The Great Arab Conquests (9 page)

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Authors: Hugh Kennedy

BOOK: The Great Arab Conquests
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With a very few exceptions, all adult male Bedouin could be described as soldiers. From an early age they were taught to ride, wield a sword, use a bow, travel hard and sleep rough, finding their food where they could. In conditions of tribal competition there were no civilians. The Bedouin lived in tents, painted no paintings and built no buildings: they are virtually invisible in the archaeological record. They did, however, excel in one major art form: their poetry. The poetry of the Arabs of the
jhiliya
(the period of ‘ignorance’ before the coming of Islam) is a unique and complex art form. Among later Arab critics it has often been held up as a model of poetic form, to be admired rather than imitated. Some modern scholarship has questioned its authenticity, but the general consensus is that at least some of the material offers a witness to the ideals and mindsets of the pre-Islamic Arabs.
 
Later Arab commentators emphasized the central importance of poets to this society. An Arab literary critic writing in the ninth century noted that ‘in the
jhiliya
poetry was to the Arabs all they knew and the complete extent of their knowledge’, and Ibn Rashīq, writing in the mid eleventh century, describes the importance of the poet to his kinsmen:
 
 
When there appeared a poet in the family of the Arabs, the other tribes round about would gather to that family and wish them joy of their good luck. Feasts would be got ready, the women of the tribe would join together in bands, playing on lutes as they did at weddings and the men and boys would congratulate one another: for a poet was a defence to the honour of them all, a weapon to ward off insult to their good name and a means for perpetuating their glorious deeds and establishing their fame for ever.
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The poet, in fact, performed a number of important functions, encouraging tribal solidarity and
esprit de corps
, defending the reputation of his group and preserving their memory for posterity.
 
The poetry is firmly set in the Bedouin desert environment. Much of it adheres to the fairly strict formula of the
qasīda
, a poem of perhaps a hundred lines, spoken in the first person, describing the loves and adventures of the poet, the excellence of his camel, the glories of his tribe or patron. The virtues of which he boasts are the virtues of a warrior aristocracy. He is brave and fearless, naturally, he can endure great hardships, he has admirable self-control and he is an irresistible lover and a great hunter. Poets are often subversive, even outlaw characters, seducing other men’s wives with shameless enthusiasm, and they often see themselves as loners, one man and his camel against the world. There is no sign of formal religion, no mention of a deity, just the power of blind fate, the threatening beauty of the desert landscape.
 
For an example of the battle poetry of the period we can turn to a poem ascribed to Āmir b. al-Tufayl. He was a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad and he and his tribe had pastures in the Hijaz around the city of Tā’if. Much of his life seems to have been spent in battle and, though he himself died a peaceful death, his father and numbers of his uncles and brothers are said to have been slain in tribal conflicts. In one of his poems he revels in a dawn attack on the enemies of his tribe:
 
 
We came upon them at dawn with our tall steeds, lean and sinewy
and spears whose steel was as burning flame
And swords that reap the necks, keen and sharp of edge, kept carefully
in the sheaths until time of need
And war-mares, springing lightly, of eager heart, strongly knit
together, not to be overtaken
We came upon their host in the morning, and they were like a flock
of sheep on whom falls the ravening wolf
And there were left there on ground of them Amr and Amr and
Aswad - the fighters are my witness that I speak true!
We fell on them with white steel ground to keenness: we cut them to
pieces until they were destroyed;
And we carried off their women on the saddles behind us, with their
cheeks bleeding, torn in anguish by their nails.
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Or again,
 
 
Truly War knows that I am her child
And that I am the chief who wears her token in fight.
And that I dwell on a mountain top of glory in the highest honour
And that I render restive and distrest
Mail-clad warriors in the black dust of battle.
And that I dash upon them when they flinch before me,
In an attack more fierce that the spring of a lion
With my sword I smite on the day of battle
Cleaving in twain the rings of the strongest mail.
This then is my equipment - would that the young warrior
Could see the length of days without fear of old age!
Truly the folk of Āmir know
That we hold the peak of their mount of glory
And that we are the swordsmen of the day of battle,
When the faint hearts hold back and dare not advance.
4
 
 
 
These, then, were the values held by many of the Bedouin who participated in the early Muslim conquests. The poets glorify swiftness and strength in battle and the excellence of their riding animals. There is also a strong emphasis on individual valour. The poetic warrior is defending his tribe, laying waste rival tribes; but perhaps most of all he is concerned for his own bravery and reputation. The armies of Islam would have taken into battle many of these same ideals, especially the concern for reputation of both individual and tribe. Consciously or unconsciously, they would have been aware of the warrior poets of the
jhiliya
as role models.
 
This poetry also affected the way in which they remembered the events and hence the way we can attempt to understand them. There is no concern for overall strategy, for a general account of the progress of battle, but endless interest in individuals and their encounters with the enemy.
 
 
While much of Arabia is desert, the peninsula also includes some surprisingly varied landscapes. In the highlands of Yemen in the south-western corner, and parts of Oman in the south-east, high mountains attract enough rainfall to allow permanent agriculture. Here the people lived, as they still do today, in stone-built villages perched on crags, cultivating crops on terraces on the steeply sloping hillsides. The people of the villages were grouped into tribes, like the Arabs of the desert, but they were not nomads. It is impossible to know what proportion of the Arabs who joined the armies of the conquests came from these settled communities. In modern times, the population of small Yemen is almost certainly higher than the whole of vast Saudi Arabia, and we can be certain that many of the conquerors, especially those who went to Egypt, North Africa and Spain, came from groups who were not Bedouin at all but whose families had cultivated their small but fertile fields for generations.
 
The people of the settled south had a very different political tradition from that of the Bedouin of the rest of the peninsula. From the beginning of the first millenium BC, there had been established, lasting kingdoms in this area, and temples built with solid stone masonry, great square monolithic columns, palaces and fortresses, and a monumental script had been developed to record the doings of founders and restorers.
5
This was a society in which taxes were collected and administrators appointed. In the heyday of the great incense trade in the last centuries BC, a whole string of merchant cities existed along the edge of the Yemeni desert, caravan cities through which the precious perfumes, frankincense and myrrh were transported by trains of camels from the rugged southern coast, where the small scraggy trees that produced the precious resins grew, towards Mediterranean ports like Gaza, where the markets were. This was also a society that could organize massive civil-engineering projects like the great dam at Marib. Here, on the sandy margins of the Empty Quarter, the rainwater from the Yemeni highlands was collected and harvested, distributed through an artificial oasis to provide drinking water and to irrigate crops.
 
By the end of the sixth century, when Muhammad began his preaching, the glory days of the south Arabian kingdoms were well in the past. By the first century AD, the incense trade had shifted as improved navigation and understanding of the monsoons meant that the maritime route up the Red Sea became the main commercial thoroughfare. The last of the ancient kingdoms, Himyar, was based not on the old trade routes of the interior but on the towns and villages of highland Yemen. By the late sixth century, Himyar itself was in decay and the great Marib dam had been breached, never to be repaired again, the oasis abandoned to wandering Bedouin. The last dated inscription in the old south Arabian script was set up in 559. With the end of the kingdom of Himyar came foreign rule, first by the Ethiopians from the 530s and then by Persians. Some men could still read the old monumental inscriptions, folk memories remained of old kingdoms, and the final breach in the late sixth century of the Marib dam was recognized as a turning point in the history of the area.
 
There were scattered towns in other parts of the Arabian peninsula and networks of markets and traders. In the hilly areas of the Hijaz in western Arabia there were small commercial and agricultural towns, including Medina and Mecca, and it was the inhabitants of these small Hijazi towns who were the elite of the early Muslim empire. There were settled communities, too, in the great date-growing areas of Yamāma on the Gulf coast. Most of these towns and markets were mainly used for the exchange of the wool and leather of the pastoralists, and for the grain, olive oil and wine that were the main luxuries. From about AD 500, however, a new economic dynamic began to emerge, the mining of precious metals in the Hijaz.
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Why it began at this time, and not before, is unclear: possibly chance discoveries set off a wave of prospecting. Both archaeological and literary evidence show that this mining was increasing in importance around the year 600 and that some of the mines were owned and managed by Bedouin tribes like the Banū Sulaym. The production of precious metals greatly increased the prosperity of the area. Bedouin, or at least some Bedouin, now had enough money to become important consumers of the produce of the settled lands. Groups of merchants emerged to import goods from Syria, setting up networks between the tribes to allow their caravans to pass in peace.
 
The most important of these new trading centres seems to have been Mecca. Mecca is situated in a barren valley between jagged arid mountains, a very discouraging environment for a city, but it seems to have had a religious significance that attracted people. A shrine had grown up around a black meteoritic stone. The people of the town claimed that the shrine had originally been founded by Abraham and that it was already extremely ancient. Around the shrine lay a sacred area, a
haram
, in which violence was forbidden. In this area members of different hostile tribes could meet to do business, exchange goods and information. A commercial fair developed and Bedouin came from far and wide to visit it: shrine and trade were intimately linked.
 
At the end of the sixth century, the shrine and the sacred enclosure were managed by a tribe called Quraysh. They were not nomads but lived in Mecca. They looked after the sanctuary and, increasingly, they organized trading caravans from Mecca to Syria in the north and Yemen in the south. They developed a network of contacts throughout western Arabia and sometimes beyond: some of the leading families were said to have acquired landed estates and property in Syria. These contacts, this experience of trade, travel and the politics of negotiation, were to prove extremely important in the emergence of the Islamic state.
 
The nomads and the merchants and farmers of the settled areas had subtle symbiotic relations. Some tribes had both settled and nomad branches, some groups lived as pastoralists or farmers at different periods, and many did a bit of both. The Bedouin depended on the settled people for any grain, oil or wine they needed. They also depended on them to manage the shrines and fairs where they could meet and make arrangements for the passing of caravans that supplemented their meagre income. In many ways, the Bedouin were used to accepting the political leadership, or at least the political guidance, of settled elites. On the other hand, the settled people needed, or feared, the Bedouin for their military skills. When they were managed as the Ghassānids and Lakhmids managed the Bedouin of the Syrian desert, they could be a useful military support; when mismanaged or neglected, they could be a threat and a source of disruption and mayhem. It was this symbiosis of settled leadership and nomad military power which formed the foundation of the armies of the early Muslim conquests.
 
 
This is not the place to give a full account of the life of Muhammad and his teaching, but some knowledge of his life and achievements is essential for understanding the dynamics of the early conquests. He was born into an honoured but not especially wealthy branch of Quraysh in about 570. In his youth he is said to have made trading expeditions to Syria and to have discussed religion with Syrian Christian monks, but much of the story of his early life is obscured by pious legend. It was probably around 600 that he first began to preach a religion of strict monotheism. The message he brought was very simple. There was one god, Allāh, and Muhammad was his messenger, passing on God’s word, brought to him by the angel Gabriel. He also taught that after death the souls of men would be judged, the virtuous going to heaven, a green and delightful garden, the wicked going to a burning, scorching hell. Muhammad began to attract followers, but he also made enemies. Men did not like to believe that their revered ancestors would burn in hell and, more practically, they saw this new preaching as an attack on the shrine at Mecca and the prosperity it brought. Muhammad found himself increasingly unpopular.

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