Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  Despite such provocations, al-Jabarti maintained a detached and non-judgemental view of the French. He seems to have regarded them as an unparalleled curiosity, as a scoop for his chronicle (they had, after all, kicked moribund history back to life) and as agents of divine retribution: ‘Your Lord,’ he writes more than once, quoting from the Qur’an,

  would never destroy towns unjustly as long as their people were doers of good.

  The French, in other words, were the human equivalent of those natural disasters with which God had chastised the erring peoples of the distant past – Ad, Thamud and Saba. Some less philosophical Cairenes regarded the French as ‘infidel dogs’; others, however, welcomed them. There was even a popular song that celebrated Napoleon, his trouncing of the unpopular Mamluks (the ‘Ghuzz’ – the Turks) and his subsequent suppression of the bedouin raiders (here, ’urban – ironically, given the look of the transliteration, another plural of the far-from-urban ’arab):

  We longed for you, O General,

  O you handsome one with the hanging cloak,

  Your sword in Egypt made havoc

  Of the Ghuzz and the ’urban.

  But more havoc was on its way: another species of Frank, hot on the heels of the first. Only a month after Napoleon had swept into Cairo, Nelson sailed into Aboukir Bay and destroyed the French expeditionary fleet in the Battle of the Nile. Napoleon was now cut off. The handsome general himself managed to slip away the following year; but the French position was untenable, and a combined Ottoman and British force squeezed them out of Egypt in the summer of 1801.

  Once again, as in the distant pre-Islamic past when they had been ‘stuck on top of a rock between two lions’, and as so often since then, Arabs were caught between other peoples’ empires. This time they were trapped between three: the Sublime but now crumbling Porte of the Ottomans and, more fatefully, those feisty foes Britannia and Marianne – the one intent on keeping open her short but vital land bridge through Egypt on the route to India, the other intent on blocking it. It had once helped Arabs to be middle-men, mediating between the two great zones of Old World trade, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Now, with two European powers both wanting to control both zones at the same time, Arabs found themselves in the way, pickle in the middle. (Nor would it be the last time: Caesar and Hulagu, as the two contending empires of the Cold War would be characterized by its greatest Arabic poet, had always prowled about the Middle East, and always would.)

  PEOPLES, TRIBES AND EMPIRES

  Once again, imperial pressures would remould Arab identity. The coming of the French to Egypt is usually seen as the turn of an era, the Arab turning point towards a modern, Western world. It was certainly the closest encounter with post-Renaissance Europe so far, but it wasn’t the first. Already, the Omani overseas empire had been inspired and shaped for over a century by growing European maritime power. More recently, in the last quarter of the eighteeenth century, the burgeoning British empire had been sending warships to the Gulf: their mission was to protect British India-bound merchantmen from raids by Arab vessels based in what is now the United Arab Emirates. Whether the raiders were pirates, jihadists or freedom-fighters is a question of taste; what is not in question is that British naval operations were a foretaste of Western interventions in the Gulf down to our own time.

  These earlier encounters, however, had been side-shows on the fringes of the Arabic world. The forces that had descended on Egypt were on a different scale: Napoleon’s army arrived on a roll from a stunning Italian campaign; Britain’s Mediterranean navy ruled the western waves. And Egypt itself, far from being at the fringe, had been the cultural heart of the Arabic world since the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols more than five centuries before. It sat across the joint between Mashriq and Maghrib, between two continents, and was home to the biggest Arabic-speaking population in all the lands of the Ottoman empire. That said, in 1798 the cultural heart was beating faintly at best, and Egypt’s conscious arabness lay dormant. The time was long past when intellectual innovators like Ibn Khaldun had come to teach in the soaring new madrasahs of Cairo, those intellectual powerhouses of four hundred years and more before, or the great Egyptian synthesizers of knowledge, like the encyclopaedist al-Qalqashandi or the literary historian al-Suyuti, had compiled their vast data-banks of Arabic learning. Now in this Ottoman twilight, as al-Jabarti had noted, there seemed to be nothing worth adding to the past. Worse, the past was being lost: what was left of the great old madrasah libraries was being steadily filched or sold off, al-Jabarti lamented. The very stuff of Arab history and identity was being stolen.

  Now, though, in the pre-dawn of what came to be called al-Nahdah, ‘the Awakening’, France, then Britain, had planted the first rough kisses that would rouse Arabs from their long sleep. Later in the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire, for long a hands-off ruler of most of its Arab domains, would put its own pressures on Arabs – and then those fractured peoples and tribes would begin to see themselves once more as a distinct group, joined by language and history. Arabs in all their diversity would be gathered again, not this time ‘on the word of Islam’, as Ibn Khaldun had put it, but on a new word: qawmiyyah, nationalism. Just as Germans, Italians and other disparate groups in Europe had been rediscovering (or reinventing) their roots at this time, and finding that they were nations with shared ancient languages and traditions, so too would Arabs. But while for Arabs the word ‘nationalism’ would be new, the idea was ancient: Islam had also tried to bring together settled peoples and mobile tribes, and to synthesize them into an ummah, a ‘nation’ in the sense of a great inclusive community. In the same way, Arab nationalism would have as its basis the idea of an ummah ’arabiyyah, a united Arab ‘nation’. And even before Islam, a shared language had defined its users as a ‘national’ group in one sense, ’arab as opposed to ’ajam. So if the nineteenth-century Awakening ‘planted the seed of an idea . . . that the Arabs were a nation, defined by a common language, culture and history’, it was not for the first time. The seed had already been planted in pre-Islamic times, replanted in the early Islamic centuries, and nurtured during the early Abbasid age, when common language, culture and history were first fixed in writing.

  Those older plantings had withered. At first, the nineteenth-century seed would grow into a new ’asabiyyah, a sense of solidarity that would be stronger than in any age since the beginning of Islam. In time, in the middle of the twentieth century, the solidarity would fuel a wheel of fire that centred on Egypt but reignited on a pan-Arab scale. And, once more, Arabs would find unity elusive: the fire would only have itself to consume.

  THE HOUSE OF TONGUES

  In early nineteenth-century Egypt, all this was as yet unimagined. Egyptians were still reeling from the sudden twist in history brought about by Napoleon. But if a European visitor of 1806 can be believed, the brief encounter with the French had already acted as a wake-up call:

  The expedition of the French . . . produced a happy change in the ideas of the people. The immense advantages of civilization, of military tactics, of the political organization, of the arts and sciences of the nations of Europe, which they have had an opportunity of remarking; the philanthropic ideas common to all classes of society, which they have had time to appreciate; have inspired them with a respect for the nations which possess such great advantages over the Arabs and Turks, whose inferiority in regard to the Europeans they candidly acknowledge.

  This might be no more than Eurocentrism, had we not the implicit corroboration of that local observer, al-Jabarti, and, more important, the explicit evidence of the coming decades of Egypt’s history under the remarkable Muhammad Ali Pasha. He and his successors would import a plethora of advantages, sciences and ideas, and naturalize them to Egypt.

  If the French had left a sense of inferiority, they also left a sense of egyptianness and of nation. From the first, Napoleon’s proclamations had claimed to support ‘the people of Egypt . . . the whole ummah’ against the ‘imported’ Mam
luks. This was something new. Egypt was a palimpsest of peoples and princes; the Mamluks were just the latest and longest in a series of imported, superimposed rulers. Then again, the Mamluks had kept power so long by not integrating, as had all the others. Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, would be different. He and his successors would tackle the sense of inferiority, turning away from Istanbul and looking for inspiration from modern, Western Europe. But the new stance would not be a mere reorientation (or reoccidentation); instead, it would firmly establish that idea of Egypt as a nation – a ‘whole ummah’, as Napoleon’s declaration had put it – not a possession of the Porte. Inevitably, too, it would reawaken Egypt’s arabness.

  Muhammad Ali was himself an ‘import’, a Macedonian-born Albanian who had risen through the Ottoman military ranks. But like those of the alien dynasts of a thousand years before, the Tulunids, Ikhshidids and others, his offspring would be arabized by Egypt: ‘the sun of Egypt changed my blood and made it all Arab,’ declared his eldest son, Ibrahim Pasha. More important, they re-arabicized Egypt itself, by replacing Turkish with Arabic as the official language. This re-established Arabic on solid, middle ground, after it had for so long existed only at the extremes – the high liturgical language on the one hand, and the low patois of the common people on the other. Before, low Arabic had meant low prestige: Napoleon had been compelled to use Turks to keep order, as arabophones couldn’t command enough respect to do so. The policies of Muhammad Ali and his successors restored that respect by giving Arabic back its official, public voice. The pasha also raised the profile of Arabic by reviving an innovation of the French. Napoleon had plastered the suq with printed posters; for a brief period in 1800, his second successor Menou had published Al-tanbih, The Announcement – the first Arabic newspaper. In 1828, Muhammad Ali took up the idea with his own newspaper, Al-waqa’i’ al-misriyyah, Egyptian Events. The title was not quite a declaration of independence from Istanbul; but it was a powerful assertion of selfhood.

  Muhammad Ali also ended the Ottoman centuries of isolation from further Europe. Notably, in 1826 he sent a group of young Egyptian men to study in Paris. Their spiritual bear-leader, a bright graduate of al-Azhar named al-Tahtawi, expressed his mixed feelings about the French city in verse:

  Does Paris have on earth a peer in which

  the suns of learning, like hers, never set?

  Or where – no less remarkable – the night

  of irreligion has no morrow yet?

  It seemed impossible to him that such clever people as the Parisians had not become Muslims. All the same, he returned to Cairo with an admiration not just for French learning, but also for French political freedoms, and the realization that ‘justice is the foundation of a flourishing civilization’, as in Islamic theory – if not, he implied, in practice. Al-Tahtawi also came back an accomplished linguist, and was appointed founding director of the House of Tongues, set up by Muhammad Ali in 1835 to translate European books. It was a new edition of the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun’s House of Wisdom, founded in Baghdad almost precisely a thousand years before, in 832.

  Under Muhammad Ali Pasha’s successors, the translation process continued. But it went both ways, and took in not just books but the city itself, the culture and communications of the country, and even the geography of east–west commerce. The pasha’s immediate heirs brought steam to Egypt, and Robert Stephenson (son of George ‘Rocket’ Stephenson) to design the lines and the rolling stock. In the 1860s, Muhammad Ali’s grandson Isma’il Haussmannized Cairo, transforming it into a city of boulevards and avenues, and built that ultimate symbol of openness to other (European) traditions, an opera house. In the meantime, work was progressing on that most literal opening between east and west, the Suez Canal. Its inauguration in 1869 proved that, whatever Kipling would think, the twain could meet – at least for a brief time at the opening ceremony, in

  a mad carmagnole . . . with Kaisers and Dervishes, Emperors and Almey girls, Patriarchs and buffons, Emirs and engineers, Mussulman high priests and Italian sailors all mixed up helter skelter . . .

  A fleet of steam yachts made the first passage of the Canal, including Isma’il’s enormous El Mahrousa – much modified since but still, amazingly, the Egyptian presidential yacht. But it all came at a price: Ismail had bankrupted the Egyptian state, and in so doing he opened the way to another less welcome aspect of Western Europe, that most dogged of debt-collectors, the British bailiff.

  A TURN OF THE HOURGLASS

  Meanwhile, across the Red Sea from Egypt, another Arab awakening had been going on, but one that led in a diametrically opposite direction: into the past, and into itself. To the Wahhabi tribesmen of the Arabian Peninsula, a House of Tongues would have been a tower of Babel, and an opera house the boudoir of the Whore of Babylon; for them, all bid’ah, innovation, was heresy. And yet their movement was, like the events that had been set in motion in Egypt, a sort of precursor to the general Arab Awakening.

  The Wahhabis’ beginnings went back to the mid-eighteenth century, but it was only in 1798, the year in which the French invaded Egypt, that the Ottomans woke up to this other, home-brewed threat to their domains. Disturbed by increasingly organized bedouin incursions into the settled lands of Iraq – that old sign, from way back before Islam, of trouble fermenting in the Arab ‘Island’ – the Turks sent a 10,000-strong army into the peninsula. It surrendered ignominiously to a rabble of bedouin warriors.

  What looked like a rabble was in fact an irregular but surprisingly disciplined tribal army. It was also unexpectedly large, for it had been mustering for a generation. We can probably dismiss the idea, mooted by an Ottoman writer in the 1880s, that Wahhabism was implanted in Arabia by an eighteenth-century British agent called ‘Mister Hempher’. Rather, the movement took its inspiration and its most common name from a cleric from the bracing uplands of Najd in central Arabia, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Born in about 1720, he went travelling in his youth and was appalled by what he saw as the saint-worship and other forms of ‘corruption’ that had infected Islam in the sultry climes beyond his native plateau. Further inspired by the writings of a notorious fourteenth-century puritan, Ibn Taymiyyah, he began a mission to disinfect the faith. The mission was multiply rooted in the past: in the ideas of Ibn Taymiyyah, but also – as the Wahhabis’ official name, ‘al-Muwahhidun’ or Unitarians, reveals – in that seminal message of the Qur’an: tawhid, the doctrine of divine unity that strips the deity bare of all associates and intermediaries. The Arabian Muwahhiddun thus shared a name and an aim with the Berber al-Muwahhidun, the ‘Almohads’ of twelfth-century North Africa and Spain. But they would prove to be a new and even more rigorous edition, and one that is still in circulation today.

  Like that of other similar idealists before and since, the Wahhabis’ Unitarianism would be both theological and political: once more, saying ‘Yes’ to the earthly ruler was tantamount to saying ‘Amen’ to the heavenly Creator. Like those others, too, the Wahhabi neo-neo-Unitarians found that even if God was One, a spirit named Legion held sway on earth. The growing movement began its struggle against both divine will and human nature by forging a super-tribal, pan-Arabian unity. If the story sounds familiar, that is because the Wahhabis were consciously replaying the beginning of the Islamic state of Medina; like the first Muslims, they even referred to their life before Wahhabism as al-Jahiliyyah, ‘the Ignorance’. And by searching for purity they were also looking back to an Arab-only version of Islam, stripped of its foreign accretions and corruptions. Yet again, Arab identity was being shaped in reflex to outsiders: not only the degenerate Ottoman overlords of Arabia and the irredeemably Shi’i Persians, who were once again encroaching on the east of the peninsula as they had before Islam; but also that whole world beyond, wallowing in saint-worship, idolatry and innovation.

  It would have been lonely for Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab up on the rocky plateau of Najd, surrounded by threats imperial and theological. But he found a vital early convert in Muhammad ib
n Sa’ud, leader of a prominent Najdi family. Ibn Sa’ud saw his chance: rather as the Quraysh ancien régime had harnessed the word gathered by the Prophet Muhammad ibn Abd Allah in order to hold on to and extend their own rule, so would the Al Sa’ud with the followers gathered by the reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. With temporal support from the Al Sa’ud and an increasing stream of tribesmen joining the cause, the reformist mission soon turned into a rampage. Wahhabi raiders unleashed a wave of righteous vandalism across the peninsula, destroying anything that hinted of shirk, ‘polytheism’. In particular, tombs that stood more than a handspan high were flattened, lest they tempt visitors down the slippery slope from respect via intercession to saint-worship. During the Wahhabi occupation of Medina (1805–12), much of the identifiable, visitable past was simply wiped out: the long-revered resting places of the Prophet’s companions were reduced to anonymous piles of rubble. Even the Prophet did not escape unscathed: treasures donated over the centuries to his tomb were looted, and the dome above it threatened with destruction. All this was relatively restrained, however, compared with their earlier spree of violence in southern Iraq in1802. There, in Shi’i Karbala, the Wahhabis had smashed the venerated tomb of Muhammad’s martyred grandson, al-Husayn. And, not content with destroying the dead, they had also massacred the living townsfolk.

  For many centuries, the fatal hourglass, that cursed, recursive history of conflict that went back to the first decades of Islam, had been gathering dust. The Wahhabis had turned it, setting the old clashes in motion once more, and their heirs – and, in turn, the heirs’ antagonists – have been turning it again and again ever since.

  With the Wahhabis in striking distance of Baghdad, the Ottomans clearly had to do something; but that defeat of 1798 inflicted on their army by Wahhabi tribesmen had shown that this imperial lion for one was, in reality, a paper tiger. The Porte eventually appealed for help to its viceroy in now French-free Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha. And in so doing it gave an extra nudge to Egyptian self-assertion – and also set in motion a new sort of clash, between a new kind of people, beginning to feel its way towards a future nationhood, and a newly united species of super-tribe, trying to complete what it saw as the unfinished work of history; a clash, in short, between progress and reaction, between an uncertain future and an imagined past.