Arabs
Page 57
Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, the Umayyad viceroy and mass-murderer, is alive and well and as wicked as ever; and as admired, by some Arabs: ‘He is strong!’ they say. Logically, the fact that he and Bashshar al-Asad are Arabs killing Arabs whereas the hanging judge of Dinshaway was a Brit killing Arabs shouldn’t come into the calculation of relative wickedness. But it does. Where civil liberties do not exist, the void where they should be is often occupied by national pride. And wounds to national pride – wounds inflicted by outsiders – can be made to hurt out of all proportion to the deaths they cause.
KINGS AND CARPET-BAGGERS
Following their successes in the earlier scramble for Africa, Britain and France had now emerged as joint winners in the scrummage for the Near East. This did not mean the end of Arab nationalism; on the contrary, it energized the movement. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s protests and revolts fizzed and rumbled against the imperial occupiers, at times violently. In Morocco, where Spain also claimed protectorates over areas of the northern coast and south-western desert regions (the latter called ‘Spanish Sahara’), a bloody war was waged between 1921 and 1926 by the Berbers of the northern Rif Mountains against both the Spanish and the French colonialists; it failed, however, to ignite the rest of the population, and was put down by the two European powers working in tandem. At the Levantine end of the Mediterranean, however, another highland enclave, the Mountain of the Druze in Syria, was hotting up and would become a further flashpoint. In 1925, armed rebellion broke out there against the French; the uprising spread to other regions of Syria, and was quelled only in 1927, when French forces were brought in from the now cooling battlefields of Morocco.
For the British, Palestine would prove the biggest headache, as we shall see, from the later 1930s on. Iraq, meanwhile, following the violent anti-British tribal revolt of 1920, remained in a state of suspended confrontation. Egypt provided occasional shocks, like the assassination in 1924 of Sir Lee Stack, governor-general of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. But the anti-colonial opposition could wield charm as well as arms, and there was cooperation towards independence – albeit with strings attached – as well as struggle. The most promising progress at this time was made in Egypt, which in 1923 became a constitutional monarchy in which political parties multiplied; one, the Wafd, was dominant, but others often held the balance of power. Admittedly the king and the British threw their weight about too; but there was genuine debate and pluralism.
As a whole in these inter-war years, the Arabosphere was looking kaleidoscopically plural: if the colonial powers at times mirrored each other, they were opposed by a plethora of local forces that constantly rearranged themselves. Advocates of a greater Arab unity, the beautiful simple vision inspired by the Awakening, were lost in the increasing complexity of the picture. Besides, the king-making and -breaking that had followed the Great War had also reminded pan-Arab nationalists of a problem that was perennial: even if Arabs could shape some sort of unity for themselves, who would lead it?
The one keen candidate for leadership, Sharif Husayn, had already been disabused of that extra title he had adopted, ‘King of the Arabs’. Soon, however, he went one better: when in 1924 the now empireless Ottoman ex-sultan, Abd al-Majid II, was stripped of his caliphal title and banished from Turkey, Husayn leaped at the vacant caliphate. A thousand years after al-Radi, ‘the last real caliph’, it was not certain what a caliph’s job description was, except that it implied some kind of vague spiritual suzerainty over the world’s Muslims, or at least the Sunni ones; but in the event, no one recognized the sharif’s claim. Husayn might have saved himself this added disappointment if he had heeded earlier protests by Indian Muslims, the most numerous in the world, when the defeated Ottoman caliph-sultan had been made to cede sovereignty of Mecca to him in 1920. The Indian reaction had highlighted a change that had passed many Arabs by. Husayn was not any old Arab: he was a Qurashi, a Hashimi, a descendant of the Prophet. In his own and some other eyes, his descent gave him the highest degree of nobility, and the strongest claim to rule the holy city. But Islam had long outgrown its Arab past: since Mamluk times, Mecca had been an international enclave, a true world-navel; for the great majority of Muslims, Islam was not a family firm but a global corporation. To restore Mecca to local rule was like handing the Vatican over to the Municipality of Rome. For Husayn now to lay claim, on top of this, to the title of caliph was an act of vaunting pride that could only invite a fall. And, sure enough, nemesis was on its way from next-door Najd.
Already, Husayn’s promotion from Amir of Mecca to King of the Hijaz had excited envy elsewhere in the peninsula. Not to be outdone, his southern neighbour and distant cousin-sharif Yahya, the imam of Yemen, had in 1920 upped his imamate to a kingdom. Now, with Husayn’s 1924 bid for the caliphate, another neighbour weighed into the title fight. He was no sharif, but a member of the Al Sa’ud clan of chieftains in the dour uplands of Najd, and he was a bruiser: tall and craggy in physique, Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman, often known simply as Ibn Sa’ud, was backed by the Wahhabi tribes who had long been allies of his family. The alliance’s ambitions had been crushed by Muhammad Ali Pasha a century earlier. Now they were revitalized by the Ottoman collapse, and by the charisma and military prowess of Ibn Sa’ud himself. They had already captured all of Najd; next they fell on the Hijaz and the hapless Husayn. The sharif fled to Cyprus while Ibn Sa’ud took his land, his title as king of the Hijaz and, over the coming few years, more and more Arabian territory. Admittedly, other than the Hijazi pilgrim cities, the more useful parts of the Arab Island – in particular Yemen and Oman – were still not his; Ibn Sa’ud was king of a wilderness with few resources and no name. And although he had united much of the peninsula for the first time since early Islam, he had done it by brute sectarian force, and by alienating not only the Hashimites but also much of the Arabic-speaking world. When in 1932, therefore, he named his land after his own family, ‘the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’, it seemed another ultimate act of pride.
This time, however, pride was followed not by a fall, but by petroleum. Inspired by recent discoveries in the other lands around the Gulf, Ibn Sa’ud gave the first exploration concession to Standard Oil of California in 1933. It took five years for them to strike commercial quantities of oil, at Dhahran on the shore of the Gulf, but from then on there was no looking back. Ibn Sa’ud’s unpromising realm would prove to contain the biggest reserves of petroleum in the world and, via the American firms that now crowded in, he had a direct route into what would soon be the biggest market for the stuff.
It may not have seemed so from their recent expansion into the Levant, but the grand old European powers, the product of ocean trade and coal-fired industry, were running out of steam. In the imperial relay, the baton was passing to a new world power, an automobile empire that would run on internal combustion and conspicuous consumption. The gas-guzzling United States, despite its well-known aversion to absolute monarchies, would snuggle up to Ibn Sa’ud when it found out what lay beneath his kingdom. And with the strange embrace of oil-fired absolutism and the Land of the Free, there began a new chapter in the relationship between tribes and empires. British-Indian influence in the peninsula gave way to American, box-wallahs to carpet-baggers and to the portmanteau world, bulging with petroriyals, of Aramco – the Arabian American Oil Company, a giant post-Second World War consortium. In 1939, the relative British and American shares in Middle Eastern oil production were 13 per cent against 60 per cent. In 1954 they were 65 per cent to 30 per cent.
The US–Saudi affair was, and is, an exceedingly peculiar relationship. A photograph in Richard Halliburton’s 1936 travel book, Seven League Boots, seems to foreshadow something of its nature. Captioned ‘The king posing with the author’ (shouldn’t it be the other way round?), it shows an Ozymandias-like Ibn Sa’ud in his beetling headgear and a cheeky Yankee in a natty white suit, but both somehow at ease in each other’s company: Saturn and Mercury, planets apart but orbiting in the same system.
The coming together brought about an equally peculiar mix of change and stasis in the peninsula. In the conquests of the 1920s, Ibn Sa’ud’s Wahhabi raiders had been the last of their kind to use the ancient but still devastating camel+horse combination. In the 1930s, with the promise of oil, cash coming in already, and courtier-concessionaires like St John Philby flogging Fords to them, they entered the mechanized age. According to one authority, ‘the age of tribal raiding came to an end’. But 2,000 years of the raiding habit were not so quickly erased; raiding as an institution lived on and thrived in other forms. The Al Sa’ud have therefore always ruled in their own web of tensions, between themselves and the Americans, but also with their own tribal warriors; at times the latter relationship has resembled that between Muhammad’s state of Medina and its own dangerous but indispensable bedouin raiders. There was no doubt about the threat the warriors posed: in 1921, for example, extremist Wahhabi tribesmen had pillaged and massacred the main Yemeni pilgrim caravan on its way to Mecca. Re-enacting the history of the early Islamic state, as Ibn Sa’ud’s authority grew, he tried to collectivize and settle his more unruly nomads, placing them in communities which he called hijrahs – that same word denoting Muhammad’s migration to a new life. And just as the earliest caliphs had failed to mix tribes when settling their own muhajirun – ‘hijrah migrants’ – in the new garrison towns, so too did Ibn Sa’ud. Tribal ties remained as strong as ever, and in 1929–30 several of the most extreme Wahhabi tribes, the Ikhwan or ‘Brethren’, revolted against the king and had to be bloodily suppressed. From Ibn Sa’ud’s point of view, some of the a’rab were living up to their description in the Qur’an as ‘the worst in unbelief and hypocrisy’.
As for the new kingdom’s a’rab in general, they might be induced in the twentieth century as in the seventh to give up their wandering lifestyle – the nomad population of Saudi Arabia went down from 40 per cent in the 1950s to less than 5 per cent in 1998 – but not all of them were converted into good bourgeois citizens. The unpredictable, volatile spirit of the Brethren lives on, channelled where possible into the National Guard and the Committee for the Commandment of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice – the ‘morality’ police – but at times inspiring new manifestations of extremism, of which al-Qa’idah was only the first.
To the south, the British had similar problems with tribesmen when, in the 1930s, they at last got round to doing something about the seemingly endemic anarchy in the vast hinterland of Aden. In Hadramawt, the situation might have been better described as polyarchy gone mad: Harold Ingrams, sent in to deal with it, reported that there were about 2,000 separate ‘governments’ in the province, some as small as a hamlet or even a single household, each of which claimed not to owe allegiance to any higher authority. Working with traditional local power-brokers – as so often, descendants of Muhammad – Ingrams hammered out a peace treaty that halted chronic fighting between the larger factions. The bedouin tribesmen, however, proved the most troublesome element: they still lived as herders, hauliers and raiders, and the British had to bomb them into renouncing that third immemorial means of livelihood.
As with their tribal equivalents to the Saudi north, however, there was no way even British-governed and British-bombed badw would change overnight into law-abiding hadar. Hadrami badw terms for their non-tribal neighbours go some way to explaining why: settled folk are masakin, from the root sakana, like hadara ‘to be sedentary, quiescent’, but also meaning ‘unfortunate, miserable ones’; they are also hirthan, ‘ploughmen’, from the root haratha, ‘to cultivate, plough’, but also in its basic sense ‘to work for one’s living’. Tribesmen do not work for a living – at least, they do not work the land; they herd, they transport, they raid, and they look down on ‘trade’ as haughtily as any antique European aristocrat. (In a latter-day state system, tribesmen may well draw pay as nominal government employees, preferably of the army or police, but usually without the bother of actual square-bashing or pounding the beat: doing nothing and getting paid is a kind of raid, too, on the state coffers.) For traditional badw in Hadramawt and elsewhere, to replace your string of camels with a Bedford lorry was acceptable. But to beat your sword or rifle into a ploughshare has always been anathema; it is to cease to be armigerous, arms-bearing, honourable. Peace, passivity, settlement, quiescence, cultivation, following the furrow, living by the sweat of one’s brow, mean the end of history in the Fukuyaman sense.
And yet, for a couple of decades, it did seem that the old time was over. Of the Hadrami badw in the decades of British-brokered peace, one observer who thought he knew them well said, ‘They are dead’. The announcement was premature; time was only on pause.
THE MUDDLED EAST
As the last of the Ottomans lived out his Parisian exile, arranging his butterfly collection, many Arabs regretted the end of the slow, simple centuries in the penumbra of the Sublime Porte. Now they were in the full glare of the twentieth century, and the Middle East, as it was becoming in Western eyes, was rapidly becoming the Muddled East. A second great mechanized war was cranking into action, and there was both excitement and fear about the future. Would more empires be swept to their doom? And if so, would the competing rhetoricians of Arab unity finally get their word together? The second possibility seemed unlikely. The Arabic-speaking world was as fragmented as it had ever been, and over the third and fourth decades of the century its inherently complex social and political map had taken on an almost vorticist twist:
… with its mixture of foreign-backed monarchies and colonial intervention – sometimes gentle, as in Hadramawt, where Ingrams made peace in sandals, a loincloth and silver bangles and the RAF dropped polite warning notes before they dropped bombs; sometimes jackboot, as in Mussolini’s nine-year war to get his own chunk of Arab world in Libya; sometimes an increasingly insistent foot in the door, as with the growing influx of foreign Jews into Palestine;
… with its strange juxtapositions, of fanatical badw raiders and American oilmen at the Saudi court, of chintzy memsahibs and indigo-painted tribesman in Aden, of Freya Stark’s cameleers borrowing her ‘Miss Lethbridge’s’ Bond Street facecream to polish their daggers;
… with Ibn Sa’ud against the Hashimites, the Hashimites sometimes against each other, and everyone always against the Hashimite Abd Allah of Transjordan, seen as a British and Zionist stooge who had his own imperial eye on a Greater Syria;
… with the French using troops from the Maghrib against insurgents in the Mashriq, battered by Berbers in the one and by Druze in the other, and with the British in Palestine battered by Arabs and Jews simultaneously as Balfour’s contradiction in logic turned inevitably into confrontation on the ground;
… with Egypt, her post-Ottoman khedive now a king with another British client-crown, his anti-British government following their own Nilotic current of nationalism – ‘If you add one zero to another, and then to another,’ Prime Minister Sa’d Zaghlul is supposed to have said, despairing of the idea of a united Arab world, ‘what sum will you get?’
… with all this, prospects for Arab unity were receding ever further.
THE THIEF OF FIRE
If political unity seemed a broken dream, at least the Arab Kulturnation – revived by the ‘Awakening’ – seemed to have benefited from its centuries-long beauty sleep, with newly creative writers and poets giving Arab identity life and cohesion. But, here too, splits were appearing. Intellectual as well as political doubts were radiating from the land at the centre of the Arabic world, Egypt, and they were threatening to undermine the whole cultural basis of nationalism.
Like the man often billed as the most recent great Arabic poet, the eleventh-century AD Syrian al-Ma’arri, the Egyptian scholar Taha Husayn was blind but disturbingly visionary. During the First World War he had studied in France and married a Frenchwoman, and he believed that Egypt should both re-espouse Hellenic-European civilization and be open, as it had been over history, to the influences of all ‘civilized peoples in the east and west’. Th
is chimed with what many other Egyptian intellectuals of the time believed. But Taha Husayn, while he acknowledged that Arabic was ‘mingled with [our] life in a way that has formed it and shaped its personality’, was not afraid to examine its founding texts critically – not the sacrosanct Qur’an, but the even deeper underpinnings of Arabic heritage, Muslim and non-Muslim, and of the language that had given voice to the whole Arab Awakening. His 1926 book On Pre-Islamic Poetry goes straight for its subject’s jugular:
The overwhelming majority of what we call pre-Islamic poetry is not pre-Islamic at all. It was fabricated and falsely attributed after the appearance of Islam.
The golden treasury of odes – the gold standard of the language, the ancient downpayment for a new future as a nation – was, as he showed in argument piled on argument, almost all dross; the early Islamic transmitters of ancient poetry were Chattertons, the ancient poets Ossians. The Arab past, and thus Arab identity, were not merely reshaped in the Umayyad and Abbasid eras, but were faked up wholesale in their poetry ‘factories’. He had arrived at this conviction by examining the evidence of the poems, internal and external, and by what he called ‘Cartesian detachment’ – by ‘forgetting’ his nationality and religion; such detachment, he explained, was ‘the distinguishing mark of the modern age’. Modern it was; but in a culture in which words are almost the sole material of art, and poems the ultimate cultural product, what Taha Husayn did was like taking a sledgehammer to the Elgin Marbles. Or worse: the icons he had trashed were ancestral portraits, not cold marble, but flesh and blood that came to life afresh with every recitation.