Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  LOST BOYS

  After the fall of Baghdad and the Abbasids, it seemed that the Mongols would follow through and wipe Islam off the map, even without the help of Crusaders and Reconquistadors. Where was the saviour, the Saladin of these latter, terrifying times?

  Saladin’s descendants had done what almost every dynasty before them had done: they had subcontracted security to Turkic military slaves, then fallen out fatally among themselves. And when the Cuckoo Syndrome operated yet again and the Turks took over, it was they who in 1260 would save Islam, stopping the Mongol advance almost at the gates of Africa, at Ayn Jalut in Palestine. Moreover, they went on to do what no purely military Turkic power-holders had done before, and made themselves into a dynasty, or rather an establishment – that of the Mamluks, or Slave-soldiers. The establishment was self-perpetuating, and in a manner that ensured longevity much more successfully than the chancy business of begetting sons: Mamluk amirs constantly brought in selected new young recruits, mostly from the Qipchaq Turkic tribes settled to the north and east of the Black Sea, and later on from the Circassian peoples of the Caucasus. These recruits would rise through the ranks and recruit their own replacements, and so on in saecula saeculorum; or at least for the next 500 years and more, until the last Mamluks were defeated by the Napoleonic horde in 1798 and then finished off by Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1812.

  As in all successful ruling cliques, the establishment was based on an elite education and the chance of glittering prizes. The recruits were placed in barrack-schools, divided into ‘houses’ with eunuch ‘matrons’, and taught Arabic and the basics of Islam. There was a particular focus on shooting, team games like polo, and, of course, on OTC drill. The idea was that the Mamluks would emerge from this as naturalized rulers and gentlemen,

  masters in the administration of kingdoms, leaders fighting the good fight on the path of Allah, men who knew how to rule, doing their utmost to display good manners and fending off the tyrannous and aggressive.

  It might be the British self-image in its muscular imperial heyday. Qipchaq fathers queued up to send their sons to the Mamluk Rugbys and Wellingtons of Cairo. And there were no school fees! Instead, it was the fathers who got the fees (there was a downside: they would never see their sons again). Succession did become genetically dynastic from time to time. The prime example was that of the long-ruling Mamluk sultan al-Nasir (r. 1293–1340, with a couple of gaps), whose eight sons, two grandsons and a great-grandson reigned after him. The average reign of these younger generations, however, was about three years, and most of them were under the heavy hands of Mamluk amirs from outside the family.

  It was a singular system. But it worked, for under the Mamluks Egypt and Syria were reasonably stable, and Cairo boomed, ‘boundless in multitude of buildings,’ as Ibn Battutah’s Travels describes it under Sultan al-Nasir in the 1320s, ‘peerless in beauty and splendour . . . she surges as the waves of the sea with her throngs of folk and can scarce contain them’. In fact Cairo was probably the biggest city in the world at the time outside China. Much of its prosperity was due to its being a double metropolis – of both the Mamluk Staatsnation and the Arabic Kulturnation. The Turkic soldiers and their Circassian successors were politically dominant, but the overwhelming cultural power was always that of high Arabic, that first and still unbeaten conqueror. For the Arabic alchemy of Egypt worked on Mamluks too: Turks and others were arabicized, never the other way round. The arabicized, however, mixing with the subject-people, lost their lofty detachment and ceased to belong to the ruling class. But the elite was always topped up with new young recruits – lost boys from beyond the Crimea and the Caucasus, whose own offspring would eventually find their place in a new world, ever-diversifying but always united by Arabic.

  At the same time, ‘true’ Arabs were not completely out of the picture, and some had maintained a measure of political independence. But they were back exactly where they had started, ‘on a rock between two lions’. For a time after the Mamluks had stopped the Mongols in their tracks, the two military superpowers glared at each other across the northern Fertile Crescent, the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria, the Mongols in Iraq. Tribal Arabs in the region and its adjoining wildernesses had reverted, meanwhile, to their position in ancient (and also coming colonial) times, when rival empires chose ‘kings of the Arabs’. One example was Muhanna ibn Isa, the Mamluk-appointed amir of the ’arab in the bedouin-lands of Syria. Muhanna was the leader of the tribe of Tayyi’, a force in the area since well before Islam. Now, like the ancient Lakhmids of al-Hirah and other, even more ancient, mercenary tribes in the fringes of the Fertile Crescent, he went about playing the great powers against each other and switching sides as it suited him: he fought the Mongols on behalf of the Mamluks; then fell out with the Mamluks and went over to the Mongols, and on their behalf attacked Aleppo with 25,000 tribesmen. Later, after a period independent of both sides, when he survived by the old Tayyi’ métier of raiding pilgrims in the desert, he returned to the Mamluk fold. His son and successor Fayyad got into trouble with the Mamluks by plundering merchants and did a flit back to the Mongols. ‘He was badly behaved’, his biography concludes curtly. The hordes may have bottled most Arabs up; some, however, remained mobile, at least in their loyalties.

  MONGOLS AND MICROBES

  The Mongol columns, advancing in their scaly armour, had resembled a crocodile devouring Eurasia. In religion, however, they were chameleons: at least nominally Buddhist early on, they also clung to even more ancient shamanistic practices; in the period after Chingiz Khan, they passed through a spectrum of beliefs, including various shades of Christianity. But towards the end of the thirteenth century, while their far eastern wing morphed into the Buddhist-Confucian Yuan dynasty of China, their three western divisions began to take on an Islamic colouring. Like that first conqueror from Arabia, the Arabic language, Islam itself seemed indefatigable, even when the people who had first professed it were reeling from defeat. But the Mongols resembled the last great wave of nomads from the east, the Saljuq Turks, in that they adopted Persian rather than Arabic as their cultural first language. Thus the hordes of Chingiz and Hulagu added a further barrier between the Arabic and Persian parts of the Islamic world: the Saljuqs had drawn a linguistic curtain across the south-western entrance to Asia; the Mongols turned it into a shutter, and Arabic was further diminished as the paramount language of the Islamic world. Yet, at the same time, they opened a door. Having digested their victories, they settled down to the business of ruling in relative peace, and presided over the so-called Pax Mongolica. For the first time since the brief height of the Arab empire in the Abbasid ninth century, truly trans-hemispheric trade and travel were up and running once more . . . and then, just when you thought it was safe to take to the Silk Road again, the Black Death struck.

  The first onslaught of plague in the 1340s and 1350s killed perhaps a third of humanity in a swathe across Eurasia and North Africa, and it did so at least partly because of the mobility which the newly unrolling land- and sea-roads offered microbes as well as mankind. The Black Death seemed like another horde from the East:

  Ah, woe to him on whom it calls! / It found the chinks in China’s walls – / they had no chance against its advance. / It sashayed into Cathay, made hay in Hind / and sundered souls in Sind. / It put the Golden Horde to the sword, transfixed Transoxiana and pierced Persia. / Crimea cringed and crumpled . . .

  Thus wrote the Syrian scholar Ibn al-Wardi; and there is a touch of levity in the original too, black humour in the face of black horror. The history from which it comes ends with a crowd of obituaries, and then stops mid-chapter: the Death had killed the author too. The Silk Roads may have unrolled again, but along them, as Ibn Khaldun put it, had rolled ‘the all-consuming plague, rolling up Earth’s carpet and everything upon it’. It all seemed as final as the fate of caliphs.

  But there was more to come, late in the fourteenth century, in the form of the delayed Mongol aftershock of Timur Lang or Tamerlane, who
shared an ancestor with Chingiz Khan. His invasions reaped another harvest of death, particularly grim among the sedentary Arabic-speaking populations of the Levant. In Aleppo, for example, he had the heads of the dead arranged in pretty pyramids, all 20,000 faces looking outwards. (Alas for Aleppo: Hulagu in 1260, Muhanna in 1311, Timur in 1400; more recently, in 2016, Bashshar al-Asad.) Next came Damascus. Ibn Khaldun was in the city as the Mongols bore down on it, left there in the lurch by the fleeing Mamluk sultan in whose suite he had come; Timur, however, had a soft spot for scholars, and spared the historian’s life. But there was a quid pro quo: Ibn Khaldun found himself having to write Timur a guidebook to North Africa, which was then translated into Mongolian. For a man who sought to out-conquer Chingiz Khan, this was inviting a Baedecker raid on the entire west wing of the Islamic world. Ibn Khaldun did, however, salve his conscience by subsequently writing to the Berber sultan of Morocco and telling him what to expect, in the form of a useful description of Timur and his hordes.

  The master of historical hindsight was too close to events to get the bigger picture. But he does give two glimpses of what Arabs had come to at this latest horrible juncture. At one end of the social scale, an Abbasid chancer was hanging around Timur, trying to get recognition from the warlord as a rival to the Mamluks’ puppet caliph. At the other end, after his own close shave with the Mongols, Ibn Khaldun himself was plundered by bedouin Arabs on his way back to Egypt, and left naked in the wilderness.

  AN AGE OF SURFACES

  If Timur was planning incursions into the Maghrib, Ibn Khaldun’s guidebook in hand, he never got to carry them out. Had he done so, he would have found that in the far west, beyond Mamluks and Berbers, Arabs were singing their swan-song and basking in the last rays of their long imperial day, down on the Costa del Sol and in the lap of the Sierra Nevada. Spain’s Berber Almoravid rulers had given way to their fellow Berbers, the Almohads. But the advancing Reconquista had driven them out, leaving a tenuous pocket of Arab culture in Granada.

  Perhaps because it was the last Arab state in the great diaspora beyond the Arabian subcontinent, a wizened rump of empire at the Andalusian peacock’s tail, a parson’s nose plucked bare of its dependencies and often paying tribute to its Castilian neighbours, Granada clung fast to its arabness. Its Nasrid rulers flaunted their descent from Khazraj, one of the two main tribes of Yathrib before it became Muhammad’s Medina, and the arabness of the population was stressed by local historians. Granada had in fact been founded by Berbers; even so, and even if your family had been thoroughly arabized for nine generations, you could still be classed by unforgiving biographers as ‘a [Berber] Masmudi client of [the Arabian Qurashi clan] Banu Makhzum’. This sort of genealogical apartheid had been largely abandoned elsewhere: it no longer reflected hybrid reality, nor did it do so in Granada, which was a racial paella compounded from Berbers, Goths, ex-slave ‘Slavs’ from across Europe, and Jews and Muslims of all sorts who had fled the Reconquista. In fourteenth-century Granada, Ibn Battutah even met immigrants from West Africa and India. ‘True’ Arabs (that is, Arabs in the patriline, however exotic their maternal ancestry), though, provided the garnish and the dominant flavour, and in this sense Granada was a boiled-down microcosm of the Arab empire as well as its last bastion. Its eventual end, too, was bathetically typical, as Castilian forces advanced on a state in which an uncle and a nephew were battling it out for possession of the sultanate. Granada was the victim of its own disunity as much as of Christian Spanish unity.

  Granada’s fall in 1492 came not many decades after the fall to the Muslim Ottomans of its mirror-image at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, Constantinople. There, in the eastern Roman empire, also shrunken to a rump of a city-state, the Palaeologue emperors had presided over a final flurry of artistic endeavour. The same happened under the Nasrids in Granada, and their most famous monument could not be more fitting. The sprawling palace of the Alhambra is important as it is the only such place that has survived; but it is also the perfect memorial to the stage-set Arab state that Granada had become. It is an architecture of facades, a pop-up palace adorned with beautiful, bombastic Arabic. If we look for solid architectural vigour at this time, we find it instead in the brutal-beautiful buildings of Mamluk Cairo, like the mid-fourteenth-century mosque-madrasah of Sultan Hasan. In contrast, the Alhambra belongs to an age of surfaces, and it is as much text and textile as building. As the Granadan poet and vizier Ibn Zamrak wrote in an ode carved self-referentially in the palace’s Hall of the Two Sisters,

  Fortune desires

  That I outshine all other monuments.

  What pleasure I provide for eyes to see!

  . . .

  Clothed in a woven raiment fine as this

  You can forget the busy looms of Yemen.

  Building has become clothing, and the verse, its voice, is finely woven too; except that the reference to Yemen’s looms has itself by now worn thin – 800 years earlier, the poet Imru’ al-Qays had wrapped up his ‘Suspended Ode’ with an image of Yemeni cloth, and his successors had been churning out the same old simile ever since. Of course, thematic originality is the last thing one looks for in high Arabic poetry; it is about form, not content. But even the kindest critic would have to admit that the Arabic language, the ever-fresh first conqueror, was beginning to look a bit jaded. It had crossed continents; now it was doing crochet.

  INSCRIPTIONS ON RUINS

  The loss of literary vigour had begun centuries earlier, with the loss of rule; swords and pens had become blunt together. Of the great Arab art-form, poetry, it is often said by non-Arab commentators that there was little or nothing that was sharp or shining after the death of al-Ma’arri in 1058. A well-read critic from within the Arabic world can also admit, ‘If I were asked to name a poet from [the twelfth century onward] I would be at a loss to answer’. There was always a lot of verse about; but less and less of it was poetry in its old sense of inspired, ‘magical’ utterance. As one observer has put it, poetry ‘could not outrun its own shadow’. In fact the shadow was winning.

  In Arabic literature as a whole, too, the old fires were burning out. The period is often called ’asr al-inhitat, the Age of Decline; others have called it ’asr al-taraju’, the Age of Retrogression. But whether downward or backward, it was also an age of going round and round, and the sum result was a descending spiral, a wheel not of fire but of waffle: ‘It was an age of condensations and exegeses, of condensations of the condensations and exegeses of the exegeses, and of commentaries on all these.’ The spiral accelerated with the centuries. Now it seemed that with the shock of the Mongols and the fall of the caliphate, Arabs had lost not only their great symbol of unity, but also their tutelary, literary spirit, their genius linguae; the introversion – Ibn Khaldun’s ‘turning in’ – had reached the empty heart of the helix, culturally as well as politically. A century after Ibn Khaldun, the decline was even more painfully obvious. Recalling al-Sahib ibn Abbad’s great tenth-century library with its sixty camel-loads of books on Arabic philology alone, the fifteenth-century literary historian al-Suyuti wrote, ‘Most books disappeared in the upheavals caused by the Tatars and others, so that the works on philology surviving nowadays . . . would not make a load for a single camel’.

  The spiral would continue to descend; some observers think it still does. In the diagnosis of Adonis, the Arabic world has been in retreat from modernity since the fall of Baghdad; in that of al-Jabiri, it has been ruled for all these centuries by what he calls ‘the resigned mind’. And the poet Nizar Qabbani might be speaking of this same continuum, from the ruin of Baghdad through the fall of Granada to the latter-day ruins of Beirut, Baghdad again, Mosul, Palmyra, Aleppo . . . when he says,

  Half our verses are inscriptions . . . and what

  Use is an inscription when the building’s falling down?

  Or, indeed, being demolished by its own inhabitants?

  FAREWELL THE CLARIONS

  But not everything was falling down. If al-Ma’arr
i, born in 973, was the last great Arabic poet, his life also coincided with the birth of a whole new genre. Maqamat, tales of picaresque heroes told in rhyming prose, are the offspring of the magic speech of ancient seers and of the Qur’an, but twisted to a quite different end – storytelling – and packed with such verbal acrobatics that they sometimes read like Finnegans Wake. The stories and their cunning, cavorting characters quickly reached the furthest corners of the Arabic world; the influence of their devilishly clever prose can be heard in much of subsequent Arabic writing – as in that jingling account of the plague’s progress quoted above – and is hard to escape from entirely, even for more minimalist modern-day authors.

  The maqamat sparked off imitations in Persian and even Hebrew. Their magic realism also gave rise to something else: graphic illustration, all but unknown in earlier Arabic books (except scientific texts). The most celebrated example is a manuscript of al-Hariri’s Maqamat, probably illustrated in Baghdad and dated 1237, a couple of decades before the city’s fall to the Mongols. All the images are brilliant, jewel-like; but the most powerful and memorable of all is a tight group of horsemen, the mounted standard-bearers of the caliph. The uprights of their banners are bordered by diagonals of clarions and gonfalons; their eyes peer outwards beyond the margin of the page, as if they are ready for the off; horses champ, hoofs paw. All the old energy of empire seems captured in that frame.