Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  KINGS WEAR KUFIC

  This sort of linguistic permeation was organic, and slow. But there were also swift and highly organized transfers of Arabic culture and knowledge to Europe. When Alfonso VI of León and Castile took Toledo in 1085, he ensured that the old Arabic learning continued, and even called himself ‘King of the Two Faiths’; the present heir to the British throne, Prince Charles, would approve (he has announced his intention to be ‘Defender of the Faiths’). Similarly, when the king of Aragón captured Murcia nearly two centuries later, he was impressed by a scholar of the city, Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Raquti,

  a scholar of high lineage, well acquainted with the ancient arts of logic, geometry, computation, music and medicine, who was also a philosopher, an accomplished physician and God’s gift to languages [literally ‘a sign of Allah’ – an ayat Allah or ‘Ayatollah’ – in languages] . . . The tyrant of the Romans [i.e. the king of Aragón] recognized his worth when he captured Murcia, and built him a school where he could teach Muslims, Christians and Jews, and this king continued to regard him with great favour.

  The Christian reconquerors had realized that by winning territory they were losing the knowledge that had always filtered through to them. They therefore founded programmes of translation from Arabic, and maintained the old Arabic academic traditions, which continued to permeate through to further Europe. Thus, medical students at the University of Paris would study Arabic texts on physic in Latin translation, and would sometimes benefit from human teachers – ‘Moors’ who went north in the brain-drain of the age; their students were known as arabizantes. Such a monopoly did Arabic learning gain over the medical faculties of Europe that Petrarch took to mocking Italian arabophiles:

  We [Italians] may often equal, and occasionally surpass, the Greeks, and therefore all nations – except for the Arabs, as you say! O madness! O vertigo! O benumbed or extinguished genius of Italy!

  Petrarch’s arabophobe attitude is said to have become so extreme that he would refuse to take medications with Arabic names.

  As Petrarch’s lamentations suggest, Italy as well as Spain was a major channel for the transfer of Arabic science into further Europe. This was especially true of Sicily and southern Italy under the rule of the protean Norman and Hohenstaufen kings. In particular, the significance of Norman Sicily was far wider in space and time than its own limited confines: it was not a mere afterthought to the Italian mainland, but the centre of an interconnecting zone that was truly mediterranean – mediating between territories and their cultures. A material illustration of this is the old Graeco-Italian wind rose used by navigators. Its centre ‘seems to be somewhere off Sicily, the heart of the Mediterranean’, for it mixes Latinate-origin terms like ‘Levante’ (‘rising [of the sun]’) for the east wind with Arabic-origin ones – Souróko for the south-east wind (shuruq, also ‘sunrise’; cf. scirocco). Another tangible illustration is the magnificent mantle made for the Norman king of Sicily Roger II (r. 1130–54), embroidered with lions, camels and a palm tree and bordered by an Arabic inscription in monumental Kufic script recording its origin in the royal workshops and its date, AH 528 or AD 1133–4. The mantle is now in Vienna, as it was used for no less than five centuries by Roger’s successors, the Holy Roman Emperors, as a coronation robe. At the most sacred moment in their lives, they would clothe themselves in Arabic.

  For a few decades, Sicily seemed to be the centre of a world with few boundaries. Its centrality was celebrated in a huge planisphere – a flattened hemisphere – weighing 400 pounds and teeming with toponyms, made for Roger by a North African scholar, al-Idrisi. The planisphere itself, the consummation of geographical knowledge to date, has not survived, but al-Idrisi’s accompanying book is extant, a map in words. The Island of Anqiltarrah (England), for example, resembles an ostrich’s head (of which Cornwall is the ‘beak’). And there is human geography too, for ‘its people are steadfast, firm and resolute. It always rains there’. (Even then, stiff upper lips and wet weather were prominent features of England.) To render them in Arabic script, al-Idrisi necessarily tweaks placenames, such as Hastinkash (Hastings), and my own local metropolis when in England, Aghrimas (Grimsby). More notably, he also arabizes his Norman patron with stately rhyming prose and regnal names borrowed from the Abbasids and their sultanic sidekicks, extolling ‘Rujar al-Mu’tazz bi ’llah wa ’l-Muqtadir bi-qudratih . . . Mu’izz Imam Rumiyah’, Roger, the Glorier in the strength of Allah, Empowered by the might of Allah . . . the Strengthener of the Imam [the Pope] of Rome.

  Another Arab in Norman Sicily was Ibn Jubayr, already quoted above on the Crusades. He is a sort of Usamah Ibn Munqidh through the looking-glass: Usamah fought, observed and befriended the inhabitants of Christendom on his own territory and terms; Ibn Jubayr travelled through their parallel world. He was in Sicily in the time of Roger II’s grandson, William II (r. 1166–89), who both read and wrote Arabic well and had a whole palaceful of Muslim functionaries, including his head chef. Sicily for Ibn Jubayr was a land of ‘lofty palaces and elegant gardens, particularly in the royal seat, Palermo’. And just as the king’s grandfather, Roger, had attracted scholars like al-Idrisi, William too was a patron of the Arabic learned:

  Whenever he is informed that a physician or astrologer is passing through his country, he orders that the man be detained – and then bestows on him such a copious salary that he gives up thought of his homeland! May Allah by His grace protect the Muslims from such temptation . . .

  Perhaps the last sentence is a sideways sneer at people like al-Idrisi, inveigled into the Nazarene’s service; perhaps there is also a hint of envy, given the decline so depressingly evident in much of Ibn Jubayr’s Arabic home territory. For, in contrast to his guarded enthusiasm for Palermo, the traveller had summed up Baghdad thus:

  Of this ancient city, even if it remains the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, and the base of the mission of the imams descended from the Hashimi clan of Quraysh, most of the traces are gone, and nothing of it remains but its famous name.

  The mid-point of an earlier boundless world in the ninth century, Baghdad had later lost its old centrality to newer hubs in Cairo and Cordova. Now, however, the centre of hemiglobal gravity was shifting again, towards a pre-renascent Europe; it hovered for a time mid-Mediterranean, in Sicily, and the open sea-roads drew men with open minds – geographers like al-Idrisi, travellers like Ibn Jubayr, polymaths like the Syrian Ibn Wasil, even accomplished eulogizing poets like the Egyptian Ibn al-Qalaqis – from the Arabic world to the courts of Palermo and its offshoot in Calabria. The Baghdadis, meanwhile, whom Ibn Jubayr had found alternately ingratiating, grasping and arrogant, had not yet caught up with the reality of their marginalization, for ‘it is as if they do not believe that anywhere or anyone else exists on God’s earth’. He had been kinder to the caliph of the day, al-Nasir, whom he spotted crossing the Tigris:

  a young man with a full fair beard clipped short, handsome and good-looking, of pale complexion and medium height, with a bright and pleasant face, about twenty-five years old, wearing a white robe like a gown with gold stripes and, on his head, a gold-embroidered cap with a band of black fur of some valuable kind such as marten or a higher quality. This Turkish style he adopts in an attempt to go about incognito.

  That sort of word-portrait is rare in Arabic prose, and it makes the bright young caliph stand out even more prominently against the gloomy background of Baghdad. But it is, none the less, a portrait of doomed youth in a dying city, where to go unnoticed one had to adopt the dress of the Turkic interloper. And, within the span of a human lifetime, far worse was to befall Baghdad and its Arab caliphs.

  A TALE TO DEVOUR ALL TALES

  If Ibn Jubayr the Frank-watcher was a kind of reflected Usamah, then the slightly later Yaqut al-Rumi (‘the Roman’, i.e. the Byzantine) was a sort of inverse Idrisi, for he was a descriptive geographer – among his other skills – but one who crossed from Christendom to the world of Islam. Unlike al-Idrisi, however, Yaqut had no choice in his t
ransition, as he was brought to Baghdad as a five- or six-year-old slave from Byzantine territory. An illiterate merchant bought him, soon realized that Yaqut was exceptionally smart, and gave him an education. The young slave went on business trips on his master’s behalf, especially around the Gulf; later, they fell out and Yaqut was given his freedom. Thereafter he set out on his own career of travel and writing. Long after the end of Arab political power, Arab language and culture were still assimilating outsiders like him and launching them into the mobile world which they had created.

  Yaqut was the epitome of the scholar-gypsy, a man who could quote from the heart the old sayings about the blessings of mobility: Fi ’l-harakah barakah wa ’l-ightirab da’iyat al-iktisab, ‘God gives grace to those who move from place to place; exile’s pain can lead to gain.’ In the well-stocked libraries of Marw, in modern-day Turkmenistan, he found books ‘that made me forget home and homeland, nearest and dearest . . . I fell upon them like the greediest glutton . . .’ He travelled throughout his life and, appropriately, spent the last part of it in a caravanserai outside Aleppo. The journey he never made, however, was the one that would have taken him away from his roots: he longed to translate himself from Yaqut, ‘Ruby’ – a name only given to slaves – into Ya’qub, ‘Jacob’, but the new name never took root. In the end, the literary name he earned was far greater. His dictionaries of Arabic poets and prose writers are still indispensable nearly 800 years after his death. And it is fitting that such a footloose scholar is best remembered for his great Arabic geographical dictionary, Mu’jam al-buldan, The Lexicon of Lands. And yet Yaqut’s sort of mobility, so much a feature of and a reason for the continuing spread of Arabic culture, suddenly found itself under deadly threat.

  In 1219 there was a double disaster, with the Crusaders taking the important Egyptian port of Damietta and – ‘the greatest calamity of all’ – the coming of the Mongols to the lands of Islam. There are different explanations for the appearance of Chingiz Khan and his Mongol horsemen in Khurasan, at this time part of the territory of Khwarizm, whose capital was south of the Aral Sea. One is that the expanionist Turkic Khwarizm Shah destroyed his buffer states in eastern Central Asia and thus let the Mongols in. Another says that the bright young Abbasid Caliph al-Nasir, his brightness now dulled, encouraged the Mongols to invade Khwarizm in order to deflect a Khwarizmian invasion of Iraq. Yet another explanation has it that the Khwarizmian generals beat off the advancing Mongols, but then fell out over booty and let them in. Whatever the reason, they would probably have come anyway.

  Their advent seemed apocalyptic. ‘The news of the Tatars,’ as Arabic writers called them (after a Turkic people they had subjugated and who then joined their campaigns), ‘is a tale to devour all tales, an account that rolls into oblivion all accounts, a history to make one forget all histories.’ So it seemed to Abd al-Latif, a physician of Baghdad. In contrast Ibn al-Athir, the great contemporary chronicler, saw the Mongols in the light of a dark future: ‘Probably not until the end of time will a catastrophe of such magnitude be seen again.’ One of those caught up in the catastrophe was Yaqut. As he wrote in 1220 from Mosul to a patron in Aleppo, his bookish Central Asian sojourn east of the Caspian had been ended by the Mongol advance, a calamity

  that whitens the hair of youth and rips out the guts of the brave, that blackens the heart and confounds to the core . . . I reached – but only just – the safety of Mosul after suffering many perils and trials, sorely tested, my sins atoned for. Often I beheld death and destruction, for my path took me between drawn swords, through the ranks of routed armies . . . wading through blood outpoured that cried for vengeance . . . In short, had not my appointed span still had time to run, I would have joined the thousand thousand thousand thousand thousand or more victims of the godless Tatars.

  However many zeros the number of the dead actually included, even apologists for the Mongols never denied that dreadful urban massacres took place. At the same time, a major depopulation of the countryside and the resulting neglect of sensitive irrigation systems caused rural devastation; from this, arguably, parts of Central Asia have never recovered. As for the old tide of Arabdom, which had rolled on and on and absorbed almost all those whom it reached, it seemed that it had finally turned; or, rather, had been rolled back by a force greater than itself.

  THE FALL OF THE FIGUREHEAD

  Following their invasion of the east, there was a long lull in the Mongol advance. But in 1258, under Chingiz Khan’s grandson Hulagu, it would sweep on to the old capital of the Arab empire and roll its last living symbol into oblivion.

  Iraq was already in trouble. There was not only the general decline from greatness noted by Ibn Jubayr in Baghdad; society itself was in decay. The same traveller passed through al-Kufah and found it more than half-ruined in raids by the Khafajah tribe. In the following, thirteenth century, Baghdadi townsfolk often took to violent rioting, with the various quarters of the city battling each other. But all this was only a minor prelude to the destruction wrought by the Mongols. In the most usual account, it was the vizier of the last caliph in Baghdad, al-Musta’sim – a great-grandson of the fair-bearded al-Nasir – who incited them to take Baghdad: as a Shi’i, the story goes, the vizier was incensed by a punitive caliphal raid on a Shi’i town. If true, the account would be the starkest example of disunity leading to destruction: divided we fall. But it may well be an example of anti-Shi’i propaganda. Whatever the case, the Mongol momentum now seemed unstoppable. They were less a factor in history than a force of nature.

  The fate of al-Musta’sim is uncertain. He was either strangled, drowned in the Tigris, or tied in a sack and kicked to death. It sounds harsh to say that the Abbasid caliphate was thus put out of its misery; but it had been living on borrowed time. Exactly 500 years before, the first of its thirty-six caliphs in Baghdad and the founder of the city, al-Mansur, had begun the borrowing by relying on slave-troops; less than 200 years after that, the alien praetorians had smothered Arab power; since then, the caliphate had been in a vegetative state, on life-support provided by its own Turkic or Iranian minders. But even at its height, the intimations of mortality were there. In the time of al-Rashid and al-Ma’mun, the Arab philosopher and astrologer al-Kindi

  is said to have made complete forecasts concerning the Abbasid dynasty. He indicated that its destruction and the fall of Baghdad would take place in the middle of the seventh [thirteenth] century. We have not found any information concerning al-Kindi’s book, and we have not seen anyone who has seen it. Perhaps it was lost with those books which Hulagu, the ruler of the Tatars, threw into the Tigris.

  ‘Only in war,’ as Mandelstam knew,

  our fate has consummation,

  And divination too will perish then.

  The Abbasids would have that shadowy afterlife in Egypt. But the destruction of al-Musta’sim and Baghdad was a massive psychological blow to Arabdom: both the human focus and the geographical locus of arabness had been wiped off the map. Not only that: although Arab political power had disappeared long before, Arabic culture had gone from strength to strength. Now, the coming of the hordes seemed to put into reverse 600 years of forward motion. The Mongols drove Yaqut and other standard-bearers of Arabic culture before them, pushing them back to the west; they overwhelmed the urban centres of that culture, and razed the libraries where Yaqut had lost himself – and his slave origins – in the study of a glorious Arab past. They wiped out history itself.

  It seemed, too, that the Mongol hordes had wiped out 600 years in which hadarah, settled civilization, had been in the ascendancy over badawah, tribal nomadism. From now on, for example, tribal Arabs would continually raid into the settled heartland of Iraq, preying on farms and villages. Such changes were part of a much wider trend. Ibn Khaldun, in a moment of ballistic overview, saw the Umayyads and the Abbasids not only as a single Qurashi dynasty, but also as the culmination of a series of polities that began with those of prehistoric, settled South Arabia and elided into those of I
slam – the movement that had brought together the settled and the nomadic, peoples and tribes:

  [There were] Ad and Thamud, the Amalekites, Himyar, and the Tubba’s [the later Himyari kings] . . . and then, there was the Mudar [North Arabian] dynasty in Islam, the Umayyads and the Abbasids.

  But with the fall of the latter, ‘when the Arabs forgot their religion, they no longer had any connection with political leadership, and they returned to their desert origins’. It is striking that Ibn Khaldun saw Arabs as losing their ‘religion’ . . . He does not mean that all Arabs suddenly stopped calling themselves Muslims or gave up praying (although bedouins, at least in townsmen’s eyes, have always been virtual infidels). Rather, the equilibrium Islam had created between Arabian peoples and Arab tribes was now being upset. Moreover, Arabs as a whole, for whom Islam had always been a sociopolitical phenomenon as well as a faith, had lost something else – not just the equililbrium, but the fulcrum on which it had been balanced. Al-Radi, who had died more than 300 years earlier, had been ‘the last real caliph’, that is, the last to preach at Friday prayers. But the office of imam, prayer leader, had persisted in potential as long as there was a caliphal line in Baghdad. For the vast Sunni majority the Abbasids had always been ‘the imams descended from the Hashimi clan of Quraysh’, as Ibn Jubayr had described them. An imam is first and foremost – in every sense – the leader of congregational prayer. Now, with the killing of al-Musta’sim, the line of imams was severed. For the first time since Abu Sufyan had watched his Hashimi cousin Muhammad leading the bowing ranks in Medina, and had marvelled at the vision of discipline never seen among Arabs, there was no leader of the unity, however symbolic. It didn’t matter that, for centuries, caliphs had been no more than figureheads. Now they were gone, people realized that however broad the ranks of worshippers, however deep the rows, however various the people who made them up, it had been precisely the figurehead, the frontman, the imam, who had held them all together.