A History of the Middle East (4 page)

There are two aspects of the Islamic religion which are of special importance to the subsequent history of the Middle East. The first of these is that while Muslims do not believe Muhammad to be divine – for Islam is the most fiercely monotheistic of faiths, adhering to the belief that ‘there is no God but God’ – they do regard him as the last of God’s messengers, or the seal of the prophets, who include Moses and Jesus. They therefore hold that Islam is the ultimate faith, which completes and perfects the two other heavenly religions – Judaism and Christianity. If mankind as a whole has not yet accepted the truth, it is due to the failings of the community of Muslim believers.

The other important fact is that, while Muslims believe in paradise and the soul’s immortality, their faith is far from other-worldly. The Prophet, unlike Jesus, was a political leader and organizer of genius, and in Islam there is no separation between religion and politics and no concept of a secular state. The Holy Koran, which for Muslims is the literal word of God, is the continuing inspiration for all Muslim thought and actions, but it is not a comprehensive code of law. Muslims have therefore looked also to the example of the Prophet and his companions. Their words and deeds, known as their
sunnah
or habitual modes of thought and action, were collected in the
hadith
, or traditions of the Prophet, which were handed down through a line or reliable witnesses. Together the Koran and the
sunnah
form the sources of the Islamic
sharia
. This is normally translated as ‘Islamic law’, but it is much more than this. It is neither
canonical law (Islam has no priesthood) nor secular law, because no such concept exists in Islam: it is rather a whole system of social morality, prescribing the ways in which man should live if he is to act according to God’s will. If he contravenes the
sharia
, his offence is against God and not the state.

This is the ideal. Since the earliest times, Arab and Muslim rulers have assumed secular powers to some degree – and none more so than those of today – but the ideal continues to have a powerful influence on the hearts and minds of all Muslims. It accounts for the potent force of utopianism among Arabs – the belief that if they were to return to the ways of the Prophet and his companions the triumph of Islam in this world would be assured. In the West this is usually described as fundamentalism, but in a real sense all Muslim believers are fundamentalist, because they know that the Holy Koran was God’s final message to mankind. The triumph of the West in the last two or three centuries is seen by Muslims as an aberration of history.

It is not surprising that the Arabs of today are still inspired to the point of obsession by the story of the first achievements of Islam. When, at the age of forty, Muhammad underwent the religious experience which turned him into a prophet and leader, the Arabian peninsula was a conglomeration of petty autonomous states grouped around tribal confederations. The largely nomadic people were mainly animists by religion, worshipping a variety of spirits who were often based in a particular rock or shrine. They had no written codes of laws; crimes were restrained by the lasting fears of vengeance. No such restraints applied to communal acts of violence, however, and the frequent inter-tribal disputes could be settled only by reference to an arbiter, a wise authority on tribal customs. This was not a high culture which could remotely be compared with that of Byzantium or Persia, but it had a matchless asset in the Arabic language, with its limitless power and flexibility and the supreme artistic achievement of its poetry.

Although proud and independent, the people of Arabia were not immune to outside influences. Through their contacts with the
Christian Byzantines and Abyssinians, and Zoroastrian Persians, they had begun to acquire some monotheistic ideas when Muhammad began his mission. By the time he died, in his early sixties, the new faith had been accepted throughout most of Arabia. In one generation he had succeeded in welding the scattered and idolatrous tribes of the peninsula into one nation worshipping a single, all-powerful god.

If the achievements of the Islamic faith in the lifetime of Muhammad were remarkable, those during the brief rule of his three successors, or caliphs – the Rashidoun or Rightly Guided Ones – were even more astonishing. The small forces of the faithful went on to challenge the two great empires of Byzantium and Persia. Within ten years they had defeated the Sassanid Persians, captured their capital Ctesiphon on the Tigris and driven them out of Mesopotamia. They then turned their attention to the Byzantine provinces of Syria and Egypt. The Arab army swept on through North Africa, and within another fifty years, in
AD
711, had crossed into Spain.

After the conquest of Syria and Egypt, the Arabs spent another ten years destroying what remained of the Sassanid Empire. The Byzantine Empire, however, was to last another eight hundred years. Although the Arabs took Cyprus, Rhodes and Cos and twice besieged Constantinople, they never conquered and held Anatolia, which continued for several more centuries to be shared between the Byzantines and the Christian kingdom of Armenia.

Within thirty years of the Prophet’s death, decisive events were to shape the future of Islam and of the Prophet’s Arabian homeland. In
AD
656 the Caliph Omar’s successor, Othman, was assassinated. His natural successor seemed to be Ali, first cousin of the Prophet and husband of his daughter Fatima. But Ali was opposed by the ambitious and able Arab general Muawiya, whom Omar had appointed governor of Syria and who, like Othman, belonged to the powerful Umayyad family of Mecca. The defeat of Ali and his son Hussein by the Umayyads led to the first and only great division in Islam: between the Sunnis, or ‘people of the
sunnah
’, who are the
great majority, and the Shia or ‘partisans’ of Ali, who continue to regard Muawiya and his Umayyad successors as secular usurpers.

Today about 10 per cent of the world’s Muslim population are Shiite, and most of these are in Iran and the Indian subcontinent. There are scarcely any Shiites in Africa. In the Levant they are important in Lebanon, where they form 40 per cent of the population and probably outnumber the Sunnis.

In the Arabian peninsula the great majority of the people have remained Sunni, although there are important Shiite minorities on the eastern fringes. The Zaydis, who inhabit the mountains of Yemen, also belong to a branch of Shiism. But Sunnism and Shiism continued in dispute over Persia (Iran) until, in the sixteenth century, Shiism was adopted as the ruling faith. In Mesopotamia (Iraq), the majority of the population have remained Shiite, and the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala are on Iraqi territory, but Sunnis are still politically dominant. This has a significant bearing on the modern history of the region.

The triumph of the Umayyads not only caused a split in Islam: it made Damascus the capital of the new Arab/Islamic Empire. After a century, in
AD
750, the defeat of the Umayyads by the Abbasids, a rival revolutionary movement based in east Persia, shifted the centre of power to Baghdad, inaugurating the Golden Age of Islam – one of the highest peaks of human civilization.

In the vast territories in which Islam was triumphant, two processes – allied but not identical – began to operate: ‘arabization’ and ‘islamization’. In Iraq, Greater Syria, Egypt and the North African countries of the Maghreb, the Arabic languages began gradually to overwhelm the existing tongues. (Kurdish in northern Iraq and the Berber tongue, Tamazight, in Algeria and Morocco have survived.) In Syria/Palestine and Egypt, Greek continued to be used in administration for a time until Arabic was made the official tongue. In the Fertile Crescent, the Arabic which was already spoken in the east and in the Arabian peninsula steadily replaced Aramaic, which now barely survives in one or two villages north of Damascus and in northern Iraq. Similarly, the Coptic language
of the ancient Egyptians was progressively extinguished as the Arab occupation changed into full-scale colonization and assimilation, although it survived at least until the seventeenth century.

Islamization was less complete than arabization because substantial communities of Christians and Jews, respected and tolerated by Islam as ‘People of the Book’, clung to their faith and survived. But the spread of Islam was more extensive than that of the Arabic language. It moved swiftly to Samarkand and the borders of India, and in subsequent centuries huge populations in the Indian subcontinent, in China and in south-east Asia converted. But here Arabic was confined to religious observance. The language and culture of the Persians survived both their conquest by the Arabs and their acceptance of the Islamic faith, although the Persian Farsi language adopted the Arabic script and an extensive Arabic vocabulary. Today only about one-fifth of the Muslims in the world are Arabic-speaking.

The Turks were not conquered by the Arabs, but they were largely converted to Islam in the tenth century, and their language was invaded by a stream of Arabic words from the vocabulary of religion, science and culture. Turkish was also written in the Arabic script. The twelfth century, when Persian became the literary language of western Asia, saw a second linguistic invasion. Turkish writers adopted Persian and Arabic grammatical constructions as well as words, to create the synthesis of Ottoman Turkish.

Three languages – Arabic, Persian and Turkish – therefore came to be spoken or written by the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Middle East region. According to modern nationalist terminology, the people who spoke these languages were Arabs, Persians and Turks.

Only three important minorities resisted assimilation and retained their national identity – Armenians, Kurds and Berbers. The Armenians had a continuing national existence from the sixth century
BC
, in what is now eastern Turkey and part of Soviet Transcaucasia, and they can claim to be the oldest Christian nation, with their own Armenian Apostolic Church. They had an independent kingdom
for several centuries before their conquest and absorption into an Islamic Empire in the fourteenth century, and, although later dispersed throughout the Middle East and beyond, they remain loyal to their language, religion and culture.

The Kurds are a mountain people whose ancient history has often overlapped with that of the Armenians. They speak an Indo-European group of dialects, related to Persian. Unlike the Armenians, they have never had their own independent state, but they have been less dispersed and today they inhabit an arc of territory from north-western Iran through north-eastern Iraq and Syria to eastern Turkey.

The Arabs were aided in their conquest by the debilitating struggles between the Byzantine and Persian Empires, and also by the unpopularity of the imperial rulers among their subject peoples. To create their own lasting empire the Arabs had to succeed better in the art of government than their predecessors. The achievement of these former barbarian nomads was astonishing, and undoubtedly the nature of the Islamic faith – austere, simple, comprehensible and just – provides the reason. There is no cause for surprise that Arabs of today should believe that a return to the principles and practice of those days should restore their greatness.

Initially the tribal warriors of pure Arab descent formed a military aristocracy who numbered no more than a few hundred thousand. Non-Arabs who embraced Islam – Persians, Egyptians, Levantines of mixed race or North African Berbers – were called
mawalis
or clients. But this aristocracy of the Arabs did not last.

Although Islam’s relationship with Arabia and the Arabic language is indestructible, racial distinction among the faithful is contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the Holy Koran. As marriage with
mawali
women was frequent, assimilation proceeded swiftly, and in the process the term ‘Arab’ began its gradual change from the name for a beduin nomad of the Arabian peninsula to its present meaning of anyone whose culture and language are Arabic.

Under the Abbasid caliphate, a great movement of ethnic as well as cultural assimilation took place within the Islamic Empire. While Arabic came to be accepted first as the dominant language and then
as the
lingua franca
, the ‘pure’ Arabs also gradually abandoned their claims to aristocracy. The principle of ethnic equality came to be accepted. Thus the language and religion of the Arabs acted as the cement which held this great edifice together. Its strength and prosperity lay in the fact that the splendid Persian and Hellenic civilizations which had been overwhelmed were not destroyed: for a time the new Arab rulers left the existing systems of government and administration largely intact, until they had assimilated them and developed their own synthesis.

The transfer of the empire’s capital from Damascus to Baghdad shifted its centre of gravity eastwards. Interest in the Mediterranean declined, and oriental influences, such as the Persian taste for absolute monarchy, increased. The removal of frontier barriers made Baghdad the centre of a vast and increasingly prosperous free-trade area in which most sections of the population had the opportunity to engage in vigorous commercial activity. Arab ships sailed to China, Sumatra, India and southwards along the east coast of Africa as far as Madagascar. Learning and culture also flourished in this Islamic Golden Age. At first it was mainly a question of translation into Arabic of the great scientific and philosophical works of the ancient civilizations, but soon the Islamic Empire brought forth its own towering achievements in science, literature and the arts.

As in all other human empires, the seeds of decline were already sprouting when this empire was apparently at its zenith. Despite the remarkable system of communications radiating from Baghdad, effective power could not be exerted over the more distant provinces for long. In Egypt and in eastern Persia, authority was delegated to local commanders who made themselves autonomous. The Arabs who had earlier supplied the vanguard of the imperial forces felt alienated from their new arabized rulers and no longer enlisted, so the caliph took to importing Turkish slave-boys known as Mamlukes from what is now Soviet Turkestan to be trained as soldiers who would maintain the security of the empire. Although speaking Turkish, the Mamlukes were not all ethnic Turks but included Kurds, Mongols and other central Asian peoples. These mercenaries made
effective soldiers, but they soon realized their ability to seize control for themselves. In 861 they assassinated the caliph in Baghdad and set up a military dictatorship. In 867 a Turk named Ibn Tulun seized power in Egypt. He easily occupied Syria and once again brought it into an association with Egypt. This was to last, with intermissions, until the whole region came under the domination of the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the sixteenth century.