Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  In a sense it doesn’t matter whether Taha Husayn was right or not. There is no question that some poetry was fabricated, and probably much else was restored and repolished in Islamic times. Many critics, however, feel that he was wrong to dismiss ‘the overwhelming majority’ of pre-Islamic poetry. But the deed was done. And along with the poetic baby and its bathwater, the book threw out some disconcerting questions. While he did not apply his Cartesian detachment directly to scripture, Taha Husayn did interrogate a number of long-cherished stories that had filled in dots in the Qur’an’s elliptical text. These included the traditional accounts of the people of Ad, of the Marib damburst, and of much else in the apocryphal Arab Genesis. His book was banned on the grounds that it threatened public order by calling aspects of the Qur’an and the Prophet into question, and in 1927 he was summoned to appear in court on a charge of heresy. Among other complaints from the Shaykh al-Azhar, the highest Muslim authority, he was accused of ‘belittling’ Muhammad’s ancestry – something ‘no infidel or polytheist has ever dared’ to do – and of implying that the original Arab faith had not been Abrahamic monotheism. A lot of the case hinged on the historicity and role of Abraham/Ibrahim and his son Ishmael/Isma’il, so important in the forging of a united Arab identity from Umayyad times onward. But ‘forging’ in which sense: ‘hammering out’ or ‘faking’?

  Taha Husayn himself was literally in two minds. In the court hearing, he asserted that,

  as a Muslim he did not doubt the existence of Ibrahim and Isma’il, or of any Qur’anic material connected with them. But as a scholar he was compelled to submit to methods of academic research, and therefore could not accept the existence of Ibrahim and Isma’il as a fact of scholarly history.

  It was the old pitfall, between faith and reason, rhetorical truth and empirical fact. And there was Taha Husayn, down in the pit but looking bravely up. The trial might have been the Arab-Muslim world’s long-delayed ‘Galileo moment’.

  He was by no means the first Muslim thinker caught in the binary trap. But most had turned a blind eye to their predicament, like the tenth-century logician al-Sijistani who simply stated that the Qur’an was exempt from logic. That the physically blind Taha Husayn could admit to that stereoscopic vision was indeed a ‘modern’ viewpoint, and deeply subverting. Moreover, it peered into a dark chamber in the heart of being Arab: ‘Dualism,’ wrote a more recent and equally shrewd observer, Muhammad al-Jabiri, ‘constitutes the essence of being Arab in all its domains.’

  One must beware of cod psychology. But this sort of dualism – the ability to look at phenomena simultaneously from two opposite viewpoints, in two contrasting lights – might go towards explaining a number of apparent anomalies: how, for example, a whole mass of Arabic words can mean one thing and its opposite (jawn = black/white, jalal = great/small); how people can adore a political leader while admitting that he is blatantly corrupt, and can speak of him without irony as sariq watani, ‘a patriotic thief’, or even – as we have seen – sariq ’adil, ‘a just thief’. The perspective is Cubist, the ‘doublethink’ Orwellian. And apart from points of view, there are the great and undeniable dualities: peoples/tribes, spiritual Mecca/temporal Medina, hajj/hijrah, haram/halal, unclean sinister left hand/clean dexter right hand, quietist Sufis/militant Wahhabis, ’arab/’ajam, high Arabic/Arabic dialect . . . a perpetual dialectic in society, religion, language, in which the world is a series of conflicting opposites, thesis and antithesis. Cod psychology or good red herring, some considerable Arab thinkers have fished the subject. Adonis, too, netted a whole catch of double-headed dichotomies that concluded with ‘. . . country/city, Arabs/Greeks, Arabs/West, prophecy/technology’. All these, he said, are ‘opposing dualities that paralyse creative movement’, as if Arabs are in the position of Buridan’s ass, who couldn’t choose between the two mangers on either side of him and died of starvation . . . not just stuck on a rock between lions, then, but also stuck in a stable, stalled between stalls.

  It is nice and neat to see everything in such Manichaean terms, but ultimately simplistic. All the same, Muhammad al-Jabiri may have been right when he guessed that a specific dualism lay at the core of what this present book is about, the problem of Arab unity. Of the pairing ‘unity/particularity’ he observes how

  regional idiosyncrasies compete with the pan-national whole – but without either the parts or the whole seeking to cancel or negate each other. Such a negation would be a self-defeating act, because the existence of one is dependent and conditional on that of the other.

  Like the ancient Arabian duality of hajj and hijrah, Mecca and migration, then, the idea of Arab unity works as both magnet and centrifuge: it attracts, but inevitably repels. Pilgrims travel hopefully, arrive – but must always leave. Womblike Mecca cannot hold them all for ever; even holy migrants turn into madding masses. Unitarians are pilgrims, too, in perpetuity, filled with hope on the road but always fleeing the crowd for reality and home.

  The judge in Taha Husayn’s trial was scholarly and open-minded, and the case was dismissed. The book, however, was punished: it was permitted to be reissued, but with the offending passages bowdlerized. The bigger questions, about bipolarity, dichotomy, detachment, remained and still do so, glaringly; Galileo has yet to be freed. In fact, Taha Husayn’s message is even more disturbing nowadays. The more distant political unity seems, the more reassuring are those ancient poetic foundations of Arab cultural solidarity; the more Islam is pulled apart by its own opposing extremists, the more important is that stable, unquestionable core, the Prophet and the Qur’an.

  And yet Taha Husayn sparked off ideas that still smoulder. The poet Nizar Qabbani remembered him as ‘the Thief of Fire’ and longed for him to return. Would he be acquitted today?

  A PLURALITY OF UNITIES

  Around the time of Taha Husayn’s trial, T.E. Lawrence, who had once been the advocate for a united Arab east, came to that realization already mentioned, that ‘Arab unity . . . is a madman’s notion’. It is a realization all romantics arrive at if we live long enough in the real Arab world. If it could be conjured into existence, Arab unity would not be the Egyptocentric Sa’d Zaghlul’s nihilistic sum of zeros; neither would it be some neat binary chimaera, a pushmi-pullyu. Rather, going by attempts to achieve it in the 1930s and 1940s, it would be a many-headed monster, a hydra with a multiply-split personality.

  From 1936 onwards, King Abd al-Aziz Ibn Sa’ud was mooting a pan-Arab federation, with himself as head. At the same time and until his assassination in 1951, King Abd Allah of Transjordan was lobbying for union with Syria, eventually to incorporate Palestine and Iraq, with himself as head. Later, the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Sa’id was trying to persuade the British to work towards a union – again with Syria, Palestine and Transjordan, but with Iraq at its head. Not unexpectedly, nothing came of these ideas. More surprising was that Egypt abandoned its sphinx-like aloofness and proposed what, in 1945, became the Arab League. The founder members were Egypt itself, together with the reluctant quadrille of Syria, Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine; also Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. More surprising still is that, other than in the aftermath of its Camp David Accords with Israel, when Egypt was ostracized and from 1979 to 1990 the League was chaired by a Tunisian, every one of its secretaries-general has been an Egyptian.

  Needless to say, the other members would never have agreed to a virtual Egyptian monopoly if the League had ever been anything more than a toothless talking-shop, a diplomatic Drones Club in which the members always ‘agree to disagree’. They did, however, agree at the start on some aims that were diffident enough to satisy the most paranoid sovereign:

  To strengthen the ties between the participant states, to co-ordinate their political programme in such a way as to effect real collaboration between them, to preserve their independence and sovereignty, and to consider in general the affairs and interests of the Arab countries.

  The League has expanded and now has twenty-two members. The criterion for member
ship is having Arabic as an official language; this brings together some strange bedfellows, including Somalia and the Comoros. As for the League’s answer to the old question of who or what an Arab is, it is someone whose language is Arabic and who lives in an Arabic-speaking country (which would seem to exclude actual Somalis and Comorans), and who ‘sympathizes with the aspirations of the Arabic-speaking peoples’. What these aspirations are, and how sympathy for them should be expressed, is not clear. A woolly mammoth as well as a tuskless one, the League exhibits few vital signs, and has been branded as ‘still-born from the inception’, and ‘an institution of the dying age of tyranny’. But reports of its death, either before its birth or in the future, are probably exaggerated, and it may have done slightly more good than harm.

  In any case, like all the best gully-gully men, the Egyptians had something much more surprising up their sleeve. Egypt had been home to the first stirrings of the Arab Awakening, and had given birth to the Thief of Fire. But in the 1950s it brought forth the Knight of Dreams – a man who for a brief, bright decade would ignite the biggest Arab wheel of fire since Muhammad.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE AGE OF HOPE

  NASSERISM, BA’THISM,

  LIBERATION, OIL

  THE EMPTY THRONE

  Early in the summer of 1952, a plump and pampered camel processed around Cairo, accompanied by a guard of honour and a brass band. Atop its hump, rocking to the music, rose an elaborate litter with a pyramidal roof. Enclosed by superbly embroidered panels of cloth and decorated with silver-gilt finials, the litter, or palanquin, resembled a small but gorgeous pavilion. The mahmal or ‘bearer’, as it is called in Arabic, was empty, but full of symbolism – it was a cipher of sovereignty, mobility, pilgrimage and, in its calligraphic covering, of the power and beauty of the Arabic language. It was in effect a travelling throne-room in miniature, and in former times it had gone to Mecca to pay the Egyptian ruler’s homage to the House of Allah – an armchair pilgrimage in which the chair itself did the travelling.

  The mahmal was also full of history. It may have originated as early as in Umayyad times, but it became a regular institution in the thirteenth century under the first Mamluks of Egypt. Soon, other regions began sending mahmals to Mecca – Yemen, Syria and, later, Ottoman Turkey – each paying its allegiance to the unity symbolized by the ancient Arabian city, the navel of the world, but each also expressing its independence. Like the rest of the pilgrim caravan, the mahmal came home after the pilgrimage, and its journey to and from Mecca was powered by the pull and push that held the Arab world together and yet kept it apart.

  The mahmal’s travels were as much about local politics as about pilgrimage. In his brief role as infidel defender of the faith, Napoleon had a new mahmal made and sent to Mecca. The Franco-Egyptian procession that saw it off from Cairo seemed to the historian al-Jabarti

  a wonder of wonders, with its variety of forms, diversity of shapes and mingling of denominations. In it the hoi polloi were raised high, the riff-raff multiplied, and the marvels of creation came together in a conjunction of opposites and a total contrast to tradition.

  Tradition, however, soon re-established itself after the French had gone. Some of it was strange enough in itself. For instance, the mahmal was customarily followed by an old man called ‘the Shaykh of the Camel’, who had long hair but no other covering than a pair of pyjama bottoms –

  He was mounted on a camel, and was incessantly rolling his head . . . all assert that he rolls his head during the whole of the journey.

  At times, the old man was himself followed on another camel by a scantily clad old woman called ‘the Mother of Cats’, half a dozen of which shared her saddle to Mecca and back. Such picturesque characters, however, would have no place in the modernized Egypt of the later nineteenth century. From 1884 the Egyptian mahmal travelled by train to Suez, in its own private carriage, then by steamer down the Red Sea to Jeddah; there it was hoisted on to the traditional dromedary. Such adaptations perhaps helped the Egyptian mahmal to survive; the Yemeni mahmal had disappeared in the seventeenth century, and the Turkish-Syrian one would fall victim to the Great War. But the Egyptian mahmal was doomed as well. In 1926 Ibn Sa’ud’s Wahhabi Ikhwan, the new protectors of Mecca, stoned it, beat up its bandsmen and clashed with its guard: for the puritan tribesmen it was a bid’ah, a heretical innovation, even if the ‘innovation’ was 600, or perhaps 1,200, years old. Since then, for a generation, it had only paraded around Cairo, all dressed up and nowhere to go.

  The parade of 1952, however, was its last. Later that summer, a group of army officers overthrew the British-backed king of Egypt; the past and its superannuated symbols, including the mahmal, were consigned to the lumber-room of history. Besides, since 1926 the camel and its empty palanquin had been a reminder of a bitter present. Travel was easier, camel trains had been replaced by steam trains and steamships, and the Arab world should have come closer together in the face of imperialism and its new and wayward step-daughter, Zionism. But the last remaining symbol of the old connectedness had been rejected by the new masters of Mecca. Now the new masters of Egypt rejected it too: for them it was the opposite of an innovation – an anachronism. The symbolism of the empty palanquin was now itself empty; emptier even than the rhetoric in that other, newer symbol of Arab connectedness in Cairo, the Arab League.

  If anything, Egypt, sitting between the Maghribi and Mashriqi wings of the Arabic world but belonging to neither, had just distanced itself a little more from its fellow Arab states. The revolution was following a current that had been released by Napoleon’s propaganda of liberation and had strengthened ever since: Egypt was pursuing its own national course into the uncertain future, and the nationalism was Egyptian, not Arab. It had, everyone pointed out, its first truly Egyptian rulers since the pharaohs; although what ‘truly Egyptian’ meant, in a land that had been the confluence of humanity from three continents and for at least as many thousand years, was not clear. It certainly did not mean that the revolutionary officers were Copts, whose name comes from that of the country; etymologically, a Copt is a ‘Gypt’. Rather, it meant that the new leaders were not any of the relatively recent arrivals – Mamluks, Ottomans, Albanians or, God help us, British. Like that revolutionary of seventy years earlier, Ahmad Urabi, they came from Arab or arabized settler stock and, in this land of the longue durée, 1,300 years were deemed long enough to have turned Arab invaders into indigenous Egyptians.

  In the event, four years after the 1952 revolution Egypt’s new Egyptian rulers would change tack, and not just assert their arabness but assume the leadership of Arabs everywhere. Arabness, as so often, was something to be forgotten and rediscovered, cast off then reassumed, to be recollected and reshaped. It was something that ebbed and flowed according to the phases of the times and their political mood, and it was about to have a spring tide.

  THE DAGGER IN THE MAP

  Four years before the 1952 revolution, arabness and Arab unity had, in contrast, been at one of their lowest ebbs ever. Zionism had waved the wand of religion over colonialism . . . and magicked it into territorial nationalism. The transformation had taken place against a background of events both foreseeable and unpredictable.

  Among the foreseeable events was the utter unworkability of the Balfour Declaration. Between the two world wars, uncontrollable Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine ignited inter-communal violence; predictably, the Palestinians revolted against the British mandatory power, which in return inflicted brutal collective punishments. What had happened to the ‘sweet, just, boyish master’ of the world, as George Santayana had described imperial Britain only a decade earlier? Later came the turn of the Jews to revolt, when the British tried to stem the influx of immigrants. Most violent were the extremist Zionist groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang:

  By using terror tactics to achieve political objectives they . . . set a dangerous precedent in Middle Eastern history – one that plagues the region down to the
present day.

  The locus classicus of terror was the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the 1946 bombing of which by the Irgun killed nearly a hundred. The explosion reverberates down the decades, from the Holy City to Beirut to Baghdad to Manhattan. The Israelis, meanwhile, have graduated from planting or throwing bombs to the more civilized method of dropping them.

  Other unforeseen events, however, eased the transformation from Zionist colony to Israeli nation-state. What none but a prophet could have predicted was the suffering inflicted by Nazism on the Jews of Europe. As if silenced and blinded by its enormity, the rest of the post-war world affected not to notice the suffering of Palestine. Arabs were only too aware of it. But their perceptions of Palestine were skewed, variously, by their own self-interests. When the show-down came in 1948 – the war between the Zionists and their neighbours, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq – the Arab allies were thus fatally divided. The most notable unity they achieved was when four of them ganged up to stop Abd Allah, the Hashimite king of Transjordan, enlarging his realm by grabbing Palestinian Arab territory. The fear was well founded: Abd Allah had already been in contact with the Zionists, trying to get guarantees to this very end. As one contemporary observer put it, apart from this joint attempt to contain Abd Allah’s ambitions, ‘the Arab states’ campaign was crippled by lack of unity . . . [and] mutual distrust’. It was this mistrust that was the ‘something false and rotten’ in the Arab ranks, and it was as tragic a flaw for the Five Against Zion as anything in the Aeschylean drama of Seven Against Thebes; as destructive as those divided ranks when, at the time of the first appearance of the Crusaders in the Levant, ‘The sultans were at loggerheads with each other, and this enabled the Franks to occupy the country’.