Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  The Age of Disappointment may prove to be shorter than it feels when you’re in it. But on it drags. I began with an image of Arab time, Nizar Qabbani’s hourglass. In a poem of his called ‘Waiting for Ghudu’ – the Arabic ‘Godot’ – there are other measures of time:

  We’re waiting for the train

  Waiting for a traveller unknowable as Fate

  To come out of the cloak of years

  To come out of Badr

  Out of al-Yarmuk

  Of Hittin

  To come from the sword of Saladin

  The past is calibrated in battles and heroes. As for the present,

  We’re waiting for the train

  Broken, since we came, is the clock of the years

  Time does not pass

  . . .

  Come, Ghudu,

  Save us from tyrants and their tyranny

  For we are imprisoned like sheep in the station of history.

  It sounds like the constant present that, for St Augustine, was the eternal, infernal timeline of hell. But it is really that ever-present past – Max Weber’s ‘eternal yesterday’, the relentless authority of tradition. It is no paradox that, in Arabic, the word hadith means both ‘a tradition’ and ‘modern’.

  Today, an Arab Spring on from that poem, the clock is still broken; but the hourglass turns and the squeezebox plays the same old tunes. The latest-issue octogenarian king in Saudi Arabia has been busy ‘gathering the word’ – that is, silencing opposition – by appointing his son Crown Prince and sanctioning the detention of royal cousins on suspicion of corruption. At the same time, the Saudis and their allies have been ganging up on their neighbour, Qatar, for ‘splitting the stick’, that is, diverging from the jointly gathered word of the club of Gulf regimes.

  A particular bane to them has been Qatar’s independent media voice, Al Jazeera Arabic. Rather than reporting that the ruler has sent a telegram of congratulation to the president of Ruritania on the occasion of his amicable country’s national day, Al Jazeera has jazzed up the Arabic media with innovations like investigative journalism. The neighbouring regimes see the network as having fanned the poisonous breezes of the Arab Spring. They also see Qatar as having crossed the old red line by reaching out to the millennial foe, Iran. Some of them have brought in laws against ‘showing sympathy for Qatar’. Egypt’s President al-Sisi has said that he would ‘cut the tongue’ of Al Jazeera – that ancient threat wielded by pre-Islamic tyrants against turbulent poets. As I put the finishing touches to my text (or rather, prepare to let it go; books are never really finished, histories least of all), the royal court in Riyadh is admitting that one of its critics, Jamal Khashoggi, himself a Saudi national, was murdered on a visit to his country’s consulate in Istanbul. It seems that perhaps rather more than his tongue was cut: the Turkish authorities claim that he was dismembered and the parts dissolved in acid. Arab allies of the Saudis have condemned international criticism of the killing as an infringement of the kingdom’s sovereignty and ’urubah, arabness … All those sticks, tightly bound: symbols of authority, tools of execution. To eyes that have regarded the European past, they cannot fail to look like fasces.

  Words are still the sharpest weapons; language remains at the core of identity, community and continuity. The Israeli government knows this as well as any Arab leader, and in July 2018 inflicted its own mass tongue-cutting by demoting Arabic from the status of an official language of the State of Israel. For the Arab 17.5 per cent of Israeli citizens, who live in a language as well as a land, it is not the final solution – that would be an imperial Ottoman-style ban on the teaching of Arabic – but perhaps it is the penultimate solution.

  In much if not most of the Arabic world, the clock seems not just to be broken but to be going backwards. Even Tunisia, the lone land where the revolutions of 2011 appeared to have achieved anything lasting, is faltering in its forward progress: the revolution there has not magicked an ailing economy back to health, and autocrats, islamocrats, tyrannosaurs and terrorists are by no means extinct. In Syria, the Eye-doctor, Bashshar al-Asad, appears to have clung on to power – with the backing of those two old empires-in-abeyance, Russia and Iran. The Aleppo mosque, victim of the war that has prolonged his rule (and probably victim of his own artillery), is being rebuilt with Chechen cash. The whereabouts of its glorious pulpit are still a mystery.

  In my own corner of the Arab world, the former Arabia Felix, Fortunate Arabia, I have watched the people of a reasonably united Yemen sleepwalk – or be led, sleeping – into the ultimate nightmare, civil war. I have lain listening to the missiles and wondered if they were the last sounds I would hear. It has all been tragic in its most literal sense, and as this book neared its end, so too did our tragic hero-anti-hero: Ali Abd Allah Salih, the ‘billy-goat in the officers’ mess’ who had ruled for a third of a century. In 2014 he had wreaked revenge on the people who had dethroned him by siding with that even more inexorable force, the Huthis. Together, in a massive raid on the capital, they had overthrown Yemen’s new rulers. Not surprisingly the Huthis, the soi-disant ‘Helpers of Allah’, did not wish to be the Helpers of Ali: he had fought six wars against them. And yet this most impossible of unions lasted three years before it exploded in recriminations, then all-out violence. The shelling reached a crescendo on the night of 3–4 December 2017; next day, news dawned that the old billy-goat was dead. (I said it was literally tragic: was not tragōidia originally performed at the sacrifice of a tragos, a goat?)

  More recently, however, Ali had been better known for his association with another creature. Well before that unnatural and doomed alliance was revealed, I had written,

  Ali Abd Allah Salih, who is supposed to have compared ruling Yemen to ‘dancing on the heads of snakes’, should have kept a much older Yemeni saying in mind – ‘In the end, the snake always gets the charmer.’

  It wasn’t a hard prophecy to make. The snake-charmer ended up in the squamous and multiplex coils of his own creation, like Laocoön – the old Trojan whose punishment, in one account, was for contracting an unholy marriage. Both of them died grappling with an overwhelming fate that they themselves had loosed. Yet Ali’s end was not squalid: he resisted, and died like the soldier he never ceased to be. His corpse lies, we think, in a freezer up the road: history unburied; the past on ice.

  He has probably united more people in death than he did in his lifetime. Meanwhile, with power-centres in at least three places, the body politic of the unified Republic of Yemen seems beyond preservation. Unity, as always, is that mirage briefly grasped.

  Or as almost always, for there are exceptions. The United Arab Emirates still lives up to its name, as well as to the rhetorical past. Just as the ruler of Dubai launches the arrows of his verse in battle against the millennial threat from over the Gulf, so does his son gather the word of the land in lines like these, part of a long ode recited by him in a slickly produced and very popular video:

  Already when we unified in ’seventy-one, we were one folk:

  The hearts united first, and then the homes.

  United we remain – within the minds of men, true Arabs,

  In our bloodlines that endure and never die.

  . . .

  May God for ever keep our peoples strong! (All say, ‘Amen!’)

  May God preserve our unity as long as ages run!

  Amid the skyscrapers and shopping malls, a new generation of leaders is picking up the old thread of language, spinning out the eternal word-magic.

  Nearly everywhere, however, words and resulting deeds have blown societies apart, not unified them. It is painful to watch all this happening to a land I love, and to see a wider Arabic world suffering from so much self-harm. But is the pain made worse by my own heritage, by the feeling that things might be better if – to be honest – they were ordered more like they are in the land where I was born and formed? Half a century ago, the wise Doreen Ingrams, who was both the last and greatest of Arabian imperial lady travellers and a p
ioneer post-imperialist, wrote after the British withdrawal from Aden,

  The assumption that the ‘natives’ must prefer the order and justice of our administration to the disorder and injustice of their own was one of the more astonishing aspects of the British attitude towards their colonial subjects.

  Fifty years on, not all the Arab world is disordered; but probably half of it is, going by population, and nearly all of it is unjust – outrageously unjust, by the standards of liberal democracies. But is it a form of intellectual colonialism even to apply those liberal standards, and to hope Arabs will do so themselves? Maybe Samuel Huntington was right about the clash of civilizations. That is certainly what the dictators and ‘Islamic State’ and our own Huthis say, and it is all part of how they keep their grip on power.

  But if Doreen, whom I knew a little and remember with great fondness, was wise, so was Taha Husayn, writing a little earlier in the twilight of Western imperialism:

  We live in an age . . . in which freedom and independence are not an end to which people and nations strive, but a means to ends higher, more permanent and more comprehensive in their benefits.

  Those higher ends include, presumably, order and justice in those free and independent societies.

  They are both right, of course. Taha Husayn, however, is an ambiguous figure to Arabs who still know of him: he was wise and eloquent, but he was a cosmopolite who believed in a Hellenic-Islamic civilization. He was an Arab, but he was also an Egyptian, and one who was married to Europe literally and figuratively. He believed in clinches, not clashes. He had also written, ‘As time goes by, [our Arab mentality] strives towards change, accelerating in its contact with Westerners.’ But he wrote that more than ninety years ago, and in recent decades the acceleration has gone into reverse. There is that fear of homogenization, of the global blur, the loss of ethos. And ethos – not just as some woolly manner of thinking, some nebulous ‘Arab mentality’, but in its original sense of ‘character’, that of a group, its genius, its daemon and its fate – is a power more elemental than organized religion.

  It is partly fear of its loss that causes those temporal confusions. People, an old Arabic saying goes, resemble the times they live in, much more than they resemble their fathers. But, often, people want to resemble their fathers, to retain the ethos. Thus, temporal dislocation: they fight against the times and maintain that ever-present past, the eternal yesterday; they do not want to fix the broken clock. They know that to become part of the present continuous, the blur, would be to enter the biggest super-hadarah ever, to become more like everyone else on earth. And a recurring characteristic of being ’arab, or Arab, right from the start, has been that of being marginal, independent, not like everyone else. To the extent that one enters hadarah, civilization, one ceases to be ‘Arab’ in one of the word’s oldest senses. Arabs, after all, sparked off the then biggest super-hadarah ever with Islam, and ended up on its margins.

  What now if they came back in from the margins, and took an active place in the current, wider hadarah of civil societies that try to be truly democratic, free from tyrannosaurs and from incessant conflict, with working constitutions, equality under the law, with liberty of speech and religion, and Baskin Robbins thirty-one flavours of ice-cream everywhere (admittedly, they are almost everywhere now – including, I’m told, at one of the gates of the sacred temenos of the Ka’bah)? Would they become merely ‘West Asians’ and ‘North Africans’? They would have nothing left but their shared language and history – in short, their culture. Would that be enough? Only they can know.

  Then again, no hadarah, however super, lasts for ever. Nor is the extinction of tyrannosaurs inevitable. And while they are still at large, to remain flock-like, even if it means being raided, herded, penned in the station of history and periodically slaughtered, offers quite a lot of Arabs a modicum of security for a majority of the time, as it has for most people over most of human history.

  But the clock need not stay broken. It can be made to work, and can be set to Arab time. It can run in parallel with the rest of a world in which Arabs have so often been not just stuck on a rock, but also the essential middle-men, the central cog in the global clockwork.

  The fact that recent centuries have run largely on Western time has left the world out of kilter. This bias to a hemisphere (really a hemidemisphere, the north-west) has left its neighbours looking at it askance. For many Arabs, in particular, the West is ambiguous: if not a Gorgon with a gaze that destroys, it is at best a Siren that both enchants and endangers. Arabs might do better to look away, towards themselves, and to listen to their own voices. They certainly do not have to submit to ‘the gaze of the Western Other – a gaze that . . . foredooms all your hopes’, or to reject apparently ‘Western’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ ideas as a ‘crusade’ against the Muslim mind, as Muhammad Jalal Kishk, a founder of modern political Islam, put it. What matters is the idea itself – not where it comes from. This is what al-Kindi, the ninth-century ‘Philosopher of the Arabs’, knew: he pursued truth, ‘wherever it may come from – even if it comes from races who are distant from us and societies quite different from our own’. It is what the great thirteenth-century Sufi divine, Ibn al-Arabi, knew:

  He sees the lightning to the east, and for the east he longs;

  And if it flickers westward, to the west he’ll lean.

  ‘My love,’ he says, ‘is not for places or for lands.

  My only passion’s for the lightning-flash.’

  If they look, Arabs will see flashes in the mirror of their own history – their whole history, not just that blinding flash of greatness in the middle of it. They will find that individualism, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, inclusiveness, civil society, objective truth are not part of some ‘Western crusade’, but are part of their own past. They will see, for example:

  … the search for freedom and independence of those original diverse pioneers who left the northern fertile crescent for the wild south of the peninsula – the likely first ’arab;

  … the settled, productive, non-tribal pre-Islamic societies of that other fertile crescent in South Arabia;

  … the cosmopolitan networks of trade and culture that centred on great caravan cities like Palmyra, Qaryat and Mecca, meeting-places of badw and hadar;

  … the eloquent individualism of the pre-Islamic ‘vagabond’ poets like al-Shanfara, seekers and speakers of truth beyond tribal boundaries;

  … the all-embracing heaven of the earlier Qur’anic revelations –

  Those who believe and those who are Jews and Christians and Sabians [a gnostic sect in Mesopotamia], whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day and acts righteously, they shall have their reward with their Lord;

  … the inclusiveness of Muhammad’s first Constitution of Medina, and of his Farewell Sermon, the crystallization of his mission;

  … the brief but marvellous openness of Abbasid society at its height, particularly under the philosopher-caliph, al-Ma’mun (before he became infallible);

  … the ‘cultured, sophisticated, broad-minded’ contemporary caliphate of Cordova, where life was ‘something glorious in itself, to be ennobled by learning and enlivened by every kind of pleasure’;

  … the liberating theologies of Sufism;

  … the adaptability and spiritual depth of Islam in the expansive, oceanic fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and after;

  … the intellectual, intercredal movers of the nineteenth-century Awakening;

  … the twentieth-century advocates of cultural collaboration, like Taha Husayn, married to Europe as he was;

  … the truth-seeking poets of the exodus in our own times, spiritual descendants of the ‘vagabonds’;

  … the seekers of liberty, dignity and daily bread now and to come.

  For Arabs to reconsider their past is long overdue. The foremost ‘vagabond’ of recent years put the challenge forcefully:

  We want a generation who are angry . . .

  Who will wrench up history from t
he roots.

  The history is human and live. Some of it will come up shrieking like a mandrake, and as deadly to its discoverers. But to get at the truth of their past, to allow it to have its own intifadah, its shaking-off of dust, and then to re-examine the roots, to share as common property what has been buried in the celebration of a brief imperial greatness and the long mourning of its loss – for Arabs, all this would be more than just preserving heritage and culture.

  Truth, despite the old saying, will not always out. Some of it is just too deeply buried. But as well as al-Yarmuk and Hittin and all the victories over Byzantines and Persians and Franks, Arab schoolchildren must learn about those inglorious Arab–Arab battles: the seventy severed hands and the 7,000 dead of the Day of the Camel, that fight between Muhammad’s son-in-law and his favourite wife; the 70,000 dead of Siffin, the battle between the old and new regimes of Muhammad’s tribe; all the other inter-Arab battles since, with their concatenating zeros of dead. It would be to reclaim the past not as a theme-park for the present, but as ground for a better future.

  It would be a way of being true to themselves, without having to be antagonistic to a Siren-Gorgon ‘West’. Selfhood is still often imagined, sometimes expressed (in both senses, ‘articulated’ and ‘forced out’), by opposition. ‘Allah is great,’ say the slogans beneath my window,

  Death to America

  Death to Israel

  The curse of Allah on the Jews

  Victory to Islam.

  It is still identity moulded in negative, in opposition to the big empire without and the little empire within (and the irony is that this version of the old mould itself comes from one of the oldest of the moulding empires, Iran: it was the slogan of Khomeini’s revolution). Allah’s own book advocates not opposition but apposition, parallel coexistence: ‘To you,’ Muhammad was told to say to those who did not believe in his mission, ‘be your religion, and to me mine.’ More loosely, we can each have our own ethos.