Arabs
Page 55
It was not only the lexicon that had lagged; so had newspapers. Muhammad Ali Pasha’s Egyptian Events of 1828 onwards was a lone voice until it was joined thirty years later by the Syrian Garden of News: two newspapers in the whole Arabic world compared with 3,000 in the USA alone at the same time. The number increased steadily in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the style of the journalism was hardly cutting-edge. One newspaper, for example, was written in verse, and even into the twentieth century, ‘No self-respecting writer would publish a political article in anything but rhymed prose’.
But at least Arabs were starting make their voices heard through the press. And then another sort of silence descended on them: for no sooner did vocabulary expand and newspapers multiply than the Ottoman authorities imposed strict censorship; from the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, expressions like ‘revolution’, ‘freedom’ and ‘Arab awakening’ were banned in the Arabic press. The Porte was beginning to see its semi-conscious, increasingly articulate subjects, both Arab and others, as a threat. In a further response, the Ottomans started to use their own language as a tool of imperial control. It all came to a head with the Turks’ own burgeoning nationalism and the revolution by the Young Turks in 1908. Under them, Istanbul began to impose its language on its Arab domains; what natural linguistic selection had not achieved over a thousand years of mostly Turkic rule, the Young Turks would now try to do by force. As a result, Arabic was banned in schools, except as a ‘foreign’ language. Just as Abbasid Arabism had found itself head to head with a powerful Persian Shu’ubi movement, a youthful Arab nationalism was confronted by its young and aggressive Turkish counterpart. But the Ottomans were not alone in their repression of Arabic, that core element of Arab identity.
THE OTHER GREAT GAME
In the later nineteenth century, the so-called ‘Great Game’ had entered its final phase, pitting Britain and Russia against each other to the north of the Indian subcontinent. But while the sahibs defended the Central Asian marches of their Raj, a hardly less important second eleven was playing against another side further west. It was a new round of the contest that had begun with Napoleon. This time it might have seemed more like a ‘friendly’ match; but the British aim was no less important than that of securing the borders of India – for in this second-division encounter they were securing the way there. When your two imperial capitals, London and Calcutta, are 16,000 kilometres apart by sea, even with the short cut at Suez, you need to make sure you can travel freely between them.
Britain’s Napoleonic rivals in the Near Eastern game had been disappointed of Egypt in 1801. But the French imperial urge did not abate; a generation later, in 1830, they took advantage of a commercial and diplomatic spat to begin moving into Algeria, like Egypt a nominal vassal of the Ottomans. So large a territory needed time to be absorbed, but the French eventually followed on into Tunisia in 1883 and added a protectorate over large parts of Morocco in 1912. The French sphere of influence in the Arabic world would be rounded out after the Great War with a mandate over Syria, including Lebanon, in 1920.
The British, meanwhile, had gained a small but important toehold in southern Arabia by taking Aden in 1839. It was the first Victorian addition to the empire, and the first steam-driven event in the region: the British were looking for a coaling station for the nascent generation of India-bound steamships, and Aden, with its superb natural harbour just round the corner from the mouth of the Red Sea, was strategically perfect; as long as one didn’t mind the absence of fresh water, the burning heat, and a volcanic backdrop that made it look to Kipling
like a barrick-stove
That no one’s lit for years an’ years.
For generations of British it would be the perfect dump in both senses, coal-hole and hell-hole.
In time, however, Aden grew on the British, particularly when, thirty years after they took the port, the Suez Canal transformed the Red Sea from a dead end into a live issue and a major seaway. Nor was it long before they got another toe in that new and highly convenient back door to India. Because of all those debts incurred in digging the canal – not to mention boulevardizing Cairo, hosting the Empress Eugénie and the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, hiring Stephenson, Verdi and a firmament of grand opera stars, and converting the Mamluk-era military into a model army – Egypt was bankrupt. The creditors were European and, from 1876, a posse of European powers imposed their own financial control over the country. It was also now that the cultivation of Egypt’s independence and arabness, started by Muhammad Ali, began to bear bitter fruit for his heirs. Nationalist opposition to both the Europeans and the still dominant Turkic elite surged, and culminated in 1881 in native Egyptian army officers imposing their own will on the old pasha’s great-grandson, Tawfiq. As trouble increased in the following year and turned to violence, Britain moved in at the behest of the Porte, shouldering the white man’s burden with a dutiful sigh – but in fact delighted to keep the Frogs out once again, and to be in charge of that spanking new canal. Gibraltar, the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, and now Suez: the British controlled all the bottlenecks on the long sea-road to India.
The top burden-bearer in Egypt, Evelyn Baring, might on paper have been the anglicized, distantly German-origin controller of finance for the arabized, distantly Albanian-origin vassal (with a Persian title, khedive, or ‘prince’) of the Turkish caliph-sultan in Istanbul; but he soon earned both promotion to the post of Britain’s consul general – and the nickname, ‘Over-Baring’ – and as the real new ruler he joined a line of foreign pharaoh-functionaries going back to Kafur, the black eunuch slave and master of Egypt 900 years before. And not only of Egypt, for the British also found themselves in charge of Egypt’s own vast imperial back yard, the Sudan. For form’s sake, they adopted the fancy dress of rule alla turca, such as tasselled fezzes and titles like ‘Bey’ and ‘Bimbashi’. As for the growing national aspirations of the Arab majority of the population, the new de facto rulers sent a clear message by condemning to death the rebellious officers’ leader, Ahmad Urabi – whom, in a small but perhaps Freudian misnomer, they often referred to as Ahmad Arabi.
In the end, Urabi’s sentence was commuted to exile. The British were also lenient towards less obviously threatening manifestations of Arab identity. Cairo continued to be the capital of the Arabic press; numbers of newspapers and periodicals increased, several of them launched by incomers seeking the freedom of expression not to be found in regions under direct Ottoman rule. These new Arabic vocal organs were of all political hues, including distinctly nationalist. Further west, however, the French wielded the language weapon as bluntly as their Ottoman counterparts. In their North African possessions, they discouraged the setting up of new Qur’an schools; in Algeria in particular, they attempted to ban the teaching of high Arabic, and promoted the use of dialect instead. By such measures, the French did their best to cut off the Maghrib from the increasingly politicized nationalists of the rest of the Arabic world. As well as attacking high Arabic, they promoted the Berber languages and cultures of the region. And in one case – that of northern Algeria – they detached the whole region administratively in 1881 and joined it to Metropolitan France. Linguistically, culturally, politically they were trying to de-arabize the thick end of Africa.
In the case of language they were especially successful. The struggles against France in the Maghrib would be among the bitterest of all wars of decolonization; but, rather as Persian Shu’ubis had resisted Arab dominance in Arabic, the main weapon on the North African language front was the imperial power’s own tongue, French. After independence, it is said that even the staff of the Moroccan bureaux of re-arabicization used French to speak to each other in the office. But it was in Algeria – where, with its sparse cities, vast rural hinterland and many Berber speakers, high Arabic had never had much of a presence – that the effects of the French campaign against the language went deepest. Alone in the Arabic world, Algerian radio broa
dcasting was mostly in the colloquial language; Ben Bella, the first prime minister of independent Algeria, had to have an Arabic tutor; and the Algerian National Assembly of 1963 found it could only do business in French.
Meanwhile in Egypt and the Mashriq, the Arabic lands to the east, Arabs had rediscovered their own voice and were raising it ever louder. A nationalist movement that had begun as a cultural and linguistic one became ever more overtly political. As early as in the incipient turkicization of the 1880s, banners and placards had appeared in Ottoman-ruled Syria calling for both recognition of Arabic as an official language and that other demand (still to be granted today), freedom of speech. Two decades later, when the Young Turks muzzled their Arabic-speaking subjects even more tightly by banning their language in government schools, the Cairo press grew more outspoken in response. And along with placards and the press, poetry – still in the metres and monorhymes that originated before Islam – played an increasingly emotive part in politics. It could provoke draconian reactions: the Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi, for example, attacked British policy in verse, and was silenced by them in 1914 by being exiled to Barcelona. Later, in the anti-British uprising in 1920s Iraq, populist political poets would recite from the roofs of cars: echoes of the mounted poets and camel-back preachers of the pre-Islamic past.
The French might have imposed an angry silence on their North African possessions; further east, the Arab word was gathering itself in a crescendo of protest.
LANGUAGE AND LAND
Arab intellectuals had adapted ideas about language and nationhood from Fichte, Herder and other European theorists, but Arabs had had their own sort of linguistic ‘nationalism’ long before these European latecomers. There was, however, a difference: the national awareness that grew before and with Islam focused on language and cult; now, in the twilight of the Ottoman territorial empire, the sense of nationhood focused, in European style, on language and land.
There were problems with this focus. There was a unifying language; but no one spoke it as their mother-tongue and, with widespread illiteracy, few could read it well and even fewer write it. Conceivably, education could change that. There was little, however, that could be done to change the other ingredient of modern nationalism, land. The Arab territory was not a neat, discrete area like most of the nation-states of Europe, bordered by rivers, mountain ranges or gulfs. It was bigger than the whole of Europe together and, like its people, too disparate, not least economically. And there was a third problem: one of the forces that might have been expected to hold the territory together, Islam, seemed instead to undermine the whole notion of nation-states. ‘The nation-state,’ one recent commentator has said, ‘was an entirely alien concept in Islamic theory and practice.’ This is because ‘Islamic constitutional theory is concerned only with community and not with territory’. ‘Islamic constitutional theory’ is not cast in bronze; it is hard enough to put down on paper. But the fact is that the ideas of Muslim scholars about the nature of rule have generally been about people not land, chaps rather than maps. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many of the movers behind modern territorial nationalism were non-Muslim Arabs.
Perhaps, too, the problems that seem inherent in the idea of Arab nation-states are another aspect of the unfinished debate between qabilah and sha’b, mobile tribe and settled people. A state is, after all, cognate with stasis, not mobility: it is static. It would be very misleading to claim that the ancient South Arabian sha’b was anything like a modern nation-state; far from it, as far as we know (which is still not very far). But sha’bs did have a strongly territorial aspect, and their economies were based on cooperation rather than competition, on mutual aid not mutual raid. Bedouin mobility may be useful in the initial stages of empire-building; it is not so good at consolidating a territorial state. Borders, which define such a state, mean nothing to bedouins. But a territorial state without borders is a contradiction in terms. And yet the danger is that, if you do have borders that are effective, the bedouins – or the bedouin-minded – will be tempted to raid their own state.
For Arabs, then, the prospects for such a state or states did not look hopeful. But as the twentieth century was drawn towards its first great conflict, they were getting ever nearer the time when, like it or not, they would see their world defined in territorial terms, by lines on maps: lines laid down not by themselves but by those seemingly inescapable Others.
HIJRAHS OF STEAM
The decades before the Great War, however, would be another age of migration in a still – just – uncircumscribed world. There was a steady diaspora of Arabs, another hijrah; and as in the legends of the Marib Dam and the history of the first Muslims, hijrah would again be a catalyst, a mobilizer of change. Now, with the power of steam, a world of new destinations opened up, wider even than the Indian Ocean arc.
Although it was in a sense the next stage in a history of migration that had begun in the prehistoric past, the Arab age of the babur (from French vapeur, ‘steamer’) had modern-looking beginnings: from the 1870s there was a silk boom in Lebanon, and farmers and traders in their thousands would go to spend their summer holidays in France. But by 1890 the boom, and the holidays, were over. Instead, Levantine Arabs went to seek their fortunes as traders, pedlars and labourers in Europe and beyond, particularly West Africa and the Americas. Other Arabs travelled too: Yemenis, the pioneers of Arab settlement in the monsoon lands, now headed north from Aden’s Steamer Point through the Suez Canal to found the first Arab communities in Britain – this time as stokers and stevedores rather than merchants and missionaries. But it was the eastern Mediterranean ports that shipped the most émigrés. By the early twentieth century, hijrah had become ‘a virtual epidemic’ in the Levant, and particularly in Lebanon. Estimates of how many Lebanese emigrated range from ‘perhaps one-quarter of the total population’ to ‘almost half’; another authority puts the total of Lebanese migrants to the Americas at 300,000 by 1914. Whatever the exact figures, they are the reason why, in the United States, a Syrian-Lebanese quarter sprouted in what its inhabitants called ‘Nayy Yark’; why, more recently, Salman Rushdie could find ‘Egyptian’ (in fact Lebanese) shops in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, run by the likes of Armando Mustafa and Manolo Saleh; and why on a visit to Dakar my breakfasts comprised Franco-Levantine pain au chocolat, Turkish coffee and Lebanese ladies with hairdos and Marlboros. They are also the reason why Argentina has had an Arab-origin president (Carlos Menem), Brazil another (Michel Temer), followed, in 2018, by an Arab-orign presidential runner-up (Fernando Haddad), and why Brazil’s Arab-origin citizens now number twelve million, making it the ninth biggest Arab country by population – bigger than Lebanon. They went forth, multiplied and left the old country behind in every way.
These hijrahs of steam are also how, at last, modernity entered the Arab awakening of letters: not from imitation of the forms of other literary cultures, but rather from the sheer liberation of throwing off old muzzles and moving somewhere new. One of those who was moved to write was the Lebanese-born Jubran Khalil Jubran, who arrived in New York in 1912. Later famous in the West as a misty mystic and the author of The Prophet, he was also a founder of poetic modernism in Arabic. By leaving his old home, he and other emigrants seemed to free themselves from the passive past: not only from the centuries of Ottoman insulation, but also from the powerful poetic force field of ancient Arabia. With hijrah, as ever, came activity, creativity. Jubran addressed his fellow poets, stuck in the old style, and by implication his fellow Arabs left behind in the old country:
You are neighbours to yesterday; we have inclined towards
a day whose dawn is shot through with the hidden.
You have sought remembrance and its ghosts,
while we pursue the ghost of hope.
You have roamed the earth to its edges;
our journey rolls within itself the vault of space.
If those ‘neighbours to yesterday’ go anywhere, Jubran wrote elsewhere in prose, they only ‘go from
place to place along a track already beaten by a thousand and one caravans, never diverging from it for fear of getting lost in the wilderness’. It may be the safe route, but it is also the shortest one between ‘the cradle of thought and its grave’.
RULERS WITH RULERS
In contrast to today’s border-beset age – in which Syrian passports, even with valid visas, even accompanied by Green Cards, do not necessarily admit their bearers into ‘Nayy Yark’ – travellers into and out of Syria in 1876 did not need to worry much about documentation. ‘The traveller’s passport,’ Baedeker’s Palestine and Syria noted, ‘is sometimes asked for, but an ordinary visiting-card will answer the purpose equally well.’ The Ottomans and (more surprisingly) the British were similarly nonchalant when, in 1849, they found themselves imperial next-door neighbours in southern Arabia; it took fifty years for them to get round to drawing a boundary between the Aden Protectorate and Ottoman Yemen, re-occupied after a 200-year absence. A joint commission worked for a couple of years (1902–4), and the line wiggled slowly inland and upland from Bab al-Mandab. On the far side of the more populous highlands, however, they gave up and used a ruler to draw a straight line across the thinly peopled steppe – and then just carried it on into the Empty Quarter, aiming north-east towards the Gulf through 1,000 kilometres of Arabia. The line was not to apportion sovereignty, but to suggest ‘spheres of influence’. A few months after it was ratified in 1914, the two powers went to war. But the south-western section would last until 1990 as the border between the northern and southern parts of a divided Yemen. Now, less than thirty years on from that date, that line seems to be reimposing itself. Imperial rulers, both the people and their straight edges, thus have a lot to answer for. But not everything to answer for: in the end it was oil, above all, that would turn borders into barriers and spheres into sovereignties. In the interim, however, the great powers’ Great War helped to solidify the lines on the map.