Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  At the same time, while the essential texts, rituals and doctrines of Islam crossed oceans and deserts intact, and were explained through translation, they were nearly always relocated on foundations of previous local beliefs. These might be hidden, but they were rarely eradicated; upon them new superstructures arose – cultural, ethical, philosophical, mystical – that belonged less to seventh-century Arabia or ninth-century Baghdad than to Islam’s new settings. Just as, say, the spiky mud mosques of Dienné in Mali, the Hindu temple-style mosques of Kerala, the elaborately carved wooden mosques in the Maldives that are built on the foundations of Buddhist temples, and the moon gates and curly eaves of Chinese mosques are all in harmony with their local history, so while the words and the worship are the same as those of Arabs, the local ‘architecture’ of surrounding practice and underlying belief can be different. Different superstructures are easy to spot, like the cave eremism that Indian Muslim ascetics adopted from their Buddhist peers, or the pranayama breath control that they learned from yogis. In the fourteenth century, Ibn Battutah observed many Muslim penitents studying ascetic techniques with Shaivite saddhus at Khajuraho; he also saw Haydari dervishes who had taken over the practice of penis-piercing from Naga sanyasis. The infrastructure of earlier beliefs is harder to see, but the case of Jalal al-Din Tabrizi, the early thirteenth-century Muslim proselytizer of Bengal, is probably far from unique: he converted a Hindu temple into his main centre of worship, gave it an Indo-Arabic name, ‘Deva Mahall’, and simply took over the resident Hindu devotees, who ‘presumably’ converted along with the building. Over the next two centuries, Isma’ili missionaries in India would identify Islamic figures with members of the Hindu pantheon: Adam was the equivalent of Shiva, Muhammad of Brahma and Ali of Vishnu. Inevitably with such ‘translations’, something would be lost, and something gained.

  It helped that Sufism was surfing a wave in these expansive Islamic centuries. Most memorably, the great early thirteenth-century Andalusian divine, Ibn al-Arabi – ironically, perhaps, in view of his name – was freeing Islam from its Arabian matrix. For him, Mecca was still the beloved mother-city, the Ka’bah the navel of the world, but that did not necessitate navel-gazing or preclude other loves:

  Receptive now my heart is for each form:

  For gazelles pasture, for monks a monastery,

  Temple for idols, Ka’bah to be rounded,

  Tables of Torah and script of Qur’an.

  My religion is love’s religion: where’er turn

  Her camels, that religion my religion is, my faith.

  At times the creolization of Islam went so far that it gave birth to beliefs that would be disowned by mainstream Muslims, or were classified as new religions, like those of the Sikhs and the Baha’is. Sometimes the Islamic symbol and the sanctity lingered, but the ritual context changed entirely, as with the metamorphic masks worn by Poro society members in Guinea. One example has a human face and a hornbill’s beak, and is lined with paper inscribed with Arabic letters and allusions to the Qur’anic chapter in which Muhammad’s uncle is cursed. There are other surprising cohabitations. Around the corner from the Kababolon, that West African repository for Islamic relics, and resembling it on a smaller scale, is a traditional pre-Islamic fetish house, supposedly founded by a servant of the Mecca-visiting emperor of Mali. Outsiders, I was told, ‘came here and brought Islam, and our kings went to Mecca and brought back Islam, but the people kept their own beliefs as well’. Promiscuous, but pragmatic.

  OTHER PEOPLE’S EMPIRES

  Even though Ibn Battutah and many other travellers and traders had made it almost as far south as Mozambique, the further reaches of Africa were extremely hazy. The consensus, illustrated by al-Idrisi’s map, was that the continent bent eastward and nearly met the far end of Eurasia, all but enclosing the Indian Ocean and making it an enlarged mirror-image of the Mediterranean. It was the early sixteenth-century Arab navigator Sulayman al-Mahri who put his fellow mariners right. Reporting a recent discovery by the Franks, he revealed that Africa extended much further south than had been thought – to where the elevation of Ursa Major was seven ‘fingers’ below the horizon – and, far from stretching to the east, the shoreline turned sharply north and west at what the foreigners had named the Cape of Bunasfarans: Bõa Esperança, or Good Hope. Africa had unbent; the Indian Ocean was not a near-lake. And all of a sudden the kindly sea of Arabia and the Indies had been thrown open to interlopers.

  The Ming revolution that ended Mongol rule in China in 1368 had already closed Chinese ports to foreign traffic: direct ocean trade between the west and the far east had therefore ceased more than a century earlier. Now, in 1488, the Portuguese had appeared via that unexpected south-western route, and they wanted to turn what had been a mare liberum into another mare nostrum. The ocean would prove too big for them to do so; but they still did their best to stymie Arabs as middle-men, building a ring of forts around the oceanic arc and patrolling with their strange new ships, square-rigged, square-pooped, and held together with nails (in all the western part of the Indian Ocean, ships were still ‘sewn’ together with coir cord).

  The Europeans also stymied some other, nearer neighbours. In 1453, the Ottoman Turks had joined up the most significant dots of their Eurasian empire and taken Constantinople, that pivotal and long-desired junction between the two continents. The city’s fall was perhaps of more symbolic than strategic importance; still, it gave the Ottomans a new and splendid capital, the jewel in the sultan’s turban, and they were poised to take unopposed control of the major east–west traffic of the Old – and still, just, the Only – World. And then, in less than a lifetime, the whole overland trade between east and west collapsed with the Portuguese rounding of the Cape, that back door to the wealth of the Indies . . . just as, far to the west, two whole continents in one rose unsuspected from the Circumambient Ocean. From the trade of the Americas the Ottomans were excluded – except as consumers, consoling themselves with its tobacco.

  They may have been left high and dry by the changing currents of world trade, but the Ottomans were still suffering from the imperial itch. Yet now they too seemed stuck, as Arabs had so often been, between two growing lions – the increasingly wealthy and powerful European states to the west, and a newly nationalist Safavid Persia to the east. There was therefore only one way they could head to satisfy the itch: into the ruins of the old Arab empire. The old seats of Arab power fell into Ottoman hands in rapid succession: Damascus in 1516; Cairo and its Arabian dependencies, Medina and Mecca, in 1517; Baghdad in 1534. And not only the old capitals, but almost the furthest wings of the Arabic world: Algiers, which handed itself over soon after the fall of Cairo; Yemen, where every pass had to be fought for. Already for the last 600 years, distant Turkic cousins of the Ottomans had been displacing Arabs from the most important of these seats, slipping into them in a long-running game of musical thrones. This was different. Now Turks had their own throne on the Bosporus: they were no longer cuckoos in Arab nests, but fully fledged imperial eagles.

  The latest forms of firepower accelerated the conquests. The Mamluk historian Ibn Ilyas evoked the way the Turks had suddenly loomed over Cairo, ‘coming up from every direction like clouds . . . the noise of their musketry deafening, and their attack furious’. In just a few months, the Ottomans ended the 250-year dominance of the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria. Soon, too, an even longer era was to end. The Mamluks still had an Abbasid puppet caliph in residence, al-Mutawakkil III (they had long ago run out of new throne-names); the conquerors took him to Constantinople, now more usually called Istanbul, ‘and the caliphate and the swearing of allegiance to it were cut off’. In the Ottoman capital, al-Mutawakkil was at first treated with due respect; later, however, he was accused of embezzling religious trust-funds, and was sent back in disgrace to Cairo, where he died in 1543. It was 800 years since the revolution in Khurasan had put his ancestors on the throne; but it was 600 years since that throne had meant serious rule, and 300 since it had been
anything but a joke. Dynasties do not always provide the best lens through which to view the past. But the Abbasid family saga seems to sum up the whole middle period of Arab history: two centuries of power followed by three of pathos, then three more of bathos.

  Turks had been instrumental in the beginning of the long-drawn Abbasid decline, and now Turks had brought about its conclusion. It was therefore appropriate that the Ottoman sultans adopted the title of caliph. They did so somewhat gingerly: you might be sultan, padishah, the Master of the World, the Second Alexander, but ‘caliph’ was not a title to be taken on lightly. It was heavy with history and, despite everything, with Arab mana.

  Now, however, even those last numinous associations seemed to have dissipated.

  ALIEN BROTHERS

  Ottoman relations with their Arabic-speaking subjects are hard to summarize. The territory, from the western Mediterranean to the south of the Red Sea, was too various for generalization, the period too long – three, in places four centuries, largely of mutual tolerance or indifference but punctuated by occasional fits of passion. Arabs and Turks shared a religion, and a script, and many words; but never a language, either literal or metaphorical. Like those earlier Turks, the Saljuqs, the Ottomans had been persianized along their journey from the east before they were arabicized; unlike the Saljuqs and the many others who had already ruled Arabs, they now ruled them from outside the old Arab empire, from a capital inherited, ultimately, from Rome.

  To most Arabs the Ottomans were nominal brothers-in-Islam, but always aliens – to be collaborated with, suffered or rebelled against as the case might be. Often the Turks were only effectively in control of the towns, and then only with the connivance of local elites. When Arab chieftains saw a weakness in the occupiers, they might ignite a local wheel of fire. But in general the alleged saying of Muhammad still applied: ‘Leave the Turks alone as long as they leave you alone.’ Individual Turks, and the Circassians, Albanians and others in their service, occasionally settled in imperial outposts and were absorbed by their arabophone neighbours. But the Ottoman empire as a whole was much too big and too heterogeneous ever to succumb to the power of Arabic culture, as had, for example, Berber rulers in the west or the Kurdish rulers in Egypt and the Levant. Besides, by 1500 the power of Arabic culture was at its lowest level ever as, just before the Ottoman takeover, al-Suyuti had illustrated so memorably with his image of the ancient caravan of Arabic knowledge reduced to a single plodding camel with a meagre load of second-rate books. And while Arabs might work with or for the Turks, the only way into the alien heart of Ottomandom was by being enslaved – a legal impossibility for most Arabs, as their rulers were fellow Muslims. The way to a top job in the Ottoman military or civil service was open to, say, a Bulgarian Christian enslaved in the devshirme, the ‘levy of boys’ recruited from non-Muslim subjects. To most Arabs, that route was firmly closed.

  For 300 years and more, Arabs lived and died grumbling about Ottoman tax-collectors, paying lip-service in Friday prayers for their absentee sultan-caliph within his Sublime Porte on the Bosporus, but never sparing a thought for other Arabs in other lands, let alone for any ideas of unity with them. Indeed, most Arabs would never have thought of themselves as Arabs: they were Muslims or Christians or Jews; they were people of Fez or Damascus or Muscat, or of country regions dependent on towns; and they were subjects of the Porte. It was not quite as one authority has put it, that ‘The Arabs fell into a lethargy and ceased to be aware of their Arabness’. They spoke and wrote in forms of Arabic, and the intellectual few who thought about such matters were thus conscious of being ’arab as opposed to ’ajam, arabophones as opposed to non-arabophones. But in common usage ’arab as such were, once more, those people who lived beyond the limits of civilization, herding flocks and raiding the God-fearing sons of Adam. A recent historian of Arabs under the Ottomans says of the Turkish conquest of Egypt, ‘it was too early to speak of a distinct Arab identity that would object to “foreign” rule’. Looking only forwards from that time, he is right. But, looking backwards as well, it was too late to speak of that identity – an identity that had begun to form before the Christian era, had coalesced under the Lakhmid and Ghassanid kings, had solidified with Islam and reached its firmest form under the Umayyads and earlier Abbasids, but then had weakened and decayed around the time of the death of the last ‘real’ caliph in the mid-tenth century. What had happened since then was that Arab identity had reverted to its herding-raiding beginnings. The idea of ’urubah, arabness, had been almost as mobile and various across time as the peoples and tribes to whom it attached; under the Ottomans, it entered a 300-year dip in the road, and became invisible.

  There was one thing, however, that kept up the momentum of arabness throughout that trough. It was common to the people of Fez and Muscat, to the God-fearing townspeople and the apparently godless bedouin, to Jewish Yemenis and Christian Syrians: they all spoke Arabic of a sort, and if they could write, the Muslims among them at least tried to write the old high Arabic. In stark contrast to the way in which their language had colonized the subject-peoples of their own empire, less than 1 per cent of Arabic-speakers in the Ottoman empire would ever learn Turkish.

  THE IRONIES OF EMPIRE

  After that first shock of the Portuguese doubling the Cape, old momentums also built up again in the Indian Ocean. The organic patterns of migration and trafficking had been disturbed and distorted by European expansion, but Arabs soon acclimatized to the new currents, and began to swim with them: if arabness was in a trough in the old imperial heartlands, in the ocean it rode another crest. The pioneers of the new wave were few in number and limited in origin, but were as mobile and adventurous as their seventh- and fourteenth-century forerunners. In one case they would take their cue from the European empire-builders when, at the end of the seventeenth century, the rulers of Oman invested in naval power and staked out a new Arab mini-empire on the East African coast. Later centred on Zanzibar, it recapitulated the littoral state of Kilwa, founded 400 years earlier, and would last into the 1960s; its economic base was the export not of gold but of slaves and, later, cloves.

  Elsewhere, the informal cultural empire resumed its expansion. Especially prominent in the revived growth were sayyids – descendants of Muhammad – from Hadramawt in the Arabian south. Their shared ancestor had arrived there in the tenth century; they had multiplied and become locally important as mediators and power brokers. Now, in the relative calm after the stormy Portuguese arrival in the Indian Ocean, they rode its new currents as merchants, but also founded their own micro-empires as religious and sometimes political leaders. The al-Jufri family were, and in places still are, particularly successful. In the eighteenth century they established themselves on the Malabar coast of India and soon became prominent in the native Muslim community (thus reviving an old connection: Arabs had been ‘masters of the coast’ here in the time of Pliny). Further east and into the nineteenth century, Sayyid Muhsin al-Jufri would become one of the great tycoons of nascent Singapore, with agents scattered around the ocean arc from Suez to Surabaya; Joseph Conrad served on a Jufri (or ‘Joofree’) ship, and portrayed the family in his novels. Members of the clan are still to be found as far away as north-eastern Borneo, where they live in settlements with names like ‘Kampong Arab’, and trade in rattans and precious aloes-wood – those same oceanic products that were listed in the earliest account of Arab travel. Other Hadrami sayyid families ended up at various different points around the arc: Kaffs and Saqqafs at both extremes, on the Swahili coast as well as in Singapore; Aydids in Mogadishu; Aydaruses in Ahmadabad and Kerala; Ba Faqihs in Calicut and Colombo.

  Also in the eighteenth century, Hadrami missionaries continued to shine the lamp of Islam into ever further corners of the East Indies, for example among the seaborne Bugis of Sulawesi and surrounding regions. Southern Yemeni tribal warriors, meanwhile, began to forsake their lean ancestral land for richer pickings as mercenaries, particularly in the wealthy Indian state of
Hyderabad. Sometimes Arabs became independent rulers abroad: a rare adventurer from the north, Sayyid Muhammad Shams al-Din of Hamah in Syria, made it to the Maldives at the end of the seventeenth century and married his way on to the throne of the island sultanate. He died before he could found a dynasty, but other expatriate sultanates would last longer. Among them were those of the Hadrami sayyid family surnamed Jamal al-Layl, ‘Camel of the Night’, because their ancestor would piously hump water around in the dark to fill mosque ablution-pools. Various branches of the Night Camels have been rulers of the Comoros, of Aceh in Sumatra (where, just like that wandering Abbasid, a few miles along the coast in Samudra-Pasai and 300 years earlier, they married into the local ruling family) and of the Malaysian state of Perlis, where they still rule today as rajas.