The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (3 page)

I knew no Arabic at the time, and Awad’s Japanese was better than his English, which meant he knew ten Japanese words useful in equestrian matters rather than only five. And yet friendships don’t really begin in talk, but rather with watching how someone else fills space and how the world repays that charisma. I imagine this is the main ingredient in women’s intuition, and for men it is what makes us follow other men. And so I admired Awad even if all I knew about him was how he was with horses.

In time, of course, we talked. He had few opinions about the United States, and shrugged his shoulders when I asked if he knew where Green Bay, Wisconsin, was. Because that’s a Green Bay Packers cap you’re wearing, I told him. Eventually I gave him a Yankees cap to replace it, a curiosity he seemed to appreciate given New York’s place in Arab history now. Obviously, Awad knew nothing about baseball, and neither did he care for any other sport, not even soccer, an Egyptian passion, or indeed any pursuit besides horsemanship. It was not just a sport, though it was the best of sports; it was a way of being in the world, learning how to master what parts of an environment you could control and how to use fear, real physical terror, as well as fear
of contingency and chance, to your advantage, for the animal, as an ally or an agent of nature indifferent to man’s success or failure, can sense both mastery and fear.

The horse I rode was Amina, a small gray mare with some Arabian blood, a type of mutt that the Egyptians call
baladi
, or “country,” a word that refers to virtually anything, good or bad, that is authentically Egyptian. She was bred for the desert, her head alert in either direction and her nostrils flared, as though she had discerned the ghost scent of old enemies. She was carrying Assad’s foal, which left her doubly handicapped that day, for while I weighed less than Awad, my teacher was by far the superior rider. The race started abruptly. We reached a flat stretch that seemed to go for a mile or so, Awad said,
“Yalla
, go,” and all of a sudden I was watching Assad’s haunches from more than two lengths behind. This continued for about a quarter of a mile, when Amina decided she would not let me make her lose. Awad looked over at us one more time before we ran past him and did not relinquish the lead.

Awad’s cap had fallen off during the race, so after finishing, he turned back to retrieve it. I watched him dismount and bend down to scoop the blue hat out of the sand while he yanked on Assad’s reins so tightly it struck me that we were in trouble if the animal bolted, and it made me tired to think of immensity like the desert’s. An Arabian who only knows the desert is unlikely to willingly leave its owner’s side for long, but these animals, tended by any number of farmhands, had their fealty fraternized out of them, and in any case loyalty didn’t seem to be one of the manifest qualities God had bestowed on the haughty stallion. If he left, he’d run into other horses eventually, maybe a pack of flea-bitten mares rented out by tourists from one of the
baladi
stables by the Pyramids, or his pride would just keep driving him farther away and into the desert.

The farther you get from the Pyramids, the cleaner the desert becomes, void of the refuse from generations of tourists, travelers,
and conquerors, the uncurated museum of the dunes, where the trash from Napoleon’s troops mixes with candy wrappers scattered by a Russian tour group the day before. Awad threw a spent match in the sand, lit his cigarette with another, and then leaned over the two animals to light one for me. We walked through the
gebel
, or “mountains,” as he called the high dunes of the desert, smoking in silence.

From this vantage point, I could see the road to the farm in the far distance, lined with tall date palms casting their shade across the narrow dirt road, surely one of the most beautiful places on earth, even if the corpses of oxen, horses, and donkeys filled the canal by the roadside. At some recent point in their five- or six-millennia-long history, the inhabitants of the Nile River valley learned to become ashamed of discarding their dead animal labor in the water supply, but instead of relinquishing the habit, they found it easier, or perhaps just less abject, to discourage tourists from photographing these liquid graveyards. The canal ended about a mile before a military base, which was also forbidden to photograph, forbidden by law, because an army that fights wars against its own people must keep many secrets. Awad and I kept the horses at a walking pace until we came upon a sun temple; it was from some period, I don’t know which, in pharaonic history, unattended like most of the antiquity scattered throughout Egypt, and in ruins.

In English poetry, there is a genre of contemplating ruins that starts right around the beginning of the colonial era, when Europeans first became fascinated by all things Oriental, with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818). The narrator meets a “traveller from an antique land” who tells of a large monument in the desert “half sunk,” bearing the inscription “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” The poem is set in Egypt, the colossal statue is of Ramses II, and the irony is that to
look on
this shattered monument is not to fear its
visage of cold command
, but rather to
despair
that all earthly ambition must meet the same desolate end.

Shelley’s poem, like most of the subsequent efforts it inspired, is a comment on power, the vanity of men, and the passing of civilizations. But in Arabic poetry this stopping at the ruins, or
wuquf al-aüal
, begins more than a millennium before, in the pre-Islamic era, or the
jahiliya
, the age of pagan ignorance, and Imru al-Qays is credited as the poet who first employed the conceit. Qays, according to the Prophet of Islam, was the greatest of the Arabs’ poets—and their leader into the hellfire.

The poet was a pagan and a prodigal, part Hamlet and part Prince Hal, a king’s son who, as Qays’s famous
mu’allaqa
, or “suspended ode,” makes clear, spent much of his time chasing women. One of the poem’s most colorful scenes, once described as “the most indecent verses ever spoken by any Arab poet,”
¹
takes place when Qays is making love to another man’s woman while she is tending to her infant child. In the same poem, he has slaughtered his camel for a group of young maidens, and while preparing the feast, the girls play catch with the animal’s innards,
as white as Damascene silk.
The rare beauty of this strange and gruesome episode derives from the fact that Qays proposed such a thing was beautiful and made it so.

Qays’s stopping by the ruins is not a moral dirge about the capricious nature of temporal power, and there is no irony here, but only flesh and love, tenderness and longing. He comes upon a deserted camp, the tents are packed away, the tribesmen are gone and with them his beloved, the fires are extinguished, and only their ashes remain. Qays is thinking not of death and the passage of time but of life and passion, and so his poem begins with an ending,
al-atlal
, “the ruins.”

These are among the most famous verses in all of Arabic poetry. “Stop, and let us weep for the memory of a lover and a dwelling.” The
imperative is in the dual case as he is addressing two figures, attendants who eventually come to rebuke him for his self-pity and remind him of his many other conquests. His interlocutors go unnamed in the poem, though one gloss, my favorite, suggests the two are his sword and his mount, apt companions for the poet known as the Wandering King.
²

Qays’s father disapproved so keenly of his son’s pursuits-women, wine, and song—that he is supposed to have tried once to have him killed. Perhaps to plague him further, on his deathbed Qays’s father charged the poet with avenging his death. The old man had been assassinated, and as he lay dying, he sent a messenger to inform the poet that he had chosen him rather than his brothers to perform the vendetta. Qays did not relish the burden of his father’s blood, but meant to honor it nonetheless. “Wine today,” he supposedly said, giving rise to one of the most famous aphorisms in Arabic literature, “tomorrow business.” His revels lasted a week, after which he swore off all pleasures and vowed not to rest until he took his revenge.

“That’s Khaled bin Laden’s house,” Awad said. He brought Assad to a halt and pointed to a large ranch at the bottom of the dunes where a strip of green divided the desert from Cairo in the distance. Awad saw my expression change and explained that Khaled was not like his famous brother. “He’s a good man and an excellent horseman. He raises Arabians.”

There is a story about Arabians relating how once after a long journey the Prophet of Islam turned his horses out to drink, but before they reached the water, he called for them to come back to him, and only five mares returned. The old Arabs preferred mares to stallions on account of their steady demeanor and quiet calm when preparing to ambush an enemy, so these five became Muhammad’s chosen,
al-khamsa
, “the five,” believed to be the bases of the five major strains of the Arabian horse. This foundation story tying the origins of the modern breed to the Prophet of Islam is of extremely dubious
authenticity, but its popularity says something about the significance of lineage, affiliation, and legacy to the Arabs.

 T
he strength of any society depends on its group cohesion, or what the fourteenth-century North African-born historian Ibn Khaldun described in his masterwork,
Al-Muqaddima
, as
assabiya.
Once
assabiya
starts to fade, the regnant civilization becomes easy pickings for a younger one still adhering to its martial ethos. As a result, history for Ibn Khaldun is an unbroken cycle of strong horses, not one Ozymandias but columns of them, one after another rising in the desert to replace his predecessor and rule until he, too, is put down by a more vital force.

This is the ethos driving jihad, but shorn of the jihad’s triumphalist, religious rhetoric. Ibn Khaldun was a good Muslim and no doubt believed that armies of the
umma
were able to push far into Byzantium, Persia, North Africa, southern Europe, and India because, as Muhammad said, Muslims were the best of nations, enjoining good and forbidding evil. But in Ibn Khaldun’s work, God is beside the point; he is not the agent of history but a narrative detail, the protagonist of one story that manages to motivate groups of men to kill and die.

The sacred book of the Arabs is the Quran, a difficult text written in an Arabic rarely spoken by most Arabs, except for the men of religion. Even for them, understanding and explicating some parts of the book require them to rely on certain passages from pre-Islamic poetry. This poetry was part of the pagan tradition that Islam was meant to replace, but without it Islam is incomprehensible, both as a text and as a cultural phenomenon. The message, as its audience is reminded several times, is an Arabic Quran, and it was revealed to an Arabian prophet. The same is true for Al Qaeda, as it cannot rightly be understood without accounting for its Arab roots, a tradition steeped in heroes, horses, and poetry that existed long before Islam.

That doesn’t mean that bin Laden or any of his colleagues really intend to drag the
umma
or anyone else back to the seventh century. Al Qaeda is a military and political initiative to Islamize modernity, a concept espoused by almost every Islamist thinker of the last hundred years. And this project is in keeping with the initial thrust of the Quran, which was to transform the Arabs, to Islamize them. Islamization, though, did not mean de-Arabization.

Islam ameliorated some tribal practices, like the burial of infant girls, a custom that Muhammad outlawed; and it codified other Arab customs, like the raid, or
ghazu
, a word bin Laden and his peers regularly use to describe their operations. The
ghazu
was conducted against other raiding tribes, but more profitably against sedentary populations. While the Bedouin traded in livestock that wandered with them—camels, sheep, goats—farmers and merchants engaged in agriculture and industry, and a tribesman’s interaction with these outsiders was not always regulated by tribal custom. More often than not, they were considered fair game.

In Ibn Khaldun’s scheme, the Bedouin and the sedentary represent the two major groupings of civilization. The sedentary have their roots in the nomadic tribe, and the Bedouin’s victories will invariably lead them toward a sedentary condition. Indeed, the raiders’ military and political success is indicated by the extent to which the tribe is afforded luxury in its style of life, its manners, dress, entertainment, food, and drink, and yet these are also signs of its coming demise, for the more the tribe becomes accustomed to the good life, the farther it strays from the warrior ethos that initially motivated it. For a while anyway, the sedentary are capable of defending themselves, and later they hire others to do so, but they are merely postponing their inevitable end, for it is not only the actual fighting skill of the group that makes it strong but also the values that are derived from its young men, who will band together to protect the tribe. Once they lose their group feeling, their
assabiya
, the group is lost, and so one civilization or dynasty or nation falls when
another rises to take its place and destroy it. What’s radical about Ibn Khaldun’s thesis is that he is not merely describing how one group expands at the expense of others, imposing its will with catastrophic consequences for the rest, but also suggesting that for history to have meaning, one tribe, one nation, must be stronger than the others. For if all groups are equal, then everyone is weak. The Islamist project can be understood in these terms: the Islamists want to restore the
umma
to its rightful place in world affairs, to be the strongest tribe. In their attempt to do so, they have reached farther back into the past than the great cultural, political, and military achievements of classical Islamic civilization and even before the revelation of the Quran. Jihad taps Islam at its source, its pre-Islamic roots, in the values of the raider, the
ghazi
, the Arabs.