Yusuf himself – better known as Salah al-Din or Saladin – became nominal viziers to the Fatimid caliph. That, however, was as far as niceties went. As others had done before them, the Kurds played the sectarian card: they were orthodox Sunnis, their suit matched that of the Sunni majority population, and they soon trumped the heterodox Isma’ili Fatimids. In 1171, Saladin abolished the Fatimid caliphate and re-established the nominal sovereignty of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad.

  The Fatimids’ dubious arabness had always been the skeleton in the dynastic cupboard. Saladin, however, made no bones about his own antecedents: as with the Almoravids, there were attempts to arabize the Ayyubid pedigree, but Saladin himself dismissed them. The great commander had a good working knowledge of Arabic, and could quote poetry; his younger brother composed proficient Arabic verses. But, for these Kurdish dynasts of the new, post-Arab age, as for most of the peoples of the former Arab empire, arabness of blood no longer mattered. What counted was arabness of mind, instilled by constant draughts of language from the holy chalice of the Qur’an and from the ever-expanding literature of Islam; often too from the more ancient vessel of pre-Islamic poetry. Earlier, rougher arrivistes like the Berber Almoravids might have claimed an imaginary transfusion of ennobling Arab blood, but now ancestry was no longer so important. This is clear in Notable Deaths, the great cumulative biographical dictionary of the Arabic world compiled by the thirteenth-century Ibn Khallikan (himself of Iranian origin), many of whose notable dead have been exhumed in this chapter: occasionally the book gives long pedigrees going back to Arabia for older entries, but they dwindle as the centuries progress. Arab origins were becoming as irrelevant as Arab caliphs.

  All the same, Arabia itself remained the holy land. Saladin exhumed his uncle Shirkuh and his own father, Ayyub, from their tombs in Cairo and sent them for reburial in Medina. The two dead Kurds were not alone in making the journey. There were even instances of corpses being taken to circumambulate the Ka’bah and perform the other Meccan rites before burial. Such posthumous pilgrimages were a reflection of what had happened to Arabdom and to Islam. Before, the Egyptians had fought to keep the body of Nafisah, a fifth-generation descendant of Muhammad, when her husband had wanted to return it to her home town, Medina: they meant to make a corner of their foreign field for ever Arabia, for ever holy. Now, in contrast, Egyptian corpses of Kurdish origin were heading for Muhammad’s city, and the dust of Arabia itself was being internationalized. It was another aspect of the reverse conquest, of the opening up to others not just of Arab minds and Arab genes, but even of the sacred earth of their ‘Island’.

  Live Kurds, however, found no rest in the peninsula. The Ayyubids managed to set up a branch of their dynasty in Yemen; its ruler, Saladin’s brother Turanshah, soon became homesick for Cairo, and complained of the impossibility of getting ice in his punishing posting. Another Ayyubid ruler in Yemen lost his mind. Except as a destination for pilgrimage, the Arabs’ ‘Island’ had regressed into a state of isolation from which parts of it have only emerged in very recent times. (I have heard echoes of Turanshah’s complaints from Cairenes who served time as soldiers and teachers in Yemen in the 1960s and 1970s.) The regression had begun long before, with the shift of Arab power to Damascus, then Baghdad. But it had accelerated as Arabs lost power entirely and ‘turned in on themselves’, as Ibn Khaldun had put it. Now, however, introversion was affecting Arabs everywhere. It is symptom enough that the Frankish historians of the Crusades rarely mention Arabs: they almost always call their opponents ‘Saracens’ – a word of disputed origin, bristling with contrary etymologies, but already in use for many centuries.

  For the Franks, the most celebrated Saracen was no genetic Arab, but that borderless product of the post-Arab Arabic empire, Saladin. A century and a half after his death, he would be remembered in Europe as the model of Saracen knighthood: England’s Black Prince had Saladin’s exploits embroidered on his bed-curtains, and Boccaccio embroidered his life, in words, in the Decameron. At home, he towers over the middle history of the old Arab imperial heartland – a member of an Iranian race, albeit born in Iraq, raised in the service of Turkic rulers in Syria, himself ruling in Egypt and Syria, fighting across the Levant and dying in Damascus. He has the longest entry in Notable Deaths, longer than any prince or poet, caliph or commander of actual Arab origin. Like Kafur, the black eunuch slave who ruled Egypt two centuries before him, we remember Saladin in Arabic terms. He needed no imaginary transfusion of Arab blood; instead, he was the perfect product of the fusion catalysed by Muhammad’s revolution, and by the even older catalyst of language.

  TALLY-HO

  All these incomers, Frankish, Kurdish, Berber, may have finished off the remains of the Arab Staatsnation. But the Arabic Kulturnation was still in good shape, and growing. Its influence would not only spread to Muslims like Saladin, but would cross over into Christendom. Spain, Sicily and the south of mainland Italy had long been interfaces for the transfer of Arabic culture. This is clear from the number and nature of Arabic words that infiltrated their languages. We have already noted that Spanish uses around 4,000 Arabic loan words. These are not just the vocabulary of exotica: even something as basic as the respectful pronoun for ‘you’, usted, is from the Arabic ustadh, ‘master, professor’, itself from the Persian ustad. In traditional Sicilian dialect, there are other down-to-earth loan words in the many terms of Arabic origin used by farmers; among the stranger Sicilian arabica is the name of Piazza Ballarò in Palermo, once the Arabic Suq Balhara, a market for foreign luxuries that took the Arabic name of a famous Indian monarch, Balhara.

  The Crusades accelerated the process of transfer, spreading Arabic words and Levantine ideas much further afield in Europe. Not surprisingly, many military and associated innovations were imported from the east, such as crossbows, carrier-pigeons and maybe even heraldic charges. But the inspi-ration went further. The first organized European hospitals were probably influenced by Levantine models, and life in general was enriched by physical imports – for example of crops li
ke rice, lemons and sugar cane, and of many new types of textiles and dyestuffs. And the fact that even the more peripheral Europeans took part in the general Crusading mobilization meant that technology and vocabulary were flung far across the continent. Thus, even English has well over 2,000 Arabic-origin words. If you write a cheque (sakk, written agreement) for a carafe (ghiraf, measure for scooping grain) of alcohol (al-kuhl), or for a coffee (qahwah, admittedly long post-Crusades, but the word is an old Arabic one for wine), a sherbet, a sorbet with syrup, or a glass of old-fashioned shrub (all four from the root shariba, to drink); if you wear chiffon (shiff, diaphanous cloth), mohair (mukhayyar, ‘select’ cloth), muslin (mawsili, cloth from Mosul), satin (zaytuni, from Citong, an old name for Quanzhou in China) or even a jacket (shakkah, chain-mail upper garment) or a jumper (jubbah, gown); if you sit on a sofa (suffah, bench) or a mattress (matrah, mat, sleeping-mat) stroking your tabby cat (’attabi, striped cloth, named from a quarter of Baghdad), then you are using Arabic. Much of that Arabic came to Europe during the love–hate, clinch-and-grapple period of encounters via Crusaders and Reconquistadors, merchants, pilgrims and scholars. Perhaps, too, if you go hunting and cry, ‘Tally-ho!’, you are using Syrian dialect, ta’ali hun, ‘come here!’ . . . Perhaps: for as with so much in etymology there is nothing to prove it.

  Looking beyond the dictionary to the atlas, Arabic is even further flung. It is not only confined to Spain and its many Arabic placenames (like the Guadalquivir – al-Wadi al-Kabir, the Big Valley). Via the Iberian Peninsula, Arabic makes it to London’s Trafalgar Square (al-Taraf al-Agharr, the Gleaming Point), and to the New World and San Francisco Bay, where Alcatraz is the island of al-ghattas, the diving bird, the pelican (the word wandered even further and metamorphosed into ‘albatross’). On the Brazilian coast, Recife is the Arabic rasif, quay, while up the Amazon one can encounter people of mixed Portuguese and native blood called, disparagingly, mamalucos (mamluks, slaves). Beyond the Andes and out to sea again, even Chile’s Robinson Crusoe Island has a local administrator called an alcalde (al-qadi, the judge) and a guest-house called an aldea (al-day’ah, the country estate).