Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  Numbers were never huge in the oceanic diaspora: in 1905, Hadramis in Indonesia, for example, numbered 30,000. But the southern Arabian lands from which nearly all the emigrants came were themselves sparsely populated, the range of destinations vast, and the power, economic, spiritual and at times temporal, of these Arab expatriates was far out of proportion to the census figures. And, creolized though many of them became, their identity remained Arab at heart. It was not the irruption of the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean that ended the informal oceanic empire, but the post-Second World War division of imperial territories, formal and informal, into nation-states. One could no longer be a creole, a citizen of the ocean shore: one had to have a nationality. Arab blood, however much diluted, had always been thicker than water; in the end the passport would prove more solid than either.

  For three centuries and more, these geographically vast but often unnoticed Arab migrations extended a pattern of mobility that had begun in the post-Mongol thirteenth century, and further shaped today’s Islamic world. This time, however, the migrations took place in the shadow of other peoples’ empires – those of the Portuguese, closely followed by a scrum of other Europeans, from which the British emerged paramount in India and the Dutch in the East Indies. Among the resulting imperial ironies was the one that would make the British royal house of Windsor – if only for a few years from the end of 1917, when it controlled Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad and India – the greatest ‘Islamic’ dynasty in history, at least in terms of numbers of Muslim subjects.

  And there was another irony of empire in these centuries: the high point of Arab unity – in terms of the greatest population under a single rule over the longest time and the widest geographical extent – was achieved under the Ottomans. Arab unity was purchased at the expense of Arab independence, and in many ways also of Arab identity. That identity seems, sometimes, almost too potent: a self-consuming fire that forges an alloy, a unity – then vaporizes it. The Arab word, the Arabic world, was most effectively and durably gathered when, perhaps because, it was least audible. As millennia of dictators have known, argument and disunity can only come about when one can raise one’s voice.

  But the new world of these times contained yet another empire. It was not shown on any map, but it was as important as continents. In it, not only Arabs but also their Ottoman masters and all those who used the Arabic script were almost totally silenced.

  PRINT-UNFRIENDLY

  This new realm was the empire of the printed word. Developments in typography and geography were sudden and simultaneous. Gutenberg’s Bible came out in 1455, two years after Constantinople fell to the Turks. By the time of the Portuguese rounding of the Cape in 1488, swiftly followed by the fall of Granada and Columbus’s landfall in the New World in 1492, printing had spread across Europe; Latin movable type and European maritime imperialism got moving together. Arabic, the first conqueror, had preceded the Europeans to the limits of the Old World – in the Qur’an, on gravestones, as the script for non-Arab languages, even to the land of Urduja the pugilistic princess – but it didn’t make the next vital stage of the journey: into print.

  From the start, there was opposition to print from users of Arabic script. Under pressure from religious scholars, the Ottomans banned printing in Arabic as early as 1485, and confirmed the ban repeatedly thereafter. Naturally this delighted the copyists, who in Constantinople alone are said to have numbered tens of thousands. But apart from arguments about their jobs, or about the innate sacredness of Arabic letters as the medium of God’s message, printed Arabic was an aesthetic and technical disaster. The basic problem was simple: cursive script and movable type don’t go together. Add to that the difficulty of showing vowels that are not separate letters, but are written above or below their consonants, and it meant that complete Arabic fonts contained 900-plus different characters. A standard compositor’s type case for English contains about a tenth of that.

  To give a random example, the single Arabic letter sad, with its possible ligatures and vowels, has dozens of forms:

  The letter mim, one of the most frequently used, and on its own an unassuming tadpole

  appears in as many as seventy-three different guises; the Latin equivalent of mim has just two, m and M. Latin inherited its detached characters and separate vowel letters from the Greek alphabet, which had itself taken shape by the mid-eighth century BC. In turn, Greek characters derived, as ultimately did Arabic, from vowelless Phoenician; but some bright Greek spark had the idea of adapting some characters from the parent script and using them to slip sounds into the consonantal line – just five extra letters, but they suddenly gave texts a voice. Coping with unvowelled Semitic scripts, meanwhile, remained that bit harder, the equivalent of lip-reading rather than hearing. It is another example of chaos theory at work in history: a brainwave in the Aegean in the time of Homer had far-reaching consequences when movable-type printing appeared more than 2,000 years later; perhaps, as we shall see, even further-reaching ones in the 500 years thereafter.

  Lithography, enabling multiple copies to be printed from the same hand-written plate, would have avoided the technical problems of Arabic typesetting – and saved scribes’ jobs – but it was invented too late, in 1798. And 1798 was exactly when letterpress printing finally established itself in the Arabic world – with Napoleon fly-posting Cairo. Then again, when printing did finally take off, the printed texts usually skimped on vowels and were thus harder to read than the manuscripts: contrarily, they aimed at a wider distribution, but they made the reading of Arabic an even more ‘undemocratic’ process than it had been. My modest library contains many multi-volume printed works where vowels are seldom, if ever, shown. By losing their vowels, they have lost their inflections, their ‘logic’; reading them is that bit harder, a cryptic puzzle rather than the ‘quick’ one it would have been in the vowelled manuscript equivalent. As for typewritten Arabic, it would be even more horrible to look at and read, the disjointed tracks of crippled beetles. It lacked even the steampunk charm of Latin typewriting, and it was the very devil to do.

  A couple of attempts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make Arabic more print-friendly, by using only the separate forms of characters, got nowhere. Nor did attempts to invent the equivalent of capital letters, which help so much in navigating Latin texts (glance at this page: you can find a proper name like ‘Arabic’ almost instantly, because of its signpost capital). The 1928 Turkish solution, to scrap Arabic script and adopt Latin, provoked outrage in some quarters of the Arabic world. It was worse than vandalism: in an aniconic culture, it was the nearest thing to iconoclasm. ‘Arabic script,’ fumed one of its distinguished practitioners at the time,

  had committed no sin against them [i.e. the Turks]. It was just their way of going along with spurious ‘civilization’ . . . The decision did not result from sound theory or from logical reasoning . . . It was nothing but an intoxicating notion that fermented in the heads of their great leaders.

  Atatürk would have begged to differ: the Turkish leader’s reason was no less than the cultural re-orientation of post-Ottoman Turkey away from the Arabic-Islamic world, and its temporal re-orientation from the fourteenth century AH to the twentieth century AD. Whether his theory was sound may still be too early to tell.

  Since Atatürk, however, there has been another revolution, and it has finally put paid to the scribes – but also to doubts about the viability of Arabic script in the contemporary world. Only twenty years ago, wanting the Arabic epigraphs of my first book to look good, I used the services not of a typographer but of a calligrapher. All this has changed with word-processing: now we can all be calligraphers, and we can print in an instant, with vowels, ligatures, frills, furbelows and all,

  But for a full 500 years from Gutenberg to Microsoft, the problem was that essential print-unfriendliness of Arabic.

  There were other problems too, quite apart from the technical or aesthetic ones. Arabic moveable type took a good two-th
irds of those 500 years even to get moving in its homeland. The oldest surviving Arabic printed book, a volume of Christian prayers, was printed in Italy in 1514; from then on, Orientalists would print Arabic texts in Europe. As for the Arabic lands themselves, Christians in Lebanon experimented with printing a hundred years later, and in Aleppo another hundred years on, but in neither case did the technology spread to the Muslim majority. The first press in Constantinople was founded in 1722, but was not seen in the Arabic world, apart from those two abortive attempts, until Napoleon’s Egyptian adventure of 1798 and the appearance of propaganda posters on calligraphic Cairo’s walls:

  The Amir of the Army, BŪNĀBĀRTAH [Bonaparte] . . . is a man perfect in reason, merciful and kind to the Muslims, loving to the poor and needy!

  This was followed by Muhammad Ali Pasha’s establishment of a full-scale government-run press in the city in 1822. Only then did typography gain a permanent foothold in Arabic lands. Thus, for around 350 years after its spread to every corner of Europe, most Arabic users were utterly deprived of print. It is hard to quantify the effects; but there is no doubt that the time-lag put a powerful brake on progress, scientific and technological. Moreover, the brake may not only have slowed down the dissemination of new ideas. It has been argued that the European print revolution underlay the new concept of the fact as proof, as opposed to the ‘proof’ of rhetoric and of divine or human authorities; this new concept, in turn, underpinned the whole scientific revolution. If this is true, then it is something the Arabic world missed out on.

  Both Bacon and Carlyle numbered printing along with gunpowder – and, respectively, the compass and Protestantism – as the three great discoveries of modern times. Elsewhere, Carlyle wrote,

  He who first shortened the labour of copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most Kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.

  For a sizeable section of humanity that whole new world was postponed, and for users of Arabic the reason was not only the conservatism of copyists and kings, but also their exquisitely beautiful but print-unfriendly script. Imagine the equivalent if, say, Arabic users were to have been prevented from using the internet for a third of a millennium.

  That of course did not happen. Arabs are enthusiastic users of the internet, especially since the appearance of smartphones. And in this is another twist to the ramifications from that Greek invention of vowels, the best part of three millennia ago. For it may also be true to say that much of the Arabic world has vaulted over print and landed straight in the world of information technology – or perhaps of misinformation technology, since, again, multiple versions of the ‘truth’ are simultaneously available, versions that rely once more on rhetoric and human or divine authority as much as on empirical fact. Many Arabs may thus have leapt straight from ‘pre-truth’ to ‘post-truth’ without going through the intervening stage.

  THE WICKEDEST OF RACES

  If those 300-odd years from the coming of the Ottomans seemed to retard scientific progress in the arabophone world, they seemed no better for Arab identity. Before the beginning of the Ottoman trough, Ibn Battutah (genetic Berber, cultural Arab) had referred to ‘Arabs’ in his rambling travel book (nearly a thousand pages in the full English translation) only about a score of times, despite the span of thirty-three years and around 120,000 kilometres of wandering, including all the Arabic-speaking lands. The references divide roughly into thirds: a third of them use ‘Arab’ as an ethnic-linguistic or cultural marker, as in, ‘faqirs [Sufi ascetics] of the Arabs, Persians, Turks and Anatolians’; a third refer to Arabs as desert guards and guides, marginal to the mainly civilized world in which Ibn Battutah travelled, for example those in the Eastern Desert of Egypt; and a third refer to Arabs as a danger, like the marauding Arab tribesmen he found besieging Tunis.

  By the end of the 300-year trough, in the early nineteenth century, the best-known Arabic historian of the times – the Egyptian al-Jabarti (genetic Ethiopian, cultural Arab) – refers to Arabs in his nearly 2,000-page chronicle of Egypt more often than Ibn Battutah, but seldom in their ‘cultural’ or even linguistic role. Almost always they are Gog and Magog, the peril beyond the pale. ‘Those accursed a’rab,’ for example, ‘are the wickedest of races, and the greatest evil that besets people.’ To ignite panic and set off a stampede in which women were trampled to death, it was enough for the rumour-mongers of Cairo to go about shouting, ‘O people! The ’arab have fallen upon you!’

  But all that was set to change. A new Arab identity was about to awaken, one that would embrace diverse peoples and tribes from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic – and would fail, as ever, to unite them.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  IDENTITY

  REDISCOVERED

  AWAKENINGS

  THE HANDSOME ONE WITH THE HANGING CLOAK

  ‘In this age of ours,’ wrote Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti towards the end of the eighteenth century, in the introduction to his chronicle, ‘people have abandoned the writing of history.’ Al-Jabarti, who – as we have just seen – considered tribal Arabs ‘the wickedest of races’, was no less gloomy about history itself:

  For the times are running contrary; the shadow of the age has shrunk . . . No proper tally of events is kept or recorded in books; indeed, to employ one’s hours in so useless a pursuit is but to squander it. What’s over and done with cannot be brought back.

  This age of oblivion had been going on, he said, for the past fifty years or so. The glory was gone, and now history too was trapped, like literature, in its own downward spiral – one in which wicked badw raided helpless hadar and plundered the Mecca pilgrim caravans, as they had done time out of mind; in which Mamluks still lorded it over Cairo, as they had done for over half a millennium, including 300 years of Ottoman rule.

  Before the eighteenth century closed, however, the times had done an about-turn and taken off headlong into an unsettling future. Bedouins descending on Cairo caused panic; yet at least they were the jinnis you knew, as the saying goes – better than the humans you didn’t know. For when, in July 1798, another horde descended on Egypt, it was not the familiar fiends but a species of raiding humans unknown for more than five centuries, since Crusading Franks had last invaded the Delta. Then, they had been repulsed. This time the contest was less equal: the Mamluks were blown to bits by superior artillery, the townspeople of Cairo had nothing with which to oppose this new breed of Frank but prayers and sticks, and Napoleon marched in.

  His aim was not only to satisfy the imperial itch for expansion, but to disrupt Britain’s communications in the eastern Mediterranean, and particularly the short but vital overland leg, through Egypt, on the way to her growing Indian empire. Al-Jabarti observed the latter-day Franks with an anthropologist’s fascination. With stereoptypical Frenchness, one of the first things they did was to open restaurants providing a table d’hôte service and prix fixe menus:

  Each dining-room has a sign with the amount of dirhams the diner must pay . . . and when they finish their meal they pay this sum, neither less nor more.

  ‘Neither less nor more . . . ’: it was a small first in the metropolis of haggling. Observing both dining-room and bedroom, al-Jabarti noted that the French were not tardy in forming liaisons with the concubines of defunct Mamluks, ‘white, black and Abyssinian . . . most of whom adopted the dress of the Frankish women’. In matters of dress, the revolutionary occupiers were less successful when they tried to get the three big religious shaykhs to change their traditional subfusc taylasans, a sort of academic hood, to revolutionary tricolour versions.

  They did, however, manage to launch a small tricolour Montgolfier. It turned out to be an over-hyped flop, as it was not manned – fortunately, as it fell apart in mid-air. Far from being, as al-Jabarti had expected, a means ‘for people to travel to distant lands . . . it seemed more like those kites that the servants make for festivals and weddings’. Nor was he edified by the
spectacle of the few hard-riding Frenchwomen who had come with the expeditionary force, dressed in their Paris fashions and ‘shrieking with laughter and joking with the donkey-boys and the common yobs’. But some Frankish innovations did impress him. They included that brilliant invention, the wheelbarrow, and in particular the public library which the French opened. Al-Jabarti spent many hours there, noting that it was popular even among ‘the lower ranks of the soldiery’. He also enjoyed visiting an interactive exhibition, where one could observe scientific experiments at close quarters, and even experience shocks from an electrostatic generator: ‘One’s body is immediately convulsed with a rapid quivering, and one feels as if the joints in one’s shoulders and arms are being cracked.’

  Apart from the new technologies and new fashions that he brought, Napoleon wielded a new broom in this land where the dust of the past lay so thick. Having demolished the gates that separated the quarters of Cairo, he had the streets swept and lit, and the city’s properties registered. He began to sweep away some mental cobwebs too. The Cairene legal establishment, whose schools of jurisprudence had been formed the best part of a thousand years before, were surprised to find that French court procedure was based not on religion, but on reason. Napoleon also introduced new political ideas, including elections by ballot and a chamber of representatives. And in an attempt to keep newly opening minds under control, he also instituted the Arabic world’s first printed propaganda, in the form of those posters proclaiming himself the friend of Islam. The friendship was not always apparent: registration of property led, of course, to plans for a property tax, which led in turn to a popular uprising, and the French tit-for-tat desecration of the hallowed mosque of al-Azhar.