The Arabs from Alexander the Great until the Islamic Conquests: Orientalist Perceptions and Contemporary Conflicts 9781463242862

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The Arabs from Alexander the Great until the Islamic Conquests

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The Arabs from Alexander the Great until the Islamic Conquests

Orientalist Perceptions and Contemporary Conflicts

Ayad Al-Ani

gp 2021

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2021 by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. ‫ܓ‬

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2021

ISBN 978-1-4632-4285-5

ISSN 1935-6838

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available at the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ......................................................................... v The disappearing Arabs before Islam: Beyond Orientalism. Preface to the international edition ................................... vii Foreword to the German edition............................................... xiii 1. Introduction to the problem of de-Arabization........................ 1 2. Oriens and Arabia without Arabs? ......................................... 17 3. In search of the Arab koine .................................................... 37 4. Can Non-Europeans think? .................................................... 51 5. The Hellenistic-Roman Orient: Dark design, suppression, forgetting and no explanation? .......................................... 61 5.1 The Hellenistic Orient ................................................ 63 5.2 Roman Arabia and the diocese of Oriens ................... 76 5.3 Rome’s Arab rulers and the problem of “Orientalization”: Julia Domna, Elagabalus and Philip the Arab as seen by historians ......................... 85 5.4 Avidius Cassius, Zenobia, and Mavia: Arab resistance to Rome...................................................... 97 5.5 Changing of the guard: The Ghassānid takeover of the limes ................................................................... 105 5.6 Early historians on the Arabs: The origins of Orientalism and their modern echoes ...................... 112 5.7 From Arabia to Europe ............................................. 123

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6. Yarmūk: The mysterious end of Rome in Oriens ................. 127 7. Taboos: The smooth integration of the Arabs/Semites of the Oriens into the Islamic Umma ................................... 143 8. The Pope of Baghdad ........................................................... 153 9. Orient and Rome? ................................................................ 159 10. Demarcation, new beginnings and displacement .............. 169 11. Transgressions: The “Christian” Qur’an ............................. 179 11.1 Monotheistic trends in Arabic discourse before Islam ......................................................................... 181 11.2 Christian Arab liturgy before Islam and the riddle of Jahili poetry ......................................................... 187 11.3 Political consolidation and its requirements............ 193 12. Conclusion .......................................................................... 203 13. Appendix. Diffusion: Dilmun, Gilgamesh, al-Khidr and the Qur’an – the power of the imaginary in the Arab region ............................................................................... 207 14. Addendum to the German edition: The return of the Oriental ............................................................................ 223 Plates ........................................................................................ 227 Maps ......................................................................................... 231 Bibliography ............................................................................. 235 Index......................................................................................... 257

THE DISAPPEARING ARABS BEFORE ISLAM: BEYOND ORIENTALISM. PREFACE TO THE INTERNATIONAL EDITION

This is not a conventional history book. It is rather a study of the sociology of historical writing about a period that, although quite distant in time (330 B.C. to A.D. 670), still influences political discourse about the Arab world, and especially the relationship between the West and the Middle East. This book focuses on the riddle of the disappearance of the Arabs from history before Islam, their sudden appearance behind the banners of the Prophet, and the powerful and traumatic effect this emergence into world history has had on the relationship between the Arabs and the West. Although the mainstream Western historical narrative does not see the Arabs before Islam as a political or cultural force, or even as members of a defined cultural unit, Arab historians and more traditional Western sources do permit a rather different picture once misguiding or obscuring labels have been removed. In this study, Arabia and the Arabs appear as a region and people that enjoyed considerable linguistic, cultural, religious, and political cohesion centuries before Islam. The appearance of the Prophet was, from this perspective, the culmination of a historical process that had already been long underway – perhaps delayed by Roman interference in the East and the establishment of the Roman diocese of Oriens, but also reinforced by Hellenistic-Roman culture and religious thought. In this scenario, the vii

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rise of Islam is in no way surprising or in need of explanation as a retrospective forgery, as the revisionist school would have it. Uncovering this historical process involves answering two questions: what was the history of the pre-Islamic Arabs under their Hellenistic and Roman rulers, and why has that history disappeared? There is evidence that the Arabs, under different names and labels (Semites, Saraceni, Barbaroi, Indignae…), were in fact a kind of consolidated union with a shared cultural consciousness, although of course not in the form of an Arab nation in the modern sense. The situation was perhaps similar to that of the Germanic tribes, who would not have described themselves as “Germanic” even though they were aware of their shared characteristics, which were also clear to the Romans who fought and colonized them. Although it may seem surprising in the context of contemporary attitudes to the Middle East, this Arab Kulturnation was closely politically and culturally integrated into the Hellenistic-Roman world. Moreover – contrary to the current prevailing view – the Greeks themselves were well aware that a considerable portion of their own culture had originated in the Middle East and Africa. The Greek and Arab regions were by no means antagonistic poles, but rather mutually influencing spheres – as would be expected of cultural systems that had been interacting for many centuries. 1 This allows us to move past the idea of “Orient oder Rom,” the belief that Rome and the East were elements of different historical systems. Instead, we can show that such a belief is the result of current political and cultural circumstances being projected back onto the past. Why did this history disappear? Although the period was certainly no “dark age” with silent sources and scarce archaeological remains, there seems to be a desire to deconstruct the Arab world into smaller elements – local or regional cultures, This academic discussion, or rather battle, between those who emphasize Greek culture’s Aryan or Semitic roots, respectively, has been treated extensively by Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London: Random House 1991), 337ff. 1

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civilizations, and languages – that make it difficult to identify a wider Arab sphere, an area of shared Arab language and culture. The Arab victory over Rome and the loss of the Christian heartland in the Middle East, sealed by the unsuccessful crusades some centuries later, were a traumatic experience for the West. Christianity had to be reimagined and redefined as a Western religion. Suddenly, the joint historical experience of East and West, their common roots and cultural exchanges, became a burden. As Edward Said showed, Arabs needed to be seen as different, as the “Other.” 2 This led to two reactions. First, Arabs and their long history of interaction with the Hellenistic-Roman world had to be suppressed. Second, the Arabs’ military success against Rome and Christianity in the seventh century had to be explained away as an opportunistic seizing of the “critical moment,” or even as the result of dishonest strategies used against an otherwise more sophisticated and culturally and religiously superior power. Arab integration and participation in the Greco-Roman world had no place in this narrative. When the West began to return to the Orient in the 18th century, the imperialist and colonial idea was legitimized by a belief in the superiority of Western culture and religion. Ethnically Arab Roman Emperors, senators and scientists were a clear contradiction and even an impediment in this context, which also saw the rise of an intellectual anti-Semitism that further reinforced the underlying processes and attitudes. Of course, history could not be fully suppressed, and memories remained. To strengthen the idea of Western superiority against a once and perhaps still dangerous adversary, negative images of the pre-Islamic Arabs were absorbed into the narrative of the “Clash of Cultures” introduced by the Orientalist Bernhard Lewis in the 1990s. As this book shows, these negative images are the result of a highly selective approach to historical sources that, in reality, portray a much more nuanced situation. The Arabs appear in these sources as Roman allies and citizens, 2

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 31ff.

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bound to Rome in a difficult and complex relationship in which Christianity played in important role. Edwards Said’s groundbreaking work on Orientalism and its arguments can now be updated: the portrayal of the Arab as the “Other” was a necessary step in the process of muting a thousand years of close interaction between Arab and Greco-Roman culture. The image of Arabs as barbarians draws selectively on historical sources that have been stripped of their context, concealing their writers’ individual circumstances and attitudes towards the Arabs. At the least, this book should make available a fascinating stretch of history that seems to contradict current views of the Western-Arab relationship. What are these powerful sources – we may wonder – that are capable of shaping historical narratives in such a specific, antagonistic way, despite the fact that traditional Western sources were able to admit other explanations? If the writing of history depends – more even than we perhaps wish or imagine – on interpretation, interpretation itself is always molded by the attitudes, values, and motives of the commentator. Moreover, as this book shows, interpretations, once set in motion, are then reinforced by scientific methods that deconstruct the field into smaller pieces, digging deeper into specific subject areas while neglecting the overall historical system and its longue durée. 3 Such conclusions may make us feel uneasy. If such a significant piece of history can be so severely contested and interpreted in so many different ways; if the Arabs themselves seem to be unable to reclaim their history, being for the most part seen as This is something that Said addressed in his responses to his critics, including Albert Hourani, who saw Orientalists in a more neutral role: “I do insist on the prevalence in the [Orientalist] discourse itself of a structure of attitudes that cannot simply be waved away or discounted. (…) I suppose that one can imagine at the limit that a specialist in Ottoman or Fatimid archives is an Orientalist in Hourani’s sense, but we are still required to ask where, how and with what supporting institutions and agencies such studies take place today.” Said, Orientalism, 342.

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outsiders to the Western scientific community, what hope is there for a relationship between the Arab world and the West that is based on mutual appreciation, recognition, and trust? It is our hope that the translation of the original German version of this book may help broaden interest and promote discussion about this historical period. This book would not have been possible without the help and support of Professor Peter Gran, who kept a close eye on the German edition and the debate it provoked. Many thanks also go to my German editors at Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, for their support of this edition.

FOREWORD TO THE GERMAN EDITION In the midst of the turmoil of the Arab Spring, the influential Time Magazine columnist Fareed Zakaria made a remarkable observation. As time went on, the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen only seemed to grow more complicated and harder to define. Faced with their failure to produce an unambiguous democratic success, Zakaria asked himself why the Arab nations have what he called an inherent “democracy deficit.” 1 By asking the question, he was following in the footsteps of well-known Orientalists like Bernard Lewis, who had already speculated that the deficit was related to the political and cultural development of the Arab world 2 (and specifically Arab, rather than Islamic; Muslim countries elsewhere, like Indonesia, do have democratic structures). Zakaria pointed out that the deficit is particularly noticeable in the countries that were conquered by Muhammad’s Muslim armies before the twelfth century: “Lands that the Arabs controlled in the 12th century remain economically stunted today.” 3 This reference to a historical Fareed Zakaria, “A Region at War with its History,” in Time Magazine, 4.16.2012, available online: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,2111248,00.html (as of 08/15/17). 2 Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: OUP, 2002). 3 Zakaria refers to a study by the economist Eric Chaney of the historical factors that led to this predicament: “In areas conquered by Arab armies, by contrast, the use of slave armies meant that military power remained concentrated in the hands of the sovereign. This prevented the emergence of a European-style land1

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event that occurred over nine hundred years ago is remarkable for several reasons. For one thing, it once again illustrates the West’s strong tendency to seek religious or religious-historical explanations for current political phenomena. The high ratio of government spending to GDP in Arab countries is thought to reflect the “historical” influence of the Islamic conquest, but there are plenty of alternative possible explanations. Not least among them is the fact that almost all the Arab nations are postcolonial in structure, and that their governments and ruling classes – in most cases originally installed by the West – have played important roles as nation builders and agents of modernization but are now being re-evaluated by the people. 4 On the other hand, this religious-historical reasoning may not be completely groundless. The rise of Islam and the Arab conquest of the Roman East seems to have triggered something that left deep marks on the Western consciousness, coloring its perception of, and probably also relationship to, the Orient ever since. However the West’s “dismay” is defined or explained, it makes objective analysis of the historical period rather difficult. When we try to understand the historical relationship between the Arabs in Oriens and the Arabian Peninsula and the Romans, in whose “backyard” the new Islamic religion was born, we encounter an interesting phenomenon: the Arabs of the pre-Islamic period are often represented in Western historical writing as an obscure group that only appeared relatively soon before their victory over the Roman Empire, and that previously had had little significance or even reality either inside or outside the empire. The history of the Arabs is all too often invisible, blurred, and unclear: it has been “de-Arabized.” For that very reason, however, the success of the Arab conquest and the sudden emergence of the Arabs into world history are hard to explain. ed aristocracy and the concomitant development of civil society.” Eric Chaney, “Democratic Change in the Arab World, Past and Present,’ Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2012, 363–414, here 382f. 4 On the role of the ruling class in modernization, see Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale: YUP, 1968).

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There are several highly divergent accounts of this phase of Arab history, roughly classifiable into Western and Arab perspectives (this distinction is not meant to be a precise ethnic one; there are Arab and Western scholars in both camps). The “Arab” view is that this period of history was one long, steady development that began three thousand years before Christ in Yemen. The tribes who migrated north from this Arab homeland subsequently founded many civilizations with clear similarities in language and culture. In this view, the Arab conquest of Oriens simply re-revealed an identity that had long been obscured or pushed into the background by Roman and Persian rulers. In the Western account, on the other hand, these migrations were “Semitic,” and the tribes who traveled out of southern Arabia or another “proto-Semitic” homeland were the ancestors of a range of different languages and cultures that had little to do with one another. In this view, the Arabs are just one among many Semitic civilizations, and moreover one that came late to the scene and then managed, by taking advantage of “critical moments” and exploiting the momentum of their own religion, to defeat Rome and the Sassanids and to create their own global empire, writing system, culture, and religion. Indeed, some of these achievements (writing, poetry, religion) are even seen as a retroactive “invented tradition” intended to give the new Islamic nation appropriately deep historical roots. There is a vicious circle at work here. The de-Arabization and deconstruction of Arab history have rendered many historical developments inexplicable, leading some Western scholars to turn to revisionist theories in an attempt to explain them. Arab historians do not share this way of looking at history. The two accounts grow ever further apart, each travelling down its own path. Communication and exchange between the two seems ever more unlikely. And so we find ourselves confronted by the paradox that the Arab element is often given more prominence, and is less “atomized” and deconstructed, in the works of earlier Western scholars than those of modern historians, whose historical perspective, filtered as it is through the lens of numerous sub-disciplines, prevents them from achieving a sufficiently broad and integrative view.

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These two phenomena – the reliance on religion or the history of religion to explain current problems, and the often mysterious and controversial substance of such history – are intimately related. The history of the Arab world is, for a variety of reasons, very important to the West. We suggest that this fact may have had, and indeed has had, a massive influence on the construction and interpretation of that history. The Western attitude may ultimately be rooted in a form of “defensive reaction” or perhaps even a “trauma” caused by the loss of Christianity’s original homeland. This study will show how that defensive reaction was able to build on the tendencies of the classical historians, who, in response to periods of Arab dominance within the Roman government and Rome’s inability to deal with the increasing autonomy of the Arabs, warned of the dangers of “Orientalization.” Their attitude towards the Arabs was one of suspicion and probably also aversion. Based mainly on Western and Arabic secondary literature, this study seeks to counter the de-Arabization of pre-Islamic Arab history by presenting a more nuanced picture of the historical development of the Arab world. It focuses particularly on the period stretching from the conquest of Arabia by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C., via the reorganization of the Roman province of Oriens by Pompey in 64/63 B.C., up to the Arabs’ almost overnight victory over the Romans at the Battle of Yarmūk seven hundred years later, on August 20, 636. A succinct account of the history of the Arabs in the Roman East before the Islamic conquest reveals the long development of the Arab peoples. This study may help draw attention to this period of Arab history. If it also manages to paint a picture of the shared history of Arabs and Romans that can provide an alternative to conventional Orientalist clichés and prejudices, then it will more than have fulfilled its goal.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEM OF DE-ARABIZATION In the afternoon of 20 August 636, the Roman East, the diocese of Oriens, fell under Arab control. 1 After a five-day battle on the banks of the river Yarmūk, near the city of Jābiya in present-day Syria, the Arab troops broke through the entire front line and chaos swept through the Byzantine army. The Romans’ retreat was barred, however, as the Muslims occupied the bridge of alRuqqād behind the enemy army. Several Roman horsemen fell down the steep slopes of the wadi while fleeing and drowned. Others surrendered and were massacred on the spot. 2 After a series of battles in Rome’s eastern provinces that had involved Byzantine Oriens (East) extended from the Taurus to Sinai and included Roman provinces in modern Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Iraq. Originally it also included Egypt, but it was split off around A.D. 380: Irfan Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2006), xvi. The term “Byzantium” is, of course, a more recent one. By and large, Arab observers at the empire’s periphery accepted the grandiose image projected by Byzantium, which viewed its history as an extension of the histories of ancient Rome and Greece and used the term “Rūm”. See Yasmine Zahran, The Lakhmids of Hira. Sons of the Water of Heaven (London: Stacey International, 2009), 15; Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 2004), 21ff. In this book the terms Rome and Byzantium are used interchangeably. 2 Philip K. Hitti, History of Syria, Including Lebanon and Palestine, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1957), 416. 1

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heavy losses on both sides, this time almost no prisoners were taken. Although it took some time, eventually the whole of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine had been conquered by the Arab troops. In the coastal cities of Syria and Palestine there were some longer-lasting pockets of resistance, but the end of Rome in the East was in sight. Even the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, who had reconquered the region from the Persians with great difficulty only a short time before, was resigned to his defeat: “Peace unto thee, O Syria, and what an excellent country this is for the enemy.” 3 With the loss of the provinces of the diocese of Oriens and the severing of the land connection between Byzantium and Roman North Africa, it was inevitable that the provinces there would eventually be lost as well, although that process took several more years. The battle of Yarmūk was the culmination of a worldhistorical event comparable in scale to the campaigns of Alexander the Great, and also the beginning of the separation of Arabia from Europe. 4 For almost a thousand years, a large part of the Arab world had been under Greek and later Roman or Byzantine control. Although some historians insist that the Arabs were never fully integrated into the Hellenistic and Roman world, this is belied by the numerous Arab Caesars, scientists, and politicians, as well as the unique blend of Arab and GrecoRoman elements in the region’s culture and religion. This deep connection to Rome also manifested itself from the fourth century on in the proliferation of Christianity in Oriens. Today, when cultural and religious differences between East and West are all too often in the spotlight, this long shared history is remarkable, paradoxical, and hard to fully understand. It seems generally difficult to describe, classify, or analyze the Arabs of antiquity. The difficulty, if not impossibility, of getting a clear view of the Arabs at that time is due to the “deCited in Abu-l Abbas Ahmad ibn Jabir al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State. Being a Translation of the Kitâb Futûḥ al-Buldân, translated from the Arabic by Philip K. Hitti (New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2002), 210. 4 Hitti, History of Syria, 420. 3

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Arabization” of Arab history. Modern Western historical scholarship often gives the impression that the Arab troops advancing out of the Arabian Peninsula encountered a mostly Greek- and Aramaic-speaking population in Oriens, so that they appear as invaders of an ethnically largely foreign area rather than a region that was predominantly inhabited by Roman Arabs. 5 As a consequence of de-Arabization, Western observers often tend to underestimate the significance and the political role of the Arabs in the Roman Empire. In a recently published book by the historian Greg Fisher about Rome’s Arab allies, the foederati, Fisher comes to the conclusion that they were “more outside than inside,” in other words that they were not an essential component of the Roman Empire, and that historical works that describe the Arabs as a critical factor in Oriens exaggerate their importance. 6 Of course, the Arab element cannot entirely be suppressed, but in cases where Arab ethnicity is undisputed – such as the foederati whose Christian faith bound them to Byzantium and who defended its borders, and of course also the Arab nomads who constantly tried to break down those borders and posed an everpresent threat to Oriens – we find ourselves confronted by a whole array of negative, Orientalist characterizations that have their origin in Roman or Byzantine historical works. If such characterizations seem strangely familiar to us, it is because they have been adopted by modern historians and political scientists. These images of ‒ at best ‒ “superficially Romanized Arab barbarians” apparently still have such descriptive power that they can be usefully employed in the ongoing Arab-Israeli For example, Hoyland: “Since the Arab occupation of the Middle East that began ca. 640 proved to be permanent, this date is usually taken to mark a turning point in the history of this region and its peoples. To the degree that domination by a different ethnic group [sic!] (…) must have had severe repercussions, this periodization does have some validity.” Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It. A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1997), 12. 6 Greg Fisher, Between Empires: Arabs, Romans and Sassanians in Late Antiquity (New York: OUP, 2011), 29. 5

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conflict, for example. 7 This “Negativfolie” 8 is so powerful that it does not only conceal the important role of the Arab Romans and foederati in the East, but is also still being used centuries later to describe the present-day Arab world. The American scholar Albert Glock pointed out the almost completely negative characterization or negation of the history of the Arab population in this region: “There can be no doubt that this hiatus is a function of the foreign excavators’ strong cultural bias against the Muslim tradition. The negative view of the native population, reflected in the accounts of the pilgrims since the fourth century A.D., reached its apogee in the nineteenth century travel writings that emphasized the duplicity of the inhabitants and the squalor of their living conditions.” 9 The process of de-Arabization means that the Arab success at Yarmūk throws up some important and rather unsettling questions. It is unclear how a previously almost non-existent group could suddenly appear in world history, reduce the mighty Roman Empire by two thirds of its territory and shortly afterwards defeat the other superpower of the time, the Iranian Sassanids: “At the time of its occurrence Persia and Byzantium were the only two world powers; the Arabians were nobody. Who living then could have guessed that such a happening was

Bus passengers in New York and San Francisco were recently able to read the following phrase in an advertisement: “In any war between the civilised man and the savage, support the civilised man”. On this campaign see Hamid Dabashi, “The war between the civilised man and the savage. A provocative ad which debuted last month in San Francisco is making its way to New York subways today,” Aljazeera, September 24, 2012, https://www.aljazeera.com/ opinions/2012/9/24/the-war-between-the-civilised-man-and-the-savage (as of 01/27/2021). 8 Gudrun Krämer, “Unterscheiden und Verstehen: Über Nutzen und Missbrauch der Islamwissenschaften,” in Abbas Poya & Maurus Reinkowski (Eds.), Das Unbehagen in der Islamwissenschaft: Ein klassisches Fach im Scheinwerflicht der Politik und der Medien (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2008), 263–270, here 265. 9 Albert Glock, “Cultural Bias in the Archeology of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies XXIV, no. 2, Winter 1995, 48–59, here 51. 7

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within the realm of possibility?” 10 This problem – which is often, although unsatisfactorily, discussed – is even more remarkable given that in the eyes of many Western observers, the Arabs, as an ethnic and demographic group, were not a significant political force in Oriens, or even in Arabia, prior to the invasion. This “Western” account inevitably generates other difficult questions, such as how the holy book of Islam, the Qur’an, could have been created in all its linguistic complexity with almost no significant literary antecedents, and, furthermore, in a Semitic language that, according to many linguists, only found expression in a script of its own at a relatively late stage. Here, too, Western scholars have tried to find answers such as that proposed by the scholar Christoph Luxenberg (his name is a pseudonym). He solves the “puzzle of the language of the Qur’an” by suggesting that many parts of it were composed long after the time of Muhammad, and moreover that it is riddled with Aramaic vocabulary, on the basis that the “sudden” appearance of the Arabic is otherwise extremely difficult to explain. 11 This then begs the question of where the Arabs in Oriens and the Arabian Peninsula came from, how they spread out, how their language and script arose, and, above all, what their self-image, their identity was. The first thing to be confronted as we attempt to answer these questions is the singular concept of the “Semitic languages.” The term “Semite” was coined by the German scholar August Ludwig von Schlözer in 1781, and has since then developed into a theoretical construct that sees the Hitti, History of Syria, 409. This assessment seems still valid: “What generated this force is as obscure now as it was in the beginning, and historians have been impeded by the tendentious character of most of the sources for this great upheaval, as well as by their own prejudices.” Glen W. Bowersock. The Crucible of Islam, (London: HUP, 2017), 1. 11 Christoph Luxenberg, Die Syro-Aramäische Lesart des Koran. Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache (Berlin: Verlag Hans Schiler, 2007); see also Luxenberg, “‘Licht ins Dunkel’. Der Koran als philologischer Steinbruch. Ein Gespräch mit Christoph Luxenberg,” in Streit um den Koran. Die LuxenbergDebatte: Standpunkte und Hintergründe, ed. Christoph Burgmer (Berlin: Verlag Hans Schiler, 2004), 18–38. 10

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various Semitic languages as descendants of an original UrSemitic language, which itself is unattested and must be reconstructed. As for who these Ur-Semites were and where they came from, many scholars identify the (southern) Arabian Peninsula as a possible homeland from which various migration waves, starting in 3,500 B.C., spread north towards Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. In response, some Arab scholars ask why it is necessary to invent a new group named after a mythical Biblical figure, when on the basis of the proto-Semites’ probable homeland in the Arabian Peninsula it seems perfectly reasonable to speak of Arab groups using different Arabic dialects. This is even more pertinent when we consider the astonishing fact that the Arabic language, which according to some Western scholars was the last of the Semitic languages to make an appearance in Middle Eastern culture, 12 is, nevertheless, the one that is closest to “Ur-Semitic.” 13 The proximity of all the Arab/Semitic groups naturally led to constant interchange between their “languages” and cultures, as well as adaptation to the outside influences that surrounded them. Seen from this perspective, it is possible to put forward another version of events that counteracts the one created by deArabization, according to which the Arabs, as “latecomers,” could only co-opt and copy the achievements of other civilizations. On the basis that, long before Muhammad, the Arabian Peninsula and Oriens were largely Arab regions, inhabited by related ethnic groups with similar dialects, many Arab historians see the Arabic/Semitic language and culture as the product of a long, continuous line of development, rather than something that just appeared out of nowhere, abruptly and inexplicably, in the fifth or sixth century. 14 In this new account, mysterious pro12 Bertold Spuler, “Die Ausbreitung der arabischen Sprache,” in Bertold Spuler (Ed.), Semitistik. Dritter Band (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1954), 245–253, here 245. 13 Hitti, History of Syria, 35; Theodor Nöldeke, Die semitischen Sprachen. Eine Skizze, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: C. H. Tauchnitz, 1899). 14 “Without providing any solid proof, many Western scholars portray the structurally sophisticated and vocabulary-rich classic Arabic language, as a post-

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cesses of composition and editing are no longer necessary to explain the Qur’an, which can now be understood as the exceptional, dramatic culmination of thousands of years of cultural, linguistic, and religious development. This need not imply that there was no exchange between or mixing of different dialects, scripts, and religious ideas. On the contrary, the Qur’an itself makes reference to its own relationship to both Christian and Jewish elements, and Arab scholars recognize that it contains many words from other Arabic dialects. But the simple fact that detailed research is necessary in order to clarify whether a certain word in the Qur’an is of Aramaic or South Arabian origin demonstrates the close relationship between these “languages.” In simplified terms, the difference between the “Arab” and “Western” positions seems to be that in the Arab account there was, despite all their differences, a sort of cultural and linguistic sphere or shared ethos uniting the Semitic peoples. Thus, by casting off Byzantine and Persian rule and the associated processes of national consolidation and centralization, the Arab conquests of the seventh century reinforced, or rather completed, the already essentially Arab character of the region. This view does not just reject the idea that the Qur’an is the product of a mysterious and complex editing process involving retroactive Arabizing falsifications, but also points to a long civilizing process – often concealed and inaccurately labelled by Western observers – that Islam brought to the forefront. The narrative of de-Arabization has affected our understanding of all of Arab history, right from its earliest phases. As we shall see, although the discourse of de-Arabization never toIslamic creation. And others go even further: knowing such claims would not stand against the clear evidence of the highly developed language of the Quran (let alone the eloquent pre-Islamic Arabic poetry) they resort to spreading unsubstantiated theories claiming that both the authenticity of the language of the Quran and origins are questionable.” Saad D. Abulhab, DeArabizing Arabia: Tracing Western Scholarship on the History of the Arabs and Arabic Language and Script (New York: Blautopf Publishing, 2011), 6.

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tally concealed the facts, it nevertheless rendered distinctively Arab elements (people, language, script, religion) and lines of development unrecognizable. It did so by undertaking a “deconstruction” of historical knowledge – not seen anywhere else in the world – that meant these shared features were never combined into a coherent body of knowledge. In this context, some Arab historians reproach their Western colleagues for describing (Arab) tribes as separate “peoples,” even though they occupied a geographical region that contained no natural barriers like rivers or mountains. Above all, however, they criticize the designation of Arab/Semitic dialects as “languages” and the way that the similarities between them have been ignored, 15 despite the fact that the “Semitic” languages are all very closely related and that switching from one Semitic language to another has always been relatively easy. 16 Surprisingly, this similarity was generally accepted in early Western research on the Arabic/Semitic dialects. For example, the Biblical scholar William Albright observed that from 2000 B.C. on, a largely uniform language with various dialects had developed in the region between the Indian Ocean and the Taurus Mountains and from the Zagros Mountains to the Egyptian border. 17 Nowadays, however, the USPalestinian historian Irfan Shahîd is criticized for describing the South Arabian city of Nağran as Arab when its inhabitants spoke Sabean. 18 This creates the impression that Sabean was a completely different language from Arabic, and not simply another

For a summary of this position see Muḥammad ’As‘ad: Mustashriqūn fī ‘Ālam al-’Āthār [Orientalists in the world of the antiquities] (Kuwait: Arab Scientific Publishers, 2011), 154ff; ’Aḥmad Dāwūd, Tārīkh Sūriyā al-Qadīma, Taṣḥīḥ wa-lTaḥrīr [Ancient history of Syria. Corrections and exemptions] (Damascus: Dar Al Safady, 2003), 63–146. 16 Spuler, “Die Ausbreitung,” 247. (Own translation). 17 W. F. Albright, “Recent Progress in North-Canaanite Research,” BASOR 70, Apr. 1938, 18–24, here 21. 18 Theresia Hainthaler, Christliche Araber vor dem Islam (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 147. 15

1. INTRODUCTION

9

dialect. 19 Language also plays a central role in Fisher’s analysis. He is reluctant to admit the existence of the Arab element at all, and even then only from the fifth century A.D. Because he denies the Arabic/Semitic linguistic continuum, and instead classifies these related dialects as separate languages, he is able to conclude that: “There is very little evidence for Old Arabic (…). On the infrequent occasions where Arabic was written, it was, before the sixth century, commonly written in scripts normally associated with other languages [sic!]. These were usually scripts of local prominence such as Dadanitic, Sabaic, Nabatean, and possibly Hismaic.” 20 This is a problematic, although not uncommon, way of thinking: the equation of language with script. This often leads to incoherence, as when Jan Retsö claims that although there was an (Old) Arabic language, it used other Arabic/Semitic scripts and its existence therefore cannot be verified. This and other ways of thinking contribute to the basic thrust of de-Arabization: that the many Semitic peoples of Arabia and Oriens were not necessarily Arabs, and that the Arabs themselves only came into existence ‒ with startling abruptness ‒ shortly before the emergence of Islam. On the other hand, if the Arab factor is given more weight, and if the difference between the Arab/Semitic peoples is treated as a difference between groups who spoke various related dialects and who were generally aware of their similarities, it is much easier to explain the relatively “simple conquest” 21 and the rapid linguistic and political assimilation of the population of Roman Oriens into the new Islamic empire. Seen from this point of view, Yarmūk merely completed a process that had already started in Babylonian times, namely that of giving political and religious substance and structure to the already Arab character of the region. 22 19 On the close relationship between Sabean and Arabic see e.g. Reynold A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, 3rd ed. (1907; repr. Delhi: Adam Publishers, 2008), xvi. 20 Fisher, Between Empires, 135–7. 21 Hitti, History of Syria, 417. 22 Ibid., 457.

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If we treat the “Arabization” of Oriens as something that had been taking place in various ways long before Yarmūk, we must be able to explain how the Arabs – veiled under various tribal names and terms like “Syrians,” “Arameans,” “Indignae,” “Saracens,” “Tayaye,” and “Rhomaioi” – were able to be part of the Hellenistic and eastern Roman world for almost a thousand years without losing their identity. In what follows, we will see that the Arabs were indeed a significant part of the GrecoRoman world. They were integrated into the political system of Rome as Roman citizens, in the case of the Rhomaioi, or as Arab tribes allied with Rome in the East, in the case of the foederati. This bond was so strong that many Arabs remained Christian after the victory of Islam, and some foederati even left the Levant to settle in Roman Anatolia. Nevertheless, the Arab peoples under Roman rule did not relinquish their “Semitic” roots any more than did the Jews, who were subject to the same Romanizing pressure and who also spoke Aramaic as a lingua franca without thereby becoming Arameans. In contrast to other groups, the Arabs also had the advantage that their contact with their “original Semitic homeland” in the Arabian Peninsula was never interrupted, and that there were always intruders and migrants from Arabia drifting around Oriens, replenishing and strengthening the Arab element. 23 The process of de-Arabization and deconstruction continues in modern historical writing. The logic of academia means that once they have been defined as such, “languages” and “civilizations” become increasingly isolated specialist subjects. Although many historians speak of great advances in the analysis of preIslamic history, 24 there are rather few actual new facts. For example, Nabatean culture in Saudi Arabia seems to be attracting

Irfan Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs. A Prolegomenon to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1984), 11. 24 Without specifying what these advances are. For example, Hainthaler, Christliche Araber, 11: “Man kann geradezu von einer Explosion der Erkenntnisse über diese ‘Remote Corner of the Roman Empire’ in den letzten 30 Jahren sprechen.” 23

1. INTRODUCTION

11

a certain amount of interest at the moment, 25 while pre-Islamic sites in Iraq, 26 the Gulf Region, 27 and Syria 28 are often neglected or even threatened. Ultimately, it is not the evidence itself that seems to determine historical knowledge, but rather how the evidence is (re)interpreted – and interpretation is always subject to cultural and political influences. Moreover, researchers tend not to join forces in a way that would allow integrated interpretation. This leads to a situation where significant works by modern Western scholars make almost no reference at all to contemporary Arab historians, instead restricting their use of Arabic sources to classical writers like al-Balādhurī and al-Ṭabarī, who have been translated into English and French. 29 In fact, such writers were not actually Arabs at all, and lived centuries after the death of Muhammad: “They originated from many different countries from Morocco and Spain to Persia, but none of them were nomads from Arabia, the people who had carried out the conquests. The historians of the Abbaside period, therefore, were not themselves familiar with the life of the early bedouin conquerors (…).” 30 It seems that Western and Arab historical discourses exist in parallel worlds, without mutually enriching each other. Modern Arab historical writing about the pre-Islamic era is barely acFabrice Demarthon, “A rediscovered city,” CNRS International Magazine: http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/1235.html (as of 03/27/2017). 26 For example, the pre-Islamic city of Hīra in Southern Iraq, the capital of the Lakhmids, has become a victim of the new airport for the nearby city of Najaf: Mohammad Al-Harissi, “Iraq Christian heritage sites lie neglected,” AFB, 5/27/2012, https://www.arabstoday.net/en/317/iraq-christian-heritage-siteslie-neglected (as of 10/01/2021). 27 Gulf Daily News, 24/7/2013, “Protecting Bahrain’s Christian heritage,” http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Print.aspx?storyid=359780 (as of 27/01/2021). 28 The civil war has had a particularly severe impact here: Al Jazeera: “Six Syrian heritage sites declared endangered,” 21/06/2013, https://www.aljazeera.com/ news/2013/6/21/six-syrian-heritage-sites-declared-endangered (as of 27/01/2021). 29 John B. Glubb, The Great Arab Conquests (New York: Prentice Hall, 1963), 8. 30 Ibid. 25

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cepted in the West. When Arab works are not ignored altogether, they are normally rejected as unscientific. This may also be to do with the fact that many publications are only available in Arabic, and that many Arab historians feel obliged to devote themselves to their national cause. The negation of Arab research and historical writing is paradoxically accompanied by enormous interest on the part of Western historians in Arab, especially pre-Islamic, history. Obviously this history is too important to be left to Arab historians. Karl Marx’s statement, cited by Edward Said in the foreword to his study of Western Orientialism, 31 “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented,” still has a certain relevance. 32 Or as the Iraqi historian Sūsa put it in the language of his time: “Every land on earth can write its own history, except that Arab history is written by colonialists and foreigners (…).” 33 Arab historians studying at Western universities often find themselves in a bridging role, forced to walk the fine line between promoting new Arab perspectives on early history on the one hand, and achieving acceptance in the Western Scientific Community on the other. It should also be noted that the “Arab point of view” of early Western-Arab historians like Hitti and Hourani is much more “cautiously” formulated than the more recent one of Shahîd, who, working as he is in the period of the “Clash of Cultures,” must have his work and even his motives subjected to scrutiny. 34 How are de-Arabization and the separation of Western and Arab perspectives maintained? The choice of sites to excavate, as well as selectivity in the collection and bias in the interpretaEdward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). As a matter of form, it should be noted that in the original text (Der achtzehnte Brumaire der Louis Bonaparte, Berlin, 1960, 198), Karl Marx was obviously not referring to “Orientals,” but to French smallholders. 33 ’Aḥmad Sūsa, Al-‘Arab wa-l-Yahūd fī al-Tārīkh [Arabs and Jews in History] (Damascus: Arabi, 1957), 56. 34 However, even Shahîd is not trying to break with the Western establishment but sees himself as an integral part of it. The first volume of his monumental history of the Arabs and Byzantium is dedicated to none other than Nöldeke, who had a certain bias against Arabs. 31 32

1. INTRODUCTION

13

tion of data all play a role. This is strikingly evident in the archaeology and history of Mesopotamia. Eighteenth and nineteenth century historians of the area were predominantly focused on Bible history. This was memorably described by the German scholar Friedrich Delitzsch: “To what end this toil and trouble in distant, inhospitable, and danger-ridden lands? Why all this expense in ransacking to their utmost depths the rubbish heaps of forgotten centuries, where we know neither treasures of gold nor of silver exist? Why this zealous emulation on the part of the nations to secure the greatest possible number of mounds for excavation? And whence, too, that constantly increasing interest, that burning enthusiasm, born of generous sacrifice, now being bestowed on both sides of the Atlantic on the excavations of Babylon and Assyria? One answer echoes to all these questions, ‒ one answer which, if not absolutely adequate, is yet largely the reason and consummation of it all: the Bible.” 35 The history of Palestine suffers under similar, if not even more severe restrictions. The current political conflict there exerts additional pressure on research, as both sides use it to seek historical legitimacy for their claims. Glock criticized this bias very clearly: “In general terms, bias is produced by uneven sampling of total data possibilities. Translated into the practical terms of field archeologists, this means that we excavate and save only what we think is important. Further, it is only what we save that we analyze, classify and describe. Our interpretation thus limits new data to answering old questions.” 36 These pre-determined priorities mean historical research is focused on a few specific areas while neglecting others: “Until 1925, when the first evidence of Pleistocene hominids was uncovered, all excavations focused on biblical sites of interest to Jews and Friedrich Delitzsch, “Babel und Bibel,” speech given on January 13, 1902 to the German Oriental Society in Berlin. Translated by Thomas J. McCormack and William H. Herbert as Babel and Bible (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1902). Delitzsch’s work was also translated into Arabic in 1987. 36 Glock, “Cultural Bias in the Archeology of Palestine,” 49. 35

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Christians (…). Since 1925, the interest of excavators has broadened only slightly.” 37 In practice this means that entire topics find little or no place in research agendas, including the question, so important for this study, of the mixing and integration of Semitic/Arab cultures and the transition from Rome to Islam. 38 The result of this selectivity and bias is that the Arabs are to a great extent squeezed out of the history of Palestine, as Glock laments: “If we are to preserve an understanding of Palestine’s cultural history, we cannot allow the Arab people of Palestine to continue as the losers in the archaeologist’s cultural conquest.” 39 This study considers the “Arab” perspective, according to which Arabs, or Arab/Semitic peoples with various different names and dialects, have always represented a significant force in the Middle East – in other words, not just since the fifth century A.D. For that reason, they were closely integrated into the Roman Empire. The Roman conquest and the restructuring of Provincia Arabia by Pompey “only” delayed the formation of an independent Arab nation by a few centuries. The Arab conquest in the seventh century was relatively “easy” because it was merely completing a process that had been underway since the earliest Arab/Semitic migrations out of the Arabian Peninsula. The concept of the Semitic language conceals the presence of the Arab element and encourages the Western view that the Arabs did not see themselves as an ethnic group and therefore did not have their own identity. However, Islam – according to the Arab view – found it relatively easy to integrate the Hellenized Ibid., 51. “Topics that receive scant attention or are not discussed, and for which data are not usually collected: (…) The transition between the Byzantine and Umayyad and between the two succeeding Islamic periods (…) The distinctive material culture traditions of the polyethnic communities that formed the population base of Palestine in most periods to the present.” Ibid., 53 39 Ibid., 51. For an exhaustive overview of the role of archaeology in the Israeli society and how this discipline has shaped the region’s political imaginations: Nadia Abu El-Haj: Facts on the Ground. Archeological Practice and Territorial SelfFashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: CUP, 2001) 37 38

1. INTRODUCTION

15

Arab culture of Oriens, including its Christian and Jewish inhabitants, under the mantle of Semitic Arabness: the contrasts and differences between these groups were outweighed by their “Arab/Semitic” similarities. Despite many similarities in religion, language, and culture, Arabia and Europe had been almost completely separated by the time of the final failure of the crusades, at the latest. The purpose of this segregation was to establish Christianity, which had lost its religious homeland in the East, as a “new” Western religion. As time passed, Western observers took existing prejudices and attitudes towards the Arabs, which had their origin in the Roman and Byzantine historians, and modernized, adapted, and applied them to contemporary political situations. Modern and Classical discourse alike is often characterized by an anxiety or even fear of the Arabs or the Orient. This fear led naturally to a dismissive attitude that emphasized its own superiority. The deArabization process, moreover, blurred the contours of Arab preIslamic civilization to an ever greater extent. With time, much of the shared history of East and West was forgotten. Recently, this centuries-old, self-perpetuating and self-referential process of Orientalization/de-Arabization has found a home in the discourse of the “Clash of Cultures.” Existing stereotypes are appropriated, strengthened, and applied retroactively to Arab civilization and to that shared history. This book is probably not a history book in the classic sense, as it uses mainly Western and Arabic secondary sources. However, its value may lie in its offer of an integrated perspective on the Arab element in Oriens and Arabia, and in the suggestion of political and cultural factors that might have influenced the way it has been evaluated. Although many of these secondary sources are rigorous in their treatment of the rich and diverse evidence available, their conclusions often end up travelling down well-worn paths that have hopefully been avoided in this study. Nevertheless, there is always an awareness that these interpretations are only interpretations. In this respect it is worth remembering Spencer Trimingham’s commendable modesty in the foreword to his study of Arab Christianity before Islam: “Since this book does not claim to be an historical study in

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any strict sense because the sources for such a study do not exist, but rather an attempt to put into perspective the issue of the influence of Christianity upon the Arabs (…), it is not claimed that any interpretations that have been drawn are anything more than tentative.” 40

40 Spencer Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic Times (Beirut: Libraire du Liban, 1990) xii.

2. ORIENS AND ARABIA WITHOUT ARABS? The main factors responsible for the “disappearance” of the Arabs before Islam seem to be their – from a Western perspective – lack of cultural and political identity and the difficulties involved in delimiting the Arabic language and script. The Arab element rarely comes to the surface in historical accounts of the Roman-Hellenistic period in Oriens. Even within the Arabian Peninsula, the Arab/Semitic heartland, many historians differentiate between Arabs and southern Arabs, claiming that the latter spoke a completely different language and did not see themselves as Arabs at all. In Oriens itself, it is only the Arab tribes that were allied to Rome – the foederati – who are clearly identified as being Arab. Irfan Shahîd, whose work focuses on this group, describes the difficulty of identifying the Arabs: “Although the classical historians who wrote on the history and geography of this region were aware of the ethnic affiliation of these groups, yet they did not normally refer to them by the generic term Arab, but by specific designations. In so doing, these authors reflected the fact that each of these Arab groups had developed its own identity during a long period of historical development, but they also unwittingly obscured the other and larger fact that all these groups belonged to the same ethnic stock and were Arab. This has made the student of the Roman East in this period oblivious of the pervasive Arab presence in the Orient in the first century B.C. (…) Historians in modern times have used various terms to designate the Arabs of the Ori17

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ent in the Roman period, such as Semitic, Aramean and Syrian. Something could be said for the application of these terms in view of the fact that the Arabs were Semites, that they were in some respects Aramaicized, and did in fact live in Syria (…).” 1 This Arab history without Arabs can be partially explained by the fact that Arab identity was diluted under Roman and Hellenistic influence. Naturally, some Arab groups were more able to withstand this pressure than others. The Arab Idumeans, who played an important role in the Orient under their King Herod, were fully absorbed into the Jewish nation. Herod is a good example of how difficult it is to define the ethnic affiliation of individuals. Glen Bowersock criticizes Shahîd for his view that Herod was an Arab: “It is probably not reasonable to include Herod the Great among the Arabs. Josephus takes care to inform us that Herod had an Arab mother. Had he believed that his father, an Idumean, was also an Arab, it seems most unlikely that he would have taken the trouble of singling out the mother for her Arab origin.” 2 On the other hand, Spencer Trimingham, who gives more weight to Herod’s identity as an Idumean, identifies him unambiguously as an Arab: “Herod the Great of Judaea came from another Arab grouping, known collectively as the Idumaeans. The ruling family became Hebraized in certain surface characteristics, but Herod was as much an Arab as his rival Aretas, king of the Nabataeans, and both spoke Aramaic.” 3 His judgement is based on Strabo’s comment that the Idumeans were originally Arab Nabateans who had been forced to convert Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs, 6. This problem had already been addressed (not very satisfactorily) by Strabo. He eventually dealt with it by treating Arabs, Armenians, and Arameans in the same way, because of their similarities: “…between the Armenians, Syrians, and Arabians there is a strong affinity both in regard to dialect, mode of life, peculiarities of physical conformation, and above all in the contiguity of the countries. Mesopotamia, which is a motley of the three nations, is a proof of this (…).” Strabo, Geography 1.2.34, trans. H. C. Hamilton & W. Falconer (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1903). 2 Glen W. Bowersock, Studies on the Eastern Roman Empire (Aschaffenburg: Keip Verlag, 1994), 396. 3 Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs, 4. 1

2. ORIENS AND ARABIA WITHOUT ARABS?

19

to Judaism: “The western extremities of Judaea towards Casius are occupied by Idumaeans, and by the lake. The Idumaeans are Nabataeans. When driven from their country by sedition, they passed over to the Jews, and adopted their customs.” 4 When the Romans occupied the area, many of those who had been forced to convert were able to return to their old religions, but the Idumeans remained Jewish: “the Idumaean Arab leaders found it convenient to remain with the Judaeans.” 5 This line of argument falters when authors like Jan Retsö and Greg Fisher designate the Nabateans as Arameans or Semites but not as Arabs, and deconstruct/challenge the Arab element in their typical way: “While there is no reason to suppose that Arabic was not used in the [Nabatean] kingdom, it may, in consequence have been the commonly used language of only some of the population.” 6 This de-Arabization comes despite the Sicilian historian Diodorus’ description in his Universal History of the battle in 312 BC between the Greeks, under Antigonus, the one-eyed former general of Alexander, and the “Arabs who are called Nabateans.” Diodorus has no doubt that the Nabateans were Arabs, and that they were closely connected to other Arabs in the peninsula. That much is clear from his detailed description of the Arab way of life, which he includes in order to explain the Greeks’ final military defeat in the desert regions they were unfamiliar with. 7 Strabo, Geography, 16.2.34. Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs, 34. 6 Fisher, Between Empires, 139. Jan Retsö, in The Arabs in Antiquity. Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 369, concludes: “Apart from accounts preserved from Josephus, there is thus no immediate documentation that straightforwardly identifies Nabataeans as Arabs before the Roman conquest of Syria.” On the other hand, Glen W. Bowersock, in Roman Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 59ff, identifies the Nabateans unambiguously as Arabs. 7 “Now that Antigonus without a fight had gained possession of all Syria and Phoenicia, he desired to make a campaign against the land of the Arabs who are called Nabataeans. Deciding that this people was hostile to his interests, he selected one of his friends, Athenaeus, gave him four thousand light foot-soldiers 4 5

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In 212 B.C., the free inhabitants of the Roman provinces were granted Roman citizenship; the Arab Peregrini became Rhomaioi. Together with the fact that many Arabs also adopted Roman and Greek names, this tends to further disguise the Arabs’ role in the region. For example, the famous Neoplatonists Iamblichus 8 and Porphyry (his “Semitic” name was Malchius) were probably Nabatean Arabs. 9 In Arab Nabatea itself, with its capital city of Petra, Hellenistic culture offered obvious opportunities: “The sophist Heliodorus, whom Philostratus describes as an Arab, had already made a profound impression on Caracalla (…). We can identify a certain Callinicus from Petra, a sophist who was sufficiently distinguished to practice rhetoric in Athens itself. And there he was confronted with a rival, Genethlius, who was also a native of Petra.” 10

and six hundred horsemen fitted for speed, and ordered him to set upon the barbarians suddenly and cut off all their cattle as booty. For the sake of those who do not know, it will be useful to state in some detail the customs of these Arabs, by following which, it is believed, they preserve their liberty. They live in the open air, claiming as native land a wilderness that has neither rivers nor abundant springs from which it is possible for a hostile army to obtain water. It is their custom neither to plant grain, set out any fruit-bearing tree, use wine, nor construct any house; and if anyone is found acting contrary to this, death is his penalty. They follow this custom because they believe that those who possess these things are, in order to retain the use of them, easily compelled by the powerful to do their bidding. (…) While there are many Arabian tribes who use the desert as pasture, the Nabataeans far surpass the others in wealth although they are not much more than ten thousand in number; for not a few of them are accustomed to bring down to the sea frankincense and myrrh and the most valuable kinds of spices, which they procure from those who convey them from what is called Arabia Eudaemon. They are exceptionally fond of freedom; and, whenever a strong force of enemies comes near, they take refuge in the desert, using this as a fortress…” Diodorus, The Library of History, 19.94.1, trans. Russel M. Geer (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1947). 8 The name “Iamblichus” is derived from the Arabic “Yamlik el” and means something like “he rules.” See Barbara Levick, Julia Domna. Roman Empress (London: Routledge, 2007), 15. 9 See Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs, 154. 10 Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 135.

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21

Nevertheless, the question of who was Arab is increasingly problematized in recent Western works on the pre-Islamic history of Arabia and Oriens. To express it another way, the question of what Arabs are is more difficult to answer than it first seems. 11 Jan Retsö’s widely acclaimed – and criticized – study develops the radically deconstructive view that it is not appropriate to consider the Arabs as a nation because they did not understand themselves as one: “It is extremely unlikely that the ‘Arabs’ would have been identified by themselves or by others in terms of a modern nation.” 12 At first sight, this is hardly surprising, and could be said of most peoples at that time (what does a “modern” nation mean here?). However, as we will see further on, the term “Arab” was in fact used repeatedly to designate both a population group and a geographical location by the Arabs themselves and by the Persians, Romans, and Greeks. But Retsö’s problematization goes even further. Even assuming that the Arabs did not consider themselves as such – just like the Germanic tribes, who certainly did not perceive themselves as part of a “Germanic nation” – it is still the case that the Arabic language would have functioned as a link between the different Arab groups. Thanks to their shared language and culture, the Arabs could be considered as a “cultural nation.” This fact is often denied, however, and even countered with the argument that Arabic was only loosely related to other “languages” of the time: “There is no agreement among modern scholars on how to delimit a language which they call Arabic. All experts nowadays make a clear separation between the languages in South Arabia, like Sabaean etc., and those in other parts of the peninsula, reserving the term ‘Arabic’ for the latter (…).” 13 This non-recognition of the Arabic language, especially in Oriens, may well be related to the fact that Arabic had no official role. Aramaic was the sacred language and script of the Christians in the East. Greek and Latin were the predominant 11 12 13

Hainthaler, Christliche Araber, 1. Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 109. Ibid., 111.

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languages of government and the Roman Legion, respectively. Arabic was mostly restricted to personal communication or highly-specialized pre-Islamic poetry. 14 Nevertheless, the foederati, the Arab tribes who had been allied to Rome since the fourth century, spoke Arabic. As such, they contributed to a constant Arabization or re-Arabization of Oriens. The foederati were not under such strong pressure to assimilate as the Arab cives, and we can assume that the Arab element was conserved there in an unadulterated form. 15 Jan Retsö’s understanding of the Arabs’ sense of identity as weak or even non-existent is exemplary of many “Western scholars”. It is clear that the difficulty of defining the different languages is a significant contributing factor to de-Arabization. Therefore, it would be useful to address this problem before proceeding to a more in-depth consideration of the role of the Arabs. If we cannot treat the Arabs as members of even a loosely-defined nation or society, and if language was not an integrating factor, then it becomes almost impossible to define these groups more accurately. It is precisely at this crucial point that there is an enormous rift between the “Western” and “Arab” academic positions. Arab scholars point out how artificial the construct of the Semitic languages is. They claim it disguises the fact that the original language was basically Arabic, and not an unattested original Semitic language spoken by a hypothetical Semitic ancestral group. Initially, Western researchers acknowledged that the Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs, 224. The role of the foederati in the development of the Arabic language and its poetry cannot be overestimated: “Although they must have learned some Latin as the language of the Roman army of which they formed a part, and more Aramaic, yet Arabic was their principal language, and those of the fourth century had hailed from the region of the Lower Euphrates, in and around Ḥīra, which probably witnessed one of the earliest outbursts of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. It was through the medium of Arabic that the earliest attested Arabic poetry in Oriens was composed in the fourth century for these very foederati, thus preluding a long tradition of Arabic poetic composition in Oriens (…).” Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 21f.

14 15

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23

concept of the Semitic languages was based on a Biblical reference system, but it was deemed to serve a purpose despite its limitations: “The name, which was introduced by Schlözer, is derived from the fact that most nations which speak or spoke these languages are descended, according to Genesis, from Shem, son of Noah. But the classification of nations in Genesis x. is founded neither upon linguistic nor upon ethnographical principles: it is determined rather by geographical and political considerations. For this reason Elam and Lud are also included among the children of Shem; but neither the Elamites (in Susiana) nor the Lydians appear to have spoken a language connected with Hebrew. On the other hand, the Phoenicians (Canaanites), whose dialect closely resembled that of Israel, are not counted as children of Shem. Moreover, the compiler of the list in Genesis x. had no clear conceptions about the peoples of south Arabia and Ethiopia. Nevertheless it would be undesirable to give up the universally received terms ‘Semites’ and ‘Semitic.’” 16 Nöldeke is very clear about the artificial nature of this label, which he nevertheless endorses: “As there are no natural labels for large linguistic or population groups – because the groups themselves are unaware of their own relationships – science must create artificial names for the purpose, and it would be a good thing if all such names were as concise and as clear.” 17 Of course, it is impossible to say for certain that the Arab/Semitic peoples were unaware of their own relationships. After all, they could apparently understand each other’s languages with very little difficulty. But what particularly aggrieves Arab scholars – and there may be traces of resentful nationalism at play here – is that it was deemed necessary to invent a new label for the Arab tribes at all, and a Biblical one at that. This is despite the fact that most scholars (Western and Arab researchers are in agreement on this point) think the Semitic languages and tribes originated in the Arabian Peninsula. Even Nöldeke 16 Theodor Nöldeke, “Semitic Languages,” The Encyclopaedia Britannica (London, 1911). 17 Nöldeke: Eine Skizze, 2 (Own translation).

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admits, albeit cautiously, that the home of the original Semites was Arabia: “There is much that appears to support this theory. History proves that from a very early period tribes from the deserts of Arabia settled on the cultivable lands which border them and adopted a purely agricultural mode of life. Various traces in the language seem to indicate that the Hebrews and the Aramaeans were originally nomads, and Arabia with its northern prolongation (the Syrian desert) is the true home of nomadic peoples. The Arabs are also supposed to display the Semitic character in its purest form, and their language is, on the whole, nearer the original Semitic than are the languages of the cognate races.” 18 From the Arab point of view, this is where the blurring starts. Muḥammad ‘Aql criticizes Nöldeke for recognizing the limitations of the term “Semitic languages” but not allowing that recognition to have any effect on his conclusions: “He leans towards the view that the Semitic peoples all came from the Arabian Peninsula, but does not call their wanderings Arab migrations, and offers no explanation or reason for why he chooses not to do so.” 19 Nöldeke’s “reticence” with regard to the Arab element is also visible in his study of the “Semitic” people of the Amalekites, where he makes the oft-cited statement that: “We should be wary of the idea that all the Semitic desert peoples might simply have been Arabs in our current understanding of the word.” 20 Even leaving aside that this is not what Arab researchers claim, Nöldeke’s comments about the group are remarkable. He rejects the Arabic sources and the Qur’an – which identifies the Amalekites as the original people and as “true Arabs” – on the basis that the Arabs had no written tradition and were still a nomadic group “whose historical memory is not supported by any written sources. (…) How can one give credence to Arab reports about Nöldeke, “Semitic Languages.” Muḥammad ‘Aql: ’Abjadiyya al-Qur’ān min Mamlaka Saba’ [The Script of the Qur’an comes from the Kingdom of Saba] (Beirut: Dar Al-Mahaja, 2009), 30. 20 Theodor Nöldeke, Über die Amalekiter und einige Nachbarvölker der Israeliten (Göttingen: Dieterich`sche Buchhandlung, 1864), 23f (Own translation). 18 19

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the Amalekites when they seem for the most part to be invented tales, and moreover when they contradict the sure information of the O.T.” 21 The line of argument is absolutely clear: if the groups in question could not have been Arab, they must have been something else, something that cannot be precisely defined, and so must be classified in the artificial, superordinate group of “Semites.” These comments may seem outdated, narrow-minded, Bible-oriented, and perhaps even racist. 22 But it is important to be aware that Nöldeke’s definitions are (often enough) still not far below the surface of the modern academic mainstream: if in doubt, scholars declare Arabs to be Semites whose origin cannot be determined in more detail. 23 The Arab reaction to the Semitic construct, and the decision to refer to Semitic languages and peoples as Arab dialects and tribes, could be dismissed as a disingenuous form of nationalism. But it is striking that the creation of an artificial – because not based on geographical origin – group of languages and cultures is a unique phenomenon: “(…) we know that the Latin people (and language) take their name from the region Latium in central Italy. We also know that the word ‘English’, used to describe a person of certain origin and specific place, owes its existence or takes its configuration from the land of ‘Angeln’ in Germany (…) So, where in any geographical or inscriptional records one can find a region in the Middle East called ‘Shem’ or language called ‘Shemitic’?” 24 This argument is supported by the fact that there is no evidence of an original Semitic people: Ibid., p. 28 (Own translation). Nöldeke’s attitude towards the Arabs is described in slightly more diplomatic terms in modern writing: “Though Nöldeke and Wellhausen had something of a soft spot for pre-Qur’anic tribesmen, neither their work nor Kremer’s was generated by a deep sympathy with the cultures under study.” Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race and Scholarship (New York: CUP, 2009), 186. 23 The above quotation is found in Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 1, where he problematizes the definition of “Arab,” and in Bowersock, Studies, 369, who argues that the Idumeans were not an Arab tribe at all, but a Semitic one. 24 Abulhab, DeArabizing, 54f. 21 22

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“Strangely enough, the same scholars who uphold the existence of the never existed ‘Semites’ demand inscriptional evidence to validate the Arabs’ assertion that they are Arabs!” 25 When Arab scholars define the Semitic languages and migrations as “Arab,” it is more than just a sign of growing selfawareness: “If correct order is relevant to any classification, then all the languages of the old Near East should be described as Arabic languages, because all available historic, geographic and linguistic evidence shows Arabic, which was spoken by the absolute majority in the Peninsula, is what all other tongues are related to and can be derived from.” 26 When discussing the Arab/Semitic peoples, many contemporary Arab scholars refer to the definitive work of the Iraqi historian Jawād ‘Alī, who states categorically in the foreword to his encyclopedia of pre-Islamic Arabia that: “The term ‘Arab peoples’ is the most suitable label for these Semitic peoples. The time has come to replace ‘Semitic’ with ‘Arab’.” 27 The foreword also reveals ‘Alī’s struggle to reconcile his use of this new terminology with his continued use of Western sources. His task is particularly difficult because he is aware that the migrations of the Semitic peoples are not entirely the same as the migrations of the Arab tribes in the seventh century, which were described as such at the time. 28 Philip Hitti, who is implicitly reproached by many Arab historians for his Western perspective, resolves the “struggle” to find the right term for the Arab/Semitic languages and peoples by calling these groups “Arabians” instead of “Arabs.” 29 The Arab linguistic and cultural element serves an important function as a unifying bracket, encompassing all the dialects, languages, peoples, and civilizations of the Arab/Semitic Ibid., 61. Ibid., 55. 27 Jawād ‘Alī, Al-Mufaṣṣal fī Tārīkh al-‘Arab qabla l-’Islām. Vol. 1 [Detailed History of the Arabs before Islam] (Baghdad/Beirut: Dar al-Mu’alim, 1961), 7. 28 Ibid. 29 Hitti. History of Syria, 62; Hitti, History of the Arabs, 5th ed. (London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1951), 43. 25 26

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world, including Roman Oriens. Arab scholars give Old Arabic the status of a reference language, but Western scholars reserve that status for the unattested proto-Semitic language. “Even though Muslim Arabs may have imposed their religion on the pagan majority of Arabia through protection and tax incentives, their old Arabic language and its closely related derived dialects were already dominant in the Arabian Peninsula, Fertile Crescent and the North and Horn of Africa. Structurally, old Arabic was the root tongue to Aramaic, Nabataean, Babylonian, Mandaic, Hebrew, Phoenician and other evolved dialects. (…) it is clear that many tribes of the Arabian Peninsula who spoke initially an earlier version of the Arabic language (closely related to the old Yemen language) had migrated north carrying with them their languages and dialects, which were gradually changed consequent to interactions with northern local and foreign populations. In time, this language and dialects evolved to form either significantly different dialects now we call languages (i.e. Aramaic, Hebrew), or slightly different dialects (i.e. Nabataean and Hijazi, or the dialects of Najd and Eastern Arabia). The most accurate, scientific and impartial term to name the family encompassing all these newly formed languages and dialects is, therefore, Arabic.” 30 The Arab cultural and linguistic 30 Abulhab, DeArabizing, 63, 56. As mentioned above, this does not mean that all European scholars hold the European view described in its most acute form here. For example, Peter Funke is very aware of the linguistic bracket, but thinks it was weakened by tribalism and political influences: “The history of Arab powerand state-building in antiquity is a history of alternating self-assertion and subjection. If state-building is always related in some way to the search for identity, then the Arab world has always been faced with a dilemma that is as powerful now as it was in antiquity. Already in the pre-Islamic period, the greatest obstacle to the formation of large, viable nations was the existence of rivalries between the different tribes, sub-tribes, clans and families that overlay the unifying commonalities of language and culture.” Peter Funke, “Die syrischmesopotamische Staatenwelt in vorislamischer Zeit. Zu den arabischen Machtund Staatenbildungen an der Peripherie der antiken Großmächte im Hellenismus and in der römischen Kaiserzeit,” in Bernd Funck (Ed.), Hellenismus. Beiträge zur Erforschung von Akkulturation und politischer Ordnung in den Staaten des

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sphere plays an even more important role in some Arab researchers’ interpretations of the “Semitic” migrations. For example, ’Aḥmad Dāwūd’s view of the movement of Arab population groups has more in common with the traditional migrations of nomadic tribes than with conquest and invasion. Over the course of millennia of nomadic migrations, smaller groups constantly broke away and settled in the northern regions, founding cities and states. In a similar way, the Bedouin Arabs today include those who govern the Gulf States as well as those who continue to live a nomadic lifestyle. 31 Seen from this perspective, cyclical migration created a cultural space where linguistic and cultural similarities “(…) could be sustained and preserved throughout the Arab area.” 32 Initially, this Arab/Semitic sphere was clearly visible to Western observers: “The connexion of the Semitic languages with one another is somewhat close, in any case closer than that of the Indo-European languages. The more ancient Semitic tongues differ from one another scarcely more than do the various Teutonic dialects. Hence even in the 17th century such learned Orientalists as Hottinger, Bochart, Castell and Ludolf had a tolerably clear notion of the relationship between the different Semitic languages with which they were acquainted; indeed the same may be said of some Jewish scholars who lived many centuries earlier, as, for instance, Jehuda ben Koreish.” 33 The shared origin was clear, even for groups who had developed separately for a long time: “The Hebrews, it has become plain, were simply an Arab clan which, under strange and unique guidance, entered Palestine and settled there. But they remained Arab, although they denounced the name. And their literature, throughout all their history and to this day, in its methods of production and in its recorded forms, is of Arab scheme and hellenistischen Zeitalters (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 217–238, here 234. (Own translation) 31 Dāwūd, Tārīkh Sūriyā, 95. 32 Ibid., 88. 33 Nöldeke, “Semitic Languages.”

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type. Every kind of literature in the Old Testament, with the partial exception of the Psalms, finds a pigeonhole for itself in the great scheme of Arabic letters. Many even of the Psalms find their parallels, in the poems of the desert. And, further, while the Hebrew literature has often a spirit, a variety of picture, and an essential life lacking in that of the Arabs, it is, in comparison, small in amount.” 34 Arab scholars are of course aware that the Arabic language of that time subsequently split into many different dialects, and that it may have been very different from modern Arabic. 35 Nevertheless, they differ from their Western counterparts in one very important respect: if the Arab linguistic and cultural sphere seems hardly relevant anymore to many Western Orientalists, 36 and if it is increasingly disguised by the ever greater specialization of academic disciplines into individual dialects and civilizations, for many Arab linguists it is still intact. It is possible to understand other Semitic languages using Classical Arabic as a “matrix language”: “Based on its pronunciation and structure, it [Classical Arabic] is one of the few languages found in texts that can be dated to as far back as 2000 B.C. (…). It is one of the languages with which it is possible to understand cuneiform Duncan B. Macdonald, The Hebrew Literary Genius. An Interpretation. Being an Introduction to the Readings of the Old Testament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1933), 1. On the relationship between the Hebrews and “their cousins the Arabs” see also: James A. Montgomery, Arabia and the Bible (New York, NY: Ktav Publishing House, 1969), 37–54. 35 ‘Alī, Tafsīr, 20f. This diversity is also supported by the anonymously authored Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (ca. 1st century AD), which describes the Red Sea coast: “Directly below this place is the adjoining country of Arabia, in its length bordering a great distance on the Erythraean Sea. Different tribes inhabit the country, differing in their speech, some partially, and some altogether.” The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century, trans. William H. Schoff (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), §20. 36 “The period in which the Hebrews, the Arabs and the other Semitic nations together formed a single people is so distant that none of them can possibly have retained any tradition of it.” Nöldeke, “Semitic Languages.” 34

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texts, Canaanite and Yemenite scripts when these are transliterated into Arabic.” 37 This Arab cultural sphere creates a fascinating historical study area. If Arabic still functions as a reference language today, then it must have been widely and consistently understood throughout the region in the past: “If we study the transcriptions of Northwest-Semitic names and words into cuneiform and hieroglyphic about 2000 B.C. we find only comparatively insignificant marks of different dialects; the forms of nouns and verbs both agree so closely with those in South Arabian from the eighth century B.C. on and in North Arabic from about the seventh century B.C. that we may safely infer the existence of what was substantially a common language, understood from the Indian Ocean to the Taurus and from the Zagros to the frontier of Egypt. This common language (excluding Accadian and other possible extinct Semitic tongues) was probably almost as homogenous as was Arabic a thousand years ago, i.e., many local dialects were spoken, but the differences between them were mostly too slight to offer any serious barrier to social intercourse. This stage is reflected in Hebrew genealogical tradition, in which no sharp distinction is made between Hebrews, Aramaeans, and Arabs in the days of the Patriarchs.” 38 Seen from this perspective, Arabia and Oriens formed a single area in which the old Arabic language developed over the course of thousands of years. Naturally, different dialects appeared over time, but they retained linguistic similarities. 39 Even after the ’As‘ad, Mustashriqūn, 186. Albright, “North-Canaanite Research,” 21. 39 And, of course, migratory waves also caused repeated transformations. For example, the Aramaic-speaking population of Mesopotamia is thought to have undergone constant Arabization: “Around the Euphrates a number of Aramaean nomad tribes took over establishments on the river as a kind of settled base, and within a short time they had merged with Arab nomads and had adopted the Arab language. (…) The process by which other nomads speaking the language we now call Arabic infiltrated into the steppe zones that the Aramaeans dominated is entirely unknown, but we may presume it had been going on persistently. (…) The merging of Aramaean nomads with Arab nomads can be illustrated 37 38

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Islamic conquests, different groups apparently had no difficulty understanding each other’s “languages”: “There is no single evidence that they used translators to communicate with local populations. History teaches us that before the emergence of Islam, Prophet Muhammad did not only trade goods, during his frequent visits to the Damascus area, but had also conversed about deep philosophical, sociological and religious topics with local prominent figures in that area. Yet, he is known to speak one language: Arabic. It is true that before Islam, the Aramaic and Syriac languages were fully established in many areas of the Fertile Crescent, but so was Nabataean Arabic, the language of the majority in the region, and old Arabic, their mother and matrix tongue.” 40 Despite the existence of various dialects, it was perhaps always possible to fall back on a sort of Arabic lingua franca. 41 From the Arab perspective, it seems likely that the Arabs of antiquity were aware of this linguistic similarity. Over the course of their migrations and as they came into contact with other groups, it would surely have become clear to them that their Arabic dialect, with which they could understand many others, afforded them a central position among the “Semitic” peoples. Perhaps they even realized that the language they spoke functioned as a sort of central reference language. The by the Arab clans of Hagar, who are recorded as submitting, together with other Aramaeo-Arab assimilated groups, to Tiglath-Pileser I around 1100 BC.” Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs, 8ff. 40 Abulhab, DeArabizing, 190. This does not necessarily mean that there were never problems of mutual understanding. The Aramaic/Syriac-speaking Metropolitan of Oriens, Aḥūdemeh, who in the sixth century converted those among the Arab Tanūkh tribe in Syria who were still pagan, is reported to have found Arabic to be a “difficult language” and had to employ local believers and clergy. Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 419ff. 41 Hitti’s list of the different languages/dialects and cultural elements in Nabatea in the pre-Islamic period is a good example here: “Arabic in speech, Aramaic in writing, Semitic in religion, Greco-Roman in art and architecture, the Nabatean culture was synthetic, superficially Hellenic but basically Arabian, and so it remained.” Hitti, History of Syria, 383.

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very fact that they were able to understand the languages of other groups must have made it obvious that they were in some way connected or related to all these “peoples.” We can only imagine what they thought about it all. The nature of the Arabs’ collective consciousness can perhaps also be elucidated by the idea that while they were aware of their identity, they did not see any great need to use it as a construct in their interactions with each other. The primary social unit was the tribe. Outside that unit, interactions seems to have taken place between tribes and states that spoke related dialects and were not generally hostile towards each other. Linguistic as well as cultural similarities were undeniable, and so it was not necessary or even possible for one group to distinguish itself sharply from the others, or to try to form any other type of unit. For example, there is no Arabic word for “Arabia” (in Arabic, the Arabian Peninsula is called the “Arabian Island”). If you asked modern inhabitants of the central Arabian Peninsula about their background, they would probably say they were “Saudi”: the name of a clan. There are also indications that this linguistic and cultural sphere engendered a certain sense of commonality even before Islam. For example, Robert Hoyland quotes a conversation between the grandfather of the Prophet, ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib, and one of the last Yemenite rulers, Saif ibn dhī Yazan, during which the latter was told: “God has granted you a realm fine, firm and fair … You are the head of the Arabs whom they will follow (…).” 42 It is very interesting to observe how Western scholars deal with this tradition. As the Western position is that this kind of Arab identity did not exist at that time, and indeed that the southern Arabs were not Arabs anyway, Hoyland is forced to fall back on the old difference between north and south and to dismiss the labelling of a “South Arabian” ruler as an Arab king as incorrect: “Though cast here as an Arab hero, Sayf in fact belonged to an 42 Robert G. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs. From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (New York: Routledge, 2001), 229.

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ancient Hadramite family who would certainly not have considered themselves Arabs (ancient south Arabian inscriptions draw a clear distinction between Arabs and native peoples of Yemen.)” 43 Hoyland explains this “trickery” by the fact that this story was written down in 828 AD, at a time when the Arab national ethos was already strongly pronounced, and that the authors’ use of the label is therefore anachronistic: “There existed a very clear conception of Arab identity and it was applied retrospectively to all the inhabitants of pre-Islamic Arabia.” 44 Because he adopts the basic de-Arabizing stance sketched out above, Fisher – for whom both the Arab script and the Arab identity associated with it appeared only in A.D. 500 – must conclude that the Arabs own perception of themselves as such is highly problematic: “In the absence of direct evidence, it is impossible to state with any certainty how the Arabs of late antiquity viewed themselves with regard to their ethnic identity.” 45 That he comes to such a conclusion is inevitable, given that he – like Retsö – does not acknowledge the unifying power of the Arabic/Semitic language, and so cannot see its potential to create a common identity: “The question of what role language played in creating or reinforcing identities poses especially difficult problems. (…) it seems reasonable to assume, at least, that the use of Arabic in general, as well as for the oral tradition, surely played a role in defining commonality and difference, although, like so much here, we lack the specific evidence to understand exactly how this might have occurred.” 46 Clearly, the sudden eruption of Arab identity that accompanied the rise of Islam cannot be easily explained from this perspective, founded as it is on a lack of clear evidence and above all on a selective perception of what the “Arab” language was. Following this logic, the Arabs managed to develop directly into a full nation state

43 44 45 46

Ibid. Ibid. Fisher: Between Empires, 170. Ibid.

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out of almost nothing, having completely skipped over the cultural nation phase. Bowersock has recently put forward a new perspective on the Arab sphere that connected all these Arab/Semitic tribes and languages. It focuses particularly on the effects of Hellenism on the Arabs. Bowersock points out that the Hellenistic divine pantheon had a formative impact on the Arabs and that it actually strengthened Arab identity. 47 His argument builds on that of Gustave von Grunebaum, who, in contrast to Retsö, acknowledges that the southern and northern Arabs belonged to the same cultural nation before Islam. 48 This cultural nation was defined above all by shared rhythms of life, the rejection of tyrants, and struggles against external usurpers. Neither rivalries between individual groups nor the existence of numerous different dialects seriously diminished the power of the Arab sphere: “To emphasize the evidence for intense linguistic fragmentation is to emphasize its failure to destroy the reality and the consciousness of that community which kept the Northern Arabs together as an acknowledged culture group.” 49 Arab identity was also not weakened by the lack of a standard language or script. On the contrary, it seems to have provided the flexibility needed to sustain an identity of this nature: “The absence of a written standard language in the ‘outlying regions’ helps to keep linguistic separateness below the threshold. Is it too much to claim that it was the decision of the Dutch to use their speech as a Schriftsprache which made their crystallization as a nation distinct from their German neighbors irrevocable?” 50 47 Glen W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 77ff. 48 Gustave E. von Grunebaum. “The Nature of Arab Unity before Islam,” Arabica, 10, (1963), 5–23, here 14. On the other hand, Retsö, in Arabs in Antiquity, 623ff., sees the Arabs as a sort of warrior caste. He also notes their “disappearance” in the sources (“The disappearing Arabs”) and suspects that the use of the term “Saracens” instead of “Arabs” from the fourth century on had something to do with changes in military technology (horses, armor). 49 Von Grunebaum, “The Nature of Arab Unity,” 14. 50 Ibid.

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What are the implications of supposing that this national feeling, or perhaps better, implicit awareness of a sense of belonging, existed long before Islam? Can we be sure that groups who spoke very similar languages, and who shared stories and myths about their homeland, were not at least able to develop a certain sense of community? 51 Might it be possible that they just saw no need to define themselves as members of an exclusive Arab nation? Such a nation would have made no sense in a region so obviously dominated by linguistic and cultural similarities. As a political category, the nation simply had no institutional reality. But that does not mean that the Arabs were unaware of their identity as members of an ethnic group. The Arabs themselves seem to have had little difficulty identifying other Arabs. Von Grunebaum remarks on an interesting phenomenon that seems to support this idea: the Arabs regularly identified other Arabs as such, but generally defined themselves in terms of their tribe: “A precious stallion might ‘belong to a man of the Arabs’ (…), an individual be described as ‘one of the tramps of the Arabs’ (…), a tribe defined as ‘Quraiš of the Arabs’, yet the individual remained a Bakrī, a Huḏalī or a Quraiši whose group would then belong to Muḍar or Ma‘add, but not to Ismā‘īl, or any other genealogical hero representing ‘the Arabs’ in their entirety.” 52 Other groups also had no difficulty identifying the Arabs. So it is not surprising that during the Neo-Assyrian and NeoBabylonian periods, but at the latest by the eighth century B.C., there was already a stretch of land described as belonging to the Arabs, “māt Aribi.” This term was used to refer to an area that stretched in a crescent from the Arabian Gulf to the northern See below, the Appendix, regarding the origin of the Phoenicians in the Gulf region around Bahrain. 52 Von Grunebaum “The Nature of Arab Unity,” 16. For arguments on the cultural unity of Arabs/Semites from an “Arab perspective,” see Muḥammad Khalīfa Ḥasan ’Aḥmad: Ru’ya ‘Arabiyya fī Tārīkh al-Sharq al-’Adnī al-Qadīm waḤaḍāratih [Arab Perspective on the Ancient History of the Near East and its Civilization] (Cairo: Dār Qabā’ li-l-Ṭibā‘a wa-l-Nashr wa-l-Tauzī‘, 1998), 36ff. 51

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end of the Red Sea. Its outer curve was formed by the landscapes of Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine, and its inner edge was bordered by the oases of Dūma, Taimā’, and Dedan. 53 The regions of Transjordan, Sinai, and the strip of land to the right of the Nile were added under Darius’ rule (about 500 B.C.), after which point the whole area was governed as the satrapy of ‘Arbāya. 54 Under Roman rule, parts of this area became the Provincia Arabia. 55 The Roman geographers themselves always identified two regions as the homeland of the Arabs: besides the remote “Nome Arabia” in Egypt, they defined “Arabia Deserta” as the northern desert region that stretched east of Pelusium to Mesopotamia, and “Arabia Felix” as the Arabian Peninsula. 56 Based on this, we can assume that the Arab cultural and linguistic sphere – much like the Germanic one in Europe – must have been visible to outsiders as well.

Peter Högemann, Alexander der Große in Arabien (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985), 10ff. 54 See ibid. for a discussion of Strabo’s statement that the Arabs were not part of any satrap. Rather, the Arabian region was probably governed as a semiautonomous protectorate, as the nomads were hard to rule and were not subject to any kind of direct management (like the later Lakhmids). Nevertheless, they had to provide the King of Kings with troops. Also see ibid. for a discussion of where the Greek geographers located the Arabs. 55 Shahîd, in Rome and the Arabs, 15, sees the name of Provincia Arabia as an important indicator of the Arab identity of the Nabateans, whose kingdom arose in this province: “The Arab character of Nabataea was reflected onomastically after the annexation in A.D. 106; the new province was called Arabia, and the name thus reminded the student of the provincial history of the Orient of the Arab character of what had previously been Nabataea.” 56 See Strabo, Geography, 16,3,1. The geographer Ptolemy was an exception. He included the region Arabia Petraea inside Arabia Deserta. Bowersock, Studies, 363. 53

3.

IN SEARCH OF THE ARAB KOINE The denial of Arab identity is particularly clear in the Western claim that there was no Arab matrix language, or Arabic koine, to serve as the central link in a chain of related dialects and languages. Instead, Arabic is seen as the youngest of the Semitic languages and, especially, written traditions. 1 This perception does not just problematize the Arab element in Oriens, but also in the Arabian Peninsula. “The centerpiece of Western scholarship’s theme regarding Arabia, and the field of Arabic language and script history seems to be that the classic Arabic language, the modern Arabic script, and even the Arabs themselves, are the youngest of the Near East and were not originated from Yemen as scholars of the Arab Islamic era told us; even more, that people of pre-Islamic Yemen were not Arabs and did not speak Arabic!” 2 The “dissolution” of the Arab element as represented by its language, which was supposedly the last of all the Semitic languages to mature despite mysteriously being the closest to Proto-Semitic, completes the marginalization or concealment of the Arabs in the history of Arabia: “Western theories seem to portray the Arabs as marginal groups of rootless Bedouins and outsiders in their own historical homeland.” 3 For the term koine see: Aziz Al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity. Allāh and his People (New York: CUP, 2014), 147. 2 Abulhab, DeArabizing, 6. 3 Ibid. 1

37

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This then begs the question of why Arab (and, of course, Western) scholars often fail to recognize the central position of Classical Arabic within the Semitic language family, or the close similarity of the “South Arabian” language to Classical Arabic. Muḥammad ’As‘ad has put forward an enlightening theory with regard to this oversight on the part of Arab scholars. He points out that Arab researchers and translators have all too often been unable to translate old Semitic texts directly from the original into Arabic. If they had been in a position to do so, they would undoubtedly have noticed the similarities to Arabic. However, whether due to the dominance of Western Orientalists or the faults of Arab researchers, translations often involve obscure, multi-phase operations. ’As‘ad uses the example of the translation of Babylonian or Akkadian texts to explain this process: “We can identify three separate stages that detached the original Arabic words from their source; often even four stages. The first alteration was due to the use of scripts that were unable to represent all the characters of the Arabic script (such as Sumerian cuneiform) or that combined Arabic characters in different ways. In the second stage the Arabic characters were completely lost when the words were transliterated into the Latin alphabet. In the third stage, the consonants were often reconstructed or voiced by referring to Hebrew and not Arabic. Finally, the text was translated into modern Arabic, without the translators being aware of the changes made in the first three stages.” 4 The central role of Arabic for understanding and deciphering older Semitic languages has only become clear recently, now that Arab scholars have increasingly started translating directly from the original texts. 5 To do so, they transliterate the texts into Arabic characters, and then translate them. Even at the transliteration stage, whether of Babylonian texts or Ugaritic script, it is clear ’As‘ad, Mustashriqūn, 176. For example, the Arabic translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh: Ṭāhā Bakir, Melḥamet Gilgamesh (Baghdad, 1985). His description of his use of the Arabic version to reconcile the Western translations with the original is also interesting (5). 4 5

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that the ancient languages are fairly closely related to Arabic. Translators soon realized that it was possible to decipher the meanings of numerous Ugaritic words using Classical Arabic, confirming the hypothesis that the two languages are closely related, and that Arabic can function as a central reference language. Indeed, it is astonishing that this proximity has gone so unnoticed by Western scholars. This can hardly be ascribed to a lack of knowledge; rather, it seems to be due to a gradually diminishing process of understanding. At a conference on the Ugaritic language in Damascus in 1979, a number of Arab and Western scholars were able to prove the close relationship of Ugaritic to Arabic. 6 Nevertheless, in a major article in a recent work on Semitic languages, the relationship between the two languages is not even mentioned. 7 The ongoing process of deArabization seems to be getting more intense as time goes on, even to the extent of disregarding insights gained in the past by Arab and Western researchers working together. De-Arabization is – like the concept of the Semitic languages – rather a unique phenomenon. The establishment of separate, sharply delineated subfields serves to deconstruct and efface the Arab element, and leads to an increasing denial of important contextual relationships. A new generation of Arab historians is starting to criticize their older Arab colleagues for joining the deconstructive Western scientific community.’As‘ad John Healey, “L’ugaritique et l’étude des langues sémitiques,” Annales archéologiques arabes syriennes 29–30 (1979–80), 17–22; Arabic translation in alMa‘rifa No. 213/1979, 112–121. A significant part of the seminar, which was also attended by numerous Arab linguists, was devoted to discussing the connections between Arabic and Ugaritic, e.g. Luʿay Ajjan, “L’explication de quelques expressions vagues dans le texte d’Aqhat a la lumière de la langue arabe,” AAAS 29–30 (1979–80), 43–61; Ali Abu-Assaf, “L’explication des significations de quelques vocabulaires ugaritiques,” AAAS 29–30 (1979–80), 256–262. My thanks to Prof. Healy from Manchester University for giving me access to the seminar documents. 7 Dennis Pardee, “Ugaritic,” in R. Woodard (Ed.), The Ancient Languages of SyriaPalestine and Arabia (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), 5–36. Once again, this article does not cite a single Arabic work. 6

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criticizes Philip Hitti for having obscured the Arab character of the Semites by dividing his history of Arabia into a Semitic and an Arabic phase: “What (Western) researchers call the ‘Semitic’ migrations were really the wanderings of Arab tribes who founded the ‘Semitic empire’, i.e. the Akkadian empire with its Babylonian and Assyrian parts, the states and cities of the Aramaeans and the Canaanites. Moreover, Indo-European territory was an ever-present external danger that meant that the region’s population structure, culture, language, buildings and religion retained their Arab character. (…) Especially in the Arabian Peninsula, the original population remained entirely unaffected by outsiders. In reality, the Arab power that integrated the old and new tribes and states in the seventh century was a restoration of the region’s original Arab identity, and not a process of Arabization, as it is so often described in modern Western and Arab historical studies.” 8 From the Arab point of view, the deconstruction of the Arabs into isolated Semitic subgroups and the de-Arabization of Arabia and Oriens are highly peculiar phenomena that cannot be justified on the basis of scientific traditions and principles: “The Orientalists used the term ‘peoples’ to designate tribes, in order to give the impression that they were separate civilizations. They called the individual dialects ‘languages,’ even though they knew that regional variation in the pronunciation of the same words does not imply the existence of separate languages. It is astonishing that whenever they found a new city or a village, they immediately identified it as a new civilization. This does not happen anywhere else in the world. On the contrary, scholars elsewhere actively seek out similarities and patterns between even distant regions. It is as if the largely flat and level Arab region were somehow fragmented.” 9 Western scholars were aware that all their finds were connected in some way, but the artificial Semitic bracket they chose to use was much less 8 9

’As‘ad, Mustashriqūn, 154. Ibid.

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clear than an Arab one could have been: “At the beginning, (Western) researchers labelled every individual grave as an independent civilization, with its own people, and they named the civilizations after the locations of the graves. Later they named the civilizations and peoples after the cities they discovered, while preserving all their peculiarities, differences and core characteristics. Later still they established a connection between them in the form of a shared original language, Semitic (…).” 10 An almost absurd example of this deconstructing process can be found in Philip Wood’s work on the development of Christianity in Oriens, in which he contrives to leave out Arabs altogether. His description of the different “languages” used in the area paints an almost cacophonous scene: “The Jews of Edessa writing on their tombs, the Manichees and Mandaeans writing on their incantation bowls, Palmyrenes, Nabateans and Hatrans writing monumental inscriptions in their cities (…) all used different scripts to write languages that could differ substantially (…).” 11 There is no indication here that Palmyra, Nabatea, and Hatra were Arab cities, and that their populations spoke Arabic dialects. Instead, Wood gives the impression that these were completely independent populations and civilizations with little or nothing to do with each other. 12 Unless action is taken, this fragmentation of knowledge about the Arabs will simply continue on the same course. Without a reference framework, it is impossible to integrate new information. 13 With no acknowledgement of the Arab element Dāwūd, Tārīkh Sūriyā, 69. Philip Wood, ‘We have no King but Christ’. Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c. 400–585) (New York: OUP, 2010), 78. 12 Wood only acknowledges Arabs in the rural areas of Oriens (Ibid., 10). He even uses Aramaic spelling convention to write the names of the Arab Phylarchs of the sixth century, like al-Ḥārith (Ḥārith Bar Gabala). 13 This deconstruction is naturally translated to the individual Orientalist fields. Kermani does not mince his words when it comes to these academic subjects. All that remains to be said is that a similar segmentation is underway in pre-Islamic Arabian history, and that the process of deconstruction is having the same effect in a variety of different subfields: “Die Obsession des Westens, den Orient durch 10 11

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uniting the different fields or of the existence of the Arab sphere before Islam, and because the available frameworks are not useful in practice, new findings are forced to settle into their own isolated niches and deconstruction cannot be halted: “The vast array of new data types cannot be accommodated without more flexible social constructs or more diverse interpretive scenarios. As a result, final field reports tend to contain many autonomous essays by specialists with little attempt to produce an integrated picture of a living society.” 14 As a counterpoint to deconstruction, some Arab scholars argue in favor of an Arab reference framework in which the different Arab/Semitic groups shared an Arabic koine and an overarching culture. Such a framework contests the view that, for example, the Yemenites did not speak Classical Arabic, despite probably being the original Arabs, and that their “South Arabian” languages can therefore not be called “Arabic languages.” Of course – to paraphrase the Arab perspective – the Yemenites spoke Proto-Arabic, which was different from Classical Arabic. 15 Quite apart from the fact that all languages change and develop, even in their place of origin, as Nöldeke noted a long time ago, 16 seine Religion zu verstehen, macht sich bis heute in den Lehrplänen, ja bis in die Fächeraufteilung bemerkbar, die in die Erforschung eines gemeinsamen Kulturraumes konfessionelle Schneisen schlägt.” Navid Kermani, “Zur Zukunft der Islamwissenschaft,” in Poya & Reinkowski (Eds.), Das Unbehagen in der Islamwissenschaft, 301–309, here 302. 14 Glock, “Cultural Bias in the Archaeology of Palestine,” 54. 15 Nöldeke (Über die Amalekiter, 32, own translation) also refers to relevant Arabic sources, although not without once again accusing the Arab authors of inaccuracy: “Yaqût remarks in this context that these Proto-Arabs spoke the language [sic] Almusna, which as is well known is the name of the Himyarite (South Arabian) script that was still in use long after the time of Christ.” The Arabs are well aware that Musnad is a script, and Yaqût surely meant the South Arabian dialect. Moreover, Arabic linguists still use “Musnad” as an umbrella term for the Yemenite languages today, see Jurjī Zīdān, Tārīkh ’Ādāb al-Lugha al-‘Arabiyya [History of Arabic Literature] (Cairo: Dar El-Hilal), 41. 16 “It is certainly not always the case that a language remains most faithful to its original form in its original homeland.” Nöldeke, Eine Skizze, 11. (Own translation)

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the evidence for a close relationship between the South Arabian “language” and script and Classical (North) Arabic has been getting stronger in recent years. Against the view that the Arabic script developed at a late stage out of the North Arabian Nabatean script, many Arab scholars derive it rather from the much older Musnad script, which was used widely across the whole Arabian Peninsula. 17 For its part, the Musnad script is just one phase of the millennia-long development of the Arabic/Semitic script, and probably shares Phoenician’s Canaanite roots. 18 According to this view, the Musnad script was the ancestor, under Nabatean influence, of the North Arabian Jazm script, which itself gave rise to the Arabic characters still in use today. In this context “Jazm” means ‘to reduce,’ which is further support for the idea that it was derived from Musnad. Although both scripts have 28 characters, Jazm has fewer character forms (in Arabic For example, the inscriptions found in the ruined city of al-Faw in Saudi Arabia display a mixture of both North and South Arabian “languages”: “The Musnad script in Qaryat al-Faw took a distinctive form, but without departing from it and without abandoning its general style. As such, it must be considered a variant of Musnad writing. Whilst the inhabitants wrote in a southern style of inscriptions, they did not limit themselves to expressing their views in the southern language only, for their language was a blend of southern and northern dialects, and it also had features of northern grammar. Even in the inscriptions written in classical Musnad (and by this, I mean the inscriptions which are devoid of traces of Qaryat al-Faw variants), the language of the north is clear. Perhaps this was due to the fact that while the ruler was a southerner, the citizens were a mixture of southerners and northerners.” Abd al-Rahman al-Ansary, Qaryat al-Faw. A Portrait of Pre-Islamic Civilization in Saudi Arabia (Riyadh: University of Riyadh, 1982), 26. 18 However, it is unclear whether the Phoenician script developed out of the Musnad or the other way around: Abulhab, DeArabizing, 184. The general consensus is that Musnad is derived from the Canaanite/Phoenician: ‘Aql, ’Abjadiyya, 22. In any case, the two regions (South Arabia and Phoenicia) verifiably maintained contact over a long period of time, so a transfer in either direction could have been possible. The South Arabian Mineans had already founded trade colonies as far north as Palestine by the second millennium B.C.: Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der islamischen Völker und Staaten (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 1977), 3. In the nineteenth century B.C. there were South Arabians in Syria, along the Red Sea, and in Egypt: ‘Aql, ’Abjadiyya, 39. 17

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the characters have several different forms depending on whether they are in the middle, at the beginning, or at the end of a word). The difference between this sort of Arab view and the deArabizing Western one could scarcely be greater: on the one hand, a people who did not possess even the rudiments of their own script until the fifth century, and on the other hand a people who were well aware of their own identity, who had an ancient tradition of writing and a wide range of dialects, and who even indirectly influenced European script! This is not a work on linguistics, and the sketchy overview given here is no more than a summary of the range of views held by individual researchers. More important for our purposes is the observation that whenever Arab scholars try to argue in favor of the unifying power of Arabic or of its role as a matrix language, their attempts find little or no traction in the Western scientific community. The fragmentation of the field into specialist subject areas seems to have progressed too far to allow the individual elements to be fitted back together again. Abulhab, who clearly operates on the fringes of the scientific community, attempted to transliterate “South Arabian” texts directly into Classical Arabic, and then translate them on that basis. After transliterating the characters so that the South Arabian “Musnad” texts were displayed in Arabic script, he was able to identify the inscriptions as being in Arabic, because they could be read by someone with knowledge of Classical Arabic. He submitted his translations to various well-known scientific journals, and was rejected by all of them. Besides his errors and the linguistic arguments and queries, the reviews are very interesting in themselves. They show how the study of individual Semitic languages in the West has become so differentiated that a linguistic – and therefore cultural – sphere can no longer be accepted. 19 Journal of Near Eastern Studies (JNES): “South Arabian inscriptions make it abundantly clear that the Arabs were outsiders, and that the inhabitants of Saba, Hadramaut, Qataban and Ma’in (…) and later of Himyar were not themselves Arabs … Modern Arab nationalist perceptions suffuse this paper.”

19

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Of course, there are also Arab scholars who lean towards the “Western” view. The controversies outlined here are echoed within the Arab scientific community. For example, the reviewers’ belief that the Yemenites and their script were not Arab is supported by the work of some Classical Arab authors, who also saw significant differences between the South Arabian language and Classical Arabic. 20 However, the Yemeni linguist Taufiq alSāmaʿī demonstrated that a not inconsiderable portion of the vocabulary in the Qur’an is originally South Arabian, or at least permits a South Arabian interpretation. Moreover, he was also able to explain the northern Arabs’ denial of South Arabian “Arabness” as the result of political rivalry between the south, Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy (AAE): “If you want to publish the inscription, I would suggest that you collaborate with a trained Sabaist… Interpreting a clearly Sabaic inscription as an Arabic text means to ignore more than a hundred years of scholarly work (…) The interpretation you have given of the inscription is simply incorrect, because you have read it as though it were Arabic rather than Sabaic. The two languages are simply not the same… The Sabaic language, as well as other Ancient South Arabian (ASA) languages, has nothing to do with (Classical) Arabic – apart from their historical relationship within the Semitic language family.” Journal of Semitic Studies (JSS): “I noted also that your claim that the Musnad inscriptions are in fact Arabic… The referee felt that the article showed inadequate background knowledge of Semitic philology and ancient South Arabian history and society.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies (JNES): “It is totally impossible that the Arabic script (not language) be derived from the South Arabian script (musnad); the only other possibility is Syriac. There really is almost no point of similarity between South Arabian script and Arabic script.” Abulhab, DeArabizing, 75ff, 78ff. 20 Nevertheless, the caveats around the latter actually often serve to emphasise the proximity of these two languages/dialects. The famous Ibn Khaldun said of the difference between South Arabian and Classical Arabic that: “The Himyarite language is another language and differs from the Mudar language in most of its (conventional) meanings, inflections and vowels, (and has) the same relationship (to it) that the Mudar language has to present-day Arabic.” Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal (New York, 1986), 346. In other words, the difference between South Arabian and Classical Arabic (Mudar) was no bigger than the one between Mudar and the Arabic of Ibn Khaldun`s time.

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with its early-flourishing, highly developed civilization, and the north, which only became powerful thanks to Muhammad. 21 AlSāmaʿī also points out that the Jewish linguists, such as Judah ibn Koraish and Ibn Barun, who wrote in Arabic and to whom we owe vital knowledge about the relationships between the “Semitic” languages, focused largely on the very close relationships between Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew, while neglecting the relationship between South and North Arabian. 22 According to al-Sāmaʿī, the political conflict between the north and south also affected linguists’ work, leading to a situation where the South Arabian languages and Classical Arabic were viewed in isolation even though earlier writers had identified the former as dialects of Arabic. 23 With time the South Arabian dialect was forgotten, until its “rediscovery” by Western scholars. 24 As a final comment on the topic of the South Arabian languages it is worth pointing out that almost all the Arab tribes we will encounter (on both sides) in the battles between the Arabs and the Byzantines were originally from Yemen. There seem to have been no linguistic or cultural barriers between them. On the contrary, as Robert Hoyland notes with surprise, for some reason these tribes seem to have spoken Arabic. 25 In summary, the South Arabian language and the thousands of inscriptions found in the Arabian Peninsula are – from a mainstream Western standpoint – not a clear indication or eviFor a summary of his theories, including regarding South Arabian vocabulary in the Qur’an, see Taufīq al-Sāma‘ī, “al-Lugha al-Yamaniyya fī al-Qur’ān,” [The Yemenite language in the Qur’an], Al Gomhoriah, June 25, 2012. 22 Ibid. 23 “The Bedouins of the North spoke Arabic – that is to say, the language of the Pre-islamic poems and of the Koran – whereas the southerners used a dialect called by Muḥammadans ‘Ḥimaryite’ (…).” Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, xvii. 24 Ibid., 6. 25 “Evidently a number of these southern Arab tribes spoke Arabic (…).” Hoyland, Arabia, 233. Retsö also recognizes the presence of Arabs in South Arabia, but classes them as servants and soldiers in the employ of South Arabian rulers. Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 546. 21

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dence of an Arab koine and cultural sphere. South Arabian is declared a different language, its connections to Old Arabic weak and hazy at best. Curiously, there is a similar situation further to the north in Oriens. Approximately 18,000 stone inscriptions in Safaitic have been found there, around 6,000 in modern Syria and more than 12,000 in northeastern Jordan. 26 A similar mechanism is at work here as with South Arabian, in that Safaitic is seen as a separate language and not as a member of the Arabic koine. According to Macdonald, “Safaitic is not Arabic as such, but belongs to a different group of North Arabian dialects (sic!) which are related to, but distinct from, Arabic. In Safaitic a number of the words for some of the most important aspects of the way-of-life of these nomads are not found (at least in these senses) in Arabic (…).” 27 Again, we get the impression that we are dealing with a different language and not a related dialect. This is even more astonishing given Macdonald’s acknowledgement that the neighbouring Nabateans spoke some sort of Arabic and were probably able to understand (but not read) Safaitic: “Ironically, if, as is generally held, many Nabataeans spoke a form of Arabic, even though they wrote in Aramaic, they would almost certainly have been able to understand the dialect of the authors of the Safaitic and Thamudic E inscriptions.” 28 Macdonald then comes to yet another astounding conclusion regarding these thousands of inscriptions: that they are no more than a peculiar form of written testimony in an “illiterate” society. “(…) the Safaitic inscriptions are almost entirely graffiti, and writing was treated by their authors as a game rather than as a serious form of communication. (…) the ‘inscriptions’ were largely the product of hours of enforced idleness, while, as the texts themselves tell us, the authors were pasturing the animals, M.C.A Macdonald, “Nomads and the Hawran in the Late Hellenistic and Roman Periods: A Reassessment of the Epigraphic Evidence,” in Syria. 3–4, 1993, 303–403, here 304. 27 Ibid., 381. 28 Ibid., 382. 26

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keeping watch, etc. As unpremeditated productions of the moment they inevitably deal mainly with events which were of immediate concern to the writers”. 29 And furthermore: “We are thus faced with the curious paradox of a non-literate society in which large numbers of people could read and write. A society in which literacy, having apparently no useful place, seems largely to have been used as a pastime. In this, these graffiti are very similar to the drawings which so often accompany them, and which seem to have served no purpose beyond the pleasure of the artist.” 30 To summarize the analysis of thousands of inscriptions in North and South Arabia, we may conclude that a considerable number of Western scholars are still unable to identify them as important elements of the Arab koine. If, however, these “languages” are seen as dialects forming part of a cultural and linguistic sphere whose members could understand each other, than we may conclude that “(…) the Arabic language as it developed in the centuries before Muḥammad was nevertheless to be of great moment, by developing a koine that complemented the growing network of communication and mutual awareness and recognition in the steppe and desert.” 31 Moreover, these Arab communities seem to be hardly less literate than the settled Arab Rhomaoi in Oriens. Thus, it should come as no surprise that, following the assumption of power in the peninsula and in Ibid., 351. Ibid., 388. 31 Al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam, 147. For a critical view see G. R. Hawting, “The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity. Allāh and his People. By Aziz AlAzmeh,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 17.1 (2015): 114–118. Hawting, however, does not criticize the idea of a koine as such but rather Azmeh’s emphasis on what he sees as the autonomous development of Islam in a “pagan reservation” of Arabia (polygenesis) and his downplaying of the effects of other religious ideas (diffusion) (118). This idea of diffusion was already introduced by ‘Alī: “We should not imagine that the religions of the Arabs before Islam remained uninfluenced by external factors or that the Arabs did not inherit any religious elements from the nations and peoples surrounding them.” ‘Alī, Al-Mufaṣṣal, Vol. 6, 11 (Own translation). 29 30

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Oriens by Muslim Arabs, the privileging of the written word for its own sake was one of the Arab people’s greatest contributions to world art. 32 Finally, we can now answer the question of why the Arabic script – as opposed to the language – developed relatively late, as Fisher noted. As the Arabic language spread, probably from southern Arabia, it developed into different dialects and even languages. These dialects evolved over thousands of years and each could have developed their own script. This accounts for the fact that the different scripts (Nabatean, Sabean, Safaitic …) can still be read using Classical Arabic, which is relatively close to the original language. The various scripts seem to have been used across a wide area, and the population to have been by no means less literate than in the Roman parts of Arabia. Fiema and his colleagues suggest that the relatively late development of a distinctive Arabic script and the apparent “reluctance” to write in the Arabic matrix language can be explained by the belief that “it could not be written,” rather as many Arab speakers in the recent past believed that it was “impossible” to write down their spoken dialects. 33 For this reason Arabic did not develop a script “of its own” until late antiquity, and Arabic speakers would have had to learn a distinctive dialect (i.e. Aramaic) and its associated script in order to be able to write. Furthermore, the very availability of these different dialects and their “prestige” scripts made the development of a distinctive Arabic script less pressing. 34

Warwick Ball, Rome in the East. The Transformation of an Empire, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 30. 33 Zbigniew T. Fiema, Ahmad Al-Jallad, Michael C. A. Macdonald and Laïla Nehmé, “Provincia Arabia: Nabataea, the Emergence of Arabic as a Written Language, and Graeco-Arabica,” in Greg Fisher (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 373–433, here 397f. 34 Ibid., 398. As we shall see below, switching between these dialects did not pose serious difficulties for the Arab Rhomaoi of Oriens, who were able to adapt to Arabic “overnight” after the Islamic victory (Chapter 7). 32

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In summary, we can, therefore, assume with some certainty that there was an Arabic koine using different scripts and an Arab Kulturnation long before the coming of Islam. “The deep relationship between language and cultural identity, which is so evident among the Arabs in the Islamic period, can thus be seen to go back much further, at least to the Namāra inscription and probably beyond.” 35

35

Ibid., 433.

4.

CAN NON-EUROPEANS THINK? Based on the discussion in the previous chapter, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the various Arab/Semitic peoples in the Peninsula and Oriens were much more closely related than modern scholarship, with its tendency to study individual groups and dialects separately, is capable of understanding. There is a case to be made that the various tribes and peoples saw their differences as less important or irreconcilable than they seem to be in recent Western depictions. According to its Arab critics, Western Orientalism has become constrained by its own path dependency, fixated on a few supposedly isolatable subject areas. It tends to view Semitic studies through a narrow lens without seeing the bigger picture: that the original Arab/Semitic tribes, labelled and grouped variously as Nabateans, Arameans, Phoenicians, etc., retained stronger connections to each other than is often assumed. In reality, according to Arab critics, all these groups were part of one and the same civilization that developed over the course of thousands of years. It is striking that this deconstruction and de-Arabization was much less pronounced among Western Semitists before the Second World War. It is fairly safe to assume that increasing deArabization since then is connected to the gradual splintering of academia into individual specialist subjects. But it may also be related to the changing political circumstances of the last seventy-odd years. During that time, relations between the Western and Arab worlds have become steadily more confrontational. At the very least, we can say that Arab and Western scholars have 51

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cooperated in increasingly limited ways, and that as a result there has been little progress towards re-evaluating the historical role of the Arabs as part of a holistic research program. 1 So it is not surprising that Western historians of pre-Islamic Arabia scarcely make any use of the work of Arab historians of the same period, such as Jawād ‘Alī and Burhān al-Dīn Dallū. Their bibliographies are all too often overwhelmingly made up of Western works. Jan Retsö is one of the few who is willing to even acknowledge the existence of these Arab researchers, if only to immediately disqualify them: “Many of these works are rich in content, reflecting deep knowledge of their authors of classical Arabic literature, which makes them useful also for the western scholar. On the other hand, they mostly lack critical analyses of the sources and they do not discuss the problem dealt with in this study. All of them take the modern, nationalistic definition of Arabs for granted.” 2 Sometimes the explanation for the neglect of Arab research is given in cryptic but unmistakable terms. For example, in the introduction of his seminal work on the venture of Islam, Marshall Hodgson simply remarks: “Because of the cultural circumstances of the Modern Technical Age, Western scholarship has been the chief channel “In unserer Zeit, in der der Islam längst Teil der europäischen Lebenswelt geworden ist, sind westliche und muslimische Koranforscher durch hermeneutische Barrieren weiter denn je voneinander getrennt. (…) Während noch in der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen Rufe an arabische Universitäten an europäische Islamwissenschaftler ergehen konnten und sogar noch in den siebziger und achtziger Jahren Gastdozenturen deutscher Koranforscher in Jordanien und Ägypten willkommen waren, sind solche gegenseitige Neugierde und Offenheit heute Geschichte. Zwischen damals und jetzt liegen einschneidende politische Ereignisse und Entwicklungen (…) in der an sich skandalösen Situation, in der sich zwei Forschungstraditionen gegenüberstehen ohne in einen kreativen Austausch zu treten, ist Koranforschung als solche neu zu überdenken.”Angelika Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike. Ein europäischer Zugang (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2010), 21. Neuwirth’s comment refers specifically to Qur’an research, but her description seems extendable to other areas of Islamic studies, Arabic studies and historiography. 2 Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 116, n4. 1

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for studies of a Modern type in the Islamics field at least until very recently.” 3 This sort of courteously worded dismissal of Arab academics’ “unscientific methods” is also sometimes directed towards researchers of Arab origin working at Western institutions who are deemed to be overstating the importance of the Arab element. Irfan Shahîd, author of a several-volume work on the history of the Arabs in the Roman/Byzantine Empire, has been the target of much of this sort of criticism. He has been charged with trying to make the Arab element more prominent than the facts warrant: “Er möchte eine Geschichte schreiben und nicht bloß Philologie (wie Nöldeke). Shahid geht es um „ByzantoArabica“, d.h. um die Beziehung zwischen Arabern und Byzanz, mit der Betonung auf „Geschichte“. Das kann den Nachteil haben, daß zuweilen die Hypothesen, die Konvinienzargumente Überhand gewinnen und eine eigene Dynamik entfalten.” 4 In other words, indulging in wishful thinking, or even allowing some unspecified ideology (nationalism?) to dictate the line of argument. Arab researchers who put forward such views are accused of developing historical constructs that are not backed up by the sources: “Yet Shahid’s efforts pose significant problems, not least in his choice and use of sources and his ideological [sic!] desire to present a particular image of Ghassān as a staunchly miaphysite Christian Arab group, loyal to the Roman Empire, and important to Constantinople’s ability to defend its frontiers from Sasanians and their Arab allies. As such, he overinterprets the source material and assigns too much importance to (for example) the role and position of the phylarchs.” 5 That Greg Fisher criticizes Irfan Shahîd for his selectivity when it comes to sources is not without a certain irony, given that Fisher does not cite a single contemporary Arab author in his own work. Moreover, he makes no attempt to address what Shahîd Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Vol. I: The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: CUP, 1974), 39. 4 Hainthaler, Christliche Araber, 9. 5 Fisher, Between Empires, 11. 3

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identifies as the prejudices and shortcomings of Western researchers, for example in their assessment of Rome’s Arab allies or their uncritical reliance on biased classical sources like Procopius. 6 On the contrary, Shahîd’s criticisms are interpreted as part of his overall strategy of promoting a certain image of the Arabs and of ignoring the “fact” that “(…) Arabs appear marginal (…) because they were.” 7 According to Fisher, Shahîd is simply “unwilling to consider that they may only have been ‘footnotes’ to the events in the sixth century.” 8 Another problematic aspect of this criticism is that by attempting to treat the Arabs as less relevant than they actually were, one runs the risk of being unable to understand the rise of the Islamic Empire as a product of the interaction between the Arabs and the Roman and Hellenistic empires. Research on the Roman West has benefited greatly from consideration of the close relationship between the state formation processes of the western barbarians and the Roman Empire itself, but the same approach has yet to be applied to the East and the Arabs. Robert Hoyland points out that as long as Shahîd’s thesis about the central role of the Arabs in Oriens and the importance of their interactions with Rome is ignored, it will be extremely difficult to close this gap. 9 6 This is despite the fact Western scholars are well aware of a number of suppressio veri in Procopius: “For a writer of the sixth century, Procopius is as remarkable for what he leaves out as for what he has to say. It is a curious paradox that the major historian of Justinian, judging by volume as well as quality, leaves many areas of contemporary life unexplored.” Averil Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century (London: Duckworth, 1985), 225. 7 M. Whittow, “Rome and the Jafnids: writing the history of a 6th-c. tribal dynasty,” in J. H. Humphrey (Ed.), The Roman and Byzantine Near East: Some Recent Archaeological Research (Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series no. 14), 219, cited in Fisher, Between Empires, 11. 8 Ibid., 12. 9 Robert G. Hoyland, “Arab kings, Arab tribes and the beginnings of Arab historical memory in late Roman epigraphy,” in Hannah M. Cotton et al. (Eds.), From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 374–400, here 374. For a very similar discussion of Roman

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Historical writing is always about interpretation, particularly in an area where the facts “on the ground” are still limited. 10 Yet Arab scholars’ interpretations are clearly seen by their Western counterparts as unscientific: useful as uncritical factcollectors and compilers, but not real scientists. 11 At this point we must ask on what evidence the Western interpretation of the role of the Arabs is based. We must also consider the possibility that some of the racism and disdain of the classical historians has been transmitted to the present, and that in tandem with the current political situation it may have created a climate perhaps best summarized by the question: “Can non-Europeans think?” On the Arab side, de-Arabization is seen as going hand-in-hand with the colonial ambitions of the French and English and their desire to control and dominate the Orient. The colonial project could never have permitted a large-scale national history of the suppressed Arab region: “They [Western researchers] are unable to understand this coherent Arab civilization. (…) But authoritarian colonialists perceived the true situation and understood that it was in their own interest to prevent the development of national sentiments or the idea of a national, coherent civilization. So they gave us and our region names like ‘Mesopotamia’, ‘Semitic peoples’, ‘Fertile Crescent’, ‘Near East’ and ‘Middle East’, etc.” 12 Anyway, de-Arabization does not actually need an Africa see Jonathan Conant, Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), 439–700. 10 Hoyland criticizes the fact that the EU-financed research project on the transformation of the Roman world does not include the Arab region: “These eastern barbarians still suffer from a lack of attention and from a lingering sense that their role in the history of the Roman Empire was minimal.” Ibid., 374. 11 For example, from another review of Shahîd’s work: “The author’s scholarly method has been criticized and his conclusions seen as exaggerated, but the works are valuable as an indication of the amount of possible evidence available on the Arabs in the centuries before the rise of Islam.” Available online: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195390155/ obo-9780195390155–0142.xml?rskey=YAr9Ns&result=85&q (as of 01/05/2017). 12 Dāwūd, Tārīkh Sūriyā, 68.

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explicit motive: once the different civilizations have been defined by scholars, deconstruction is almost inevitable. Regardless of why it takes place, the sweeping marginalization of the Arabs does not appear to be justifiable based on the scientific facts alone. And it should not be denied that Arab researchers regard their European colleagues with just as much suspicion as the latter direct towards them: 13 “Westliche Forscher werfen Muslimen Befangenheit in theologischen Dogmen vor, muslimische Forscher nehmen ihre westlichen Kollegen als polemischtriumphalistisch, ohne elementare Empathie für den Islam, wahr.” 14 The revisionist theses propagated by some sources, which treat Islam as a later “falsification” and “interpolation” into history, also play an important role here. The “mysteries” and “dark periods” that shroud the sudden emergence of a previously almost unnoticeable or unidentifiable Arab monotheism are conveniently easy to integrate into a “Clash of Civilizations” discourse that more or less subtly devalues the rival and his history. 15 Bernard Lewis, the Orientalist who coined the phrase “Clash of Civilizations,” makes it very clear that this is a conflict whose roots go all the way back to the historical period under consideration in this work: “It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of 13 For example, in the tense current climate Angelika Neuwirth’s Qur’an research has been seen by some Arabs as an “Orientalist” project: “A student and protégée of a recently passing German scholar decided to reveal that 450 microfilm rolls of Quran copies assembled before WWII to study ‘the evolution of the Quran’ were actually stored secretly by her deceased professor in boxes, not destroyed by bombardment as previously believed. This ‘lost archive’ or the socalled ‘Munich Archive’ is to be instrumental for a new project – not surprisingly led by that ex-student – to produce a ‘critical version’ of the Quran for the first time in the history of Islamic scholarship. (…) My viewpoint: to a serious researcher, revealing the archive after 60 years of its ‘disappearance’ and only after the passing of the professor, in the midst of a global Islamophobia environment, should be a clear indication that this project is anything but scholarly.” Abulhab, De-Arabizing, 44f. 14 Neuwirth, Der Koran, 21. 15 Ibid., 101.

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issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations – the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival [sic!] against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.” 16 Obviously, there is still a sense in the West – despite its dominance – that the Arabs pose some kind of threat. This is by no means a post-9/11 phenomenon. There was a similar feeling at the time of the Islamic conquest of the Christian heartland in Oriens, and even further back when Rome’s Arab foederati were becoming ever more indispensable and the Severan dynasty of Roman emperors was being increasingly “Orientalized” by Arabs from Syria. This mutual sense of threat, paired with contempt on the part of the West and a feeling of inferiority on the part of the Arabs, is at the root of the phenomena described here. It also prevents the sort of cooperation that would enable a solution. On the other hand, it is a remarkable fact that the Arab world still remembers its Greek and Roman heritage and the exchanges between the Orient and Hellenism during the preIslamic period, even though recent political events have pushed that memory into the background. Sporadic phases of remembering seem to have played a crucial role in several important transformational processes that encouraged reflection on Arab roots, and have thereby influenced the modern Arab world. One such phase was the period of cultural upheaval or renaissance that began around the start of the 20th century (Nahda). For example, Ṭāhā Ḥusain, one of the leaders of Arab modernism, called for Latin and Greek to be taught not just at Arab universities, but also at high schools. His reasoning was that instruction in the Classics would lead to academic independence, because Arabs would no longer have to rely on foreign scholars to deci16 Bernard Lewis, “The roots of Muslim rage,” The Atlantic, September 1, 1990. Available online: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1990/09/theroots-of-muslim-rage/304643/ (as of 01/05/2017).

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pher the millennium in which the Arab world was under Greek and Roman rule. 17 Later, Ḥusain and others held the – today almost unheard of – view that the “Aegean” cultural community that bound Orient to Occident must be of very ancient origin, and that there was at a fundamental level “no underlying difference between the two worlds.” Therefore, there was no need for competition, let alone conflict, between the two cultures: despite the effects of intermittent divergence and even opposition, Ḥusain believed that the spirit and essence of both cultures were inseparably one and the same. 18 Reading these words, it is clear how far the West and the Arab world have drifted apart in just the last century. It is striking that Ḥusain’s theories about the close relationship between the Arab and Hellenistic worlds have been less discussed by either Arab or Western historians than his work on plagiarism in pre-Islamic poetry. This may be because the latter fits more easily into the debate on de-Arabization (see below). The mutual mistrust between Arab and Western researchers is all the more tragic when we consider the personal risks some scholars have taken just to be able to express their views. For example, Ṭāhā Ḥusain was forced to retire from his position as rector of Cairo University. Albert Glock, an American who taught in Palestine, was murdered. Although it is not clear whether his killers were politically motivated, the lively speculation around his death kindled a certain amount of attention and debate, although not always of the most substantive sort. 19 At Bir-Zeit University in Palestine, the Palestinian Suliman Bashear was thrown out of a See Jörg Kraemer, “Der islamische Modernismus und das griechische Erbe,” Der Islam 38:1 (1963), 1–26, here 2. This period also saw the first translation into Arabic of the Iliad: Suleiman al-Bustani, Iliadat (Cairo, 1904). 18 Ṭāhā Ḥusain, The Future of Culture in Egypt. Vol. 1, trans. Jörg Kraemer (Cairo, 1938), 28. For a comprehensive overview of this phase of Arab modernism, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1935 (Cambridge: CUP, 1962). 19 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Who killed Dr. Glock? Archaeology is not a science, it is a vendetta,” New Statesman July 6, 2001; available online: http://www.newstatesman.com/node/153932 (as of 01/05/2017). 17

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window by his students because he proposed a historical rather than sacred view of Islam. 20 Seen from this perspective, historical writing in the region certainly has something of the “political vendetta” about it. Scholars can count themselves lucky when their work is merely ignored, like that of the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi. Based on a study of toponyms in the southwestern Saudi Arabian province of Asir, as well as several geographical inconsistencies in the Bible, he put forward the theory that the events of the Old Testament had taken place on the Arabian Peninsula and not in Palestine. 21 Astonishingly, despite ostensibly ignoring his work and the controversy it aroused, Saudi Arabia was apparently unwilling to take any risk and promptly destroyed many of the area’s historic sites to eliminate any potential support for his thesis. 22 And so the dilemma remains. Historians in the region must often overcome severe obstacles in order to write their accounts. Alexander Stille, “Scholars are quietly offering new theories of the Koran,” New York Times, March 2, 2002; available online: http://www.nytimes.com/ 2002/03/02/arts/scholars-are-quietly-offering-new-theories-of-the-koran.html (as of 01/05/2017). 21 Kamal Salibi, The Bible Came from Arabia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985). 22 “Salibi was intensely proud of his achievement, refusing to be cowed by the storm of often abusive criticism which he provoked. Israel’s self-appointed defenders in the West condemned Salibi for trying to delegitimise the Israeli state – it is surprising how long the fear of ‘delegitimisation’ prevailed in Israel, as it still does today – while more prosaic writers treated the author with goodhumoured contempt. A reviewer in the Jewish Chronicle referred to Professor Salibi as ‘Professor Sillybilly’, a wonderful crack that I forbore to repeat to Salibi himself. The Saudis, true to their fears that the Israelis might decide to take Salibi seriously and colonise the mountains of Sarawat (which Salibi believed was the real ‘Jordan valley’ of the Bible), sent hundreds of bulldozers to dozens of Saudi villages which contained buildings or structures from Biblical antiquity. All these ancient abodes were crushed to rubble, Taliban-style, in order to safeguard the land of Muslim Arabia and the house of Saud.” Robert Fisk, “Kamal Salibi: Scholar and teacher regarded as one of the foremost historians of the Middle East,” The Independent, August 7, 2011; available online: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/kamal-salibi-scholar-andteacher-regarded-as-one-of-the-foremost-historians-of-the-middle-east2350184.html (as of 01/05/2017). 20

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In such circumstances, it is more important than ever to dare to include non-Europeans constructively in the writing of Arab history. The mere existence of dialogue between the two groups would surely lead to enrichment and open up new horizons beyond current largely static perspectives.

5. THE HELLENISTIC-ROMAN ORIENT: DARK DESIGN, SUPPRESSION, FORGETTING AND NO EXPLANATION? Since Edward Said’s book Orientalism, the objectivity of the branches of Western science that study the Orient has been in question. Orientalists are suspected of reproducing a power relationship that subordinates Eastern society, culture, and religion to Western hegemony. 1 Said’s achievement was to “unmask” the prejudices, misjudgments, and sometimes propaganda of many former and current Orientalists, from Cromer to Lewis. In Said’s view, Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt was an important watershed in the relationship between East and West, occurring as it did at a time of increased contact between the two regions. Nevertheless, two fundamental questions remain unanswered: how were the Orientalists of the time able to conjure such a coherent paradigm out of apparent thin air? And above all: is Orientalism really only a product of modern imperialism, or is there another dimension, deeper and older than that power relationship? Some historians have in recent years devoted themselves increasingly to the period of almost exactly seven hundred years between Pompey’s conquest of the Arabs in 63 B.C. and the Arabs’ triumph over Rome at the battle of Yarmūk/Jābiya (Hiero1

Said, Orientalism.

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max) in A.D. 636. Their constantly evolving image of the Arab world is a fascinating one of a region that was deeply integrated into the Hellenistic and Roman sphere and that was inhabited by Roman cives or Rhomaoi, who included well-known thinkers, senators, and even Caesars. By the end of the period, it was also a largely Christian region. This intense phase of Arab-Western interaction can be traced back to an even earlier but equally important event: the campaigns of Alexander the Great, who brought numerous Arab regions under Greek rule and who enabled a multifaceted fusion of Greek civilization with Arab/Semitic culture. The Arab world’s close connection to the West did not come to an end with the victory of Islam. The Arab administration carried on using Greek for almost a hundred years after the battle of Yarmūk. As subjects of the Caliph, Arab Christians and their leaders were responsible for the expansion of the eastern Nestorian Church all the way to Afghanistan, Tibet, and India. According to some estimations, in A.D. 1000 there were almost as many Christians who were members of churches based in Baghdad as there were living in Europe. 2 Academic research into the period is also noteworthy because of peculiarities stemming from its deep engagement with classical sources. As we saw in our earlier discussion of the Arabic language and the geographical spread of the Arab/Semitic peoples, Arabs are all too often entirely absent in contemporary accounts of the period. The fact that many Arabs took Roman or Greek names tends to render them invisible – except in records of attacks by the marauding nomadic Saracens from the Semitic At that time there were about 17–20 million Christians in Asia. “By this point, a reasonable estimate would suggest that Europe had some 25 to 30 million Christians, many whose faith was very notional indeed compared with the ancient churches of Asia and Africa. (…) Most Asian Christians, in contrast, stemmed from Christian traditions dating back twenty-five or thirty generations. If raw numbers favored Europe, Asia could still properly claim the leadership of the Christian world.” Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia – and how it Died (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 70. 2

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heartland, the Arabian Peninsula. That Arab culture in Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq was overwhelmingly urban, and that large parts of Oriens and even the Roman Empire were actually governed by Arabs, is often omitted or obscured in historical writing of the period. And on the few occasions when Arabs are identified as such, they are all too often portrayed in a negative light. It is a portrait that can tell us much about the people who painted it. The classical historians (such as Procopius, Ammianus, and Zosimus) wrote with the same tone of prejudice that Said detected among Orientalists of later centuries. We must, therefore, explain why this image arose and why or how it was handed down to modern observers. As a narrative tradition, the “Orientalist concept” has strong historical roots that stretch back to long before the imperialist phase of the 18th and 19th centuries. These roots shed light on Orientalism’s possible origins or underlying motivations and legitimation mechanisms. Such questions are left hanging in Said’s work, because he does not address the fact that Orientalism sits within a longestablished framework of reference and legitimation that has supported it and provided it with material for many centuries. The phase of Arab involvement in Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian history is not a “dark age”, where sources and architectural remains “go quiet” only to reappear again in full force out of nothing. Written and archaeological sources from the period are widely available. Leaving aside for now the question of why this period is currently so poorly represented, we must first address some important historical events that will make the significance of this forgetting, and the reasons behind it, clearer.

5.1 THE HELLENISTIC ORIENT

Hellenism entered the Arab region with Alexander’s victory over the Persian Empire and the establishment of Seleucid rule after his death around 320 B.C. From the very first meetings between Alexander and the Arabs, it was clear that there was an unsurmountable conflict of interests. The Arabs were an ever-present

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force in the desert regions of Syria and Phoenicia, and Alexander even had to call off a siege of Tyre because of their raids. 3 The Macedonian’s savage conquest of Tyre, and especially his attack in 332 B.C. on the city of Gaza, which was fiercely defended by the presumably Arab commander Batis, did more than just arouse fear and horror in the region. Gaza, the end point of the important Incense Road, was with its Arab merchants and mercenaries a crucial part of Arabia’s trade routes. Alexander’s attack cut the route between Arabia and the Mediterranean, provoking a conflict that gives us an early glimpse of something like a nascent Arab identity, or at least a consolidation of Arab interests: “In the war for Gaza it was unclear whether the defending commander Batis was motivated first and foremost by loyalty to the (Persian) King of Kings or whether he was fighting rather on behalf of the Arab interests that depended on Gaza as a sort of free-trade haven for Arabian and Indian incense.” 4 Alexander himself was certainly aware that he was in conflict with Arab interests – after all, almost all world trade was now under Greek control – and he decided that once he had conquered Asia, he would end the stalemate and conquer Arabia as well. Once the destruction of Gaza had brought the conflict into the open, events could hardly have gone any other way. For their part, the Arabs must have been equally aware that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to reach a compromise with Alexander. His actual reasons for wanting to conquer Arabia are not entirely clear. Strabo mentions twice that Alexander was angry because the Arabs refused to pay homage to him as the new ruler in Babylon, but it is clear that Strabo thinks he simply used the absence of an Arab delegation at his coronation as a pretext to justify his occupation of Arabia. 5 Högemann, Alexander, 27. Ibid., 48. (Own translation) 5 “The pretext for the war, says Aristobulus, was that the Arabians were the only people who did not send their ambassadors to Alexander; but the true reason was his ambition to be lord of all.” Strabo, Geography, 16.1.11. Högemann, Alexander, 54ff., does not seem to attach much important to this; he suspects that the 3 4

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Although Alexander’s early death in Babylon prevented him achieving his goal of conquering the Arabian Peninsula, it did not hinder the expansion of Hellenism across the Arab world under his successors. The Seleucid Greeks left traces of their settlements as far south as the Arabian Gulf. On the island of Failakā opposite Kuwait, known to the Greeks as Ikaros, there is a Greek temple containing Cretan wine amphorae and a dedication from the Seleucid governor. What is now Bahrain was then called Tylos, and a number of Hellenistic artefacts have been discovered there as well. 6 Although many of their cities and settlements can no longer be located, the Seleucids are thought to have built extensively even in this inhospitable region. 7 Greek influence was naturally even stronger in Syria: “Although the archaeological traces of Hellenistic Syria are frustratingly few, the powerful impact of Greek culture can be seen everywhere a few centuries later in the early Roman imperial prov-

decisive factor was the “diplomatic passivity” of the Arabs. Their reticence towards Alexander was due to the fact that the Persian King of Kings was still alive, and that after the conquest of Gaza the Arabs expected worse than nothing from Alexander. It is also unclear which of the Arabs’ tribes could have spoken for them anyway. Högemann thinks it would have been the – unspecified – Arab units that had fought for Persia at Gaza and in other satraps against the Greeks. 6 On Tylos, Sumerian Dilmun, see Chapter 13. For the Greek inscriptions found on Ikaros and their translations, especially the stele of Ikadion, see Daniel T. Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. Vol. 2: From Alexander the Great to the Coming of Islam (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 154ff. 7 “(…) a Greek without the sea was a lost creature. (…) This was why the Seleucids, following out one of Alexander’s ideas, took such trouble to colonise the inner Persian Gulf in spite of the heat.” William W. Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India, revised ed. (Chicago Ridge, IL: Ares Publishers, 1997), 66. But: “Unfortunately, the evidence on which these statements are based is extremely sparse.” Potts, Arabian Gulf, 15. However, the magnificent recent excavations at Alexandria-on-the-Tigris, known later as Charax Spasinou, near the south Iraqi city of Basra, offer a glimpse of the possible magnitude of these settlements: Charax Spasinou Archeological Project, “Charax 2018 Report”, http://www.charaxspasinou.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/CHARAX2018_ENG.pdf (as of 10/01/2021).

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ince of Syria.” 8 For example, the Arab caravan city of Palmyra was bilingual, as were Damascus, Bostra, and Emesa. Although there are those who believe Hellenization was only ever a “thin veneer,” 9 in recent years Glen Bowersock has shown that Hellenization may have been more deeply rooted than was previously thought. The Arabs’ strong self-awareness and sense of identity at the time of Muhammad can be explained as the result of the influence of Hellenistic religion and culture on the Arab sphere. Many Hellenistic remains have been found not just in cities, but also in rural areas. One example is an inscription carved into basalt in the southern Syrian city of Ṣammā al-Bardān. It was set up by a man and his son: “Ausus, Obaidos his son, both of them made this gift to Ilaalges and to his angel (angelôi), Idarouma.” Both names are Greek forms of “Semitic” names, and probably represent local inhabitants of the region. Their inscription is dedicated to a Semitic god, Ilaalge, whose name contains the Arabic elements Allah al-Ji (the god of al-Ji). Al-Ji was a Nabatean deity. The name of his angel contains the Arabic elements ida (hand) and rouma (raised); in other words, an angel who is a raised hand. 10 The Greek pantheon had a transformative effect on the originally fairly manageable number of Arab deities. When the Prophet destroyed the idols in the Kaaba, there were apparently more than 360 Arab gods represented there. In the third century, a man called ‘Amr ibn Luḥai had already tried to rein in the proliferation of gods by launching a counterreformation with the aim of determining the principal deities. 11 Bowersock, Hellenism, 29. Hitti, Syria, 253. 10 Cited in Bowersock, Hellenism, 30. Millar warns us that this example is unsuitable for any generalisations about the mentality of the population of the Roman Near East. “As regards the personal beliefs of the population of the Near East, questions are more appropriate than premature answers.” Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East. 31 BC–AD 337. (London: HUP, 1993), 523. The point made by Bowersock, however, is rather about the fascinating mixture of Greek and Arab elements and not so much about a tangible belief system. 11 Toufic Fahd, Le pantheon de L’Arabie centrale à la veille de l’Hégire (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1968). 8 9

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Hellenism seems to have been a useful model for expressing local religiosity, and so in a sense it paved the way for Islam by enabling the development of a form of Arab self-worth. This was achieved above all at religious fairs and events attended by all the different tribes, where they established rituals of interaction that helped build a sense of identity: “The worship of these deities at international festivals, held on a regular basis, was borrowed directly from the tradition of fairs and festivals celebrated by the Greeks. In the best Hellenic tradition, these pagan festivals of the Arabs included a statutory truce among all participating tribes.” 12 Bowersock made this crucial observation almost a hundred years after the German Orientalist Julius Wellhausen acknowledged the role played by these Hellenistic religious festivals in the creation of Arab identity, and also in the spread of monotheistic beliefs. 13 Bowersock, Hellenism, 73. For a discussion of the positive effect on Arab identity of the existence of places where individual groups could gather, see also von Grunebaum, “The Nature of Arab Unity,” 17. 13 “Bezeichnend sind die Wallfahrten der verschiedensten arabischen Stämme nach gewissen Heiligtümern, die eine allgemeine Anziehungskraft ausüben. Die Religion hat ihren bestimmten ethnischen Charakter mehr und mehr eingebüsst und einen syncretistischen angenommen. Sie hat auf diese Weise einen grossen und segensreichen Einfluss ausgeübt. In dem tumultuarischen Wirrwarr, der die Wüste füllt, bilden die Feste, zu Anfang jedes Semesters, den einzigen erfreulichen Ruhepunkt. Ein nicht kurz bemessener Gottesfriede unterbricht dann die ewige Fehde. Die verschiedensten Stämme, die sonst einander nicht über den Weg trauen, wallfahren unbesorgt, durch Freundes oder Feindes Land, gemeinschaftlich zu der selben heiligen Stätte. Der Handel wagt sich heraus, und es entsteht ein lebhafter, allgemeiner Verkehr. Man atmet auf und fühlt sich eine Zeit lang frei von den Schranken, die sonst jeden Stamm einschliessen und von anderen trennen; man lernt sich kennen: alle hervorragenden Männer, auch wenn sie durch weiteste Entfernungen getrennt wohnen, wissen von einander und haben sich in der Regel auch gesehen. Die Feststätten werden zu Messen und Märkten; in Ukatz gibt sich ganz Arabien ein jährliches Stelldichein. Dem Austausch der Waren folgt der geistige Austausch; er erstreckt sich auch auf die Poesie und die Tradition. Eine Gemeinschaft geistiger Interessen entsteht, die ganz Arabien umfasst: eine allerdings illiterate Literatur, eine über den Dialekten stehende Sprache, eine gewisse allgemeine Bildung und Anschauungsweise. Über der Zersplitterung der Stämme erheben sich die inneren Grundlagen der Nation12

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Archaeological excavations in the village of al-Faw, in central Saudi Arabia, have revealed what the Hellenistic model was capable of achieving when translated into the local Arab culture. The excavators found inscriptions written in the South Arabian Musnad script but using North Arabian grammar; even more importantly, they found murals depicting people with indigenous-looking faces and Arabic names like “Zeki” surrounded by grapevines. The style is typically Greek and points to a connection with the cult of Dionysus, which was also popular in the East. 14 The paintings represent the Arab version of a typical euergesia, the Hellenistic institution for honoring public benefactors. 15 The Greek language retained its important position in Arabia even when the area fell under Roman rule. There are hardly any Arabic/Semitic inscriptions in the cities of the Greek Decapolis in Oriens, but plenty of Greek ones. 16 Greek remained in use alität, bestehend in dem Gesamtbesitz der geistigen Güter, welche dem Leben eines Volkes höhere Art und Würde verleihen. Allerdings hat diese Entwicklung die Fühlung mit der Religion einigermassen verloren. Man dachte wenig daran, dass die heiligen Monate dem Cultus dienen sollten; man hielt sie für bestimmt, um darin Geschäfte zu besorgen, Reisen zu machen und Handel zu treiben. Die Messe zu Ukatz hatte ein recht profanes Aussehen. Trotzdem hat hier überall der Einfluss der Religion, lange vor dem Islam, mitgewirkt, um ein geistig gleichartiges und geeinigtes Arabien zu schaffen.” Julius Wellhausen: Reste arabischen Heidentums, 2nd ed. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1897), 216 14 Al-Ansary, Qaryat al-Faw, 12ff. 15 See Bowersock, Hellenism, 75. 16 See Benjamin Isaac, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East (Oxford: OUP, 1990), 177. Recently, Ball pointed out that the perceived Greekness of major cities of Oriens (Decapolis and also the Dead Cities) has come at the expense of their Arab character. “The assumed recognition of ‘Greek’ institutions…in the Roman Near East is one of the most individous manifestations of western misconceptions, and ‘it has long been customary to search the middle east microscopically for any evidence of something Greek – almost to the exclusion of the existing cultures.’ For example, inscriptional evidence for a town assembly is naturally translated into the Greek language as boule, and a mere reference to a boule at Philadelphia [today’s Jordanian capital Amman, AA] leads to the sweeping statement that ‘we need not seriously doubt that Philadelphia possessed the normal constitutional structure of a Greek city.’” Consequent-

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for a remarkably long time after the Muslim conquest of the area. Excavations in the Negev desert found papyri from the time of the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (about A.D. 685) that contain administrative texts in both Arabic and Greek. The documents are a good illustration of how the two languages could combine, for example when the Arabic word for food rations, rizq, becomes rhouzikon in Greek. The Caliph is referred to as Abdelmalech in the Greek text. It was not until later that he ordered the language of administration to be changed to Arabic. In his history of the Muslim conquests, the great ninth century historian al-Balādhurī describes an episode when a Greek scribe working for the Caliph refilled an empty inkwell with his urine, triggering al-Malik’s decision to order the change of language. 17 This incident aside, it is clear to Bowersock that the inhabitants of the former Roman diocese of Oriens did not make any sort of concerted effort to replace Greek with Arabic. Given how closely entwined the two languages and cultures had become, this is not particularly surprising: “Because Greek practices had helped the Arabs to find their identity in the centuries before the Prophet, it should now be less surprising that some of those practices persisted conspicuously after the Prophet’s death. It is not only that old ways die slowly: it was that the new ways had, in important respects, their roots in the old ones and could therefore scarcely be expected to eliminate them overnight.” 18 Greek’s persistence was not due to any inability to write Arabic effectively. It should rather be understood as the result of specific historical circumstances: “A shortage of Arab scribes cannot be the explanation of this phenomenon. Some doculy, “[A]ny use of the term ‘Arab’ or even ‘Syrian’ in a cultural context is often treated with extreme scholary – even commendable – scepticism; with any similar use of the term ‘Greek’, however, scholary caution is thrown to the winds (…).” Ball, Rome in the East, 487f. 17 Al-Baladhuri, Futûh al-Buldân, 301. A very peculiar story, perhaps intended as an amusing anecdote to make up for the fact that the real reason could not be stated? 18 Bowersock, Hellenism, 77.

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ments, notably the requisitions known as entagia, are bilingual in Greek and Arabic. Yet none is uniquely in Arabic.” 19 Another impressive monument to the persistence of Greek culture in Syria long after the Muslim conquest is the recently discovered map of Provincia Arabia in the eighth-century mosaic floor of St. Stephan’s church in Umm al-Raṣāṣ, Jordan. The map shows all the important cities in the region, and is labelled in Greek. It is dated to the year 680 after the foundation of Provincia Arabia: A.D. 785, roughly a century after the area became part of the Islamic empire! 20 Another aspect to bear in mind is that it is probably inaccurate to treat Hellenism and Arab/Semitic culture as completely alien to each other. It is not just that the Greek alphabet has Arabic/Semitic roots. The relationship between Hellenism and Arab/Semitic culture is much more multifaceted. 21 Greek religion, literature, and science were heavily influenced by the “Orient” in the Babylonian period: “Another genuine theme from Mesopotamian literature is told by Herodotus and taken up in the Persika in telling of the origin of Cyrus. It reproduced elements of the folklore concerning Sargon of Agade, abandoned by his parents in a basket of rushes, later to become a gardener and subsequently king. Echoes from Mesopotamian literature have been noted (or disputed) in the works of other Greek authors: for instance, Aischylos has been thought to have assimilated the cunning nature of Ea into his version of Prometheus. Later Classical tradition continued to ascribe a Mesopotamian education to Greek scientists and philosophers. It is difficult to Ibid. For an interpretation of this mosaic and others in Oriens, see Glen W. Bowersock, Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 2006). 21 This is more or less the line taken by some Arab historians and is naturally unfamiliar to Western observers: “Civilization arose in the Arab world and was never imported from outside it. All external attacks have been by barbarians who brought destruction and not civilization. As for the Greeks, their civilization was founded upon the cultural achievements of the Arab region.” Dāwūd, Tārīkh Sūriyā, 741. 19 20

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see what motives they would have had for claiming such influence if it had not existed, since they were proud of their own traditions (…).” 22 Moreover, if we examine the knowledge the Greeks gained from the Orient more carefully, the close and productive relationship between Hellenistic culture and the Orient becomes even clearer: “Written history is at least six thousand years old. During half of this period the center of human affairs, so far as they are now known to us, was in the Near East. (…) In this rough theatre of teeming peoples and conflicting cultures were developed the agriculture and commerce, the horse and wagon, the coinage and letters of credit, the crafts and industries, the law and government, the mathematics and medicine, the enemas and drainage systems, the geometry and astronomy, the calendar and clock and zodiac, the alphabet and writing, the paper and ink, the books and libraries and schools, the literature and music, the sculpture and architecture, the glazed pottery and fine furniture, the monotheism and monogamy, the cosmetics and jewelry, the checkers and dice, the ten-pins and income tax, the wet-nurses and beer, from which our own European and American culture derive by a continuous succession through the medium of Crete and Greece and Rome. The ‘Aryans’ did not establish civilization – they took it from Babylonia and Egypt. Greece did not begin civilization – it inherited far more culture than it began (…).” 23 We know of a number of influential Babylonian scientists, such as Diogenes of Babylon (philosophy), Appolodorus (physics), Seleucus (arithmetic), Abydenus (history), and Kidenas/Kidinnu (astronomy), all of whom cast a long shadow over their fields. After Alexander’s conquest of Babylon, these scientists, whose Babylonian ethnicity is often disguised by their Stephanie Dalley & A. T. Reyes, “Mesopotamian contact and influence in the Greek world (I & II),” in Stephanie Dalley (Ed.), The Legacy of Mesopotamia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 85–124, here 110. 23 Will Durant, The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 116. 22

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Greek names, wrote in Greek. The close relationship between the two cultures meant that the Babylonians did not experience this as a rupture, but rather as the ongoing development of their own scientific tradition in a language that they had adopted: “By studying Homer and Plato, Babylonian scholars considered that they were dealing with evolved, modern versions of their own writings in one of the languages that had come to replace their own.” 24 In his True History, the satirist Lucian went so far as to describe Homer himself as a Babylonian. 25 Lucian, who was writing in the second century, was obviously amused by the Greeks’ earnest attempts to declare Homeric poetry the “Greekest poet-

Stephanie Dalley, “Occasions and opportunities: Persian, Greek and Parthian overlords,” in Dalley (Ed.), The Legacy of Mesopotamia, 35–56, here 49. Some of the scientists named here were described as Greeks, although they were just as likely to be of “Semitic” origin. In the case of Diogenes, it is impossible to say for certain: “We do not know whether he was a Greek or Babylonian by parentage. (…) If he was a native Babylonian, his Greek name would have been used in addition to a Babylonian name according to the practice attested for two local governors at Uruk.” (46). 25 “Hardly two or three days had passed before I went up to Homer the poet when we were both at leisure, and questioned him about everything. ‘Above all,’ said I, ‘where do you come from? This point in particular is being investigated even yet at home.’ ‘I am not unaware,’ said he,’ that some think me a Chian, some a Smyrniote, and many a Colophonian. As a matter of fact, I am a Babylonian, and among my fellow-countrymen my name was not Homer but Tigranes. Later on, when I was a hostage (homeros) among the Greeks, I changed my name.” Lucian, Verae Historia, trans. A. M. Harmon (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 2:20. It is also worth mentioning that Lucian described himself as a Syrian and so may have had an affinity with the subject. Like no other writer, Lucian toyed with the boundary between fiction that was fiction and fiction that was capable of representing aspects of reality. When he declared that everything in his History was a lie, he also declared that statement itself to be a lie. “Lucian declares that the only true statement in his work is that he is a liar, and he knows perfectly well that this means that the reader has no basis for believing that statement either.” Glen Bowersock, Fiction as History: From Nero to Julian (Berkeley: UCP), 5. 24

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ry,” even though it was clear to many of his contemporaries that its roots were in Assyria and Babylon. 26 Later, the Arab Rhomaioi in Oriens were – we can assume – aware that Arab/Semitic culture had laid important groundwork for Hellenism. Their sometimes cynical comments about the Greeks read like the reactions of contemporary Arab intellectuals to Western dominance today. The famous logician and astronomer Severus Sebokht (575–667) could not restrain his “Syrian” pride when faced with Greek chauvinism, for example when he reminded his readers of the Greeks’ debt to Babylonian astronomical knowledge: “That the Babylonians were Syrians I think no one will deny, so those who say that it is in no way possible for Syrians to know about these matters (astronomy) are much mistaken.” 27 And he comments sarcastically on another scientific work: “Being an unlearned Syrian, I am putting these small queries to you to convey to those who assert that the whole of knowledge exists only in the Greek tongue.” 28 Perhaps, as Ṭāhā Ḥusain remarked during the Nahda, Hellenism was not so different or foreign to the Orient after all. Perhaps the interaction between the two cultures – as it appears in Glen Bowersock’s depiction – was actually an ongoing, mutually beneficial process that had started in the Babylonian period. 29 If the influence of Hellenistic culture, which had itself preDalley & Reyes, “Mesopotamian contact and influence in the Greek world,” 85. 27 Cited in Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 21. 28 Ibid. 29 In the de-Arabizing perspective, however, only the much later translations of Greek works into Arabic are seen as relevant: “Besides the heritage it shared with Israel, Islam also came into intimate contact with the heritage of classical antiquity. It was from the Arabs that many classical texts […] were recovered in the West […].” Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966). In this view, Arab culture is responsible for copying and translating Greek works, but not for generating any insights of its own. The fact that Arab/Semitic authors in the Hellenistic period were sometimes perceived to be not the equals of “real” Greek writers also suits this perspective. The German classical philologist Eduard Schwartz deemed the 26

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viously gained much from the Orient, was even stronger in Oriens and Arabia under Greek rule than was previously suspected, that fact probably also contributes to the difficulty of identifying the assimilated Arab/Semitic population as such. Arabs often adopted or used a Greek name, or added it to their Arab one: “Artemidorus for ‘Abdtanit, and Heliodorus for ‘Abdshemsh, and Aphrodisius is a rival version of ‘Abdastart.” 30 Such name changes were themselves a sign that the population had brought their gods and beliefs closer to those of the Hellenistic pantheon: “The old gods and goddesses, Shemsh, Tanit, and Astarte are identified with their Greek equivalents, Helios, Artemis, and Aphrodite.” 31 In Sartre’s and Jones’s definitive works on ancient Syria, neither of which uses any Arabic secondary sources, there are almost no identifiable Arab inhabitants, settlements, or actors in Hellenistic Oriens. The only hint is a brief reference to the original “Semitic settlements” of the region. 32 For the most part, Sartre at least focuses on the consequences of Greek immigration into the area, and on the effect of Hellenistic culture on the Jews. 33 But there is no reason to think Hellenization could not Hellenism of authors like Lucian, who came from the “Semitic East,” to be not particularly profound: “die gewandten, ehrgeizigen Syrer, denen das Echthellenische nur bis zum Epidermis ging.” Eduard Schwartz, Fünf Vorträge über den griechischen Roman (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1896), 149f. 30 A. H. M. Jones, Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces (Oxford: OUP/Sandpiper, 1998), 249. 31 Ibid. 32 “When a town known to us under a Greek name in the Classical period was known by a Semitic name in the Arab period, there is presumption in favour of its existence in the pre-classical period. This presumption is strengthened into proof, if there is any evidence, as there often is from the Talmud or from classical authors, that the Arab names were in use before the Arab conquest (…).” Ibid., 230f. 33 Maurice Sartre, The Middle East under Rome, trans. C. Porter & E. Rawlings (London: Belknap, 2005), 7: “Fairly rapidly large numbers of colonizers from Greece and the wider Aegean basin settled in Syria. The fact remains that tens of thousands of Greeks populated Syria.” See also Jones, Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces, 243, where the Seleucid period is seen as the beginning of a phase of

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have impacted other population groups as well. 34 The population of Oriens was divided broadly into Arameans and Jews. This does not exclude the possibility that there were mutual relationships between the various Semitic groups in the region or that there was Arab influence on the region, but naturally such relationships are unclear: “It is more difficult to assess the exchanges among Semitic cultures. The Phoenician and Hebrew languages were unquestionably victims as much of the success of Aramaic as of Greek, but how much influence did Arabs have on the fringes of the settled populations of Syria? The Hauran, Palmyra, the Euphrates Valley and Edessa were heavily influenced by Arabs, as we can see in cults, proper names, burial customs on occasions, and perhaps certain aspects of the language [sic!]. But we cannot say much more than this.” 35 So there was some unclear degree of pressure exerted by Hellenization, but as the previous citation shows, there also seems to have some equally unclear degree of pressure exerted by Arabization. This pressure even seems to have been felt by the Greeks in Oriens, who regularly mixed with the Arabs and other groups. This was particularly the case further away from Syria’s centers of power, for example in Nippur, or Forat and Charax in modern-day southern Iraq: “Since they depended for their existence on the goodwill of Arab tribes they frequently came within the range of an Arab association, and in this way, by marrying local women, they became Arabic-speaking.” 36 Overall, the consistent pressure exerted by migration out of the Arabian Peninsula seems to have strengthened Arab presintensive colonization during which Antioch, Apamea, Seleucia and Laodicea were all settled by Greeks. 34 “The Jews were no more subject than the other inhabitants of Hellenistic Syria to pressure from their new masters to adopt Greek culture. But, as happened elsewhere, some community leaders adopted a few elements of that culture, including the language.” Sartre, The Middle East under Rome, 9. 35 Sartre, The Middle East under Rome, 367. 36 Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs, 30. For the perception of Asiatic Greeks see also Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India, 35ff.

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ence throughout the Hellenistic period, and ultimately to have led to the Arabs’ increasingly important political position. The border regions were clearly subject to Arab influence. Over time, numerous Arab rulers established themselves as the princes of city states along the Persian border: “Arab leaders, being recognized for their importance in ensuring the functioning of the trade-routes, frequently became masters of Greek and Aramaean cities and towns, and then, assuming the characteristics of Aramaean kings, founded a dynasty. City-states that had Arab dynasties included: in the eastern zone, Ḥaṭra and Singara; in the south, Vologasia and Mesēne; and, in the west, Anthemusia (capital Batnae), Urhāi (Edessa), and Carrhae (Ḥarrān).” 37 And so an Arab power structure had already started to evolve while still under Hellenistic sovereignty. It is in precisely this role, as a buffer between the great powers, that the Arab leaders would also be relevant to Roman rulers.

5.2 ROMAN ARABIA AND THE DIOCESE OF ORIENS

In the Hellenistic period, the Arab element had consolidated its position in the region comprising Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt east of the Nile Delta. For the most part, this area became the later Byzantine administrative unit of the diocese of Oriens. It was dotted with Arab groups from north to south,

Ibid., 29. Due to deconstruction or de-Arabization, there are differing opinions about this. In relation to Mesene/Charax, which was near the modern-day city of Basra in southern Iraq, Schuol’s large-scale study of the Characenes notes that the settlement was in the “Arab area,” but otherwise is unable to identify any Arab aspects. Monika Schuol, Die Charakene. Ein mesopotamisches Königreich in der hellenistisch-parthischen Zeit (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000), 262, 280. This is despite Strabo’s explicit mention of “Arabian Meseni,” Strabo, Geographica, 16.1.8. Retsö, in Arabs in Antiquity, 333, is equally sceptical, deconstructing the Arab element with a typically distorted view: “Hyspaosines is then said to have been king of the bordering Arabs. They must be those living in the part of Arabia stretching along the Persian Gulf, deriving their Arabness from their habitat in Arabia, not from actually being Arabs.” 37

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such as the Osroeni in Syrian Edessa 38 and in the Euphrates area, the Arabs in the caravan city of Palmyra, the Iturians in Lebanon, the Nabateans in Jordanian Petra, and the Idumeans in southern Palestine, to name only the most important. 39 Moreover, there were Arab rulers in many of the important cities of Oriens, where they were put to use by Pompey in his reorganization of the Roman East. Pompey developed a clear plan to deal with the difficulties that would accompany the implementation and maintenance of direct government in the region: a ring of newly established Roman provinces stretching along almost the entire coast of Asia Minor and Syria was bolstered by numerous client principalities, including Emesa, Edessa, and Chalcis. These were primarily intended to provide protection against the Parthian Empire in the east, which had also installed several vassal states along its border with Roman territory. In this way, the Syrian-Mesopotamian area between the Roman and Parthian Empires became a buffer zone of Arab states, which were formally largely independent, but which could only maintain their independence with the help of one or the other of

38 Edessa may have been the first Christian city in the world. Eusebius of Caesarea tells us that King Abgar, “who ruled with great glory the nations beyond the Euphrates,” approached Jesus and entreated him to cure his illness. According to Eusebius, this letter was stored in the city’s archives. Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History, trans. Arthur C. McGiffert (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1890), 1.13. The Abgar legend has so far not been verified either numismatically or archaeologically. Current theories assume a pre-Catholic foundational phase around the year 100, and a Catholic phase beginning in 180 or 190. Wilhelm Baum, “König Abgar bar Manu (ca. 177–212) und die Frage nach dem ‘christlichen’ Staat Edessa,” in Sophia G. Vashalomidze & Lutz Greisiger (Eds.), Der Christliche Orient und seine Umwelt (Wiesbaden: C. H. Beck, 2007), 99–117, here 101. 39 For an overview of all Arab groups, see Irfan Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs, 5ff. There is also a description of Arab groups in Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 48. His list is clearly marked by a certain “reluctance” when it comes to defining groups as Arabs. For example, he is unsure whether the Itureans in Lebanon were actually Arabs or just strongly intermixed with them, even though they most likely spoke Arabic (407f.).

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the great powers. 40 With the rise to power of Antipater, grandfather of Herod, this ring was completed: “An outcome of Julius Caesar’s victory over Pompey in 48 BC was the appointment of the Idumaean Arab Antipater, who had adopted Judaism as a religion, as Procurator of Judea. (…) Almost the whole west Syrian territory now had Arab rulers tolerated as client-kings under the Romans.” 41 Even more than under the Greeks, the Arabs under Roman rule were able to establish themselves politically, to adapt power structures, and to use them for their own benefit. The rest of this chapter will describe some of the most significant characters of the period, such as Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who rebelled unsuccessfully against Roman rule and who spent the later years of her life as a respected Senator in Rome; or her husband, Odenathus, who saved the Roman Empire from the Persians and received the title corrector totius Orientis in return. Emperor Septimius Severus was married to an Arab princess from Syria, who was thus the mother of Caracalla. 42 After the string of “half Arabs” – Caracalla, Elagabalus, and Alexander – the first full Arab to take the purple was Marcus Julius Philippus, known as Philip the Arab. He may also have been the first Christian to sit on the Roman throne. Eusebius of Caesarea reports that Philip was the first Christian Emperor of Rome, and tells the story of an occasion when Philip wanted to attend the Easter Vigil and pray in church alongside the people, but the bishop would only let him attend Mass if he joined the ranks of the penitents. Needless to say, historians are unable to agree on whether Philip was a Christian or not. 43 What is undisputed, however, is his tolerant Funke, “Die syrische-mesopotamische Staatenwelt,” 223. See also Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 12ff. 41 Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs, 38f. 42 On the role of Arab princesses as the wives and mothers of Caesars like Elagabalus and Severus Alexander, see Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs, 34, and Bowersock, Hellenism, 160ff; see also Chapter 6.2 below. 43 Eusebius, Church History, 6.34. Eusebius also says that Origen wrote letters to Philip and his wife. If Eusebius saw those letters, we can assume that the story of 40

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attitude towards Christians, and that if he was in fact a Christian, it was for him a private matter. 44 The large number of Arab Senators in the Roman East, especially Syria and Lebanon, formed another important Arab element. 45 We can also safely assume that large parts of the Roman army in Oriens consisted of Arab cives, 46 something that is confirmed by the designation of the relevant units as indignae (e.g. Equites Promoti Indignae) or by specific references to the troops’ geographical or ethnic origin (e.g. Cohors Secunda Ituraeorum). 47 Increasing conflict between Rome and the Sassanids led to long-lasting changes for the Arabs. First, the Roman Empire became increasingly hierarchical and centralized. The eastern conquests of the second century and the consequent conflict with the Sassanids transformed the relatively loose, decentralized imperial politics and institutions of old Rome into a rigid, centralized state apparatus. This limited the freedom both of the Arabs in Oriens and those in the Sassanid Empire, which was itself forced to centralize in order to be able to match Rome militarily: “Both moved towards greater administrative centralisation and absolutist government, to the detriment of civic autonomy in the West and of the provincial nobility in the East.” 48 Philip’s appearance at Easter Mass may have been mentioned in one of them (6.36.3). 44 See Shahîd’s summary of this discussion in Rome and the Arabs, 110ff.; Yasmine Zahran, Philip the Arab: A Study in Prejudice (London: Stacey International, 2001); Bowersock, Studies, 397; ibid., Roman Arabia, 124ff. 45 For the list of Senators, see Bowersock, Studies, 155ff., and Chapter 6.2 below. 46 This Arabization seems to have continued and even increased until Oriens was conquered by the Muslim army: “(…) most of the troops within Syria seem to have been of Arab origin.” David Nicolle, Yarmuk AD 626: The Muslim Conquest of Syria (London: Osprey Publishing, 1994), 23. 47 For the identification of the relevant Arab Roman troops in the Notitia Dignitatum, see Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs, 58ff. 48 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 13. For a discussion of this centralization with a focus on the city of Gaza, see Glanville Downey, Gaza in the Early Sixth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 10ff.

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Second, rulers were no longer indifferent to the beliefs of their subjects, and religion was wielded as a new tool for the consolidation and maintenance of power. Rome’s power in Oriens was increasingly exerted over the clergy, who were integrated ever more tightly into the political apparatus. The unity of politics and religion thus created was maintained by the Muslims in the seventh century. The pressure to conform and integrate naturally provoked a reaction from the affected populations, who would have preferred to keep a certain distance from imperial culture and politics. Rome’s power in Oriens was constantly threatened by heresies, including the increasingly popular Monophysitism. Such heresies threatened Christian cohesion and so also the rule of Rome, which could not see the Monophysite church as anything other than a “national” church of Oriens. This perception of Oriens as a hotbed of separatist and heretical tendencies was condensed in the phrase Arabia haeresium ferax. In the Sassanid Empire, the problem of religious heterogeneity and its associated tensions was solved with a system in which the individual religious communities were allowed to govern themselves; a system that Islam later adopted as well. 49 As a consequence of Diocletian’s military reorganization of Oriens, a new Arab group appeared in the history of the Roman East in the fourth century: the foederati, Rome’s Arab allies. The limes Diocletianus, which was primarily manned by farmersoldiers, or limitanei, turned out to be less efficient than hoped, and was immediately put under great pressure to repel the attacks of the Arab nomads. The Romans tried to solve the problem by using Arab foederati: Arabs would halt Arab attacks. 50 Although the foederati were probably not Roman citizens, the Byzantine emperors entrusted them with the task of defending the border regions. In particular, their duties included defense against nomadic tribes and above all against Parthian or Sassanid attacks on the diocese of Oriens. The foederati represented a 49 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 15; Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 26ff. 50 Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 15.

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new strategy in Rome’s attempts to secure its eastern provinces. Rome had learnt from bitter experience during the Palmyran rebellion that local rulers could not be allowed to establish an urban power base. 51 Accordingly, the foederati were mercenary soldiers who were allowed to build their camps (ḥiras, or paremboles) within the limes, but were not permitted to establish their own urban centers. 52 The relationship between Rome and the foederati was fundamentally shaped by the fact that Rome/Byzantium, in keeping with its overall strategy of centralization and consolidation, relied heavily on the Christian church to bind the foederati to it: “Christianity revolutionized the relationship between the foederati and Byzantium and added a powerful dimension to their loyalty. The old legal and technical bond of fides that had united Roman emperor and his Arab ally was now cemented by a common faith to which both Byzantium and her Arab allies

Ibid., 20. However, the Ghassānids, the foederati of the sixth century, did have their own sedentary bases. One of these was the town of Jābiya, close to the battlefield of Yarmūk, where Rome was to be defeated by the Muslims in the seventh century. The archaeology of these bases is lost. One of the few surviving records is the travel account of the German archaeologist Rudolph Brünnow, who visited the area in the late 19th century and was the first Westerner to identify the remains of Jābiya, at that time already being used as a quarry by the surrounding settlements. His short account, nevertheless, is still able to stir the imagination with the traces of “magnificent buildings” (Prachtbauten) and cyclopean fortifications he was able to track down: “Mein eigentliches Reiseziel waren die Ruinen von ed-dschābije, die noch von keinem Reisenden untersucht worden sind. Leider fand ich bloss formlose Trümmer und könnte auch nicht einmal die Spur einer Inschrift entdecken; nur zwei Skulpturen (..) lassen auf einstige Prachtbauten schliessen. (...) Die Grundmauern eines großen Gebäudekomplexes stehen noch. (…) Am nordöstlichen Rande des Westhügels befindet sich eine cyklopische Mauer, die den Theil einer den ganzen Hügel umfassenden Ringmauer bildet.” Rudolph E. Brünnow, Mitteilungen I, Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins, No 19, 1898, 17–20, here 17–19. In addition to these Ghassānid “capitals” (Jābiya, Jalliq), Hitti identified more than 300 Ghāssanid villages on the eastern and southern slopes of Hauran, where only a few exist today: Hitti, Arabs, 80f. 51 52

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were passionately devoted.” 53 This new bond was needed to mitigate widespread distrust and insecurity in the wake of the suppression of Palmyra. A new form of cohesion was necessary: “Christianity solved this problem by uniting the two parties within its spiritual fold (…).” 54 Of course, there were always doubts about the strength of faith of the Arabs in general, and the foederati in particular (see Chapter 11.1). But there are grounds for believing that the Arabs were loyal to Christianity, and that they saw themselves as defenders of their religion against the fire-worshiping Persians and the heathen nomads: “Constantine had militarized the image of Christ, and the Cross became a symbol of victory carved on the shields of the Roman soldiers. The Arab foederati accepted this new image of Christ and Christianity, of a powerful, victorious Christ, who gave them victory in battle, and under that aegis they fought their wars and invoked his name in battle.” 55 In concrete terms, the relationship between Rome and the foederati was structured in a way that placed one Arab tribal union to rule over all the others. Rome normally gave leadership of the foederati to whichever tribal union had gained the upper hand in the ongoing competition between the tribes. For example, power was transferred from the Tanūkh to the Salīḥ tribe at the end of the fourth century when the Tanūkh leader visited a deaf Salīḥ chief called Jidh‘ to demand the payment of outstanding taxes. When Jidh‘ requested a deferment, the Tanūkh chief mocked him. In response, Jidh‘ chopped off his head. This incident is the origin of the Arabic proverb khudh min Jidh‘in mā ’a‘ṭāka, “take from Jid what Jid was willing to give,” which is close in meaning to the English “never look a gift horse in the mouth.” 56 Whoever was currently tribal leader received the title Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 21. Ibid. 55 Ibid., 25; for a criticism of this view see Wood, ‘We have no King but Christ’ 240ff, who describes the role of the foederati in much more opportunistic terms. 56 See Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1989), 286. 53 54

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of phylarch. In the fourth century the foederati were dominated by the Tanūkh tribal union, in the fifth century by the Salīḥ, and finally in the sixth century up until the Battle of Yarmūk by the Ghassānids. 57 In this last phase, Justinian proclaimed the Ghassānid phylarch as Basileus, King of the Arabs, for the first time. 58 The close integration of the foederati into the Roman army is reflected in several Arabic words drawn from Roman military vocabulary: for example, the Latin castrum, meaning fortified location, became Arabic qaṣr; Latin stratum became Arabic ṣirāṭ; fossa was borrowed as fusṭāṭ. 59 As strong as the religious bond between the Arabs and Rome was, Christianity was constantly plagued by theological variants or heresies. The Arabs often could not or would not adjust their Christian beliefs to suit the changing Christological positions of the Byzantine emperors. This regularly caused conflict between Byzantium and the foederati. The Arab queen Mavia rebelled against Valens in the early 370s, abandoning her position in the limes and embarking on a plundering spree across For details about the individual tribal unions see Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century; for information about the Tanūkh see his Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century; and for information about the Salīḥ and the Ghassānids see his Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol I, Part 1, 32ff. (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995); see also Yasmine Zahran, Ghassan Resurrected (London: Stacey International, 2006); Benjamin Isaac, The Limits of Empire, 250ff. The history of the Ghassānids was chronicled by the great nineteenth-century Semitist Nöldeke in a work that is still used as a reference: Nöldeke, Die Ghassânischen Fürsten aus dem Hause Gafna’s (Berlin: Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1887). 58 Previously, the Arab phylarchs had been subordinated to the commanders of the respective provinces (the duces). This turned about to be a disadvantage against the Persians’ allies, the more autonomous Lakhmids. And so in the sixth century all Arab foederati were placed under the direct command of the Ghassānid phylarch. See Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol I, Part 1, 97ff; also Procopius, History of the Wars, trans. Henry B. Dewing (London: Bibliobazaar, 1971), 1.17.43–48. 59 Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century. Vol. 2, Part 1 (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 60f. For more Arabic vocabulary with Latin or Greek etymology, see Zīdān, Tārīkh ’Ādāb al-Lugha al-‘Arabiyya, 38. 57

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Oriens. 60 Her revolt is thought to have been motivated above all by the Arian Valens’ hostile attitude to Orthodox Arab bishops. 61 Mavia only called an end to the rebellion when Valens agreed to the ordainment of an Orthodox (and presumably Arab) bishop called Moses. To seal the new foedus, her daughter was married to a high-ranking Roman official called Victor. Mavia reassumed her role as a foederatus and sent a contingent to help defend Constantinople against its Gothic invaders. In the sixth and seventh centuries, the foederati became Monophysite. This brought them once more into conflict with the now Orthodox emperors in Byzantium. The bond between the Arab foederati and the Byzantine emperors, or largely Monophysite Oriens and Orthodox Byzantium, was inevitably and drastically weakened by this situation. But despite this the foederati remained vitally important for Rome, and in the sixth century they assumed main responsibility for the limes. Personal relationships between individual phylarchs and their Roman rulers also played a significant role. Nöldeke tells the following anecdote about the relationship between Justin II and the phylarch Arethas (al-Ḥārith): “Als Justinus einige Jahre nach seiner Thronbesteigung kindisch wurde, da schreckten ihn, wenn er zu toben begann, die Kämmerlinge mit dem Ruf zu Ruhe: ‘Still! Arethas Sohn Gabala’s kommt über dich!” 62 The bond between Rome and the foederati was weakened still further by the Persians’ most successful invasion of Oriens thus far, just a few years before Yarmūk. Emperor Heraclius was only able to repel the invasion by mobilizing all his forces, inSee Bowersock, Studies, 136ff. Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century, 142. 62 Nöldeke, Die Ghassânischen Fürsten, 20. It is also interesting to note that Justin II named his daughter Arabia. Shahîd sees this as a sign of the influence wielded by the Ghassānids in imperical circles and as a reflection of the early inclination of Justin II and his wife Sophia to Monophysitism, to which the Ghassānids passionately adhered. For the discussion about Arabia see: Irfan Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol. II, Part 2: Economic, Social and Cultural History (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2009), 344, 348. 60 61

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cluding the foederati. Only eight years passed between this critical juncture and the Battle of Yarmūk, when Rome and its Arab allies were forced to confront the Muslim armies. Although we can assume that the foederati must have suffered massive losses in the battle against the Persians, at Yarmūk they were still on Byzantium’s side defending Oriens (about 5000 of the roughly 20,000 Romans were Arab Christians). Historians often forget that for the Arabs, Yarmūk was a fratricidal battle. The Ghassānid phylarch Jabala commanded the Roman army’s light cavalry against members of his own Arab tribe. 63

5.3 ROME’S ARAB RULERS AND THE PROBLEM OF “ORIENTALIZATION”: JULIA DOMNA, ELAGABALUS AND PHILIP THE ARAB AS SEEN BY HISTORIANS

When considering the historical portrait of the Arabs painted by the Roman and Greek historians and by many modern researchers, we are confronted by the strange phenomenon of “Orientalization”: an emphasis on negative characteristics and poor conduct explained as the expression of Arab “ethnicity.” It is as if such attitudes have been passed down through the ages as immutable attributes that can only be persuaded to yield a more nuanced view with great effort. Prejudice against the Arabs seems to have increased rather than decreased over the centuries. The Arab element in Oriens, and indeed the Roman Empire, reached its zenith in the third century. Julia Domna’s marriage to Septimius Severus did not just propel a powerful Arab lineage “(…) the Christian Arab auxiliaries included the dominant Ghassan tribe as well as men from the Lakhm, Judham, Bali, Amila and Quda’a tribes. It is interesting to note that the Lakhm, Bali and Judham were also represented in the opposing Muslim Arab army, many of their men still being Christians.” Nicolle, Yarmuk, 46. That the invasion army was pluralist by nature can also by derived from the fact that “(…) Musim lawyers debated Muhammed’s rulings about what share of the spoils of war should go to Jews and Christians who fought alongside Muslims.” Robert G. Hoyland, In God’s Path. The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 58.

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from Syria to the Roman capital; after the half-Arab Severans, the accession of Philip the Arab also marked the first time an Arab had become emperor of Rome. The presence of Arabs among the ranks of Rome’s rulers was the culmination of a process that had begun in the second half of the first century, when the first Arab senators were appointed, and that was then furthered by Julia Domna. The rise to power of “Arab” rulers in the Roman royal house forced Roman historians, and even more so modern “Orientalist” historians, to consider Arabs in a new way. They were no longer just a barbarian people who plundered Oriens, an ever-present nuisance even if not an existential threat. Arabs now threatened the very foundations of the Roman West, bringing their “Oriental” religion, habits, and followers to the capital itself. Despite all Rome’s prejudices against barbarians in general, and the Arabs in particular, the remarkable and contradictory fact remains that Arabs managed to gain access to the mechanisms of power at all. Their success may well be to do with the fact that aristocratic class systems were capable of overriding nationalistic and sometimes ethnic categories. 64 However, given what we know about the deconstructing effect of deArabization, their ascendance was probably also due to the important role of the Arab element within the Roman Empire in general. The entry of Arabs into the Senate laid the foundations for an Arab position of power that was then expanded thanks to the patronage of Julia Domna and her sister. 65 It is interesting that it was mainly Arabs from Greater Syria specifically, rather than Arabs from any other province in the Near East or indeed Jews, who climbed the political ladder. This preferential treatment of Syrians may be connected to events in Vespasian’s reign. VespaWood, ‘We have no King but Christ’ 69, points out that “Roman” was not an exclusively ethnic category. Cultural and religious factors were equally important. 65 Bowersock, “Roman Senators from the Near East: Syria, Judea, Arabia, Mesopotamia,” Epigrafia e ordine senatorio, II (1984), 651–68, here 651. 64

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sian was familiar with the region, and understood Syria’s strategic importance to Rome: “In short, Syria was, in Roman terms, both respectable and vital. The Jews were suspect and fractious, and the Arabs outside Syria were marginal.” 66 Of course, using the senator list to identify Arabs is an inexact process because many of them adopted Roman names, but names like Marinus, 67 Sohaemus, Salamallianus, and Odenathus are certainly Arabic. 68 The geographical homeland of the senators as recorded in the list confirms that the Arab representatives were from Syria: “It is important to remember that indigenous Syrians were Arabs and accordingly that an Arab name can indicate a patria in Syria as in Arabia (the province) or Mesopotamia. The evidence gathered (…) suggests that a Syrian provenance should be preferred (…).” 69 The Arab senators were generally stationed in their homeland, and later also in Numidia. 70 Naturally there were exceptions. The Arab Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus was stationed on the northern border of the Empire, although this was certainly due to his close relationship with Marcus Aurelius – he married the emperor’s daughter, and in 173 was honored with a second consulship. 71 Another example is Lucius Julius Salamallianus, who was stationed in Belgica. Septimius Severus, an African Phoenician from Leptis Magna (modern-day Libya), married Julia Domna, thereby bringing to power an Arab priestly family from Emesa (modernday Homs, in Syria). 72 Julia Domna was the mother of Caracalla, Ibid., 658. The name Marinus, widespread among Arab Rhomaioi, is likely derived from the word mār (lord) or māri (my lord). See Bowersock, “Roman Senators,” 664. 68 Ibid., 663. 69 Ibid., 661. 70 Ibid. 71 Bowersock, Studies, 152f. 72 Western researchers sometimes hesitate to recognize the “Arab” character of Emesa, despite Strabo’s comment that Emesa and its neighboring city Arethusa were ruled by King Sampsiceramus and his son Iamblichus. Strabo, Geography, 16.2.10. Iamblichus is described by Dio as an Arab phylarch, Cassius Dio, Roman History, trans. Earnest Cary (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1914), 50.13. Neverthless, 66 67

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who was thus half Arab, while her sister Julia Maesa was the mother of Julia Soemias and Julia Mammaea, who in turn were the mothers of Elagabalus and Severus Alexander, respectively. The Severan empresses were, therefore, all Arabs, and their emperors all at least partly Arab. 73 Julia Domna and her family made the Arab presence in Rome suddenly obvious. 74 Right up to the modern day, representations of the Severan family have tended to use a problematizing, prejudice-laden tone. The mutually reinforcing lines of argument used by both ancient and modern historians are easy to recognize. First, we should note that this narrative does not fall under the heading “Arab,” but rather “Syrian” or even “Oriental.” This is because the Arabs were notorious as the plunderers of Oriens from the time of Cicero down to the time of Zosimus. For that reason the Icks comes to the customary de-Arabizing conclusion: “This seems to imply that the Emesenes were originally a nomadic tribe from the Arabian desert. However, what the ancients meant by the term ‘Arab’ is at present indefinable.” Martijn Icks, The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 46. For Retsö, these rulers were not Arabs at all, but Emesenes! Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 409. For details about Julia Domna’s Arab roots see Levick, Julia Domna, 14ff. Of course, the question remains of how Arab/Semitic Julia Domna really was. There are signs that she never fully erased her nomadic, Arab origin. She was depicted in the pose of the (Arab) Queen of Hatra (in modern-day northern Iraq): “It is in her gesture, that of the raised right hand, palm front, that oriental echoes have been seen (…).” Ibid., 22. However, she probably only spoke her native language, which in the Western view can only have been Aramaic and not Arabic, among her most intimate circles: “It is a question whether she used Aramaic in her senatorial household; she may well have done to her personal servants, less so, perhaps, after she became empress (…).” Ibid. 73 “Septimius, the founder of the dynasty, was not [Arab], but all the rest were, either wholly or partly. Caracalla was half-Arab; Elagabalus and Severus Alexander were at least half-Arab and probably wholly so.” Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs, 34 n5. 74 The names of the princesses are derived from Arabic: “The origin of the name lies in the Arabic Dumayna, an archaic diminutive of dimna, and etymologically connected with the colour word for black. (…) Her sister Maesa’s name is also Arab, thought to be from a verb masa, ‘walk with a swinging gait’ (…).” Levick, Julia Domna, 18.

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Roman Arabs, the Rhomaioi, often called themselves Syrians instead. 75 In the case of Philip the Arab, who came from the Hauran region in the province of Arabia and became emperor in 243, the nickname was a later addition, and was certainly intended to be derogatory. 76 The “problem of Orientalization,” however, is a modern label that was adopted in the twentieth century following the example of the German Orientalist von Domaszewski. 77 It refers to allegations that Rome’s Arab rulers displayed “Oriental” behaviors, such as the Severans’ “craftiness,” which according to Dio was the result of their Syrian heritage. 78 The unusual habits of the Severans as noted by their contemporaries, and above all their strange religious ideas and barbaric clothes, 79 have been taken by some modern Orientalists as a visual symbol of the Severans’ tendency to “subordinate the capital to the Orient.” 80 It was also felt that Rome was being infiltrated by their “Oriental” advisors and confidants and that this in some way threatened the very fabric of Rome. According to this view, the influx of Oriental ideas under Severus and Caracalla, and especially under the two boy emperors, was “never-ending.” 81 In summary, 75 “The inhabitants of the more civilized parts of the province of Arabia referred to themselves as Syrians, an attitude reflected in the Sibylline oracle’s description of Philip.” Zahran, Philip, 18. 76 Ibid. 77 Erich Kettenhofen, Die syrische Augustae in der historischen Überlieferung (Bonn: R. Habelt, 1979), 173. 78 Dio, Roman History, 78.6. Levick, Julia Domna, 24, recognizes Dio’s racist background: “Dio, who was a Roman senator and author of a history of Rome, as well as being a Greek from Bithynia, was ready to play the racist card. He considered that Domna’s son Caracalla was a member of three peoples and possessed not a single one of their virtues, but a combination of all their failings: Gallic irresponsibility, cowardliness, and rashness, African harshness and barbarity, and from Syria, where he came from on his mother’s side, cunning and villainy.” 79 Andreas Alföldi, Die monarchische Repräsentation im römischen Kaiserreich (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), 275. 80 Kettenhofen, Die syrische Augustae, 173 (own translation). 81 Ibid.

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this long-lasting period of rule by Arab women is seen – unsurprisingly, given the catalog of negative attributes – as one of the “greatest riddles of Roman imperial history.” 82 It was not until the 1970s that Kettenhofen, one of the first modern historians to examine these assumptions, was able to show that the “Orientalization accusations” had been invented, or at least heavily exaggerated. 83 There were not actually very many “Syrians” among the Roman ruing class; nor did Hellenistic or indeed “Oriental” influences have any dramatic effect on Roman religion. 84 Kettenhofen concludes that “(…) das allzu apodiktische gefällte Urteil v. Domaszewksis (…) fallenzulassen (ist). (…) Wenn die Arbeit gezeigt hat, daß ein Einbruch orientalischer Herrschaftsbegriff und Kultformen in der Severerzeit nur schwer nachweisbar ist, vielmehr vorhandene Tendenzen fortgeführt wurden, hat sie ihr Ziel erreicht.” 85 A similarly fickle view has developed in recent years regarding Elagabalus (al-Jabal is Arabic for “the mountain”). This emperor, who brought his local cult of sun worship with him to Rome, has been the object of much suspicion. 86 It is only recently that it has become possible to soften his image as an Oriental despot. Michael Sommer points out that emperors like Elagabalus, who were only able to take power after ousting the reigning elite, were faced with an almost insoluble problem: in the Principate, where the political system was based on consent, somebody who broke the rules stood no chance, and indeed risked shattering the whole system, even retrospectively. 87 After the death of an emperor, it was the task of the Senate to either raise 82 Alfred von Domaszewski, “Die politische Bedeutung der Religion von Emesa,” in Albrecht Dieterich (Ed.), Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, Vol. 11 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1908), 223–242, here 223 (own translation). 83 Kettenhofen, Die syrische Augustae, 173. 84 On the Arabs/Syrians protected by Julia Domna see Bowersock, Studies, 188. 85 Kettenhofen, Die syrische Augustae, 176. 86 See the summary of Orientalist perspectives of Elagabalus in Icks, The Crimes of Elagabalus, 128. 87 Michael Sommer, “Elagabal – Wege zur Konstruktion eines ‘schlechten’ Kaisers,” Scripta Classica Israelica 23 (2004), 95–110, here 97

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him to the status of a god, or to condemn him to damnatio memoriae. As the example of Hadrian shows, such decisions were always balanced on a knife edge. In the case of Elagabalus, the negative portrait painted in the Senate then needed to be brought to life. 88 Elagabalus can also be seen as a harbinger of the looming split between the Eastern and Western Empires. In this sense he was a sort of signal: he resolved no contradictions and embodied the bewilderment of an era. 89 Attitudes towards and evaluations of Elagabalus have changed a remarkable amount over time. While early accounts focused above all on his various excesses, since the nineteenth century the Oriental factor has come to the fore: “Only in the nineteenth century did other aspects of the young ruler’s reign come into focus. Historians and literary authors became interested in the emperor as an ‘Oriental’, whose rise to power and introduction of the Elagabalus cult in Rome instigated a culture clash between ‘East’ and ‘West’. While this interpretation has the merit that it acknowledges the emperor’s religious reforms as an important and remarkable aspect of his reign, it tends to reduce Elagabalus to an icon of the ‘East’; someone who embodies traits which the author deems typically ‘Oriental’ (…).” 90 This development is surely linked to the increasing power of Orientalism itself. If the Roman historians were most concerned with the Arabs’ unusual appearance and beliefs, centuries later the Arabs had become members of an Michael Sommer, “Elagabal”, 95ff. Until his damnatio, official descriptions of the emperor by the imperial administration had been overwhelmingly positive: Icks, The Crimes of Elagabalus, 215. 89 Ibid., 110. Nevertheless, these contradictions were partly the product of misinterpretation. The much-criticized “unusual” clothing of the “Arab Caesars” (trousers) was – at least in Elagabalus’ case – probably simply a reference to the Sol Invictus figure of the cult of Mithras, a deity who was extremely popular in the Roman army. Elagabalus was popular among the legions, so this is another plausible interpretation of his clothing. See Lucinda Dirven, “The Emperor’s New Clothes: A Note on Elagabalus’ Priestly Dress,” in Vashalomidze & Greisiger (Eds.), Der Christliche Orient und seine Umwelt, 21–36, here 35. 90 Icks, The Crimes of Elagabalus, 216. 88

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ethnic group that had driven Christianity out of its old home. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when almost the whole Arab region was under European rule, the idea of an Arab Caesar inevitably must have seemed anachronistic, and in complete opposition to the self-image of Western superiority. One major decision of the Severan period that changed the Roman Empire forever is often overlooked in these Orientalist interpretations. In 212, the Constitutio Antoniniana extended citizenship to all free men in the Empire, erasing the distinction between Romans and the inhabitants of the provinces. We can only speculate as to whether Caracalla’s Arab mother and her (presumably) “Oriental” advisors Ulpian and Papinian were involved behind the scenes in this edict. 91 Regardless, the Severans’ Arab/African background was probably a significant motivating factor: “Although various motives have been assigned to its issue, it is not impossible that the ethnic origin of Julia and her son and the fact that the family hailed from one of the provinces of the East were operative factors.” 92 Another of the Severans’ important innovations was Elagabalus’ controversial introduction of Oriental cults. The sun god he worshipped – an Arab deity symbolized by a black stone! – can be seen as a precursor to Semitic monotheism, as von Domaszewski recognized. 93 The exploitation of religion for political purposes was an early indication of what the future held, although at that stage it was more a product of necessity than a deliberate strategy. 94 This proto-monotheism was the expression On Papinian and Ulpian see Bowersock, Studies, 320. For their untimely deaths see Zosimus, New History, trans. W. Green & T. Chaplin (London: J. Davis, 1814), 1.10. 92 Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs, 34f. 93 “Die Ausbildung dieses monotheistischen Sonnenkultes ist das Werk jener Theologenschule von Emesa.” Von Domaszewski, “Die politische Bedeutung der Religion von Emesa,” 235; Levick, Julia Domna, 151, regards the cult as a syncretism. 94 On Elagabalus’ political use of his role as an Emesene priest, see Levick, Julia Domna, 148: “His only asset was his priesthood (…). The god of stone was all he had.” 91

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of a religious discourse that had long existed in the Arab sphere, and which will be discussed in more detail later in the context of the evidence for monotheistic trends before Islam (See Chapter 11.1.). It is surely no coincidence that the three “Arab” emperors – Elagabalus, Alexander Severus, and Philip – were all known to have monotheistic interests and inclinations. Philip’s historical image is even more tarnished than that of the Severans. Even now, he is represented as “the son of an Arab desert sheik’ who followed Elagabalus as a sort of ‘Oriental Caesar.” 95 When Emperor Gordian died during his campaign against the Persians in 244, the soldiers acclaimed Philip as Caesar. The next five years of his rule marked an extraordinarily unstable time for Rome, which was embroiled in conflict in Mesopotamia while also trying to defend its border along the Danube. Philip accordingly decided to negotiate a peace with the Persians. Back in Rome, he also oversaw the city’s important thousand-year anniversary. His death at the hands of the usurper Decius was a blow to the unity of the Empire’s western and eastern parts, a unity that had been much sought after ever since Augustus inherited the conquests of Pompey and Caesar. 96 It may have been the turbulence of the times that made it possible for an Arab to rise to the throne, but it is probably also true that Rome’s Arab Senators and the rule of the Severans had paved the way for Philip: “Nothing shows better the success of the upper levels of Syrian society in penetrating the Roman Aristocracy than the arrival of three Syrian Arabs on the throne of the Caesars in the third century A.D. These were Elagabalus, who came from Emesa, his kinsman Severus Alexander, and Philip, who came from the edge of the Laja on the borders of Syria and Arabia. (…) The emergence of Syrians at the head of the Roman Government was 95 Christian Körner, Philippus Arabs: Ein Soldatenkaiser in der Tradition des antoninisch-severischen Prinzipats (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 2 (own translation). 96 Zahran, Philip, 128. For more detail about Philip’s death, the various ways it has been depicted, and an attempt at a synthesis, see Körner, Philippus Arabs, 311ff.

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yet another stage in a process that had been going on a long time, namely the provincialization of the Roman Aristocracy. But the suddenness and intensity of the Syrian presence seem at first surprising. It cannot be entirely due to the whim of Severus in selecting a Syrian wife. The fact is that the Syrian elites had been gradually rising in the Roman aristocracy through membership in the Senate for well over a century.” 97 Here again, the surprise and astonishment with which some Western historians react to the “sudden” arrival of an Arab ruler seems to be due to de-Arabization and its consequence of a general lack of awareness of the Arab presence in the Roman Empire: “If his Arab background has been stressed, it is because there is a discrepancy between the important role the Arabs played in eastern Roman history and the denial of this by most scholars. (…) It was not by magic that Philip sprang from an insignificant corner of the Roman Empire to rise to the highest position in the world. Behind him lay an extensive Arab presence in the Fertile Crescent. There were Arab tribes scattered over Syria and Iraq besides the three ‘Arabias’ outside the Arabian Peninsula: the Arabian province in south Syria, which replaced the Nabatean kingdom; the Beit Arabiya in Iraq, which loosely included Edessa, Singara and Hatra; and, in Egypt, the nome of Arabia, lying between the Nile and the Red Sea.” 98 But it is no easy to task to unravel the strands of de-Arabization. Ted Kaizer criticizes Yasmine Zahran and her presentation of the Orientalist prejudices held by ancient and modern historians against Philip by stating that she “makes too much out of the Arab aspect.” He prefers to refer to Philip as – the all too familBowersock, Studies, 187. Zahran, Philip the Arab, 13. On the other hand, Körner barely devotes any attention to the underlying Arab context of Philip’s rule, and also overlooks the tradition of Arab Senators of Syria and the influence and Arabness of the Severans: “Zwar war man bereits gewöhnt, Provinzialen auf dem Kaiserthron zu sehen, so Trajan, Hadrian oder Septimius Severus. Alle diese kamen jedoch aus reichen Provinzen, die schon lange romanisiert worden waren.” Körner, Philippus Arabs, 32. 97 98

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iar refrain – Syrian: “Most (…) emphasize that he was an ‘Arab’ or that he came from ‘Arabia,’ but it should also have been mentioned that the earliest source available refers to him, indirectly, as ‘coming from Syria.’” 99 Alongside this literal de-Arabization, classical and modern historical writing about Philip is littered with the usual negative depictions. The provincialization of the nobility may have gone some way towards opening up the Roman aristocracy to other ethnic elites, particularly Syrian Arabs, but this was clearly not enough to overcome prevailing prejudices against them. In Zosimus’ description of Philip, his views on the emperor’s origins are clear: “Philip was a native of Arabia, a nation in bad repute, and had advanced his fortune by no very honourable means.” 100 We do not know what the Romans’ attitude to Philip was during his reign. The citizens of Rome were already used to foreign emperors from Arabia, Africa, and Thrace. But the slain young emperor Gordian had been extremely popular, and Philip’s peace agreement with the Persians may have left him open to criticism, forcing him to be more cautious. Nevertheless, Philip’s apparent tolerance of or even belief in Christian or monotheistic ideas is striking, and at least in the Arabic sources he is seen as a Christian. 101 But this did not improve his image: he had the misfortune of having to feature in a history written by Roman pagans not just as an Arab, but also as a Christian or at least a friend of Christians. 102 Thus, the important role of Arab Romans in the development of monotheism, for instance, has gone largely unnoticed. 99 Ted Kaizer, “Christian Körner: Philippus Arabs, ein Soldatenkaiser in der Tradition des antoninisch-severischen Prinzipats,” Plekos 5, 2003, 195–199, here 196. 100 Zosimus, New History, 1.13. 101 On the Arabic sources regarding Philip’s Christianity (Ibn Khaldūn, Ibn al’Athīr), see Zahran, Philip the Arab, 116f. We should also not forget that Philip came from the Hauran, an area famous for its Christian tendencies. 102 However, Bowersock points out that Zosimus, who was as averse to Arabs as he was to Christians, would certainly have used Philip’s Christianity against him if he had known about it. Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 126f.

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Instead, negative depictions of Rome’s “Arab” rulers seem to have been powerful enough to survive down to the present day. Edward Gibbon’s remarks about Philip the Arab are similar to Zosimus’: “Philip (…) was an Arab by birth, and consequently in the earlier part of his life, a robber by profession.” 103 Such descriptions reveal the almost seamless transition from old to new “Orientalism.” The works of the classical historians seem to serve as templates for similar reactions centuries later. Over time, Philip and the other “Arab” emperors have been transformed into “Semitic avenging angels” sent to afflict the previously dominant West: “Philip, Emperor of Rome, has been seen by some as the revenge of the Near East on the West (...).” 104 But however he was portrayed, Philip’s intention was surely not to introduce another religion into Rome or to Orientalize it. On the contrary: he made every effort to be a “Roman” Caesar: “Seine Politik ist gerade so römisch wie die eines Augustus oder Marc Aurel.” 105 This claim to power over the whole Roman Empire only changed later, under Zenobia, Mavia, and the Ghassānids, who were more focused on regional autonomy. Philip himself did everything he could to integrate Arabia more deeply into the Roman world. Körner refutes the idea that Philip’s home city of Shahbā, which he turned into a Roman city called Philippopolis at great expense, was in some way an “Orientalist self-

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 (New York: Fred de Fau & Co., 1906), 244. 104 Zahran, Philip the Arab, 22. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall, 264, sees Philip as the “usurper” of Rome’s thousand-year anniversary: “On his return from the East to Rome, Philip, desirous of obliterating the memory of his crimes, and of captivating the affections of the people, solemnised the secular games with infinite pomp and magnificence.” The theme of the revenge of the Semites pops up again in von Domaszewski’s discussion of Elagabalus: “Die späte Rache der Semiten an der grieschisch-römischen Kultur, deren Fesseln sie durch Jahrhunderte stumm getragen hatten.” Von Domaszewski, “Die politische Bedeutung der Religion von Emesa,” 148. 105 Körner, Philippus Arabs, 327. 103

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portrayal.” 106 Indeed, the city could easily have been “(…) built in the west of the Roman Empire.” 107 Its construction seems rather to have been an expression of the striving to “(…) Romanize his home even further.” 108 It was during Philip’s reign that the Actia Dusaria took place for the first time in Bostra, a major city in Provincia Arabia. The name of these Hellenistic games referenced both Augustus’ victory in Actium and the chief god of the Nabateans, Dushara. Bowersock describes it as a proclamation of the “union of Rome and Arabia” that undoubtedly reached its highest point under Philip. 109

5.4 AVIDIUS CASSIUS, ZENOBIA, AND MAVIA: ARAB RESISTANCE TO ROME

The integration of the Arabs into the Roman Empire did not mean that they completely abandoned their own desire for freedom or a certain national consciousness. Against the view that Arab identity before Islam was non-existent or minimal at best, there are several impressive examples of Arab uprisings against Rome that could not have occurred in the absence of at least some sense of Arab identity, pride, self-confidence, and selfawareness. The first Arab rebellion against Roman rule took place during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. It is interesting that the aim of the uprising was initially not to shake off the yoke of Roman rule, but rather to take it over! Avidius Cassius, an Arab who had been appointed to the position of imperial legate in Syria, 106 See Klaus S. Freyberger, “Die Bauten und Bildwerke von Philippopolis. Zeugnisse imperialer and orientalischer Selbstdarstellung der Familie des Kaisers Philippus Arabs,” Damaszener Mitteilungen 6, 1992, 293–311. 107 Körner, Philippus Arabs, 224 (Own translation). 108 Ibid., 226. 109 Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 121f. Körner, Philippus Arabs, 227, does not see the relationship as unambiguously as this. In his view the games certainly took place during Philip’s reign, but the sources do not clearly indicate that it was for the first time. Even if he is right, the decision to hold the games at all was a clear statement, and it cannot be a coincidence that they only became famous during Philip’s reign.

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launched a rebellion against Marcus Aurelius, probably encouraged by Faustina, the daughter of Antoninus Pius. 110 Dio does not display any personal prejudice against Cassius in his account of the rebellion, even though Cassius’ ethnic background made him inconceivable as emperor. He remarks that Cassius “(…) had shown himself an excellent man and the sort one would desire to have as an emperor, save for the fact that he was the son of one Heliodorus, who had been content to secure the governorship of Egypt as the reward of his oratorical ability.” 111 Dio does not describe the failed uprising in detail, but the information that Marcus Aurelius decided not to kill the Senators who had joined Cassius or execute the governor of Egypt, who had apparently supported him, shows that he must have enjoyed a fair amount of support in the region. 112 Marcus Aurelius’ speech to his troops before the battle against Cassius also proves that ethnic categories were relevant, and that there probably was an ethnic dimension to the conflict: “For surely Cilicians, Syrians, Jews and Egyptians have never proved superior to you and never will (…)” 113 In any case, the upshot of Avidius Cassius’ rebellion was that the Romans put an end to the practice of appointing people to positions of power in their home provinces. 114 Nevertheless, Arab involvement in coups continued almost immediately. During Commodus’ reign, his sister Lucilla plotted to overthrow him with Arab support. 115 The sources we have do not say whether her Arab husband, Senator Claudius Pompeianus, was privy to the plan (he was not one of those later punished by Commodus). However, the dagger was wielded by a Dio, Roman History, 72.22.2. Ibid. 112 Ibid., 72.28,2. 113 Ibid., 72.25. 114 “A law was passed at this time that no one should ever serve as governor in the province from which he had originally come, inasmuch as the revolt of Cassius had occurred during his administration of Syria, which included his native district.” Ibid., 72.31. 115 Ibid., 73.4 110 111

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close relation, and Lucilla had many Arab followers, so that Bowersock suspects her attempt may have been connected to the failed coup against Commodus’ father, Marcus Aurelius: “Among the others privy to the plot were an Aemilius Iuncus from Tripolis and a Vaelius Rufus from Heliopolis. The Quintilii brothers, an illustrious consular pair, were also implicated and condemned to death along with the son of one of them, who happened at the very moment to be in Syria. One is left to wonder if the importance of the Syrian contingent in Lucilla’s conspiracy represents in some way a backlash from the suppression of the revolt of Avidius Cassius.” 116 The “Syrian” faction did not achieve real success until the reign of Queen Zenobia. 117 Under the Persian onslaught, the Arab Rhomaioi were more important than ever to the security of Oriens. The city of Palmyra, in modern-day Syria, had become essential for the defense of the limes Arabicus during the second century and at the beginning of the third. In the middle of the third century, the rulers of Palmyra might well have felt that other Arabs who contributed less to the maintenance of the Empire, like Avidius Cassius, were becoming more influential. There were signs that Odenathus, king of the Palmyrans, and his queen Zenobia had tried to defect and join the Persians, but that their overtures had been rejected. 118 When the Persian army of Shapur I swept across Oriens in 259, Palmyra fought against them and Odenathus was able to repel their attack. In the decade that followed, Emperor Gallienus considered him for the title of viceroy and Palmyra gained supremacy over the Near East. 119 Its dominant position was challenged by the Tanūkh tribal confederation, however, and the tension eventually came to an explosive head in 270. Zenobia, who had taken power afBowersock, Studies, 154. Ibid., 153. 118 Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 129f. 119 Sartre, The Middle East Under Rome, 354, however, points out that these Roman titles were purely honorary and did not bestow any real power, let alone independence. 116 117

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ter her husband’s death, lead the Palmyran army to Arabia and then on to Egypt. Following in the footsteps of Philip and the Severans, Zenobia appeared as a sort of Hellenistic queen, and in Egypt she adopted a position very similar to that of Cleopatra. 120 But despite the similarities to Hellenistic and Roman rituals of rulership, her ambitions were focused firmly on Oriens. Specifically, she wanted to defeat the challenge of the Tanūkhs, who even Rome itself had so far been unable to contain. Zenobia was finally stopped by the militarily skilled Emperor Aurelian, although in the Arabic tradition it was the Tanūkh king, ‘Amr bin ‘Adī, who defeated her. This latter clearly knew how to exploit the situation for his own ends: his son, Imru’ al-Qais, was recorded as “King of all Arabs” in the famous Arabic Namāra inscription. 121 The political ambitions of the Arabs in the Roman Empire seem to have been limited to Oriens after the end of Philip’s reign and Avidius Cassius’ rebellion. If Zenobia’s conquest was a defensive measure, it can hardly be called usurpation. 122 It is interesting that this was the first time the Arabs had wielded real power since they had claimed control of important Seleucid centers, only to lose them to Rome: “The Palmyrene occupation signaled the return of the area to Arab rule (…). The Arabs of the first century presented a disunited front, and this has been 120 Her official title seems to have been Queen and Co-Regent of Egypt, together with her son Vaballathus. Glen W. Bowersock, “The miracle of Memnon,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, No. 21, 1985, 21–32, here 31. 121 On the controversial Namāra inscription (written in Arabic using the Nabatean script) see Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 31–56; Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 138ff; Abulhab, DeArabizing, 87–151; Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 467–486. 122 Sartre, The Middle East Under Rome, 357, offers a contradictory interpretation: in his view, Zenobia and her son’s Hellenistic appearance was incompatible with any Arab or national movement: “(…) there was no attempt to establish a ‘Syrian’ empire, much less an ‘Arab’ one; instead they sought to seize control of the entire empire (…).” However, there is little evidence for such an ambition, and Sartre himself points out that they sought to reach a compromise with Aurelian. Such a compromise could only have been aimed at gaining more autonomy.

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presented as a partial explanation for their failure to cope with the Roman adversary. But in the third century, Zenobia succeeded in presenting a united front, and yet Aurelian was able to defeat her notwithstanding (…).” 123 It should not be considered a coincidence, therefore, that in the crucial moment of battle the Arabs sought to confront Aurelian at Emesa, the home of their sun god, who had previously been worshipped by Elagabalus and introduced by him into Rome. This was a protomonotheistic but above all Arab deity, who could offer power and success at the decisive moment of the struggle against Rome. 124 Palmyra’s end, which came even before the downfall of Nabatea, had important consequences for the Arabs in Oriens and the Peninsula. They would never again have an urban base from which they could challenge Rome’s power. Their military power became separated from their economic strength. The Arab economy relied on the trade cities of Western Arabia, which were militarily weak. The foederati, on the other hand, were mercenary soldiers with no urban base who were dependent on annonae, rations from Rome. When for any reason these annonae were not forthcoming, the foederati’s very existence was threatened, and in later centuries this situation caused repeated upShahîd, Rome and the Arabs, 152. “Gewiß ist es kein Zufall, daß die Palmyrener gerade hier [in Emesa] die Schlacht angenommen haben. Sie zählten auf den Schutz des Sonnengottes, der in der Stunde der Entscheidung von ihnen sich abwandte. Die einigende Macht, auf der die politische Bedeutung des palmyrenischen Reiches beruhte, war der arabische Sonnenkult gewesen. Von Domaszewski, “Die politische Bedeutung der Religion von Emesa,” 231. Aurelian was seemingly well aware of the importance of this deity for the Arabs. Indeed, he attributed his victory to the divine intervention of the sun god and built a magnificant temple to him in Rome. This cooption had far reaching consequences: “The Sun god cult then achieved wide popularity in the western Roman world, a prime adherent being Constantine before he favoured Christianity. Elagabalus’ Sun cult, therefore, not only paved the way for Christianity, it was later actually grafted on to Christianity to make it more palatable, and to this day Christian churches still face the direction of the rising sun.” Ball, Rome in the East, 466. 123 124

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heavals in Oriens. The loss of Palmyra as an important relay point on the spice route to Arabia also indirectly caused the rise of another important Arab city: Mecca. Mecca was able to control South Arabia on behalf of Byzantium and to secure the trade routes that ran through the Arab city of Najrān. 125 Southern Arabia’s attitude had been generally anti-Roman since Aelius Gallus’ failed campaign during the reign of Augustus, and it could only be controlled indirectly. 126 This brought what would later become Muslim territory into a central position, from which the Arabs were able to launch their victorious campaign in the seventh century. 127 It is also important to note that the fall of Palmyra aided the spread of the Arabic language and script. The use of an increasingly standard form of Arabic in north and central Arabia and in the Fertile Crescent from the third or fourth century has been attributed to the decline of Palmyra, where Aramaic was used as an epigraphic language. 128 In the fourth century, it was the Arab tribes of Oriens and their phylarchs who became Byzantium’s most important allies. In this experiment at creating a sort of self-regulating system, Christianity was used increasingly as a binding mechanism. But Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 15; S. Thomas Parker, Romans and Saracens: A History of the Arabian Border, American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation Series no. 6. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1986). 126 On this Roman campaign in modern-day Yemen see Strabo, Geography, 2.5.12 n.6; Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 48f; Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 402f. Recent excavations on the main island of the Farasan archipelago, close to the strait of Babel-Mandeb, indicate that Rome maintained important outposts in Yemen despite this setback. One inscription dates to the year 144 and commemorates the completion of a fort constructed by a vexillation of Legio II Traiana Fortis under the command of a certain Avitus, prefect of the port of Ferasan (Portus Ferrasanus) and the Herculean Sea. This outpost is almost 2000 kilometers away from the headquarters of the Legion near Alexandria. Michael Speidel, “Ausserhalb des Reiches? Zu neuen römischen Inschriften aus Saudi Arabien und zur Ausdehnung der römischen Herrschaft am Roten Meer,” in ibid, Heer und Herrschaft im Römischen Reich der Hohen Kaiserzeit (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2009), 633–649, here 635. 127 Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 14. 128 Al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam, 150. 125

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it was not always fit for purpose, as Mavia’s revolt in the fourth century shows. In contrast to other famous female leaders of the Near East, like Cleopatra, Zenobia, or Julia Domna, Mavia, the Christian “Saracen Queen,” has not been treated well by posterity, even though her exploits were once the subject of Arabic poetry. 129 It is understandable that the Arabs of the Islamic period did not dwell on her story, but the Roman historians did not treat her any better, although she had helped defend Constantinople against the Goths (see below). Unlike Zenobia in Palmyra, she left no romantic ruins in her wake: her people were Arab nomads, or Saracens, as the non-sedentary Arabs of Oriens and the Arabian Peninsula were beginning to be called at around that time. 130 Modern writers generally choose one of two possible motives for her rebellion. Bowersock argues that Mavia rebelled because the pact, or foedus, between Rome and Mavia’s foederati was for some reason not renewed. 131 Shahîd, in contrast, sees her rebellion as a reaction to the conflict between the Orthodox Christian Arabs and the ruling Arians in Byzantium. Unlike Bowersock, he believes Mavia was already an Orthodox Christian at the beginning of her rebellion. In Shahîd’s view, when the foedus ended automatically with her husband’s death, Mavia refused to agree to a renewal in protest at the persecution of Orthodox priests by the Arian emperor Valens, or perhaps even at the attempt to impose an Arian priest on her. 132 Whatever its original causes, her rebellion had extraordinary military success. Valens was forced to get involved, and Byzantium decided to make peace. Mavia and her Arabs were given an Orthodox bishop called Moses, and her daughter married a Roman officer. Although Mavia has been almost lost to history, Sozomen tells us that the Arabs at the time composed songs and poems about their queen, which is also an important indication

129 130 131 132

Bowersock, Studies, 127. Ibid. Ibid., 130ff. Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 138ff.

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that the Arabic language and its poetry were in active use across a wide area. 133 In contrast to the rebellions of Zenobia and the Arab Rhomaioi, Mavia’s war in Oriens was not an attempt to seize power or secede: “A careful examination of the accounts of the three major ecclesiastical historians, Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, clearly shows that theirs was far from being a rebellion or an expression of separatism. The foederati of Queen Mavia were staunchly orthodox. Although they themselves understood little of the theological controversies of the period, their queen probably did, as did their priests, and it was their loyalty towards these that made them stand fast by the orthodox position and fight for it.” 134 The Arabs in Oriens seem to have restricted themselves to demanding more independence on a local or regional scale. Arabization could be continued much more intensively at this level than in imperial institutions, which always demanded a certain amount of adaptability. In any case, this strategy of regionalization stalled when the political center moved eastwards from Rome to Constantinople, and Byzantium implemented a much more centralized and religiously hierarchical system. 135 The Arabs’ attempts to gain more independent power, for example over the national Monophysite church in the sixth century, inevitably clashed with Byzantium’s strict system of government. Although Mavia’s rebellion was superficially about religious controversy, we can detect signs of Arab national consciousness in the fact that she demanded an Arab as bishop. 136 Mavia’s story contains a reference to the Arabic poetry of the period. The poems themselves have been lost, and it is only Sozomen’s mention of them that saved them from complete oblivion. “It is possible to guess at what they were like from the splendid examples of Bowersock, Studies, 139. Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 202. 135 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 13. 136 Although the primary goal was to find an Orthodox bishop, it is surely no coincidence that the man chosen was an Arab. 133 134

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the genre which have survived, of the al-Mu‘allaqāt. Of a rich texture, in complex meters and varied diction that makes Pindar look like simplicity itself, pre-Islamic odes were chiefly concerned with love and battles. In Mavia’s case the subject was presumably the latter.” 137 A sixth-century ode that has survived, by the poet al-Samaw’al bin ‘Ādiyā’, offers a glimpse of what these poems might have been like; it may even contain a memory of Mavia. It describes a nameless woman leading her troops against her enemies: “She was reproaching us, that we were few in numbers; so I said to her, ‘Indeed, noble men are few. Not few are they whose remnants are like us – youths who have climbed to heights, and old men too. It harms us not that we are few, seeing our kinsman is mighty, whereas the kinsman of the most part of men is abased. (…) The love of death brings our term of life nearer to us, but their term hates death, and is therefore prolonged (…).” 138

5.5 CHANGING OF THE GUARD: THE GHASSĀNID TAKEOVER OF THE LIMES

If we are to properly evaluate the role of the Arabs in the Roman Empire, we must understand their role in defending Oriens’ borders against the Persians and their Arab vassals and against the Arab nomads. It is perhaps all too often overlooked that from the sixth century, the responsibility for defending Rome’s borders in Oriens fell primarily to the Arab foederati. This statement does not necessarily imply support for the theory that Constantinople had already de facto withdrawn from Oriens in the sixth century, long before the Islamic conquest, and that the Arabs were no more than an illusionary defensive screen. There Bowersock, Studies, 138. Arthur J. Arberry, Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students (Cambridge: CUP, 1965), 30.

137 138

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were good reasons for the Byzantine emperors to act as they did, and among them was surely the strong Arab presence in and increasing Arabization of Oriens. It is important to understand that the limes in the East never functioned in the same way or had the same linear appearance as the limites in Germania or Britain. In a controversial contribution to the history of Roman defensive strategies, Edward Luttwak characterized the prevailing military doctrine after the collapse of the borders and the crisis of the late third century as “defense in depth.” 139 Despite the criticism his theory has received, at least in Oriens it seems thoroughly plausible. 140 If it is correct, then the limes in Oriens was not a single, continuous defensive line, but rather an “interaction zone” in which Rome tried to withstand attacks from the nomads and the Persians with fortifications and a mixture of stationary and mobile troops. 141 Since Diocletian, the Romans had gradually entrusted the defense of the border to limitanei. These “farmer-soldiers” were an economical form of defense because they produced their own food and provided their own equipment. 142 The border’s fortifications were repeatedly strengthened, probably up until the fourth century. The impressive result was described by Ammianus, who lived in Oriens: “Arabia (…) a land studded with strong castles and fortresses which the watchful care of the early inhabitants reared in suitable and readily defended defiles, to Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 127ff. 140 Thomas S. Parker, The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan. Final Report on the Limes Arabicus Project, 1980–1989. Vol. 2. (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2006), 551. For an early but still impressive account of the Limes Arabicus see Rudolf E. Brünnow & Alfred v. Domaszewski, Die Provincia Arabia auf Grund zweier in den Jahren 1897 und 1898 unternommener Reisen und der Berichte früherer Reisender beschrieben. Reprint of the 1904 edition, Vol. 1–4, (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2004). 141 Parker, The Roman Frontier, 551. 142 Ibid., 556. 139

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check the inroads of neighbouring tribes. The region also has, in addition to some towns, great cities, Bostra, Gerasa and Philadelphia all strongly defended by mighty walls.” 143 The troops who manned the limes were sometimes clearly Arab or indigenous (see Chapter 5.5.). Other troops seem to have been transferred from other parts of the empire (e.g. the Balkan region). Even these foreign troops, though, cannot have been entirely immune to gradual Arabization – especially the limitanei, who with time presumably settled and intermingled with the locals like the Greeks before them: “But even these units may have been locally recruited after their posting in Arabia and thus lost their original ethnic character.” 144 The military border gradually became weaker as defensive positions were abandoned and units were downsized. After the relatively peaceful fifth century, this weakness became extremely clear in the sixth. Eventually Justinian undertook a complete reorganization of military policy. Procopius hints at his reasoning. The command structure linking the individual Roman units (divided according to province and whether the troops were Romans or foederati) was too inflexible and too weak to be effective against Persia’s Arab vassals, the Lakhmids under their king Mundhir. The Lakhmids were afforded a certain amount of autonomy within the Persian military structure, and were able to act independently and use their own tactics until almost the very end of their rule. 145 Justinian was thus faced with two challenges: first, how to stop Mundhir’s Lakhmids, who had successfully plundered Oriens during the reign of his uncle, Justin I; second, how to resolve the problem that the limitanei had become militarily so much weaker during the peaceful fifth centu143 Ammianus Marcellinus, History, Vol. 1, trans J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1950), 14.8.13. 144 Parker, The Roman Frontier, 545. 145 Many misunderstandings between the Romans and the Ghassānids seem to have been caused by the Romans’ inability to properly use or even understand the Arabs’ flexible cavalry manoeuvres. The foederati’s misunderstood tactics seem to have led to them being regularly reproached for unreliability.

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ry. His solution – probably under the active guidance of his advisor Abraham, a specialist in Arab matters 146 – was to give the Ghassānids supreme command of the defense of the limes from then on. 147 That this “Arabization” of the border conflict has been often viewed so negatively is largely due to the influence of Procopius, who wanted to describe Justinian as having neglected military matters and caused constant turmoil. 148 More recently, scholars have pointed out that the number of limitanei actually decreased gradually rather than suddenly, and that regular troops were still stationed in Oriens as before. However, there can be little doubt about the central role of the foederati in the new defensive system. 149 It is important not to forget the background to Justinian’s decision: the “Perpetual Peace” he 146 On the role of Abraham’s son Nonnusus, who was employed in a similar role, see Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol I, Part 1, 155–60. 147 “Alamoundaras [Mundhir], holding the position of king, ruled alone over all the Saracens in Persia, and he was always able to make his inroad with the whole army wherever he wished in the Roman domain; and neither any commander of Roman troops, whom they call ‘duces’, nor any leader of the Saracens allied with Romans, who are called ‘phylarchs’, was strong enough with his men to array himself against Alamoundaras; for the troops stationed in the different districts were not a match in battle for the enemy. For this reason the Emperor Justinian put in command of as many clans as possible Arethas, the son of Gabalas, who ruled over the Saracens of Arabia, and bestowed upon him the dignity of king, a thing which among the Romans had never before been done.” Procopius, History, 1.17.43–48. Procopius’ description of the Assyrian campaign in A.D. 541 is also a possible example of the foederati assuming a more prominent role. When Belisarius sent twelve hundred of his own guards with the foederati to cross the Tigris towards the Persian enemy, he directed them “to obey Arethas in everything they did.” Ibid, 2.19,15–23. See also Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol. 2, Part 1, 40ff, for an analysis of Procopius’ heavily biased criticism of Justinian. 148 Cameron, Procopius, 240. 149 On the gradual withdrawal or disbandment of the limitanei and the maintenance of regular troops, see Parker, The Roman Frontier, 567ff, and Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol. 2, Part 1, 40. Fisher is very cautious here: “The archaeological evidence for the withdrawal of troops from the region is strong, and it is well understood that the phylarchs played, in general, some kind of administrative role.” Fisher, Between Empires, 103.

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had negotiated with the Persians was expected to give Oriens a bit of breathing space, and anyway financial restrictions meant that there were very few alternatives. The Ghassānids’ role as border guards became clear at the battle of Chalcis/Qinnasrīn in 554. Qinnasrīn was a long way from the Ghassānid camp, but they were nevertheless able to beat back the Lakhmids: “It was not the dux of Syria but Arethas from his base in Jābiya that hastened to the north to meet the challenge, this time not on the frontier assigned to him but in the vicinity of Chalcis whither Munḏir had penetrated.” 150 At this point, some Western scholars pose the question of how history would have differed if Rome had chosen an alternative military strategy. 151 But to indulge such speculation – as we will see in the chapter on Yarmūk – would be completely to misunderstand the process of Arabization in Oriens and the Arabs’ increasing awareness of their own power, which grew as imperial hegemony waned. Justinian and his advisors probably came to the conclusion that it would be better to exploit Arabization than confront it. The fact that Justinian’s successors did not attempt to revoke his policies shows that this was a prudent or at least viable approach. The Romans may not necessarily have believed that Arabization of the limes was the perfect solution, but in the circumstances it seemed to be the most practical one. If the strategy failed in the end, it did so at least partly because the centralized Empire could not bear to give the Arabs sufficient autonomy. The Arabs were entrusted with more and more responsibility, but not the social, administrative, or military decision-making independence they needed in order to wield that responsibility effectively. Roman politics and culture are often described as undergoing a process of “levelling” or Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol. 2, Part 1, 44. From the purely military perspective: “By all accounts the Muslim armies were small in number and lacked sophisticated siege capability. One may only speculate about the subsequent history of the medieval Near East if Justinian and his successors had chosen to rejuvenate rather than abandon the frontier forts and garrisons.” Parker, The Roman Frontier, 596.

150 151

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“opening up” around the time of the Arab conquest, whereby the elite levels of society became more open, but there is no evidence of such a trend here. 152 Byzantine society was certainly changing, but at a fundamental level it was still stuck in its old, rigid structures. Even Heraclius, who so successfully reconquered Oriens from the Persians, who used religion for the first time to create a “crusading atmosphere,” and who repeatedly and resourcefully diverged from prevailing military doctrine in order to achieve his goals, was a conservative ruler: “He was no innovator – just a basically conservative emperor, an heir to the autocratic traditions of Justinian, making the best of a desperate situation.” 153 The combination of this conservatism with increased Arab strength inevitably fostered suspicion and a constant fear of betrayal on the part of the Romans, and dissatisfaction and frustration on the part of the Arab Rhomaioi and certainly the foederati. 154 It seems plausible that the theme of be152 “Contrary to the positions of some historians (…), I would argue that it is far from clear that the admitted disruption in classical learning and education necessarily produced or resulted from either a rise in popular culture, or a process of simplification or democratization. (…) The early Byzantine world did not cease to be a highly stratified society. There was no modernist counterculture, no move for revolution, no self-conscious questioning of the social structure. Nor is it clear that the possibility of social mobility increased as the older social structures weakened.” Averil Cameron, “Democratization Revisited – Culture and Late Antique and Early Byzantine Elites,” in John Haldon & Lawrence I. Conrad (Eds.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, Vol. VI: Elites Old and New in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2004), 91–108, here 107f. It was only after Yarmūk that the Byzantine Senate underwent significant changes. The number of non-Greek patrikioi (high-ranking Byzantine officials) grew from 12% to 19% between 650 and 750, an increase that was certainly noticeable because of the massive loss of land to the Arabs. See John Haldon, “The fate of the late Roman senatorial elite: extinction or transformation?” in Haldon & Lawrence (Eds.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, Vol. VI, 179–235, here 215. 153 Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (New York: Norton, 1989), 172. 154 Fisher recognizes this drive for independence: “Yet there are also indications that both the Jafnids and the Naṣrids were starting to separate themselves from their imperial patrons, both on the battlefield and in terms of diplomatic contacts.” Fisher, Between Empires, 117.

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trayal, which has played such a dominant role in the Orientalist view of the Arabs, had its origins here. 155 In the period before the Muslim conquest of Oriens, Heraclius made the additional mistake of stopping or suspending Rome’s financial support to its dependent Arabs, although his decision was probably inevitable given the circumstances. 156 Nevertheless, most of the Arab foederati remained loyal to Rome until the end, even after the weakening of the limes and despite the difficulties of cooperation, the denial of Arab interests, and the missteps in the relationship. They stood by Heraclius when he fought the Persians and regained Oriens, and they were mentioned in the report of Rome’s victory that was announced from the pulpit of the Hagia Sofia on May 15, 628. 157 They were also victorious, or at least forced a draw, against the Muslim forces at the Battle of Mu’ta in 629, inflicting heavy losses on their opponents. But they suffered a bitter defeat at the Battle of Marj Rāhiṭ on Easter Sunday, 634, when the Muslims launched a surprise attack while the Ghassānids were absorbed in their prayers. That battle was a foretaste of Yarmūk, but they did not falter at either moment: “If the Ghassānids harbored any doubts On prodosia as a charge directed at the foederati, see Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 293, 305f, 613. 156 “Heraclius made the fatal mistake of terminating subsidies to federate Arab allies along the frontier at this critical moment.” Parker, The Roman Frontier, 569. Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol. I, Part1, 649, does not believe the subsidies were suspended. Walter E. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), 35ff, can only locate irregularities that Heraclius tried to rectify. Fred McGraw Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton: PUP, 1981), 100, refers to reports that do suggest the annonae to the Arabs were suspended, and suspects that payments were stopped to groups that were no longer necessary following the reorganization and consolidation of the limes. This aligns with Thomas Parker’s earlier view that it was only the annonae to the Arabs in southern Palestine that were terminated. And it was precisely there, at Gaza, that the initial Arab advance was launched. Parker, Romans and Saracens, 154. 157 For the text of the victory announcement and for details of the Arabs’ role in returning the relic of the Cross to Jerusalem after the victory over the Persians, see Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol. I, Part 2, 944ff. 155

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about the succor which their God had denied them at Marj Rāhiṭ or at Yarmūk, they did not evince any sign of it after the final and definite defeat of Byzantium.” 158

5.6 EARLY HISTORIANS ON THE ARABS: THE ORIGINS OF ORIENTALISM AND THEIR MODERN ECHOES

The default attitude towards the Arabs in Greek and Roman historical writing was not a favorable one, as we saw when we discussed Julia Domna and Philip the Arab. The image of the Arabs in the Roman Empire suffered because of the lack of clear labels for Arab groups, because of the attacks of nomads from Arabia, and of course because of the general view that as non-Romans they were therefore barbarians: “The image of the Arabs, who played this extensive and varied role in Roman history, does not emerge from the pages of classical literature with perfect clarity. This is partly due to the fact that the Arabs appear in that literature not as one people but as many groups and, what is more, on various levels of cultural development. Besides, various specific names were applied to them, and this tended to obscure the ethnic affinity that obtained among these various groups, so differently designated. The nomads among them, referred to as Scenitae in the Roman period, were a homogeneous and welldefined group and consequently their image is projected with tolerable clarity. In spite of the difficulties that attend the attempt to perceive the image of the Arabs on the basis of data available in Graeco-Roman literature, it is possible to draw the following conclusions concerning that image. The attitude of the historians and geographers to the Arabs was the classical attitude of these writers to all the non-Greek and non-Roman peoples of the empire, whom they considered barbaroi.” 159 It is striking that despite how closely entwined and integrated into the Roman Empire the Arab Rhomaioi and foederati were, and despite their Christianity, only very few ecclesiastical 158 159

Ibid., 948. Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs, 156f.

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or secular historians of the time represented their connection to Rome or their crucial role in the empire objectively. The foederati wrote no history of their own, and so there is nothing to counter the overwhelmingly negative representation of the Arabs in Roman historical writing. Although the role of Roman racism in this representation is not entirely clear, it certainly existed: “The absurd notion that the Roman Empire knew cultural but not racial prejudice has lately prevailed in certain quarters (…). Toward the Arabs, sometimes called Syrians or Saracens, a firm prejudice is well attested.” 160 Especially noteworthy in this context is Ammianus, whose viewpoint would find echoes in later eras: “The Saracens, however, whom we never found desirable either as friends or as enemies, ranging up and down the country, in a brief space of time laid waste whatever they could find, like rapacious kites which, whenever they have caught sight of any prey from on high, seize it with swift swoop, and directly they have seized it make off.” 161 Or Cicero, who recorded an apparently widespread opinion: “Jews and Syrians, […] peoples born to be slaves.” 162 Such statements laid the foundations of the Orientalist perspective. Shahîd has analyzed the historical sources of the Roman and Byzantine eras and divides prejudice Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 124, n. 4. Ammianus, History, 14.4.1. 162 Cicero, de Provinciis Consularibus, trans. R. Gardner (London: HUP, 1958), 5.10. That Asians were barbarians and slaves by nature was an idea introduced by Aristotle, long before Alexander (Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 3.14.1258). This prejudice was so powerful that it also extended to Asiatic Greeks, Alexander’s settlers in the East. Their Greekhood was deemed weakened by their intermarriage with locals. In this context, Livy records two speeches by Roman generals who exploited this bias to strengthen their troops’ morale before battle: “Syrians and Asiatic Greeks, the meanest of mankind, and born only for slavery” (History of Rome, trans. Rev. Canon Roberts (London, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1905, 36.17.5.); “The Macedonians who occupy Alexandria, Seleucia, Babylonia and their other colonies throughout the world, have degenerated into Syrians and Parthians and Egyptians” (ibid., 38.17.11.) These speeches, however, may simply be Livy putting what he thought might have been useful words into the mouths of commanders trying to harden their troops before combat, as Tarn points out (The Greeks in Bactria and India, 35). 160 161

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against the Arabs into two broad categories. 163 The Greek and Roman authors often project an image of the Arabs as latrones, as plunderers of the limes arabicus, and especially as culturally inferior nomads, thieving tent-dwellers (scenitae) devoted to their abhorrent traditional rituals. 164 For their part, the ecclesiastical authors identify the Arabs above all as the descendants of Ishmael and therefore as the children of Abraham by the slave Hagar, which was surely not intended as flattery. 165

163 For more in-depth analysis of these historians, see also Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs, 95–122 (on Zosimus and Eusebius) and Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century, 239–277 (on Ammianus). 164 Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs, 108. 165 This disparaging reference to the Arabs’ descent from the slave Hagar is particularly striking because the Arabs themselves often viewed the myth with a certain amount of pride. Bertram Schmitz recently solved this paradox with reference to Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.” Galatians 4:25. In Arabic, hagar means stone or mountain. For Paul, the Biblical name Hagar and the Arabic word for stone and mountain were the same. This provided a strong starting point for his address to the Arabs during his mission: “Sie bietet sich geradezu hervorragend an, um Arabern zu verdeutlichen, dass auch sie bereits in der Tradition und Abstammung des (ersten) Bundes stehen. Vielmehr noch: Paulus schenkt den Arabern quasi (als Allegorie) diesen Bund! Es ist ihr Bund, und er gehört ihnen als Nachkommen Hagars eigentlich direkter als allen anderen. Hagar, das war eine von ihnen und Hagar, das ist der Berg, der Berg der Araber!” The reference to Hagar, the distinctively black (aswad) slave, must have reminded the believers of the black stone of the Kaaba (hagar aswad): “Nun mag es schon ein Zufall oder Wink der Geschichte sein, das es Paulus aufgrund des Gleichklangs in seinen Ohren erlaubte, die Mutter Ismaels und Frau Abrahams, die Hagar, mit einem arabischen Berg gleichzusetzen, wie er dies im Galaterbrief getan hat. Noch weiter geht die Übereinstimmung, dass der Stein der Kaaba, als ‚schwarz‘ (aswad) gilt und auch die Tradition Hagar als eine Schwarze versteht. Die ‚schwarze Hagar‘ würde sich für diese Ohren wohl kaum von einem „schwarzen Stein‘ unterscheiden. (…) Hätte Paulus nicht selbst diese Allegorie formuliert, hätte kaum ein Wissenschaftler, der nicht auf rabinische Theologie spezialisiert ist, sie für möglich gehalten.” Bertram Schmitz, “Hagar – ein arabisches Wortspiel im Neuen Testament,” in Vashalomidze & Greisiger (Eds.), Der Christliche Orient und seine Umwelt, 308–315, here 313f.

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The classical texts do not so much outright lie as leave out the truth or drop misleading hints, but the end result is a very unbalanced image which completely neglects role of the Arabs as cives and foederati. Eusebius tells us about Philip’s attendance at the Easter Vigil and therefore his possible Christianity, but does not mention that Philip was an Arab. On the other hand, he does not fail to remind us that Herod the Great, the attempted murderer of Jesus, was Arab through his Nabatean mother. One of the most important fourth-century historians, Ammianus, was a Roman officer who lived in Antioch. He describes the Arabs almost exclusively as scenitae or saraceni rather than foederati. He does not mention Mavia’s role in defending Constantinople or the fact that many Arabs were Christian. His description of the battle against the Goths for Constantinople in A.D. 378 is a good example of this kind of omission. After the Roman defeat at the Battle of Adrianople and the death of Emperor Valens, the Goths advanced towards the capital city. They were met by, among others, a troop of Mavia’s foederati sent to fulfil the terms of the foedus they had recently agreed with Valens: “A troop of Saracens, (…) who are more adapted to stealthy raiding expeditions than to pitched battles, and had recently been summoned to the city, desiring to attack the horde of which they had suddenly caught sight, rushed forth boldly from the city to attack them. The contest was long and obstinate, and both sides separated on equal terms. But the oriental troops had the advantage from a strange event, never witnessed before. For one of their number, a man with long hair and naked except for a loin-cloth, uttering hoarse and dismal cries, with drawn dagger rushed into the thick of the Gothic army, and after killing a man applied his lips to the throat and sucked the blood that poured out. The barbarians, terrified by this strange and monstrous sight, after that did not show their usual self-confidence when they attempted any action, but advanced with hesitating steps.” 166 Even here he does not call the Arabs foederati but saraceni, a general 166

Ammianus, History, 31.16.5–6.

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term that referred indiscriminately to all nomads. He leaves out Queen Mavia’s role altogether. While Zosimus depicts the Arabs as superior to the Goths, Ammianus credits the Arabs victory to the fact that “they were more barbarian even than the barbarian Goths.” 167 We may speculate as to whether Ammianus would have mentioned the Arabs’ role in defending the Roman Empire at all if it were not for that “strange event.” The individual historians’ attitudes were informed by a variety of different circumstances. Ammianus saw the barbarians as the primary cause of the crisis of the Roman Empire. As a heathen he had no reason to mention the Christianity of the foederati. Eusebius, who wrote a panegyric in honor of Constantine, the embodiment of the triumph of Christianity, may have been more concerned with emphasizing Philip’s identity as a possible Christian. He also had little contact with Arabs and relied heavily on Biblical sources, which explains his almost synonymous usage of the terms “Ishmaelites,” scenitae, and saraceni. In the sixth century, it is Procopius who stands out for his reservations about and prejudices against the Arab foederati. 168 A striking example of this is his description of the Battle of Callini167 David Woods, “The Saracen Defenders of Constantinople in 378,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 37 (1997), 259–279, here 270. Woods speculates that Ammianus’s negative attitude towards the Arabs was a response to the suffering of some of his friends and family at the hands of Arabs during Mavia’s raids at Antioch ca. 377 (FN 25). He also assumes that the Arab contingent of the Roman force defending Constantinople was part of the elite scholae palatinae unit that formed the escort of the emperor’s wife. The lack of Arabs rising through the ranks to magister militum or other senior posts was, in his view, due to fierce competition “from the Gothic nobles who poured into the system after the Gothic settlement of 382. (…) So ended an experiment, which, if allowed to continue, might have Romanized and Christianized the Saracen elite at an early date and have had a significant impact upon subsequent developments between Byzantium and her eastern neighbours.” (278–9). 168 “Procopius was the creator of a dark image of the Arabs which has dominated Byzantine history after him. This is necessary to point out, considering that in the preceding fifth century Byzantine historiography was favorable to the Arabs. It was Procopius who changed their image.” Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol. I, Part 1, 305.

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cum (A.D. 553). When the Persians and their allies, the Arab Lakhmids, invaded Syria and the Euphrates region, the Roman general Belisarius faced them with an army of twenty thousand men. The foederati provided about five thousand soldiers and were positioned on the right flank. The fighting went on all day, and in the afternoon the foederati broke under the Persians’ attack and the battle was lost. Procopius explicitly accuses the foederati of treachery for their failure to hold the line. 169 Other historians tell a completely different story in which the Ghassānid Phylarch al-Ḥārith (Arethas) held his position and refused to retreat. But the accusation of betrayal had been made, and since then it has been a recurring theme in descriptions of the foederati. Shahîd sees Procopius as particularly motivated by the desire to criticize the emperor: “Arab and Arabian affairs played an important role in the building of the case against Justinian, and although Procopius looked at the Arabs in much as the same way as he did at all the barbarians who were responsible for the process of decline, it was mainly Justinian who was his target.” 170 This was especially true because Justinian was the emperor who had strengthened the Ghassānids by making Arethas king of the foederati. Moreover, Procopius was Belisarius’ advisor, and as such may have wanted to absolve the general of any wrongdoing. 171 These striking examples show that the Arabs’ position in the Roman Empire was always difficult: as cives they were no longer seen as Arabs, and as foederati they were often considered to be no different from the nomads who threatened the borders. “Then by mutual agreements all the best of the Persian army had advanced to attack the Roman right wing, where Arethas and the Saracens had been stationed. But they broke their formation and moved apart, so that they got the reputation of having betrayed the Romans to the Persians.” Procopius, History, 1.18.33–38. 170 Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol I, Part 1, 52. 171 For a summary of Procopius’ anti-Arab views, see Cameron, Procopius, 125: “The charge of treachery at Callinicum is a device used by Procopius to deflect blame from Belisarius, and we do not need an elaborate defence of Al-Harith to see that he is exaggerating.” 169

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As Christians they were constantly accused of heresy because they did not alter their Orthodox or Monophysite beliefs when the Roman Emperor did so or when an emperor with different beliefs came to the throne. 172 The works of the classical historians laid the groundwork for later “Orientalism,” as it is known today. The theme of betrayal is a particularly good example of this. It appears repeatedly in Procopius’ descriptions of the foederati and the Arabs, and has been faithfully reproduced by more modern authors: “The theme of treachery initiated by Procopius was copied and followed by some modern writers like Gibbon on whom one can always count for an anti-Arab statement.” 173 Although the connection is seldom as clear as it is in this example, we can say with confidence that this “treacherousness,” which is mentioned repeatedly in the works of classically educated Orientalists, has been passed down through generations and over centuries. Following Eric Hobsbawm, Orientalism can be seen as a constructed narrative tradition that inculcates certain values and norms, particularly by employing repeated patterns that signal continuity with the past. 174 Although the Orientalists were able to call on more modern arguments when evaluating the role of the Arabs, they knew that they were operating within the framework of a well-established system of cultural reference. And so aspects of the history of Arabs that do not place the Arabs in conflict with In this context, Nöldeke remarks laconically that: “An sich ist es freilich für die Syrer und Kopten kein Glück gewesen, daß die Unterdrückung des Monophysitismus nicht durchgeführt and sie damit auf Dauer Europa entfremdet wurden.” Nöldeke, Die Ghassânischen Fürsten, 21 n. 1. 173 Zahran, Ghassan Resurrected, 66. On the Battle of Callinicum and the conduct of the foederati, Gibbon says: “The right wing was exposed to the treacherous and cowardly desertion of the Christian Arabs.” Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 2 (New York: Modern Library, 1934), 196. For a summary of accusations of prodosia made against the Arabs in the works of sixth century classical historians, see Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol. I, Part 1, 135–142, 220–226. 174 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Inventing Traditions,’ in Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (Eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 1–15, here 1. 172

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the Western world, or that demonstrate the extent of the West and East’s shared tradition and history, have often been discarded. As mentioned before, some earlier modern Western writers held a more holistic and favorable view of the history of the Arabs and the complex ways it connects to Western history. 175 However, this perspective seems to have given way to a less integrative, less appreciative, and more subordinating one. Garth Fowden recently offered a conclusive explanation for this change in paradigms and perceptions, which seems to have taken place after the First World War. 176 In the decades before that significant break, the discipline was dominated by a different discussion, particularly among 175 Simon Ockley, one of the first European historians to write about the Islamic invasion of Oriens, realized that the shortcomings of classical historical writing had not just distorted the image of the Arabs, but also made their successes impossible to explain. In the foreword to his History of the Saracens he discusses the sources with a clarity that is often lacking in modern authors: “The Arabians, a people little noticed by the Greek and Roman authors, notwithstanding the nearness and the extent of their country, have since the time of Mohammed, rendered themselves universally remarkable, both by their arms and their learning. (…) It might be expected, that the Greeks, who bore the greatest share of that grievous calamity, and whose vices and divisions, it is to be feared, brought it upon the Christian world, would have taken particular care to have given a just account of it. But, on the contrary, they have been more jejune and sparing in this particular, than is allowable in any tolerable historian, even when relating matters at the greatest distance. (…) ‘This,’ says he, ‘in substance, is the account of those wars, and of the beginning of the Saracenic empire, which is left to us by Grecian writers of that age, who are justly accused of brevity and obscurity, in a subject that deserved to be more copiously handled; for undoubtedly it must needs have been various as well as surprising in its circumstances; containing no less than the subduing of nations, altering ancient governments, and introducing a new face of affairs in the world.’ (…) There is nothing more just than this observation; and what lame accounts must we then expect from those who compile histories of the Saracens out of the Byzantine historians!” Simon Ockley, The History of the Saracens, 6th ed. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857), xvi. 176 Garth Fowden, Before and After Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused (Princeton: PUP, 2014), 18ff.

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Austrian scholars of art history. Together with Alois Riegl, Josef Strzygowski put forward a rather revolutionary perspective on the evolution of art, which he saw as continuous process without pause. Even more importantly, he believed it had originated in the Near East and then spread to Rome, rather than finding its way from Rome to the provinces as a kind of Reichskunst. 177 Riegl conceded that much of what was most creative in Roman art came from Greece and the Orient, but Strzygowski pushed the argument further. In a detailed study of objects and monuments, he demonstrated the impact of Hellenistic, Coptic, Syrian, and Mesopotamian art on the emergence of Christian iconography and, by extension, European art. 178 Thus, before the First World War and despite racial prejudice, there existed in certain quarters a relatively integrative view of the Orient, of Arabs, and of their interaction with the West in late antiquity. In this view, Islam and Islamic art were seen more as a continuation than as a disruptive, alien movement and stylistic representation. 179 Meanwhile, this inclusive understanding of the Arab and Islamic sphere found an advocate in Carl Becker, a German Semitic philologist turned politician. Becker wanted to embrace Islam and the Arab world partly because of the geopolitical role they played in his time, but he also stressed the continuity of 177 Josef Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom: Beiträge zur Geschichte der spätantiken und frühchristlichen Kunst (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1901), 2ff. 178 For this conclusion, see Fowden, Before and After Muḥammad, 29. This appreciation of “Oriental” influences must be tempered with the recognition that Strzygowski privileged the Greek roots of Oriental art at the expense of its other aspects. A good example of this is his evaluation of a Palmyrene tomb that he describes as an example of Palmyrene and Christian art, Greek in style but with local Oriental influences: “(…) neben lokalen Einflüssen (sic!), besonders von Persien aus, ist das breite Fundament auf dem beide fussen, die hellenistische Kunst, die nicht verwechselt werden darf mit der römischen.” Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom, 22f. 179 Consequently, in the last chapters of his master work, Stilfragen, Riegl puts the Islamic development of late antique artistic tropes firmly on the agenda. Alois Riegl, Stilfragen. Grundlegung zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin: Georg Siemens, 1893), 272–346.

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development from Alexander to Islam. In Becker’s view, the two spheres, Islamic and European, are the joint and equally deserving heirs of a common history that only diverged because of the Renaissance, the self-conscious revival of the classics that took place in the West alone. 180 His conviction that Islam and antiquity were, broadly speaking, part of the same continuum had consequences for how the German authorities, particularly the Kaiser himself, viewed the Islamic world. Becker, who worked with the “Orient” intelligence bureau at the German Foreign Office, recommended a German-Ottoman alliance to the Kaiser. When war broke out, Becker helped the German archeologist and diplomat, and fellow member of the “Orient” bureau, Max von Oppenheim, to compose a memorandum proposing the use of Islamic “jihad” as a way to encourage the Arabs to rise up against the colonial Allied powers. 181 At least in some minds, Islam and the West had never been closer, and the prospects for integrated study of the two had never been better. 182 After the war, this integrative approach collapsed in the wake of the destruction of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires and the disillusionment throughout the Arab world regarding the outcome of the peace settlement at Versailles. These developments “(…) created a blasted intellec180 For Becker, the Renaissance was a unique event that liberated the West from “Greek ecclesiastical classicism” and “Oriental metaphysical religion” and paved the way for the “(…) introduction of Germanic ideals [sic!] directly derived from true classicism.” Carl H. Becker, Christianity and Islam, trans. H. J. Chaytor (London: Harper & Brothers, 1909), 103f. For Becker’s role in “(…) making Islam part of world history” and, in effect, “(…) ‘orientalizing’ western cultural history,” see Marchand, German Orientalism, 362f. 181 On this “Made in Germany” jihad and the role of Becker and von Oppenheim, see Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, “Max von Oppenheim und der Heilige Krieg. Zwei Denkschriften zur Revolutionierung islamischer Gebiete 1914 und 1940,” Soziale Geschichte, 19 (2004) 3, 28–59. Although he was partly of Jewish descent, the Nazis did not harm von Oppenheim after they came to power, and he reproduced and adapted the original memorandum for their use in 1940. After Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein it became obsolete. 182 Fowden, Before and after Muḥammad, 37.

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tual and political landscape without prospects for rapprochement between the Islamic world and Europe, despite Becker’s continuing pleas.” 183 Suddenly, historians of the period in which Islam emerged could find nothing to stimulate or justify an integrative approach. After 1919, French and other scholars dreamed of rebuilding Rome’s frontiers to keep barbarism at bay. Unsurprisingly, the question of whether the Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire had contributed anything “worthy of note” was the subject of intense debate, with a predictable split between German and French historians. In the end it was a Belgian, Henri Pirenne, who came up with a way to ease the tension between the two sides, with significant consequences for how the Arabs were perceived. 184 In his posthumously published work, he pointed to the unbroken continuation of underlying patterns – for instance in trade, including merchant activities in the East – to support his argument that Roman civilization had not collapsed after 476. He devoted considerable space to describing the role of Arab and Jewish traders during the period, which he took as a sign of continuity, and blamed the final end of antiquity on the Arabs, or rather the Islamic invasion. Islam severed old trade links across the Mediterranean and fragmented the Roman world. 185 For Pirenne, Charlemagne as a new type of emperor was inconceivable without Muhammad’s victory. However, this Islamic influence on the development of European history was not seen in a positive light, but rather as a permanent rupture that has lasted until the present day: “The Latin world turned in on itself, and substituted Frankish roughness for the old Mediterranean shine.” 186 This narrative had an enormous Ibid. Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, trans. Bernard Miall (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939). See also Dan Diner’s informative afterword to the German edition, which describes the impact of Pirenne’s work (Mohammed und Karl der Große, Untergang der Antike am Mittelmeer und Aufstieg des germanischen Mittelalters (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1985), 207–40). 185 Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, 163ff. 186 Fowden, Before and After Muḥammad, 38. 183 184

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effect on the topics under discussion here. Not only was the integrative historical perspective abandoned, but Islam and the Arabs were now perceived as doubly alien, and could even be blamed for destroying the old order of antiquity. And, by extending the argument a little, could they not also be held responsible for the carnage and war in Europe itself? 187

5.7 FROM ARABIA TO EUROPE

The recent migration of Syrian war refugees to Europe has been treated as a singular event, as if the long and intertwined history of East and West from Roman times had not created a single historical space in which similar movements could take place much earlier. In fact, the Near Eastern “penetration and colonization” of Europe has a long history – certainly far longer than that of the European colonization of the East. 188 It began with the expansion of Phoenician influence in the second millennium B.C., and continued despite Rome’s defeat of Phoenicia’s greatest colony, Carthage. The Jewish diaspora, which started before the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 66 and led to the establishment of Jewish communities in every major city of the Mediterranean, was also a part of this pattern. So were the “Syrian” migrations. In the second and third centuries, Syri merchants– apparently a term applied to all Easterners – launched a veritable colonization of the Mediterranean world. The old Phoenician traits of energy, adaptability, and the ability to close deals were once more in evidence. 189 Syrian settlements, with their distinctive economic, social, and religious features, spread all along the coast of the Mediterranean. Substantial Arab minorities are recorded in most of the ports of southern Spain: Malaga, Cartagena, Seville, and Cordoba. Syrians are also known to have settled in Italy, with wealthy colonies in Puteoli and Ostia. Syrian, NabaPirenne makes it clear that this disruption had consequences for his own time: “A complete break was made, which was to continue even to our own day.” Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, 152. 188 Ball, Rome in the East, 451f. 189 Hitti, History of Syria, 346ff. 187

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tean, and numerous other eastern cults flourished in Puteoli, which must have resembled “(…) an oriental city in the first few centuries AD.” 190 There is also evidence of Apamean, Palmyrene, and Nabatean communities in Italy; Palmyrene and Nabatean dedicatory inscriptions have been found in Rome and Safaitic inscriptions in Pompeii. The Easterners also settled in France – including the famous Syrian merchants in Gaul mentioned by Henri Pirenne. 191 “Orientals” are recorded in the sixth century particularly in southern Gaul, but all over the region as well. Some of these Arab negotiatores in France seem to have been engaged in trade with the British Isles. 192 In Lyon, a market city that was frequented by many Near Easterners, a surviving bilingual epitaph commemorates a man called Thaim, son of Sa’ad, from Septima Canatha in Provincia Arabia. 193 Marseilles and Bordeaux both had a substantial Syrian population in the fifth century. Aramaic was still spoken in Orleans and Narbonne in the fifth and sixth centuries. 194 A Syrian Bishop, Eusebius, is recorded as having built a scola for his fellow Syrians in Paris in the fifth century. 195 Procopius mentions a certain Antiochus, a Syrian and long-time resident of Naples, who possessed “(…) a great reputation there for wisdom and justice” and headed the imperial party in the city. 196 Besides these merchants, Arabs who joined the Legion were also part of the Eastern expansion into Europe. After Emperor Severus Alexander’s Persian War in 230–3, many Arab troops, Ball, Rome in the East, 451. Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, 80f. 192 Ibid., 81. 193 Bowersock, Roman Arabia 155f. 194 Ball, Rome in the East, 452. 195 Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, 81. These families seem to have become even more influential after the adoption of Christianity, particularly by encouraging eastern forms of monasticism and a more emotional form of worship. Furthermore, the crucifix as the Christian symbol of worship and devotion seems to have been introduced into Europe by Syrians. Hitti, History of Syria, 348. 196 Procopius, History of the Wars, 5.8.15–23. 190 191

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mainly archers, were stationed in Germany. Syrian units are recorded in Roman army camps in Europe, particularly along the Danube frontier, where Syrian cults of Aziz, Hadad, and AlUzza began to appear. A Palmyrene funerary memorial belonging to a Syrian community in Northumberland has been found at South Shields, next to Hadrian’s Wall, in Britain. The ancient name of the fort at South Shields was Arbeia, which may be a corruption of “Arabs,” and an Arab community known as the “Tigris boatmen” controlled the river traffic at the mouth of the Tyne. 197 This interchange between East and West, and the rise of the Arab emperors of Rome, are an integral part of the long and complex relationship between Arabs and Rome. Against this background, the Arabs’ conquest of Spain in the eighth century, and their subsequent expansion into Sicily, Italy, southern France, and even Switzerland, was not so much the first act in Islam’s westward expansion as the last, until recently, in a tradition of Near Eastern migrations into Europe: “A tradition already thousands of years old by the time Tariq Ibn Ziyad crossed the Straits of Gibraltar (…) with his seven hundred followers in 711.” 198

197 198

Ball, Rome in the East, 451. Ibid., 452.

6.

YARMŪK:

THE MYSTERIOUS END OF ROME IN ORIENS The Arab victory over Rome at the battle of Yarmūk and the end of Byzantine rule that followed it are deeply mysterious, not because the course of the battle itself is unclear (the Arab and Roman accounts are detailed and in agreement on the key points), but because it is still not possible to explain how the Arabs were able to defeat Rome and the Persian Sassanids in such a short space of time and from such an obscure starting point. Above all, it is not clear what motivated the Arabs to undertake something so risky. In light of the previous chapters, we can now attempt to answer these questions. In the centuries before the rise of Islam, Oriens underwent a gradual process of Arabization. By the end of the period, the Arab Romans and foederati had gained considerable influence, as evidenced by the Arabs’ military power but also the protective role of the Monophysite Church, which was often in conflict with Byzantium. An Islamic state that was not first and foremost an Arab one could scarcely have existed. For the Muslims, gaining control of the Arab groups in Oriens (and Mesopotamia) must have been an important goal. The purpose of the military campaign was therefore primarily to unite the Arab population, and only secondarily to spread the new religion. Byzantium found itself unable to respond appropriately to these new developments. Centuries of looming conflict with the Arabs had created contradictions they were incapable of resolv127

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ing. On the one hand, the Romans had been forced to entrust more and more power to the Roman Arabs and foederati in order to strengthen them as citizens and defenders of the empire. On the other hand, Byzantium was a highly centralized state that needed to pool its forces to stand any chance of resisting its powerful Persian enemies. The Romans often seem to have approached the crisis and its tectonic shifts with a certain amount of bewilderment, passiveness, or even resignation. It is doubtful whether their interpretive models of the world enabled them to understand the threat at all; in any case, they did not develop any new or innovative political or military strategies to counter the Arab invasion. This is not to say that existing accounts of Yarmūk or the conquest of Oriens need to be rewritten altogether. Nevertheless, they are often too focused on the military and operational details and the mistakes made by both Arabs and Romans. As a result, they often fail to grasp the bigger picture of the development of an Arab/Semitic state. Although modern authors like Walter Kaegi can see that the Romans committed a strategic error by disregarding or underestimating the Arab/Semitic element during this important period of transformation, deArabization prevents them from understanding the cause of the error. 1 In his reference work on the Arab conquest, Kaegi does not devote much space to analysis of the Arab/Semitic element. For him, the important thing is to understand the defeat from the point of the view of the (superior) Roman institutions: “The actual conquests deserve reexamination for what they may reveal about the nature of Byzantine institutions and warfare at that time and about the reasons for the empire’s failure to develop an adequate response to the early challenges, or stated in another way, the transformation of late Roman military, politiKaegi remarks succinctly: “The initial Muslim invasions surprised the military defenders and civilian inhabitants of Syria and Palestine, who were not anticipating any major military activity from the direction of the Arabian peninsula, even though in retrospect modern observers may find warning signs.” Kaegi, Byzantium, 236.

1

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cal, and social institutions and conditions into middle Byzantine, Islamic and even medieval ones.” 2 Such considerations certainly have their value, but for our purposes we need to find a new way of reading and explaining the “gaps” that these accounts reveal. 3 Kaegi’s work is fascinating because he is apparently unsatisfied with existing explanations; he seems to sense the existence of some large-scale historical process going on in the background, which he is nevertheless unable to define. The conclusion to his account of the Islamic conquest is remarkably incomplete and abrupt: “No narrowly military explanation can be satisfactory. Yet both sides – Muslim and Byzantine – pointed to specific battles respectively as victories or catastrophes. But they resorted to religious causation to explain the outcomes of those battles. Military judgements were important in the outcome of events, as were military institutions. Probably some of those battles could have had different outcomes. Erroneous judgments, miscalculations, and human rivalries contributed to explain what happened. Although it is possible to conceive of la longue durée [sic!] in Mediterranean history, these years of the seventh century experienced an acceleration of a process, the understanding of which requires both an appreciation of elements of the long term and the critical moment.” 4 We can now piece together this longue durée. There were thousands of years of cyclical Arab/Semitic migrations out of the Arabian Peninsula and towards the Fertile Crescent. Meanwhile, the Arab element underwent a gradual consolidation process that was facilitated by Hellenistic culture, Christianity, and then a specifically Semitic religion. That the Muslim campaign was, in a way, simply the last in a long series of “Semitic” migrations has already been discussed in the context of the deArabization of history. It is also often claimed that the conquest Kaegi, Byzantium, 2. Ibid., 1–26. Kaegi mainly discusses problems with the sources and falsifications on the Roman and Arab sides. 4 Ibid., 287. 2 3

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of Oriens would not have been possible without a religious dimension: “In fact it was the last stage in the age-long process of infiltration which had begun with the Babylonians some four thousand years before. The Islamic movement, however, did possess one distinctive feature – religious impulse. Combined with the economic, this made the movement irresistible and carried it far beyond the confines of any preceding one. Islam admittedly provided a battle cry, a slogan comparable to that provided by “democracy” in the first and second world wars.” 5 That religion can inspire fervor, courage, and passion is undisputed. But it is difficult to see it as the primary motive for the invasion. As far as is known, neither the Qur’an nor the Prophet provided any relevant religious legitimation for the conquest of Oriens. 6 The final phase of Arabization was driven rather by the inner necessity of founding an Arab nation. Once an (initially) Arab state had been created in the Arabian Peninsula, it demanded the integration of the Arabs in the Roman and Sassanid Empires. The real “booty” or goal of the war was the Arab population of Rhomaioi and foederati. Thus, from a political perspective, the invasion of Oriens and Persia was the logically unavoidable – if highly risky – corollary to the emergence of an Arab nation. Neither what was still a thoroughly Arab religion nor the Arab state that supported it could have lasted long while significant parts of the Arab/Semitic population remained out of reach. This is especially true given that those parts included the

Hitti, History of Syria, 419f. Such legitimations seem to have been added later. However, Donner remarks that religious motivations cannot be excluded for every single Arab group or individual: “(…) it would be unrealistic, indeed foolhardy, to dismiss ideology or faith as a factor altogether.” Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, 270. Recently, the discussion about the role of religion has been influenced by the rise of radical Muslim groups like al-Qa’ida: “(…) the most often cited pull factor is Islam, which is assumed to have unified the divers Arab tribesmen (…) This is the message of ninth-century Muslim historians propagated, and modern Western scholars have recently embraced it.” Robert G. Hoyland, In God’s Path. 63. 5 6

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most important urban and cultural centers of the time and exerted control over crucial trade routes. 7 Donner gets close to the theory that the Arabs in Oriens were the real goal of the war when he remarks that the Ridda wars after the death of Muhammad had taught the new Muslim rulers that no Arab tribes could be permitted to remain outside their control, and that the Arabs in Oriens and Iraq must therefore be brought under Arab control: “(…) one of the objectives of the new ruling elite was simply to expand the state – to extend its political control until it embraced all nomadic groups in the Arabian and Syrian desert and steppe (and, of course, all those settled communities that lived in the nomads’ midst).” 8 7 Shahîd addressed this economic dimension in his last book: “These conquests had a prime mover. They were initially inspired by a truly extraordinary personage, Muḥammad, who before his prophetic call in A.D. 610 had spent a good fifteen years as a caravan leader on the spice route. He then began the religiopolitical movement, Islam, that in the seventh century brought an end to the three centuries of late antiquity. The relevance of the spice route in this context is its formative influence on the political, diplomatic, and administrative genius of the Prophet, who created the Arab-Muslim state of Medina in a mere ten years, between 622 and 632. From Medina he sent the first military expeditions against Oriens, initiating the future celebrated conquests. During the years that Muḥammad had led substantial caravans of the spice route, he had to deal with the Byzantine authorities and their federates, the Ghassānids, in Oriens, a complex operation involving negotiations at the frontier, at the termini (Bostra and Gaza), and between termini and frontier. In addition to honing his secular skills, the spice route enabled him to have an intimate knowledge of the geography of the southern part of Oriens, the Provincia Arabia and Palaestina Tertia. It was against these regions that he directed the first military expeditions of the conquests, and it was again in this sector in Oriens, shortly after his death in 632, that his successors won the first victories of Islam, especially the decisive battle of Yarmūk in 636.” Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol. II, Part 2, 56f. 8 Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, 94. This is perhaps even clearer for the almost simultaneous invasion of Iraq, which is only a secondary issue here. That campaign also seems to have been motivated primarily by a desire for power over the Arab tribes in the Sassanid Empire. In that sense, the beginning of the invasion of Iraq was simply an extension of the Ridda campaign, and no more religiously inspired: “Abū Bakr’s decision to interfere in the political affairs of

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If this analysis is correct, it is another important counterargument to the de-Arabization of pre-Islamic history. It implies that the conquest of Oriens was not the chance result of migration, religious zeal, or other such processes, but the intended outcome of deliberate action. Specifically, it occurred because the Arabs, who lived under a variety of different rulers, had to be unified in order to enable the creation of an Arab state that could then serve as the basis for an ethnically unrestricted religious community, or umma. 9 Seen from this perspective, Rome’s hard-won, last-ditch victory over the Persians and the resulting decision to consolidate and reorganize the foederati in Oriens led inevitably – and unintentionally – to the Arab attack. The reorganization of the Roman east under Heraclius set off a chain reaction: “From the point of view of the Muslims, the task of subjecting and unifying the tribes of Arabia under a new Islamic ruling elite was difficult enough in its own right; the efforts of a rival state to organize the tribes could only make it even more difficult for them to attain their objectives. Hence it became imperative for the Islamic state to assert its influence in the direction of Syria as soon as possible, before the Byzantines could make too much headway in their efforts to organize the tribes to the north.” 10 The strategy was certainly risky, but it was by no means unrealistic. In any case, the time was ripe for the unification of the Arabs in Oriens. This had less to do with the exhaustion of the two superpowers – Rome and Persia – after their long war than with the fact that their Arab allies, the Ghassānids in Syrian Jābiya and the Lakhmids in Ḥīra, were increasingly eager to detach themselves from their overlords. The Lakhmid vassal Iraq, by sending forces under Khālid b. al-Walīd and other generals there, sprang from his desire to complete the process of state consolidation over the tribes of Arabia that had been undertaken during the ‘ridda’ wars, rather than specific commercial, religious or even military interest in Iraq itself.” Ibid., 177. 9 Suliman Bashear, Arabs and Others in Early Islam (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1997), 118ff. 10 Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, 101.

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state in Ḥīra had recently been placed under direct Persian control and had lost almost all its independence. 11 For many Arab tribes, this was a clear signal that it was time to look for alternatives to foreign rule. Their gaze was increasingly directed towards the Arabian Peninsula: “The Arab tribes, disappointed by the policy of al-Ḥīra and Persia, and aware of the weakness of the client kingdom, began to look for a body politic of their own with a competent leadership. This was created by the emergence of a new idea of an equalitarian association based on common interest: ‘The Commonwealth of Mecca’” 12 On the Roman side, the Arabs’ situation was not much better. Rome treated the Arab tribes very unwisely, applying a “disastrous policy” to vast parts of the limes. 13 It is hard to understand why, particularly because after the gradual decline in the number of Roman troops and their transformation into limitanei, whose fighting strength was never more than a fraction of that of the legions, the burden of defending Oriens fell largely to the Arab foederati. The case of the Ghassānid king al-Mundhir (Almoundaros), a contemporary of Muhammad, is a good example of how the Romans treated their Arab allies. Al-Mundhir was not just the supreme commander of the Arab foederati and therefore of the limes. He was also the protector of the Monophysite Church in Oriens; in other words, he had a religious role in a church that expressed “Syrian” national sentiment. 14 This made him immediately suspect in

Gustav Rothstein, Die Dynastie der Laḫmiden in al-Ḥîra. Ein Versuch zur arabisch-persischen Geschichte zur Zeit der Sassaniden (Berlin: Reuter & Reichard, 1899), 116ff. 12 Meir J. Kister, “Mecca and Tamīm (Aspects of their Relations),” JESHO 8 (1965), 113–163, here 116. 13 Parker, Romans and Saracens, 154. 14 On the role of the Monophysite Church as a national institution in Syria see Hitti, Syria, 371, 403. The Arabs in Oriens were probably drawn to Monophysitism for political reasons: “Monophysitism did not become popular among the Arabs because of its intellectual attributes, but because it bound the population, especially the non-Greek portions of it, politically into the Roman Empire.” Suhail Qāshā, Ṣafḥāt min Tārīkh al-Masīḥiyyīn al-‘Arab qabla al-’Islām [Extracts of 11

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the eyes of Justinian, who scented political disloyalty and wrote a letter to the Syrian governor ordering him to kill al-Mundhir. An administrative error meant the letter ended up being delivered to the prospective victim, who was thereby forewarned. 15 There was a brief reconciliation, but two years later al-Mundhir was exiled to Sicily. After that, Ghassānid support for the Roman cause wavered until the Persian invasion of Oriens changed the course of events entirely. 16 At this point, we can ask whether Rome’s inability to accurately assess the risk of an Arab attack was the result of its difficult relationship with its Arab allies. The Ghassānids helped Heraclius defeat the Persians and fought on Rome’s side again in the battle of Yarmūk, but even they were not able to help Heraclius understand the threat. That may have been because they were not in a strong enough position to do so, or because Rome did not trust them, or because they had been weakened by the recent Persian invasion, or indeed because they were incapable of analyzing the situation correctly themselves. The Ghassānids had connections to Mecca, and as allies of the Quraysh tribe they had been assigned a house near the Kaaba, which is evidence of a certain amount of deference and loyalty. 17 Michael Lecker recently proposed the theory that the Ghassānids may even have helped arrange Muhammad’s Hijra to the History of the Arab Christians before Islam], (Beirut: Paulans Library, 2005), 282. 15 Ball assumes that there was no bureaucratic error involved, but that the letter was intercepted by Ghassānid agents: “This action itself demonstrates just how powerful they had become in Syria, where even official imperial communications between Constantinople and Antioch were subject to scrutiny by Ghassanid ‘intelligence.’” Ball, Rome in the East, 110. 16 On the history of al-Mundhir see Hitti, Syria, 403; Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, 939ff; Zahran, Ghassan Resurrected, 45; Fisher, Between Empires, 176; Qāshā, Ṣafḥāt min Tārīkh, 142. 17 On the connections between the Ghassānids and Mecca in pre-Islamic times, see Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs, 260. On the location of the house, see Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, Die Chroniken der Stadt Mekka (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1861), 55.

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Medina, and that it was no coincidence that Heraclius launched his offensive against the Persians in 625 at almost exactly the same time as the meeting at al-‘Aqaba, at which groups from Medina – including some Ghassānids – offered Muhammad exile in Medina. 18 It is, therefore, difficult to imagine that the Ghassānids were unaware of what was happening on the Peninsula. Nevertheless, there are no records of Heraclius and the Ghassānids ever discussing the subject or developing a joint defense strategy, despite the fact that the emperor had been in Jerusalem only a few years before the invasion, when there should have been plenty of opportunity to discuss the matter. 19 We must either assume that the nature of their relationship did not permit that sort of conversation, or that the Ghassānids’ evaluation of the situation was just as erroneous as that of their Roman rulers. Their victory at Mu’ta in 629 may have reinforced their incorrect interpretation. 20 We should not forget that at that time the Ghassānids were the most powerful Arab princes, with a capital city and bards and poets to extol and honor them. In Oriens they were the protectors of a branch of Christianity that seemed perfectly suited to the idiosyncrasies of their Arab con-

“Heraclius’ campaign against the Sassanians started on 5 April 622; in June of the same year the Aqaba meeting between Muḥammad and the Ansār took place, and some three months later, namely in the last third of September, Muḥammad arrived at Medina, starting a new era in world history. It is argued that these events may have been linked; in other words, that the Ghassānids – and their Byzantine overlords- were active behind the scene, encouraging the Ansār to provide Muḥammad and his Companions with a safe haven.” Michael Lecker, “Were the Ghassānids and the Byzantines behind Muḥammad’s Hijra?” Unpublished conference paper, 2. (My thanks to Prof. Lecker at the University of Jerusalem for providing the manuscript). However, Donner argues that the southern Ghassānids were independent of the Byzantine Ghassānids. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, 106. 19 Heraclius naturally tried hard to gain an understanding of the situation, sending troops to Baqla and using Arab informants to learn about events. See the Arabic sources for information about this reconnaissance mission in Kaegi, Byzantium, 81. 20 Ibid., 81. 18

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gregations. Compared to them, what were the Muslims in Mecca and Medina? The Muslims themselves may have concluded that an Arab political entity could only come into being if it was independent of the dominant power blocs and in control of as many Arab groups as possible. Moreover, they would have been confident that the Arab/Semitic inhabitants of Oriens would support the Arab cause sooner or later. 21 Nonetheless, there is no documentary evidence or record of the Muslim elites making a clear political decision to begin the invasion of Oriens. This has led some to claim that the conquest was completely unplanned and that it was merely the result of a series of ad hoc events. 22 Such a view is certainly correct with regard to the conquest of Sassanid Iraq. The first raids there seem to have been aimed at no more than testing the Persian defenses, although the overall goal must have been very similar, if not identical. 23 In general, the ability to plan successfully in those days has perhaps been overestimated; besides the underlying conditions of extreme instability and a lack of high-quality intelligence about the enemy, risk mitigation considerations would have made it appropriate to develop a strategy flexibly and gradually in response to events.

Hitti, Syria, 411. Ibid., 419. 23 At first, Iraq did not seem to be the Muslims’ focus: Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, 176ff. The initiative lay largely with a tribal leader with his own interests, Muthannā b. Hāritha al-Saybān. He launched attacks of limited scope, winning some skirmishes and losing others. It was only when the Persians started exerting serious pressure that the newly elected Caliph Umar felt forced to intervene. At the mustering of the troops, only passionate exhortations from Umar and Muthannā were able to overcome the great reluctance of the Arab soldiers: Muḥammad Faraj, Al-Muthannā bin Ḥāritha al-Shaibānī (Cairo, 1989), 91. Umar’s predecessor Abu Bakr had not been able to make up his mind to begin a long offensive in Iraq. There was a risk that attacking might serve merely to consolidate the desperate Sassanid Empire. Suḥail Ḥusain al-Fatlāwī, Tārīkh al-‘Alāqāt al-diblūmāsiyya fī al-Waṭan al-‘Arabiyy [The history of diplomatic relations in the Arab homeland] (Beirut, 2004), 244. 21 22

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In summary, ignorance of the Arabs’ motivations and an inability to understand their movement or goals prevented the Romans and their Arab foederati from developing suitable counter-strategies, such as arming the population and encouraging them to fight. Rome – departing from its usual habits and ignoring prevailing military doctrine – was forced to put all its eggs in one basket and seek an open battle. 24 But did Heraclius have any other options for defending his empire? Could a largely Arab Oriens have been defended differently against the Arabs from the Peninsula? For reasons that are unclear, Rome failed to mobilize the people or indeed the Christian community against the Muslims. 25 Presumably mobilization was not seen as necessary because the danger had not been properly understood, or it may have been judged too complicated and time-consuming to man-

Roman military doctrine, which was codified in the Strategikon of Maurice, advised against open battles. George T. Dennis (trans), Maurice’s Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 31f. The attempt “(…) simply to overpower the enemy in the open, hand to hand and face to face, (…) is an enterprise which is very risky and can result in serious harm. (…) it is ridiculous to try to gain a victory which is so costly and brings only empty glory. (…) a wise commander will not engage the enemy in a pitched battle unless a truly exceptional opportunity or advantage presents itself. (…) [He] refrains from emulating those who carry out operations recklessly and are admired for their brilliant successes. (…) [He will] watch for the right opportunities and pretexts and (…) strike at the enemy before they can get themselves ready (…).” Heraclius seems to have tended naturally to caution, and he dismissed his brother after the latter risked and lost a pitched battle against the Muslims. On the other hand, Heraclius himself repeatedly and successfully ignored the rule in his war against the Persians. Kaegi, Byzantium, 110f. James Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis. Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (New York: OUP, 2019), 472, assumes that the long desert border and lack of natural barriers in Southern Palestine encouraged the Roman decision: “Am invasion force would have to be met in open battle, with all concomitant risks …” 25 Even at the battle of Yarmūk there were few religious symbols apart from the presence of clergy and priests on the Byzantine side. In general, “(…) the clergy do not appear to have recruited large numbers or any persons at all, for the Byzantine defense of the region.” Kaegi, Byzantium, 268. 24

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age alongside military planning. 26 The Romans may also have wanted to avoid arming population groups whose loyalty must have been in question. Most of the population was cautious, as they had been during the Persian invasion, and generally tried to negotiate terms of surrender quickly. 27 Recently, Hugh Kennedy has put forward the theory that the civilian population of Oriens was not deployed against the Arabs because it was for various reasons already fairly weak. Earthquakes and epidemics had carried off almost a third of the population in the previous hundred years. 28 To support his theory he refers to the meagre tributes paid by many Syrian cities to the Arabs after their occupation. He also points out that Caliph Mu‘āwiya I introduced a policy of industrialization in impoverished areas, and that it was necessary to rebuild and repopulate cities that had long been in various stages of disrepair. Kennedy dates the beginning of the decline of Oriens to the year 540, and relates it to the steadily increasing power of the Ghassānids, who had started moving the population away from the coastal region and towards the population centers along the desert border (Damascus, Homs) long before the Muslim invasion. This view, according to which the Muslims exploited or completed the already Arab-dominated development of Oriens, helps to counteract the narrative of deArabization: “The transition from antique to medieval Syria occurred in the years after 540, not after 640, and the Muslim in-

Nicolle, Yarmuk, 23. Another consequence was the emigration of Rhomaioi who did not wish to live under Muslim rule. The inhabitants of Aleppo fled to Antioch, while those of Tripoli were evacuated by the Byzantine fleet (Mu‘āwiya, as governor of Syria for the caliph, later repopulated Tripoli with Jews). The Damascenes had to make room for the Muslims. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, 245ff. How many of the up to six million inhabitants of Oriens fled is unknown. If the majority had done so, the Byzantine sources would surely have reported that fact. Kaegi, Byzantium, 27. 28 Hugh Kennedy, The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 155ff. 26 27

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vasion was more a consequence than a cause of changes which had been taking place over the previous century.” 29 Therefore, there is good reason to believe that the Arabizing transformation of Oriens was already underway long before the invasion. But it was probably not the case that Byzantium had already given up on Oriens, as some historians have claimed. 30 Oriens was not just the cradle of Christianity; its loss also meant, sooner or later, the loss of Roman North Africa, and it is extremely difficult to imagine that the emperors would have seen such an outcome as in their interests. It seems more plausible that Rome simply no longer had the means, capacity, and above all the political imagination necessary to counter demographic and religious developments and consolidate the region. Byzantium surely did not just surrender the population of Oriens to Islam without a fight. After all, it had only recently liberated the region from the Persians after many years of war. We also have records of Heraclius’ speeches before the battle of Yarmūk in which he encouraged the population to resist, 31 although he may simply have been asking them to follow the instructions of the military leadership. In any case, that he gave an address to the people at all reveals his deep concern and his desire to strengthen civilian resistance, even if he clearly lacked a strategy to do so successfully. We now have a picture of a region that was already in a state of transformation before the invasion, and in which the Arab element was becoming ever more noticeable thanks to the presence of Arabs in politics, the military, and religion. When the Romans tried to reconsolidate Oriens after their victory over Kennedy, The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, 183. Volker Popp, “The Early History of Islam, Following Inscriptional and Numismatic Testimony,” in Karl-Heinz Ohlig & Gerd R. Puin (Eds.), The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research into its Early History (New York: Promethus Books, 2009), 17–124, here 21f, backs up this claim using the revisionist work of Yejuda Nevo and Judith Koren: Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003). 31 See the Arabic sources in Kaegi, Byzantium, 104f. 29 30

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the Persians, they could not completely ignore the increasing strength of the Arabs in the Peninsula. Rome’s inadequate response was probably the result of a combination of arrogance and ignorance, but there may have been an element of hopelessness as well; a sense that all options had already been exhausted. Furthermore, the recent successful defense of this important region against the archenemy, Persia, may have – falsely – allayed some of that feeling of powerlessness and caused the Romans to overestimate their chances of victory against the apparently far weaker Arabs. Perhaps Heraclius also was not the right ruler for the situation. His battle tactics against the Persians were often unorthodox, but ultimately he always relied on the same techniques and resources even when he deployed them in unconventional ways. Moreover, the Romans did not come up with any new ideas to counter the process of Arab consolidation. They seem to have faced the coming events with a certain amount of self-deception. But we should not forget, when making such judgements, that those who live through periods of political upheaval are seldom able to understand them properly, let alone anticipate them. To do so is immensely difficult, and in a conservative regime like the Roman system of government, it was perhaps impossible: “As in all great transitions in human history, it is unlikely that anyone realized then the importance of what was happening. That comes later.” 32 Nevertheless, Heraclius may at some point have understood what the Roman Empire was confronting, and that realization may have precipitated the personal decline and collapse of his later years. Maybe he glimpsed that the tide was no longer with him, that the momentum was now with those of the periphery. At least, he seemed to feel that God had abandoned him and that little or nothing could be done to rescue the situation: “And what, during the hideous chain of disasters, of Heraclius himself? True, he had ordered the mobilization of his ill-fated army; 32

Bowersock, Hellenism, 81.

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but neither before nor afterwards did he personally take any part in the fighting. How, one wonders, can it possibly be that this heroic soldier-Emperor, (…), recoverer of the True Cross, should have stood by while Jerusalem itself fell into the hands of the infidel, lifting not a finger to save it? (…) Even before the battle of the Yarmuk, as he watched while the soldiers of the Prophet overran the lands that he had fought so hard to regain, he had been tormented by fears that God had abandoned him – that the Almighty had perhaps even transferred His support to this new tribe of conquerors.” 33

John Norwich, Byzantium. The Early Centuries (London: Guild Publishing, 1988), 307f.

33

7.

TABOOS:

THE SMOOTH INTEGRATION OF THE ARABS/SEMITES OF THE ORIENS INTO THE ISLAMIC UMMA The victory over Rome was relatively quick and easy. 1 This was above all due to the relatively smooth and uncomplicated integration of the Arab/Semitic population of Oriens – which, as outlined above, was an important if not the primary goal of the invasion. This rapid success was reflected in historical representation: as diverse as the region and its population appeared before the invasion, so homogenous did it become immediately after the Arab victory. In the de-Arabized view of pre-Islamic Arabia and Oriens, the process of state formation after Yarmūk is naturally very difficult to explain. However, as discussed above, the Arabs in the Peninsula and in Oriens probably already had, in varying degrees and forms, some sort of common identity long before Islam. We can assume that that identity, expressed in the form of an Arab koine, ethos, or cultural sphere, was a very effective way of integrating the existing Ar-

Hitti, Syria, 417; Victoria L. Erhart, “The church of the East during the period of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 78:3, 1996, 55–72, here 65.

1

143

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ab/Semitic groups – foederati, Rhomaioi, or even others, such as the Jews – relatively quickly. This “ethnic and genealogical map,” or Arab identity, was used as a political tool right from the beginning. 2 At first sight this may be surprising, as Islam is often seen as a system that coerced as much as it integrated; after all, it is normally referred to as the “Muslim conquest.” Although Victoria Erhart’s work focuses mainly on the conquest of Iraq, her remark that the local population perceived the invasion as an Arab one is also relevant for Oriens: “While there was recognition in the Syriac sources that this current Arab invasion was of a different sort and magnitude from the Bedouin raids which were all too familiar, there is no cognizance in the mid-seventh century sources that there was a religious component to this new political rule. To the Syriac Christians the invaders were Arabs but it was not yet significant that they were Muslim Arabs. There is evidence that at least some of the groups of Arab invaders were Christian allies of recently converted Muslim tribes.” 3 As most of the inhabitants of Oriens were Arab Christians or Jews, an ethnic approach in the early stages of political integration was eminently sensible. Later on, as different ethnicities where incorporated into the Islamic Empire, the integrative power of religion was used to strengthen and expand the union beyond the Arab/Semitic peoples. Initially, however, we should work on the assumption that the Arabs in Oriens maintained their Christianity, and of course that the Jews stood by the religion of their ancestors. It was therefore necessary to create a monotheistic ecumenical framework that could support an ethnic union. After all, in contrast to Hellenism, Christianity was an indigenous religion in Oriens, 4 even though the Muslims regarded the faith of their

See Bashear, Arabs and Others in Early Islam, 121. Erhart, “The church of the East,” 57. 4 “(…) Christianity itself was, after all, a Syrian export, not an alien creed.” Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, 94. 2 3

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Christian Arab brothers – at least in the Arabian Peninsula – with a certain amount of skepticism. 5 The Arabs’ greatest achievement in this context was that they overcame their fear of Rome, of foreigners in general, and of the other great religions, and, despite the external pressure they were under, developed a complex, interethnic program to integrate a wide range of different groups. What is more, they did so in a flexible, politically sensible way. 6 It had to be a complex strategy because many of the existing social structures remained in place and the people of Oriens did not immediately switch their allegiance. 7 While there are some accounts of the local inhabitants welcoming the conquerors with open arms, many probably surrendered to the Muslims because they knew that the emperor was not going to rescue them. 8 But there was no persistent or fanatical resistance, no destruction, and certainly no religious conflict. Even the criticism directed by the Arab Christians in Oriens against the Muslims was for the most part objective, characterized by rational arguments and accurate assessments of the Islamic faith. 9

“The Christian religion never penetrated very deeply into the consciousness of many Arabs. And no less a person than ’Abi Talib could remark of the Arab Christians who did not want to convert to Islam that: ‘They know nothing about Christianity except that it permits them to drink wine.’” Qāshā, Ṣafḥāt min Tārīkh, 44. 6 “On the level of inter-ethnic and inter-racial relations the traditional material reveals the high complexity not only keeping alive these early universalist features within the framework of Arabian Islam, but also of engulfing other ethnicities, cultures and races that converted.” Bashear, Arabs and Others in Early Islam, 121. In the long run this framework was exposed to massive centrifugal forces, such as conflicts between local and central elites, which inevitably ended up causing the disintegration of the Arab-Islamic Empire. John Haldon, “Elites Old and New in the Byzantine and Early Islamic State,” in Haldon & Conrad (Eds.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, Vol. VI, 1–13, here 13. 7 “(…) there was no widespread disloyalty to the Byzantine Empire.” Kaegi, Byzantium, 173. 8 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 23. 9 Ibid., 24. 5

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A balance between Islam’s universal claim and the sectionalism of the individual Arab/Semitic groups in Oriens was initially achieved with the help of ethnic and linguistic commonalities, which necessarily drew on familiar elements: “As such, the scheme of tribal genealogical relations that in the Old Testament reflect the relations between Israelites and other nations was also applied by Arabian Islam.” 10 Astonishingly, these commonalities were not just successfully exploited to unite the various Arab/Semitic groups in Oriens, who according to Fisher, Retsö and others hardly saw themselves as Arab at all, but also to integrate distantly related Semitic groups like the Jews and the Copts, and even non-Arab/Semitic groups like Persians and Turks. 11 This sort of integration naturally needed a defined identity to serve as a foundation. Arabness must have been sufficiently distinctive to function as an identity platform or Leitkultur. 12 On the one hand, it would probably have been quite clear who was Arab and who was a foreigner (‘ajam). 13 On the other hand, it was probably also an advantage that Arabness was not fully codified and could therefore be used flexibly depending on the requirements of individual instances of integration. This policy should not be misunderstood as one of laissezfaire. The Arabs’ often-discussed tolerance of other ethnic groups and religions certainly helped prevent unrest, but real loyalty and the necessary unity when faced with external threats could not have been achieved through political quietism. Gustav von Grunebaum points out that the Arab identity had been used effectively to integrate and consolidate the population into a sort of Arab cultural nation long before Islam: “Indeed, the sources almost forcibly mislead one into underrating the reality Bashear, Arabs and Others in Early Islam, 121. Ibid. 12 “The umma did not have to work hard to press a multitude of fractious, culturally distinct tribes into some sort of union.” Howard-Johnston, Witnesses, 472. 13 Bashear, Arabs and Others in Early Islam, 118. Nevertheless, it is not always obvious whether learning the language was enough to become Arab, as the Prophet said, or whether jus sanguinis prevailed (56). 10 11

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of the idea that pre-Islamic Arabs constituted a unity. Yet it must not be forgotten that within a very few years Muḥammad and Islam transformed the Arab Kulturnation into a Staatsnation.” 14 The invasion is often assumed to have had a religious motivation, but there is no evidence for such an assumption in the first two centuries after Yarmūk. Instead, the Muslims seem to have worked on the basis that the Arab Christians and Jews in Oriens would remain faithful to their respective religions, and indeed that was often the case. 15 In that sense the ethnic approach, based on the shared values and language of the Arab cultural nation, was the only practical way to transform the diverse population into the citizens of a state – and it was a very effective one. The end goal of state-formation meant religious aspects had to be expressed in a “more restrained” way to avoid putting the unity of the new state at risk. 16 The policies of the first Caliphs were less a religious program than an attempt to consolidate the “Arabization” of Oriens: “(…) reviewing the earlier material that cites first/seventh century figures as urging the spread of learning of Arabic, one clearly notices the absence of any religious motives behind the policies of ‘Umar I, Mu’āwiya and ‘Abd al-Malik, whose explicitly stated aims were to increase manliness (muruwwa) and to facilitate the governing of Arabs, von Grunebaum, “The nature of Arab unity,” 7. The conversion of the population seems not to have reached significant levels until the eighth and ninth centuries. See Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 336ff. For a long time, Arab Christians may have seen the invasion as a period in which their faith would be tested before the peace that would come when the Church was restored. Ibid., 27. 16 “Muslim sources tend to assume that non-Muslims who participated in the conquests must have converted at an early stage, but the prosopographical evidence suggests rather that many remained in their own religion until much later.” Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 555. On that basis, Arab inscriptions and titles that have been interpreted by many observers as Christian can now be seen as expressions of the ecumenical, Arab cultural sphere: “The religiously pluralist character of the community would explain why no Islamic pretensions were advanced and why the leader was designated by such neutral terms as ‘servant of God’ and ‘commander of the faithful.’ The latter would have replaced Muḥammad as the arbiter for all parties.” (Ibid.) 14 15

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etc., and who often urged the learning of astronomy and genealogy as well.” 17 The Arab culture propagated in this way was based on the self-confident “manliness” of the Bedouins, who were Islamized to varying degrees. Arabic poetry also played a role in making Arab culture attractive. The result was an appealing “way of life” that later inspired imitations even among nonMuslims, such as in Arab Andalusia. 18 In the Western view, there was no need – or even opportunity – for ethnicity to function as a unifying force because there were no citizens in the strict sense of the word. There were only members of religious communities whose leaders were responsible to the Islamic Empire and who were united in a loose confederation that did not need to be, or rather could not be, bound by a cultural identity. 19 In this view, the fact that all Arabs were part of the same ethnic or cultural sphere is overshadowed by the religious structuring of society: if Christian Arabs and others converted to Islam, they supposedly did so primarily for opportunistic reasons and not because they were attracted to the Muslim “offer” and its ties to their ethnic identity! 20 This

Bashear, Arabs and Others in Early Islam, 119f. “The Christians of southern Spain, for instance, were called ‘Mozarabic’ because, though Christians, they nevertheless ‘wished to be like Arabs.’ Many of my co-religionists,’ wrote a ninth-century bishop of Cordova, ‘read verses and fairy-tales of the Arabs, and study the works of Muhammadan philosophers and theologians, not in order to refute them, but to learn to express themselves in the Arab language more correctly and more elegantly.’” Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 196. 19 Ibid., 186 20 This viewpoint is very clear in the description of the conversion of Omani Christians to Islam. The Nestorian Catholicus accused them of being motivated by purely secular concerns, in other words their economic situation: “Auch über die wirthschaftlichen Verhältnisse, welche beim Übertritt vom Christentum zum Islam eine Rolle spielten, geben die Briefe Jesujahbs einige Andeutungen. Er macht den Christen im Oman, den Maznûn, den Vorwurf, dass sie den Islam angenommen hätten, ohne von den Muslims dazu gezwungen zu sein, lediglich um die Hälfte ihres Vermögens zu retten. Ihr Christentum sei ihnen nicht einmal die Hälfte ihrer Habe wert gewesen.” Karl Eduard Sachau, Vom Christentum in 17 18

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Western perspective is incapable of fully understanding the effects of an Arabization policy, because de-Arabization obscures the possibility that such a policy might have existed. If there was no Arab element in Oriens, what sense is there in a policy aimed at activating it? In any case, according to this view the Arab cultural nation was too weak to implement an effective policy of this nature. Nevertheless, these ethnic and linguistic commonalities seem to have worked very well as a unifying force, creating a nation that held together through the next few centuries even in the face of external threat. As discussed above, existing social structures were well-suited for the creation of such a nation. The Arab population was widely distributed across the region, even if Western observers consider most to have been nomads: “Indeed, it seems that these Arabic-speaking pastoral peoples were, on the eve of Islam, nearly as ubiquitous (if not as numerous) in many inland districts of Syria as they were in the Arabian peninsula itself.” 21 These Arabs in Oriens were certainly aware of their close relationship to the Arabs in Arabia: “To the masses of seventh century Syria the Moslem Arabians must have appeared closer ethnically, linguistically and perhaps religiously than the hated Byzantine masters.” 22 We can assume that the Arabic koine was absolutely central to the process of integration. Even though Aramaic was widespread throughout Oriens as a sacred language and a lingua franca, the two languages were so closely related that switching from one to the other was no great problem, and for many inhabitants of the area it may often have been a return to their mother tongue: “The affinity between Aramaic and Arabic is demonstrated by the fact that Aramaicspeaking Christians throughout this vast area quickly became Arabic-speaking after the Islamic conquest without necessarily becoming Muslims; and for many this was the return to their der Persis (Berlin: Verlag der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1916), 19. 21 Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, 95. 22 Hitti, Syria, 417.

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original language, now universalized through the medium of Islamic religion.” 23 The inclusive effect of the Arab sphere seems to have extended to other groups in Oriens as well. The integration of the Jews is a particularly interesting case corroborated by multiple sources. Thanks to Heraclius’ anti-Jewish policies, many Jews were receptive to the Arab cause. In the end they integrated into the Islamic Empire perhaps even more easily than the Christian Arabs, who may have harbored doubts due to their faith: “So whereas Christians regarded the invading Arabs as God’s rod for their chastisement, many Jews saw them rather as God’s instrument for their deliverance.” 24 It is clear that the Jews recognized and understood the Arab/Semitic character of this new cultural sphere. Rabbi Simon ben Yoḥai framed the liberation of the Jews from the nation of Edom (Byzantium) by the Arab kingdom of the wild man (Ishmael) in genealogical terms: “Do not fear, son of man, for the Almighty only brings the kingdom of Ishmael in order to deliver you from this wicked one (Edom). He raises up over them (Ishmaelites) a prophet according to His will and He will conquer the land for them, and they will come and restore it to greatness, and a great dread will come between them and the sons of Esau.” 25 In recent years it is this image of an Islamic umma that has come to the forefront: a political and religious community that welcomed other monotheistic groups without requiring them to convert. One example of this is the agreement reached in Medina between Muhammad and the Jewish tribe of ‘Awf to the effect that the ‘Awf could become part of the umma even while retaining their Jewish faith (dīn). 26 This sort of attitude must have helped make integration on the basis of Arab ethnicity (the Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs, 225; see also Qāshā, Ṣafḥāt min Tārīkh, 282. 24 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 527. 25 Cited in Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 527. 26 Fred McGraw Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 2010), 72. 23

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‘Awf were Arab Jews) feasible above or beyond religious boundaries. When it came to integrating the numerous Christian Arabs, on the other hand, centuries of conflict with Rome had created an unstable situation that for the Muslims was associated with an almost apocalyptic fear. 27 Legally, the Christian Arabs had to be treated the same as all the other non-Muslims under Muslim protection, which meant undermining the Arab bond – although for that reason such treatment was often avoided (see Chapter 9 for the example of the Taghlib tribe). However, there is no significant evidence that the attempt to integrate the wider population of Oriens failed, and the exceptions to the rule can shed light on the reasons for individual failures. The last Ghassānid phylarch, Jabala ibn al-’Aiham, lapsed from the Islamic faith to which he had probably converted following the Muslim victory at Yarmūk. This episode is instructive because it suggests that Jabala’s apostasy and his subsequent flight and exile in Constantinople were not motivated by ethnic or religious factors, but because he could find no place in the new structures of power. According to tradition, his renunciation of Islam was sparked by an incident that occurred when he was circling the Kaaba. A member of the Fazāra tribe is said to have trodden on his robe, tripping him up. Jabala immediately struck the man in the face, whereupon the man complained to Caliph ‘Umar. ‘Umar summoned Jabala and ordered him to make amends to the plaintiff: in Islam all men are equal, and it is only in piety and health that one man can be superior to another. When Jabala realized that his former rank and noble ancestry See also the Muslim fear of Byzantium in Suliman Bashear, “Apocalyptic and Other Materials on Early Muslim-Byzantine Wars: A Review of Arabic Sources,” JRAS, Third Series, 1, no. 2, (1991), 173–207. The fear of not being able to control all the Arab tribes was a particularly serious one for the Muslims. See also the Muslim demand for the repatriation of the Arab foederati who had fled to Byzantium. On the basis of the agreement at Chalcis, Heraclius sent the Iyad tribe back: “for the Muslims, that involved attempting to gain control of all Arabs, as one sees in ‘Umar’s efforts to demand the return of Arabs, probably nomads, who had fled to Byzantine control (…).” Kaegi, Byzantium, 248f. 27

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were worth nothing in the new system, he withdrew to reconsider his decision. That very night he and his supporters fled to Damascus, where he gathered his family and went to Constantinople. He was warmly received by Heraclius, and lived there as a well-respected exile until his death. 28 There were further attempts to reconcile Jabala with the Islamic rulers even after this, but none were successful, and the most powerful Arab dynasty could not be won for the Islamic cause. The decision was probably not an easy one for Jabala. A poem ascribed to him captures his emotions about losing his home: “Twas the rage in my heart made us Christians once more I resented the blow in the face. I felt that my honour I could not restore If I bowed to such shame and disgrace. Ah! Would that my mother no son ever bore Nor my name had in history found place! How I yearn for the lands of my fathers of yore, Damascus, the home of my race!” 29

28 29

Zahran, Ghassan Resurrected, 27; Kaegi, Byzantium, 173ff. Cited in Glubb, The Great Arab Conquests, 184.

8.

THE POPE OF BAGHDAD The victory of Islam by no means marked the end of Arab and Eastern Christianity. Although Hellenism did not retreat as rapidly in the region as has often been thought, Oriens was in an advanced stage of Christianization by this point and the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants were almost certainly Christian at the time of the Islamic conquest. 1 Arab Christians continued to play an important role in the Islamic Empire as they advanced further into the “endless east,” now almost forgotten by European Christianity. The Christian Ghassānids and their leader Jabala retreated to Roman Anatolia after Yarmūk and were then lost to history. 2 On the remarkable long survival of Hellenism in Christian Oriens, see Bowersock, Hellenism. The example of Gaza is instructive here. In the early fifth century, despite its proximity to the holy sites of Christianity, it still had only one church as against eight temples. Downey, Gaza, 14ff. By that time, however, slightly more than half of all identified gravestones in the central section of the limes in Jordan were Christian. Parker, The Roman Frontier, 575. 2 On the end of the Ghassānids, see Zahran, Ghassan Resurrected, 143ff. After moving to Anatolia, Ghāssan’s traces become blurred. Nicephorus, Byzantine emperor from 802 to 811, was according to Bury a descendant of Jabala. Bury based his account on al-Ṭabarī: “According to Oriental historians Nicephorus was descended from an Arabian king, Jaballah of Ghassan (…). Perhaps Jaballah or one of his descendants settled in Pisidia, for Nicephorus was born in Seleucia in this province.” J.B. Bury, A History of the Eastern Roman Empire (London: Macmillan, 1912), 8. In any case, Nicephorus did not make any use of his Arab roots while battling the Muslim forces. Nicephorus, as a contemporary of Hārūn 1

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Other foederati remained in Oriens and were integrated into the Umayyad militia system. A large proportion of the population in Persia’s Arab vassal state, the Lakhmid kingdom, was Christian, and the Nestorian Church found a strong foothold among the Lakhmids and in Persia. 3 According to Arab descriptions, the Lakhmid capital city of Ḥīra (near later Kūfa and Najaf) in southern Iraq had numerous Christian buildings: “The city of Ḥira, although only partly Christian, was full of churches and monasteries. The churches had square open spaces recalling temples of Assur and Babylon; the bodies of the churches were rectangular, with pillars supporting arches of burnt brick. At the south-east end was a three-sided edifice with three chapels separated from the main body of the church by massive pillars. There were Kufic (…) inscriptions on the walls and paintings of leafed crosses (…).” 4 The Persians tolerated the Nestorian Church because it represented a rival to the Orthodox or Monophysite Church of Rome. The last Lakhmid king, Nu‘mān, converted to Christianity. 5 The Lakhmids did not just control southern Iraq, but also parts of the Arabian Gulf and Saudi Arabia (the so-called Beth Qatraye) into which Christianity was able to expand. 6 Perhaps surprisingly, Christianity in the Islamic empire was not limited to merely defending its status and power. The Nestorian Church in particular was able to strengthen its position and launch an impressive eastward expansion (to India, China, Afghanistan, and Tibet) from the former province of Oriens. Around A.D. 800, the rapidly growing church moved its seat to al-Rashīd, created the “(…) curious spectacle of two Arabs presiding over the destinies of the two imperia (…).” Irfan Shahîd, “Ghāssan Post Ghāssan,” in C. E. Bosworth et al. (Eds.), Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis. The Islamic World. From Classical to Modern Times (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1989), 323–336, here 326. 3 Zahran, The Lakhmids of Hira, 71. 4 Ibid. For a description of the early excavations and information about Christian ornaments in Ḥīra, see Talbot Rice, “The Oxford Excavations at Ḥīra, 1931”, Antiquity 23, 1932. 5 Zahran, The Lakhmids of Hira, 70ff. 6 Potts, Arabian Gulf, 262ff.

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the Caliphate court in Baghdad. The now rather improbableseeming coexistence between the Islamic rulers and the Christian church can be summarized by saying that while Islam certainly had a powerful impact on politics, the culture and religion of Oriens and other areas remained strongly influenced by Christianity for a long time. 7 Even in the Arab heartland, the Arabian Peninsula, Nestorian bishops participated in a synod in Beth Qatraye (now Qatar, Bahrain, and eastern Saudi Arabia) as late as A.D. 676. 8 The synod took place on the island of Tārūt (Dārīn in modern Saudi Arabia), and the subjects discussed there are intriguing. It seems that many Arab Christians became tax collectors and were instructed not to collect taxes from bishops. Moreover, there were apparently also Jewish communities in Beth Qatraye at that time. The bishops complained that their flocks were in the habit of frequenting Jewish taverns after receiving the sacrament. The problem was not the wine-drinking, but the fact that the Christian congregations chose not to support the presumably numerous Christian taverns. Even if Christian communities in Muslim territory were under threat, the Church could always simply continue its expansion into the endless eastern regions: “During the catholicate of Timothy I (780–823) the Nestorian church witnessed considerable expansion and six new metropolitan provinces were created. Timothy corresponded with Turks and Tibetans, and he dispatched a number of missionaries who ‘travelled to the ends of the East’ in pursuit of new souls.” 9 It seems remarkable that Arab Christians were able to use the Islamic Empire as a launch pad for their missions to pagan areas. One possible explanation is that the Umayyad state did not have the capacity to conquer those regions on its own, and so found it useful to allow missions sent by a church under its control. According to one account, Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik granted John of Dailam permission to evangelize as a reward for healing his daughter: “Let this holy 7 8 9

Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 47. Potts, Arabian Gulf, 262. Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 203f.

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man build churches and monasteries in our realm wherever he should wish to do so (…).” 10 But this may have been a special situation. All we can say is that for the Nestorians, the Islamic world seems to have been no more than background activity. An agreement between the Nestorians and the Caliphs that the former would not convert Muslims was the only real concession made. That fixed rule may have been at the root of the Nestorians’ apparent indifference towards the ruling Muslims, and the conversion of the east was ample compensation: “It is interesting to note that Muslims, unlike the pagans, are not a target for conversion – perhaps reflecting a knowledge of their monotheism as well as respect for their power – but neither are they a target of explanation or curiosity (…).” 11 The equilibrium was certainly also made easier to maintain by the fact that in the period after the conquest of Oriens, the Arabs’ religious policies treated all the region’s monotheistic religions as part of an Abrahamic ecumene. The Nestorian Church reached probably its greatest extent under its catholicus Timothy. This prince of the church, who engaged in theological debate with the Caliph and translated Aristotle into Arabic, was in many respects equal or even superior in rank to the Pope in Rome. 12 At his death in 823, Christianity was primarily an eastern religion, and the survival of the Church in the West seemed comparatively uncertain. 13 Europe’s Cited in Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 204. Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 205. 12 “It may be doubted whether Innocent III [Pope from 1198–1215] possessed more spiritual power than the Patriarch in the City of the Caliphs.” John Mason Neale, cited in Samuel H. Moffett, History of Christianity in Asia, Vol. 1 (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 380. On Timothy and the content of his debate with the Caliph, see also Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 427–425. 13 “Already in Timothy’s last days, Charlemagne’s vaunted empire was fragmenting, and falling prey to the combined assaults of Northmen and Muslims Saracenes. In the century after 790, ruin and massacre overtook virtually all the British and Irish monasteries (…). Spain was already under Muslim rule and southern Italy and southern France seemed set to follow.” Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 19f. 10 11

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crisis only came to an end much later: “For even in the late fourteenth century scholars from the region of high culture like the great Ibn Khaldun had shown little interest in Christian Europe. ‘God knows what goes on there,’ he observed.” 14 Between 640 and 740 there were three Syrian Popes. The last of the Church’s important Greek fathers, John of Damascus, was probably Greek in name only. His birth name was the Arabic name Manṣūr. Like his father, he held a high position at the Caliphate court. 15 It was not until the 13th century that eastern Christianity was pushed back by the Mongol invasions, after which it was almost completely forgotten. When the first European travelers reached India, they were amazed to discover Christians scattered all over the region, “(…) in like manners as are the Jews among us”. 16 Their presence there went unexplained for a long time. 17

Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), 223. See Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 48. Nevertheless, despite his Arabic name it is not clear whether he was Arab or Greek. He was often called a “friend of the Saracens” (which among Greeks was probably intended to be derogatory) and, alongside the Christian Arab poet al-’Akhṭal, was a drinking companion of Caliph Yazid I (680–83). But above all, he was the author of the work De Haeresibus, a systematic record of all heresies including Islam. His erudite polemic against Islam laid the foundations for later Christian arguments. Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 484. 16 “The travels of Niccolò Conti in the East in the early part of the fifteenth century,” trans. J. Winter Jones, in R. H. Major (Ed.), India in the Fifteenth Century: Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1857), 7. 17 Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 20. On the role “Syrians” played for the Indian Thomas Christians, see Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), n. 37, 360. 14 15

9.

ORIENT AND ROME? As we have seen, the Umayyads were able to integrate the Arab/Semitic groups in Oriens thanks to their religiously tolerant, Arabizing policy. Their open, almost welcoming attitude has induced some recent Western scholars to represent Caliph Mu‘āwiya as a “quasi” Christian ruler. 1 However, this view underestimates the importance of the Arab factor in Oriens and the Arab-oriented policies of the various Islamic rulers. There does seem to have been a mutual understanding and even appreciation between Arab Muslims and Arab Christians at that time, thanks partly to the close relationship between the two religions but also aided by a shared Arab culture and koine. From the Western perspective, revisionist views seem necessary precisely because too little attention is given to the Arab presence in politics and religion, so that other models must be developed to explain the integration process. In the revisionist view, the Caliph established a “Semitic” form of Christianity that had to assert itself against the orthodoxy of Constantinople: “The situation at the time of Mu‘āwiya was not a conflict between Arabian-Islamic conquerors and a Byzantine-Christian See Popp, “The early history of Islam,” 37. Popp sees this “Christian phase” of Islam as partly explained by the fact that Islam was still not codified, so “the biography of the prophet of the Arabians was not yet known (…).” He does not explain why the life and deeds of Muhammad were so little known in the years following his death despite many of his close followers being in Syria.

1

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emperor, as the later, historicizing literature of the Abbasid period would have its readers believe. Rather, as shown by the documents in the form of inscriptions by the Arabian rulers, the conflict involved the Christians of the former Byzantine east – natural allies of the Nestorian Christians of Iran and under the leadership of Arabian Christians of Iran – on the one side, and the Christians of the emperor in Constantinople (as leader of Greco-Roman Christianity) on the other. The conflict played out as a war of religion between the eastern devotees of a Semitic understanding of Christianity and the defenders of the Hellenistic and Roman counter-development.” 2 This carries Nöldeke’s remark that Islam was an Arab version of Christianity to new extremes. However, in the period following the conquest it is clear that the Arab ethnic identity formed the basis of a religious policy that managed to position Islam as a monotheistic power, capable of integrating Christianity and Judaism without requiring the conversion of Christians or Jews. Although many questions remain unanswered, this integration process based on ethnic identity rather than religious conversion was the core of what, centuries later, is still a historically unique and fascinating example of ethnic, political, and religious integration. 3 Ibid., 48. See the example of the ‘Awf in Chapter 7. This does not mean that this integration process never involved the use of symbols of power. Indeed, it was precisely this use of certain Islamic inscriptions and buildings (such as the Dome of the Rock), deliberately designed to be “accessible” within the narrative framework of local Christians and Jews, that led revisionist scholars like Popp to misinterpret them as “Christian” elements. Cultural scientists, on the other hand, have long understood them as examples of the “appropriation and demonstration of power” by the new Arab ruling class in conquered Oriens, expressed in a language and symbolism that Christians and Jews would understand: “In what was in the seventh century the Christian city par excellence [Jerusalem] Abd alMalik wanted to affirm the superiority and the victory of Islam. This affirmation, to which was joined a missionary invitation to accept the new faith, was expressed in the inscriptions, in the Byzantine and Persian crowns and jewels hanging around the sacred Rock (…). Thereby the Christian prophecy was voided and the Jewish mount rehabilitated. But it was no longer a Jewish sanctuary; it was a sanctuary dedicated to the victorious faith. Thus the building of the

2 3

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If some Western observers have clothed early Islam in Christian garb, that is partly to do with the extreme complexity of the Muslim strategy for consolidating different religious practices in Oriens. The paradox that Christianity in Oriens became stronger under the Arabs can be explained by the fact that the local bishops had almost more power over their congregations in the new system of self-government than they had previously had under the Byzantines. 4 The Arab rulers seem to have emphasized similarities between the religions and even to have encouraged the creation of a sort of “Abrahamic ecumene.” 5 This view is supported by a new interpretation of some contemporary accounts. There are signs that the Muslim attitude towards the Christians in Oriens was one of understanding or even fellowfeeling, and that their sympathies were reciprocated by the Christians. The Patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, was apparently not seriously worried by the Arab presence in Bethlehem in 634, before the battle of Yarmūk. This is in stark contrast to his grievances about the fall of the city to the Persians some years previously: 6 “What we seem to see here, despite all the turbulence both to the east and west of the Euphrates, is a local reflection of transitory good relations between Believers and Byzantium (…).” 7 Donner goes further and unravels the revisionist school’s paradoxical view of Islam as an originally Christian movement by pointing out that, during the early phase of the Islamic period, the Muslims saw themselves less as an exclusive and separate religious group than as a new, inclusive monotheistic community that was open to Christians and Jews: “By incorporating Dome of the Rock implies what might be called a prise de possession (…)” Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven: YUP, 1987), 63. 4 Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 186. 5 Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 56–61; for a criticism of this view see Glen W. Bowersock, Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 59. 6 Bowersock, Empires in Collision, 40. 7 Ibid., 72.

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such monotheist communities into their growing domains, the Believers worked toward their goal of establishing the hegemony of God’s law over the whole world. The Qur’an (…) promised the Believers that they would ‘inherit the earth’ (…), but this could be understood to imply not the dispossession of existing monotheist populations, but their inclusion within the Believers’ movement (…).” 8 Thus, there seems to have been a certain amount of sympathy on both sides even after Yarmūk, and the sharply defined enmity and polemics of later centuries only developed slowly. A re-evaluation of the surrender of Jerusalem to Caliph ‘Umar reveals a thoroughly amicable atmosphere once later Byzantine polemics are recognized as anachronistic: “There is no trace whatever of satanic hypocrisy (…) or of ‘Umar as a dirty outsider.” 9 Bowersock cannot help seeing this mutual sympathy as strange. To explain it, he suggests that the thirtieth Sura, the “Sura al-Rūm,” should be seen as honoring Heraclius’ victory over the Persians as a victory of monotheists over heathens, which the Muslims naturally celebrated. The Arabs also knew that their own successes at Yarmūk and in Mesopotamia might not have been possible without Heraclius’ victory over the Sassanids. 10 However, the strangeness can be also mitigated somewhat by bringing the Arab cultural sphere and the Arabic koine into the equation: linguistic and ethnic similarities undoubtedly contributed towards this “sympathy,” and Yarmūk did not erase them. In recent years it has become clear that Muslims and Christians were able to use the same houses of prayer, and even shared aspects of their prayer practices until the middle of the second century after Yarmūk. 11 Rulers also inevitably exploited religious similarities as part of their strategy of building an Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 112. Bowersock, Empires in Collision, 74. 10 Ibid., 75. 11 Suliman Bashear, “Qibla Musharriqa and Early Muslim Prayer in Churches,” The Muslim World LXXXI, Nos. 3–4, 1991: 267–282, here 281; Bowersock, Mosaics as History, 109. 8 9

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ecumene around a shared Arab identity. Despite the lack of clarity regarding this “ecumenical” behavior, a number of noteworthy examples have been recorded. For example, “(…) the crowning of Mu’āwiya in Jerusalem, his prayer in Golgotha, the conclusion of a pact between him and ‘Amr b. al-‘Aṣ in the Church of Mary, and his helping to reconstruct the Church of Edesa. From other reports we also learn that Khalid al-Qasri, the Umayyad governor of Iraq, built a church in Kufa in honor of his Christian mother and that even the second Abbasid caliph, alManṣur, helped to erect one in Damascus. As late as the early fourth century, we hear Eutychius lamenting the fact that Muslims of his day gathered for prayer in the Church of Bethlehem and on the steps of the Church of Constantine in Jerusalem.” 12 That there were close links between the different denominations is also supported by Bowersock’s innovative theory about the roots of iconoclasm in the early eighth century. Iconoclasm originated in an edict issued by Caliph Yazīd II, who seems to have followed the example of earlier iconoclastic movements in Byzantium and Armenia. It applied to the churches and synagogues under his control as well. 13 These edicts must have been enforced by the believers themselves. Both Jews and Christians would have been able to refer back to tendencies to Bashear, “Qibla,” 267f. To the Muslims, the importance of Jewish houses of prayer was also clear: “We need now to ask whether synagogues had a comparable religious significance for the Muslims. The possibility is worth thinking about, since Jewish iconoclasm in other respects is better explained as parallel to the Christian iconoclasm rather than as an anterior reaction to Christian use of images. Since it is now apparent that the mosaic decoration of synagogues showed close parallels with Christian mosaics, the Muslim conquerors, who knew perfectly well the Jewish origins of Christianity, must have been aware of the holiness of synagogues. More to the point, they would have known that from the later fourth century until the early sixth century a kingdom of ethnic Arabs in south Arabia had converted to Judaism and maintained their religion, not at all far from Mecca itself, until the Christians of Ethiopia brought it to an end. So Muslim Arabs knew from their own immediate past the holiness of synagogues, just as much as they knew the holiness of churches.” Bowersock, Mosaics as History, 110f.

12 13

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reject representational images within their own religions. The motive behind Yazīd’s decree, however, may in fact have been the Muslim use of churches, as Bowersock cautiously remarks: “if for those early centuries of Islam there is, as there seems to be, convincing evidence for the Muslim use of churches, the true motive for iconoclasm is more likely to have been active involvement with Christian edifices rather than hostility to them.” 14 The prompt repeal of the edict by Yazīd’s successor Hishām suggests, however, that general opinion was that Yazīd had gone too far. 15 The Umayyads, then, were successfully able to integrate the Christian Arabs and other groups into their Islamic Empire thanks to the Arab cultural sphere and their own religiously liberal, ecumenical policies. However, they were later ousted by the Abbasids, who pursued a different course. As the people needing to be integrated into the Islamic Empire became more diverse, the ethnic identity became more and more fragmented until it was eventually supplemented or superseded by Islam. The old monotheistic religions had until then been seen almost as equals of Islam, but a much more rigid religious hierarchy now developed. This meant the Christian Arabs in Oriens were under increased pressure: “More important for the Christian Arabs was the rise of Abbasid Islamism at the expense of the Umayyad Arabism (…).” 16 An episode in the history of the foederati who dominated the fourth century, the Tanūkh, provides a dramatic example of this development. After the Muslim victory at Yarmūk the Tanūkh remained Christian, and like most of the Christian foederati they were integrated into the Umayyad militia system. The historian al-Ya‘qūbī recounts that Caliph al-Mahdī visited Jerusalem on the occasion of his marriage to a southern Arabian bride, who was a member of the Tanūkh tribe. Passing near Aleppo on the way there, he was greeted by a large crowd of 14 15 16

Ibid., 110. Ibid. Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 456.

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mounted Tanūkh wearing festive clothing. Hoping to win the ruler’s favor, they called out the ill-fated phrase, “We are your uncles on your mother’s side, O ruler of the faithful.” 17 The Caliph, who was determined to emphasize the Islamic element in his policy, asked who the well-wishers were. When he was told that they were all Christian, he ordered them to convert to Islam. They refused, so he killed their leader personally and destroyed their church, at which point the Tanūkh converted. This may have been an extreme case, perhaps provoked by the Caliph’s shame at marrying into an apparently Christian family and annoyance at the Tanūkhs’ self-confident, martial appearance. Forced conversion was clearly outside Shari’a, which guaranteed non-Muslims freedom and safety if they paid the poll tax. But the incident is perhaps a striking example of the increasing pressure exerted by religion as the new main unifying force and the intra-Arab conflict it brought with it. 18 Previously, the Caliphs had encouraged Arab Christians to integrate by not enforcing the poll tax that was technically required for non-Muslims, and instead ordering them to pay the higher Muslim taxes to emphasize their membership of the Arab ethnos. 19 As the religious aspect became more prominent, it became even more important to convert Arab Christians to Islam. However, it is still not clear how this affected the other groups in Oriens, and in particular the Jews. In recent years there has Ya’qubi, Tarikh, Vol. 2 (Beirut, 1985), 398f. Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 430. 19 One example is the Christian Taghlib tribe in Syria. The Syrian governor wrote to Caliph ‘Umar and asked him to find a solution to the fact that the Arab Taghlib were refusing to pay the poll tax because it was intended for non-Arabs. “Omar wrote back allowing them to pay double the amount of the Sadaqa, the tax Muslims pay, on condition that their children would not be brought up as Christians.” Zahran, Ghassan Resurrected, 143f. The Taghlib did not comply with this condition, but their refusal apparently had no serious consequences because they were able to remain Christian until the Abbasids forced them to convert in the ninth century (ibid.). Hoyland (Seeing Islam, 338ff) notes that the inhabitants of the vulnerable border regions were under particular pressure to convert, and this may have included the Christian Arabs. 17 18

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been a highly controversial debate about whether any Jews converted to Islam: “Did the similarity between the religions, Islam’s relative tolerance toward the other monotheisms, and the religious system of taxation induce Jewish, Christian and Samaritan believers to convert to Islam? Historical logic would say yes, though there are insufficient sources to provide a definitive answer. The traditional Jewish elites were pained by the apostasy, and tended to ignore and suppress it. Zionist historiography followed them, turning its back on any meaningful discussion of the issue. Abandoning the Jewish religion was generally interpreted by modern sensibilities as betraying the ‘nation,’ and was best forgotten.” 20 This debate – like so many around this subject – is still relevant to current politics, because it implies that modern Palestinians are the descendants of converted Jews. As Sand admits, there is no evidence for conversions during this period, although it is logical to assume there were some. That there were Jewish converts to Islam in later periods is verifiable, at least in the case of a few eminent Jews in Arab Andalusia. 21 In any case, at least at the beginning and probably later on as well, the integration strategy was not dominated by religion Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, trans. Yael Lotan (London: Verso, 2009), 182. 21 Sarah Stroumsa, “On Jewish Intellectuals who Converted in the Early Middle Ages,” in Daniel H. Frank, The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, and Identity (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 179–197, here 196f. Stroumsa describes Jewish intellectuals who converted in the late Middle Ages at the court of the Muslim rulers. They included Samau’al al-Maghribi, Isaac ibn Ezra, and Abu’l-Barakāt. She highlights the elite status of these individuals, who as philosophers and scholars lived in isolation from society, perhaps contributing towards their decisions to convert: “Although we have not encountered any systematic conversion of intellectuals to Islam in organized groups and under the influence of spiritual teachers, it appears that the subjects discussed by intellectuals during this period enabled them to adopt a detached position vis-à-vis religion in general, a position which in circumstances, could lead them to embrace a new faith.” She also mentions Maimonides, who had handled the legal aspects of cases of apostasy from Judaism and whose remark seems to indicate that this was not an uncommon issue: “Cases of this kind are brought before us every day… and we always handle them in the same manner.” Ibid., 188. 20

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to the extent of fully absorbing Christianity and Judaism. Remarkably, the sociologist Talcott Parsons interprets this as a weakness of Islam, which shows how little the complex Arab ethnic and religious sphere is understood in the West: “Unlike China and India, Islam developed a radically activistic orientation. Acting upon a culturally defined base, it attempted to transform human society into a religiously ordained ideal pattern. It must, then, be judged an historical failure in that it did not even thoroughly Muslimize much of the population under its political control; the relatively complete Christianizing of Europe offers a strong contrast.” 22 The de-Arabization of preIslamic Arab history has obscured the fact that the Arab conquests were above all an Arab consolidation process that only later, as more non-Arab or non-Semitic groups were integrated, took on an Islamic character. Islam was an important stimulus and driver of consolidation, but the unifying factor was first and foremost the Arab/Semitic identity, which of course also contained elements of Christianity, Judaism, and Hellenism. This Arab identity was an effective integrative force for long periods of history; indeed so effective that Western scholars, focused as they are on deconstruction and their respective sub-fields, often underestimate it: “Late antiquity and early Islam are full of challenges to old easy dichotomies, such as Orient oder Rom, that have so long dominated historical interpretation.” 23

22 23

Parsons, Societies, 86. Bowersock, Mosaics as History, 111.

10. DEMARCATION, NEW BEGINNINGS AND DISPLACEMENT

At this point, we may assume that arrogance and fear, as the West’s emotional reactions to the loss of Oriens, the Christian heartland, to the Arabs and Islam, may be at the root of the prejudices and de-Arabizing views described here. Oriens was under Roman rule for over seven hundred years, and before that under Greek-Macedonian rule for almost three hundred. For the Romans, the loss of this important province must have been extremely painful. Even worse, Christianity was cut off from its religious homeland in Palestine. Neither Heraclius’ desperate attempts to reconquer the region, nor the later crusades, were able to win it back. The consequences were enormous: Christianity, an originally Eastern religion, was forced to develop into a Western denomination. “The disasters of the late Middle Ages tore Christianity from its roots – cultural, geographical, and linguistic. This ‘uprooting’ created the Christianity that we commonly think of today as the true historical norm, but which in reality was the product of the elimination of alternative realities.” 1 The completely new cultural and religious model created during this critical phase is now familiar, but at the time it was a radical break with the past: “In this geographical sense, Christianity has no heart, no natural core. 1

Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 25.

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(…) For long centuries, the faith found its most active centers in the Near East, but in later eras, the cultural and demographic heart of the church moved to Europe and the Atlantic world (…).” 2 However, this “new beginning” was only possible because it was enforced almost “in defiance of history.” If Christianity was now to be focused on and characterized by its Western aspects, all connections to its Eastern roots needed to be severed. 3 For the Christian West to become what it is today, it had to disown its Eastern history. In its most fundamental sense, this did not just mean that the history of Arab Oriens was mostly forgotten, but also that the many similarities between Islam and Christianity were denied. The separation was so complete that even the history of the “neglected” Eastern Church fell victim to the ignorance and forgetfulness of the West. 4 This also helps explain one of the essential characteristics of Orientalism: the “otherness” of the Arabs that Said noticed. 5 For the sake of Christian Europe’s developing identity, it was crucial for the Orient to be other, for there to be a marked difference between the two. It was a small step from this process of demarcation to the emergence of negative stereotypes or contempt directed towards Islam, which became a sort of “Negativfolie.” 6 This idea of the Orient or Islam was constructed in order to better illuminate the achievements of Western civilization, which rests on the pillars of early Judaism, Greek and Roman antiquity, and (Western) Christianity. 7 In this narrative and Ibid, 25f. Said also recognized this process of delimitation in Orientalism. However, he sees it primarily as a product of the methodological necessities of Orientalism, which had to create categories and types in order to have something with which to contrast its own largely static identity and fortress mentality. These methodological delimitation processes reinforced the historical severance described above. 4 Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 39ff. 5 Said, Orientalism, 97. 6 Gudrun Krämer, “Unterscheiden und Verstehen,” 265. 7 Ibid. 2 3

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analytical structure, the similarities between Christianity and Islam are rarely seen positively. Rather, Islam is either dismissed as a Christian heresy, a religion that developed basically in the footprints of Christianity, “or, even further, [as] the manifestation in which Christianity entered Greater Arabia.” 8 Nöldeke’s statement is, unsurprisingly, accompanied by an unflattering list of the Prophet’s attributes, such as an inability to speculate or engage in logical or abstract thought. 9 There is a direct line from there to Pope Benedict’s Regensburg lecture. The interesting aspect of the Pope’s statement was not so much that he quoted the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II on Islamic militancy, but rather that he perpetuated familiar Oriental stereotypes such as irrationality (which he did not expressly mention but which was clear as an unspoken contrast): 10 “A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act ‘with logos’ is contrary to God’s nature.” 11 His speech did not just repeat well-worn stereotypes, however; it also neglected the history of Eastern Christianity. The Pope made it clear that Christianity should invoke the Greek philosophical tradition and not the Christian tradition of the Eastern Church, despite the latter’s successes framing the Christian message in the context of nonEuropean intellectual traditions, such as Islamic, Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist schools of thought. 12 8 Theodor Nöldeke, The History of the Qur’an, trans. Wolfgang Behn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 6. 9 Ibid. 10 His statement was also paradoxical because the Byzantine emperors were known for their military interpretation of Christianity. See Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century, 529. On the “normality” of Empires using force, coercion and submission in this context: Hoyland, In God’s Path, 63. 11 Official English translation of Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture: https://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/ documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html (07/07/2017). 12 See Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 39.

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We are now in a position to summarize and explain the prejudices and Orientalist perspectives regarding the Arabs in Oriens and Arabia. Roman and Greek attitudes to the East, and to the Arabs in particular, were characterized by two fundamental emotions: arrogance and fear. This becomes even clearer when the effects of de-Arabization are accounted for. For the Romans, the Arabs were first and foremost barbarians who lived in tents, had no culture, and tended towards despotism. The Arabs were joined in this category by all the other peoples of Oriens: even the Greeks of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) referred to themselves carefully as the “Greeks of Asia” (hoi apo tes Asias Hellenes). At the same time, however, the Arab presence in Oriens produced fear. Since Trajan’s annexation of Arabia in the early second century, almost half the Roman border ran through desert areas. Oriens also controlled important access points to the Mediterranean, and for the Romans the urban centers in this harsh and hostile region were of vital significance. 13 The Romans’ concerns were linked to the length of their overstretched border, which as it grew thinner made the role of the Roman Arabs and foederati correspondingly more significant. As shown in the example of the Severans and Julia Domna, this also stoked fears of an “Oriental” transformation, of the existential threat to Rome supposedly posed by Arabs throughout the empire. 14 The same arrogance and fear appear again in the Roman reaction to the Islamic threat and invasion. Arrogance probably prevented the Romans forming a realistic assessment of the danger, while the loss of Christian Oriens provoked what could even be called an apocalyptic anxiety: “From the time it first appeared, the religion of Islam was a problem for Christian Europe. Those who believed in it were the enemy on the fronBowersock, Roman Arabia, 1f. Recently, this fear has been picked up again in certain circles. “Conservative Americans have been happy to reinforce fears of emerging Eurabia, suggesting that the inevitable fate of non-Muslims in such an order would be the degrading subject status of dhimmitude.” Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 40. 13 14

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tier.” 15 Looking back at this period of imminent danger, Gibbon mused: “A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland. (…) Perhaps,” he added sardonically, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.” 16 This arrogance and fear were closely interlinked: arrogance helps counteract fear. Furthermore, if the enemy is weak, then defeat can only be a result of unfair conduct or foul play. 17 In this sense the belittlement of the Arabs was a very important tool to help the West deal psychologically with defeat. The same two emotions also explain why Orientalist perspectives have been so persistent. In their concern about Oriental/Semitic influence or the decline of their own civilization’s superiority, modern Orientalists have always been able to draw on this repertoire of prejudices and negative portrayals of the “old rival” (Bernard Lewis). In this context Barbara Levick made an important observation in her evaluation of Julia Domna’s historical image. Said always assumed that Orientalism developed from a standpoint of control and dominance. But based on the accusations of Orientalization levied at the Roman Arabs, especially by German Orientalists who saw the Semitic element represented by the Severans as the emergence of a “demonic form,” she suggests that their arguments were also informed by their political (and racist) ideologies. Moreover, they were able to borrow Albert Hourani, Islam in European Thought (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), 7. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 5 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1880), 423. 17 On Byzantium’s fear of the Arabs in the seventh century and the accusations that the Muslims had achieved victory unfairly, see Kaegi, Byzantium, 141ff: “Christians attempted to emphasize that it was not a glorious military victory for the Muslims but one that they obtained through stealth and deceit rather than through honest martial success.” 15 16

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Greek and Roman templates for such views: “In forming such theories early twentieth century scholars allowed their political views to play a part. The ‘Orientalism’ of Edward Said’s French and British scholars, which aimed at control, was inverted, or rather bypassed, and Graeco-Roman fears were picked up and reflected.” 18 This can also be seen in the anti-Semitic attitudes of early twentieth-century German Orientalists towards Philip the Arab. 19 British Orientalists, whose empire rested on very similar beliefs, adopted their prejudices: “The ‘orientalizing’ portrait had its origin in nineteenth century German scholarship, which reflects nationalistic views of the Reich and of possible threats to its development and a related ideology of exclusion, sexist, racist, and specifically anti-Semitic. The acceptance of the portrait among English-speaking scholars, beneficiaries of an Empire based on the exploitation of lesser breeds and unconscious of where they were standing, was only to be expected.” 20 Clearly, the two emotions of arrogance and fear also fit very well into the “Clash of Civilizations” discourse. For our purposes, the important thing is that these fears and prejudices can only be properly explained once the effects of deArabization and deconstruction have been accounted for and we can see how the Arab presence would have seemed at the time. Control alone is not enough to explain Orientalist views. The role of de-Arabization is now clearer. It is an important channel Levick, Julia Domna, 133. Said admittedly left the German Orientalists out of his study: Said, Orientalism, 16f. Marchand sees German-language Oriental studies as totally different to the British and French disciplines. The differences start from the fact that the German Empire had few imperial ambitions in the Orient, and that German scholars seem to have focused more on the Bible and its history in the East. Marchand, German Orientalism, xxiv. She tries to differentiate between the German/Austrian Orientalists, and concludes that the Austrians laid the groundwork for multicultural views of the East (495ff). 19 Philip the Arab is described in blunt antisemitic terms as an “(…) unsympathische Persönlichkeit des orientalischen Parvenü (…)’ whose ‘(…) echt orientalische Hinterlist (…)’ was caused by a ‘(…) Semiten typische Misstrauen (…).” For these citations of German historians, see Körner, Philippus Arabs, n. 4. 20 Levick, Julia Domna, 163. 18

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for expressing the joint emotions of arrogance and fear towards the Arabs. If the Arabs had no history or presence before Islam, if they are historical newcomers, then what influence can their civilization have had? Is it even their own civilization at all, or just a haphazard and piecemeal thing that borrows from Christian, Jewish, and other “Semitic” religions and civilizations without making any significant contributions of its own? Is it in fact still as barbaric and irrational as ever? The question that remains is why Western science, despite its emphasis on objectivity, has so far been unable to overcome these limitations. In this particular case, Hegel’s observation regarding the alliance between European Christianity and science may be instructive. As Hegel sees it, the European spirit is the spirit of “whiteness and Christianity.” 21 Christianity, as a now primarily Western concept, interfaces with the “white race” and creates a peculiar role for science: “The European spirit opposes the world to itself, and while freeing itself from it, sublates this opposition by taking back into the simplicity of its own self the manifoldness of this its other [sic!]. This accounts for the dominance of the European’s infinite thirst for knowledge, which is alien to other races.” 22 Hegel’s European is the hero in search of new knowledge, and the European spirit “strives to bring forth unity between itself and the external world. It subdues the external world to its purposes with an energy which has ensured for it the mastery of the world.” 23 Thus, the reinvenTibebu Teshale, Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History (New York: Syracuse UP, 2011), 89. 22 Georg W. F. Hegel, Hegel´s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, Vol. 2, trans. M. Petry (Boston: Reidel, 1979), 61. 23 Ibid. See here for example the experience of British explorers and agents of the Orient: “In the ‘infinitely mysterious (…) misty and unreal, incomprehensible (…) unfathomable’ desert, faith, if not facts or visual data, seemed a reasonably practical objective.” Priya Satia, “The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 1, February 2006, 16–51, here 21f. The hidden truth of the region made it necessary to abandon empirical intelligence-gathering and prioritize knowledge acquired through intuition. Paradoxically, the only effective preparation for such work 21

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tion of Christianity as a Western creed and the Western quest for dominance both had implications for science. It could not simply treat its subjects objectively, but needed to “subdue” and “sublate” them in complex ways that did not interfere with its claims of objectivity and rationality. In this context, there seems little chance for an objective narrative reflecting the East and West’s centuries of shared history and belief, which almost seem like an anachronism. It is now clear why the history of Oriens is so strangely absent of Arabs. A common history does not fit into the Orientalist structure, with its centuries-old corpus dominated by demarcations and negative attitudes. Anything that contradicts those basic principles is ignored. 24 And yet, memories can never be completely erased; cultural interaction often follows a slow and winding path, leaving scattered and indirect traces. Strange memories sometimes reappear surprisingly in later eras and cultures. A good example is the tribe of ‘Udhra, who were Roman foederati and later migrated to Andalusia, where they enriched European literature and poetry with their verse. It is perhaps not too surprising, then, that the ‘Udhra find an echo centuries later in a famous poem by the German poet Heinrich Heine:

was “lengthy immersion.” This ability to think like an Arab, the empathetic mimicry of the “Arab mind,” comes close to Hegel’s unity between the European spirit and the external world achieved by the sublation of the latter by the former. Of course, this immersion could never be fully completed, and the European consciousness always remained intact and dominant, ready to separate itself whenever required – although with individuals like Lawrence and, even more so, Burton, it was at times unclear whether the “manifoldness” of the Arab other might not be taking over the European mind. On Burton, see Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography (Cambridge MA: Da Capo, 2001). 24 Of course, this problem is exacerbated by the practical problem that it is rare to find a historian proficient in all the languages necessary to study this period (Syro-Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, and Latin). See Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, i-xii.

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“Der Asra Täglich ging die wunderschöne Sultanstochter auf und nieder Um die Abendzeit am Springbrunn, Wo die weißen Wasser plätschern. Täglich stand der junge Sklave Um die Abendzeit am Springbrunn, Wo die weißen Wasser plätschern; Täglich ward er bleich und bleicher. Eines Abends trat die Fürstin Auf ihn zu mit raschen Worten: Deinen Namen will ich wissen, Deine Heimat, deine Sippschaft! Und der Sklave sprach: Ich heiße Mohamet, ich bin aus Yemmen, Und mein Stamm sind jene Asra, Welche sterben, wenn sie lieben.” 25

25 Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr. Vol. 3 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1975), 41f.

11.

TRANSGRESSIONS: THE “CHRISTIAN” QUR’AN A radical and revisionist view of the Qur’an has developed in the West since the 1970s, starting with John Wansbrough. It treats Muhammad and his message as retroactive fabrications that were invented in order to construct an (Arab) history, religion and language. 1 It deals primarily with textual analysis of the Qur’an, and its aim is to prove that the Qur’an is or must be a construction of the eighth or ninth century. Leaving the controversy aside, we suggest that Wansbrough’s and other studies are based on and legitimized by de-Arabization: if there is no significant pre-Islamic Arabic history, language, or script, or if the existence of such is denied and deconstructed, then works like the Qur’an that seem to suddenly appear out of nowhere must have been created later. If the Arabs were Semitic “latecomers,” who only acquired their own script in the fifth century, they surely would not have been capable of producing a complex text like the Qur’an. The sudden appearance of the Arabs in the political arena therefore needed extraordinary explanations. According to the various strands of this revisionist view, the Qur’an must be concealing a Christian or Aramaic original text: John E. Wansbrough, Qur’anic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (Oxford: OUP, 1977); Ibid., The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (Oxford: OUP, 1978).

1

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not just rapid creation of the text itself, but also the concept of a monotheistic religion is deemed beyond the capabilities of this almost non-existent, identity-less group. Therefore, there must have been other editors, as Patricia Crone, one of the proponents of the revisionist school, argues: “[The Qur’an] is strikingly lacking in overall structure, frequently obscure and inconsequential in both language and content, perfunctory in its linking of disparate materials, and given to the repetition of whole passages in variant versions. On this basis it can plausibly be argued that the book is the product of the belated and imperfect editing of materials from a plurality of traditions.” 2 The Qur’an must have been composed with some form of assistance from Christian or Jewish informants in Mecca, or alternatively elsewhere and perhaps even later, long after the death of Muhammad. 3 In this view, the Qur’an appears to be a retrospective compilation in which the “image” of the Arab origin of Islam was first conceived. 4 However, we can now argue that at the time of Muhammad there was already a long cultural, linguistic, and monotheistic tradition in the Arab world. The effects of de-Arabization have obscured the fact that the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula and Oriens had by that time been in contact with monotheism for centuries. If we turn our gaze to the long development of monotheistic discourse in Arab areas, and if we recognize Islam as a movement that transformed that monotheistic discourse into a new and above all political form, what emerges is a historical process that is far from mysterious, and which was actually a wholly consistent development.

2 Patricia Crone & Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: CUP, 1977), 18. 3 “There are only two possibilities. (…) Either there had to be substantial numbers of Jews and Christians in Mecca or the Koran had to have been composed somewhere else.” Interview with Patricia Crone in Stille, “Scholars are quietly offering new theories of the Koran.” 4 Neuwirth, Der Koran, 91.

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11.1 MONOTHEISTIC TRENDS IN ARABIC DISCOURSE BEFORE ISLAM

It is now clear that the paradox of the “sudden” appearance of the Qur’an is due to the de-Arabization or deconstruction of Arab history. If we look at the history of the Arab/Semitic peoples as a longue durée of centuries or even millennia, the creation of the text becomes easier to understand. The sources reveal another, more integrative perspective that can tell us much more than we can glean by simply searching Muhammad’s closest circles for Christian and Jewish informants. Günther Lüling was one of the first Western scholars to suspect that there were Christian hymns behind the text of the Qur’an and to try to reconstruct them. 5 As is often the case in such reconstruction attempts, he was unable to provide any records that could show how, and more importantly by whom, this “ur-text” was composed and then rewritten to form the Suras of the Qur’an. In contrast to Olig, Luxenberg, or Crone, who see the Qur’an as based on Christian or Aramaic foundations but composed after the death of the Prophet (despite having no evidence to support their theory), Lüling – also without naming specific individuals – refers to a group of Arab believers in Arabia who espoused ideas similar to those of the Qur’an before the time of Muhammad, but without adopting Christianity or Judaism. 6 Some of these hanifs, or dissenters, were in the Prophet’s closest circles. More importantly, they were the expression of an Arab monotheistic trend that had been developing for some time, perhaps even since before the beginning of the Christian era. 7 The hanifs may Günther Lüling, Über den Urkoran. Ansätze zur Rekonstruktion der vorislamischchristlichen Strophenlieder im Koran, 3rd ed. (Erlangen: Lüling, 2004). 6 Ibid., 10f. However, his reconstruction of events cannot be described as concrete: “Lüling (…) does not mention any Christian individuals.” Ghada Osman, “Pre-Islamic Arab Converts to Christianity in Mecca and Medina: An Investigation into the Arabic Sources,” The Muslim World 95, January 2005: 67–80, here 67. 7 “That there were Arabs in northern Hijaz with a monotheistic outlook in the latter half of the sixth century BC has been deduced from such indications as the 5

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have been spread much more widely throughout the Arabian Peninsula than has previously been assumed, although a definitive assessment of their distribution seems almost impossible. 8 By the time of the Prophet the idea of one God, Allah, was a long-standing one, and there are even accounts of images of Jesus and Mary being brought to the Kaaba after it was rebuilt in 608. 9 Where this differed from strict monotheism, however, was that the ruling class worshipped Allah and the other gods together in order to make the trading center of Mecca attractive as a place where people of all different faiths could meet. 10 Unknowingly, they were thereby laying the foundations for an Arab monotheism. As we saw in the discussion of the Hellenistic influence on Arab identity, the religious festivals of Arabia played a central role here. Although he does not mention the story of Job whose homeland was the upper Madyan region of ‘Awṣ, south of the Dead Sea. The Qur’ān reveals the Meccans of Muhammad’s day to be well acquainted with Allāh, recognizing Him as creator (…) and other deities as subordinate to Him.” Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs, 249. 8 There may have been hanifs among the Arab Christians who were massacred in the south Arabian city of Najrān (in modern-day Saudi Arabia). See Aishah S. Abu al-Jadayel, “The Religion of the Martyrs of Najran: A Reconsideration of the Primary Sources,” Annals of the Arts and Social Sciences (Kuwait University) 24, 222/2004. 9 Qāshā, Ṣafḥāt min Tārīkh, 44. It is also interesting that the “half-Arab” Emperor Alexander Severus continued the syncretism of his predecessor Elagabalus; he is said to have erected a chapel in which he worshipped his divine ancestors but also Christ and Abraham. Levick, Julia Domna, 151. On the monotheistic ideas of the Severan emperors see Chapter 6.3. 10 “Die Furcht, dass sie sonst ihren Handel und Kundschaft verlören, ist ein Hauptgrund, weshalb die Mekkaner an den Götzendienst festhalten.” Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums, 220. Kister has a similar view: he describes Mecca’s neutrality as an important cornerstone of its special economic status: “Mecca, in this concept, was a neutral city, not involved in intertribal wars, a place of security and sanctuary to which every Arab had the right to make pilgrimage. Only adherents of a state religion should be ordered to perform their pilgrimage to a temple established by the ruler. It is hardly necessary to observe that this neutral position enabled Mecca to expand its commercial relations with the tribes.” Meir J. Kister, “Some Reports Concerning Mecca from Jāhiliyya to Islam,” JESHO 15 (1972): 61–93, 66.

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Hellenistic origins of these festivals, Wellhausen is very clear about their role in the development of monotheism: the syncretism of different gods and beliefs encouraged the development of a more general, abstract definition of “the sacred,” the result of which was the idea of one God. 11 As it begins to prevail over an ever weaker polytheism, this sort of monotheism naturally also starts to need its own discourse, especially in a society with an oral tradition. 12 Hamilton Gibb made the important observation that even before Muhammad became the Prophet, a monotheistic discourse with a style and rhythm similar to that of the Qur’an was already in evidence at the ‘Ukāẓ festival, at which Muhammad made his first appearance: “It has already been argued that the religious vocabulary of the Qur’an presupposes the existence of a common fund of religious terms with a monotheistic reference. This passage suggests that the argument can now be carried further, to presume the existence of an established style of religious discourse. Like all early Qur’anic revelations it is rhymed throughout (in long a) but not in metre; it is the kind of rhyming prose called sa’f (‘cooing’), and used in Arabia for oracular utterances, proverbial sayings and the like. One obvious advantage of this style is that it facilitated memorizing (a matter of capital im“Der Syncretismus, den man gewöhnlich als den eigentlichen Polytheismus ansieht, ist in Wahrheit eine Auflösung des Polytheismus, wenigstens des ethnischen Particularismus der Religion, der ihm zu Grunde liegt. Aber er ist ein Fortschritt, denn er bildet den Übergang zum Monotheismus. (…) bei den Arabern ist Allah allerdings aus dem Verfall des religiösen Ethnicismus hervorgegangen; daraus, dass die verschiedenen Götter den wichtigsten Grund ihrer Verschiedenheit, nemlich ihre Verehrung seitens verschiedener Völker, verloren und tatsächlich zu Synonymen herabsanken, in denen nur der allgemeine Begriff der Gottheit noch Bedeutung hatte.” Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums, 217. 12 Neuwirth traced the development of Islamic faith discourse through the individual Suras with the aim of proving that the Qur’an was the result of a “Diskurssequenz.” Angelika Neuwirth, “Zur Archäologie einer heiligen Schrift. Überlegungen zum Koran vor seiner Kompilation,” in Christoph Burgmer (Ed.), Streit um den Koran. Die Luxenberg-Debatte: Standpunkte und Hintergründe (Berlin: Verlag Hans Schiler, 2004), 130–146, here 146. 11

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portance in a non-literate society), and there are evidence indications that much of the material used in public preaching was cast into a form which aimed precisely at this result. Thus a tradition, professedly reported on the authority of Muhammad himself (…), quotes a discourse by the preacher Quss bin Sā‘ida at the fair of ‘Ukaz: ‘man ‘asha mat, waman mata fat, wa-kullu ma huwa atin at’ (“Whoso lives will die, whoso dies will pass away, and everything that is to come will come”). The verbal authenticity of this and similar phrases attributed to him may perhaps be questioned, but the record at least indicates a reminiscence of the use of what we may called rhymed slogans in such discourses.” 13 Quss bin Sā‘ida was Christian, and Reynold Nicholson even suggests that these festivals also functioned as sites where Christian ideas were diffused: “What ‘Ukáẓ said today all Arabia would repeat to-morrow. At ‘Ukáẓ, we are told, the youthful Muḥammad listened, as though spellbound, to the persuasive eloquence of Quss b. Sá’ida, Bishop of Najrán; and he may have contrasted the discourse of the Christian preacher with the brilliant odes chanted by heathen bards.” 14 This “monotheistic discourse” in Arabia was naturally inspired by the Arab Jews and Christians in Yemen and the Christian Arabs in Oriens, who had close ties to Mecca. However, from the very beginning it must also have had a specifically Arab identity and expression that distinguished it from the monotheism of other regions. 15 For that reason, we can disregard the idea that monotheism appeared suddenly and paradoxically in a 13 Hamilton A. R. Gibb, “Pre-Islamic Monotheism in Arabia,” Harvard Theological Review 55.04 (1962): 269–280, here 278. 14 Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, 135f. Al-Mas‘ūdī, Murūj al-Dhahab wa-Ma‘ādin al-Jauhar [Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems], Vol. 1–2 (Beirut: Dar al-Andalus, 1984), 78, describes Quss as a monotheistic sage, but not as Bishop of Najrān. 15 On the cult worship of Allah before Islam in the Arabian Peninsula see Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs, 260ff. See also ‘Alī, Al-Mufaṣṣal. Vol. 6, 29: “It is clear from several Semitic legends that the old Semitic tribes had a kind of henotheism (Tauḥīd), which means that they believe in one God but do not rule out the existence of other Gods.” (Own translation)

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remote desert city. Rather, it seems that the idea had been current throughout the Arab Kulturnation for a long time, and that Islam was the culmination of this religious development, expressed in the language of the Arabic koine. 16 On this basis it seems sensible to try and understand the Qur’an and the Islamic movement in general from the perspective of the developing Muslim community, as Angelika Neuwirth does. In any case, we should not be tempted to restrict the borders of that community too strictly to the Prophet’s immediate surroundings. 17 Previous attempts to reconstruct Muhammad’s close circles and find Christian “informants” within them have been mostly unable to hone in on specific details of the writing process or the “templates” used by the writers. 18 This approach is probably too narrow in its focus on identifying a single point of transmission in“In der Zeit der scandinavischen Götterdämmerung, als Alles drüber und drunter ging, das Alte in Auflösung begriffen, das Neue noch nicht durchgebrochen war, hiess sich ein sterbender Mann, der den heidnischen Glauben verloren und den christlichen nicht gefunden hatte, hinaus in das Freie tragen, um seine Seele dem Gotte zu befehlen, der die Sonne geschaffen habe. Die muslimische Tradition über die Vorgeschichte des Islams nennt eine kleine Anzahl von „Suchern" in Mekka und Täif, welche, vom Heidentum unbefriedigt, auf der Suche nach einer neuen Religion waren, das Gesetz und das Evangelium studierten, indessen sich weder dem Judentum noch dem Christentum völlig ergaben, wenngleich sie für das letztere grössere Sympathien hatten. Diese Sucher sind keine vereinzelte, auf Mekka und Täif oder Medina beschränkte Erscheinung, sondern das Symptom einer Stimmung, die in der Zeit vor Muhammad über ganz Arabien verbreitet war und manche der edelsten Geister beherrschte. Der Boden war bereit für den Islam.” Wellhausen, Heidentum, 214. 17 Neuwirth, Der Koran, 107ff. However, according to Neuwirth this focus should not be seen as a substitute for direct engagement with the text itself (111)! 18 Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs, 259, can only state that the Prophet may have been in direct contact with Christians. Osman, in “Pre-Islamic converts to Christianity,” reconstructs the lives of four hanifs in Mecca at the time of the Prophet, and is unable to discern any direct influence. Kister analyses various Arabic sources in an attempt to portray Mecca at the time of Muhammad, and cannot shed any light on the process either: Kister, “Some reports concerning Mecca.” On the search for Christian and Jewish informants in Muhammad’s closest circles see Claude Gilliot, “On the Origin of the Informants of the Prophet,” in Ohlig & Puin, The Hidden Origins of Islam, 153–189. 16

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stead of looking at a much broader diffusion process. It was so broad, in fact, that it has all too often been overlooked by those misled by de-Arabization and deconstruction. However, if we use a more inclusive definition of the community of believers, taking into account the interlinked development of the Arab/Semitic groups discussed above, there was no need for Judeo-Christian knowledge to be explicitly communicated or deliberately included because it had been diffused throughout the Arabian Peninsula for centuries! Nöldeke knew that the Arabs were aware of monotheism, although in his typically biased way he explains that the “simple Arab mind” was satisfied with a merely fragmented, imprecise acquaintance. 19 In any case, ancient Arab historians like Mas‘ūdī were wellknown for transmitting this sort of monotheistic discourse. Mas‘ūdī dedicated an entire chapter of his history to the bearers of monotheistic faith (ahl al-tauḥīd) who lived ascetic lives dur“In Mekka hatten sich mehrere Mitglieder angesehener Geschlechter von dem alten Glauben losgesagt. Waraka, ein naher Verwandter Chadidscha's, war zum Judenthum übergetreten (wenigstens ist dies viel wahrscheinlicher, als die gewöhnliche Nachricht, welche ihn zu einem Christen macht); Zaid ibn Amr hatte offen gegen die Nichtigkeit des Götzendienstes geredet. Juden von dem mit Mekka in vielfacher Verbindung stehenden Jathrib kamen gewiß öfter des Handels wegen nach Mekka oder hatten sich wohl ganz daselbst niedergelassen; wenigstens läßt die genauere Bekanntschaft Muhammed's mit jüdischen Erzählungen und Redensarten, die sich schon in seinen früheren Offenbarungen zeigt, auf einen längern Umgang mit Juden schließen. Daneben gab es in Mekka einzelne Abyssinische und Griechische Christen, aber dies waren nur Sklaven und Freigelassene, welche größtentheils nie eine nähere Kenntniß ihrer Religion gehabt hatten und zum Theil wohl auch schon seit früher Jugend unter den Heiden lebten. Daher beschränkt sich Muhammed's Kenntniß vom Christentum auf einige zum Theil absurd verdrehte Legenden und einige sehr verwirrte Bruchstücke von Glaubenssätzen. Aber dies Alles reichte schon hin, um ein empfängliches Gemüth in seiner Verehrung der alten Götter irre zu machen und zum reinen Monotheismus zu drängen, der sich überhaupt unter den damaligen Arabern schon kräftig durch die Vielgötterei durchzuarbeiten anfing. Wir brauchen Muhammed daher weder durch Mönche in Syrien, noch durch die Phantasieliteratur bis dahin ganz unbekannter Sekten belehrt werden zu lassen.”Theodor Nöldeke, Das Leben Muhammed’s (Hanover: Carl Rümpler, 1863), 19.

19

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ing the interval (fatra) between Jesus and Muhammad and who were neither Jews nor Christians, but generally worshipped Abraham. 20 The worship of Abraham, a mystical figure who according to tradition lived in the middle of the second millennium B.C., is at first surprising. But when we remember that the Abraham material was probably composed much later, perhaps not until 600–500 B.C., its role here becomes more understandable. It is yet another example of the diffusion of “imaginary” elements throughout the Arab/Semitic region. 21

11.2 CHRISTIAN ARAB LITURGY BEFORE ISLAM AND THE RIDDLE OF JAHILI POETRY

The monotheistic discourse of these seekers and monotheists was orally transmitted; no written records of it have survived. 22 There is also no extant pre-Islamic Arabic Christian liturgy or Bible translation, which makes it difficult to study this discourse. However, it does not seem logical to conclude on that basis that the Arabs, who had encountered Christianity early on, were incapable of developing their own monotheistic discourse simply because church liturgy was in the related Aramaic dialect. 23 In fact, there is no reason to rule out the possibility that al-Masʿūdī, Murūj, 78–90ff. See John van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven, CT: YUP, 1975), 33, 38, 309ff. For the power of diffusion in the Arab region see also the example of Dilmun and the Gilgamesh Epic in the Appendix. 22 “It is a shame that there is nothing about their teachings and views in the Musnad inscriptions, the Jahili literature or in Greek/Roman writing.” Burhān al-Dīn Dallū, Ğazīra al-‘Arab qabla l-’Islām [The Arabian Peninsula before Islam] (Beirut, 2004) (Own translation), 628. Oswald Spengler also lamented this gap: “(…) if we knew more than we do about the Hanifs, the Arabian Puritans before and after the Prophet. All of them had won out of Predestination the guarantee that they were God’s elect.” Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 304. 23 “Trotz des Reste von arabischen Schrifttexten aus jener Zeit kann nicht angenommen werden, daß dem arabischen Christentum mehrere Jahrhunderte hindurch – war ja doch schon im 3. und 4. Säkulum das Christentum in Arabien bekannt und verbreitet – die Bibel, namentlich die 4 Evangelien, in ihrer Mutter20 21

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there was at least some simple Arabic liturgy, 24 and even if there really was none the Arab Christians would still have discussed their religion in their own language outside church. After all, Christianity was hardly a secret sect, and over the centuries knowledge of it would surely have spread throughout a region with no geographical barriers, inhabited by related “groups with similar dialects.” Arabic and Aramaic are not different enough to seriously impede the transfer of knowledge, 25 and anyway that would imply that the Arab Christians spent centuries participating in Aramaic rituals that they could not discuss or reflect on, which is quite implausible. 26 Some individual instances of Christian teaching probably also took place in Arabic. As discussed earlier, the Metropolitan Aḥūdemeh struggled to communicate with the Arab population and was forced to rely on bilingual Arab Christians from Mesosprache mangelten.” Georg Graf, Die christlich-arabische Literatur bis zur Fränkischen Zeit: Eine literaturhistorische Skizze (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1905), 1. Sources from Oriens suggest that the Arabic language, which many people claim was lacking in expressive power at that time, was probably no impediment to such a discourse. Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 291. 24 See Shahîd’s argument in Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 290ff. 25 Indeed, the close relationship of the two “languages” often makes it difficult to distinguish between them. According to Jerome’s Life of St. Hilarion, Hilarion rode into the pagan city of Elusa in the Negev and was greeted by the Arab inhabitants who asked him to bless them by calling out the word barech. If, instead of the Aramaic barech, they were actually saying the almost homophonous Arabic word barek, that would imply the use of Arabic in their liturgy. The local Arabs must have used Arabic for their pagan cults, after all. “The problem raised by the term Barech in the Vita is important: none other than that of an Arabic liturgy before the rise of Islam. The terms employed by Syriac and Arabic for bless are homophonous [sic!] or almost so in these two cognate languages, and if Barech in the Vita turns out to be Arabic Bārik mistaken by Jerome for Syrian Barech, then this will be a gain for the view that Arabic was employed in the celebration of the Christian liturgy before the rise of Islam.” Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 291. 26 The Christians in Najrān, in southern Arabia, apparently had a Gospel book that was lost when the city burned down in 520. Graf, Die christlich-arabische Literatur, 2f.

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potamia. If the Arab population had the same difficulties, that would be another point in favor of the existence of Arabic liturgy. 27 Evidence from the early Islamic period shows that in the Orthodox (Melkite) Church in Oriens, which remained loyal to the Byzantine emperors, most Patriarchs during this period – and therefore probably earlier as well – were Arabs or Syrians; their ethnicity should be seen as a clear sign that this sort of discourse existed and was important. 28 The example of Mavia shows that the Arabs were in a position to demand an Arab bishop for their community, a fact that can also be interpreted as a sign that clergy and congregation spoke the same language. Moreover, the Arab/Semitic languages were extremely similar, and the population would probably have been familiar with multilingualism. 29 It should also be mentioned that there were Arabs at all levels of church hierarchy, up to and including a whole series of “Syrian” Popes in the eighth century and Arab saints who were the object of cult worship. 30 Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 420. “It is sometimes suggested that the Melkite church had a largely Greekspeaking hierarchy, alienated from the majority of their congregations. It would seem that for the early Islamic period at least, this was untrue. As far as we can tell, the patriarchs were drawn almost exclusively from the Christian inhabitants of the Muslim world and it is likely that they, like most of their followers, were Syriac or Arabic speakers.” Hugh Kennedy, “The Melkite Church from the Islamic Conquest to the Crusades: Continuity and Adaptation of Byzantine Legacy,” The 17th International Byzantine Congress: Major Papers (Scarsdale, NY: Caratzas, 1986), 325–343, here 335. 29 Ibn Nawfal, a relative of Muhammad, was apparently deeply familiar with Christianity and studied Christian books intensively. Even if those books were in Aramaic or Hebrew, Ibn Nawfal could obviously read and understand them. Graf, Die christlich-arabische Literatur, 2. 30 Popes Gregory III (731–41), Sisinnius (708), and Constantine (708–15) were Arabs/Syrians, and moreover at a time when the Roman Empire and Christianity were engaged in a defensive struggle against the Arabs. The battle of Poitiers was fought while Gregory III was in office, and until 2013 he was the last nonEuropean Pope. Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 186ff. For a discussion of the Catholic Church’s Arab saints, like St. Arethas and St. Sergius, see Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol. I, Part 2, 949–967. 27 28

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On the other hand, if we restrict the focus to purely formal set pieces and structures and then apply de-Arabization and deconstruction, which hardly admit any interaction between different peoples and languages, the inescapable conclusion is that “(…) Christentum unfähig war, im Jahrzehnt vor der Higra in Mekka einen entscheidenden Einfluss auszuüben.” 31 Those who hold such views are surely aware that this also implies that the individual Arab/Semitic groups existed in relative isolation for several centuries and that they never engaged in debate about their faith. However, for these people the facts cannot be interpreted any other way: “Anzeichen dafür, daß sich an diesem nüchternen und skeptischen Urteil (…) etwas Wesentliches ändern sollte, fehlt meines Erachtens.” 32 Nevertheless, it seems perfectly reasonable to suggest that a monotheistic narrative with specifically Arab characteristics could have developed during the centuries in which Christianity and Judaism were established in Oriens and Arabia and in which Arab monotheists could be found all across Arabia, if not even earlier. Islam then transformed this narrative into its final form and message. Pre-Islamic monotheistic discourse, which is now more clearly visible, served as the basis or framework for the Islamic message. This explains why the Christian influences in early IsFor the “frontier saint” St. Sergius see: Elisabeth Key Fowden, The Barbarian Plain. Saint Sergius Between Rome and Iran, (London: UCP, 1999), 141ff. A possible Arab origin is attested for the Catholic medical saints Cosmas and Damian: “Most sources suggest that Cosmas and Damian were neither Greek nor Roman, but of ‘eastern’ descent; some call them ‘oriental’ others ‘Arabs’.” Jacalyn Duffin, Medical Saints. Cosmas and Damian in a Postmodern World (New York: OUP, 2013), 33. 31 Hainthaler, Christliche Araber, 138. 32 Ibid., 139. Hainthaler does at least concede that, “Daß eine Verbindung zwischen christlichen Äthiopiern und Byzantinern und Syrern schwer vorstellbar sei, könnte man vielleicht etwas relativieren.” (Ibid.) In fact such a connection was proven a long time ago, but that aside, the striking thing here is that the possibility that Arab/Semitic groups might have interacted with each other seems to be completely off the table.

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lamic texts often seem vague and only loosely related to the original. There was no direct transfer or copy; instead, ideas were transmitted and developed through centuries of conversation and tradition. This conclusion also counters the charges against the Jāhilī literature, which Ṭāhā Ḥusain deemed a forgery because it expresses monotheistic ideas that supposedly did not exist during the pagan period. 33 Lüling suggests that what can be glimpsed behind the poems is not so much a retroactive falsification as the influence of specifically Arab pre-Islamic monotheistic trends. 34 The poets were exposed to a widespread tradition of monotheistic thought or discourse, and the poems therefore contain sections that seem monotheistic. Arthur Arberry had already suggested this possibility in his defence of the authenticity of the al-Mu‘allaqāt: “The dilemma of the occurrence in the ancient poetry of so many references to Allah used to be resolved by supposing that this name had been substituted by the transmitters, all good Muslims, for an original al-Lāt, but there is however no reasonable doubt that the name of Allah, the supreme God, was well known to the Arabs of ignorance (…). Is it, moreover, not likely that poets seeking to command a wide hearing would deliberately alienate the sympathies of the greater part of their hoped-for audience by swearing in the 33 In the 1920s, Ṭāhā Ḥusain produced a study of pre-Islamic poetry, often cited in the West, that aligns well with the de-Arabizing view. In it he states that these poems, which are a central element of pre-Islamic Arab identity, can be regarded as later counterfeits written in Basra and Kūfa in the eighth and ninth centuries. In his view, the forgeries were commissioned by Arab tribes who found themselves embroiled in intense competition in the middle of a slowly disintegrating Islamic Empire. To increase their legitimacy, they wanted to be able to point to their own pre-Islamic roots. Ṭāhā Ḥusain, Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhiliyy [On the Jahili poems] (Sousah: Dar al Ma’arif, 1997); see also Sūsa, Al-‘Arab wa-l-Yahūd, 15ff. 34 “Es löst sich nunmehr auch der scheinbare Widerspruch auf, der darin bestand, daß sich bei den vorislamischen Dichtern allenthalben Gedanken und Wendungen finden, die auch im Qurʿān enthalten sind. Weil man es – mit Recht -, für undenkbar hielt, daß der Qurʿān aus diesen Dichtern geschöpft hat, wurde die Echtheit dieser vor dem Qurʿān entstandenen Dichtungen bezweifelt (…).” Lüling, Über den Urkoran, 13.

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name of purely local idols?” 35 Lüling calls this Arab monotheism, which developed and was transmitted through an oral tradition, the “christliche Urkoran.” He sees it as the product of an Arab character that did not borrow directly from Judaism and Christianity, but filtered Jewish and Christian influences through an Arab lens. It thus completed a syncretic process that had begun long before the time of the Prophet and that eventually resulted in a new, specifically Arab message. 36 Many hanifs did not support the Islamic message and instead migrated to Syria or Ethiopia and became Christian; according to Lüling, that was because they objected to the pagan elements that were integrated into the new religion in order to reinforce its Arab national character. 37 However, it seems excessive to portray this syncretism as a clandestine operation aimed at making sure the process of “repaganization” could proceed uninterrupted. Lüling refers to a study by Birkeland for examples of early opposition to this sort of probing Qur’anic interpretation. 38 However, Birkeland is only able to identify such restrictions from the second Islamic century onwards, when it became necessary to establish guidelines for tafsīr. At the time of the Prophet and during the century afterward there were no such rules: “The first Muslim generation regarded tafsīr of Allah’s word in the Koran as a natural activity. As means of interpretation of sayings of the Prophet himself or his companions, information from ‘Peoples of the Book’, ancient Arabic poems, with the addition of sound reasoning, (ra’y) were regarded as self-evident.” 39 Arberry, The Seven Odes, 241. On monotheistic/Christian elements in preIslamic poetry see also Qāshā, Ṣafḥāt min Tārīkh, 44f. 36 Lüling, Über den Urkoran, 10ff. 37 On this dispute regarding Abu Amir and his fifty followers see Lüling, Über den Urkoran, 11. He refers primarily to Julius Wellhausen, Muhammed In Medina. Das ist Vakidi’s Kitab al Maghazi in verkürzter deutscher Wiedergabe (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1882), 103. 38 Harris Birkeland, Old Muslim Opposition against Interpretation of the Koran (Oslo: I Kommisjon Hos Jacob Dybwad, 1955). 39 Ibid., 42. 35

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Independently of the sacred act of revelation, we can now recognize a broad, integrative process that developed over centuries, fed by a wide range of Arab/Semitic philosophical, religious, and imaginative sources, and brought to its zenith by a prophetic revelation. It was neither a paradoxical nor a mysterious process; and reading the Arab historians of the time it is clear that the presence in pre-Islamic Arabia of Arab monotheists as well as Arab pagans, Jews, and Christians was general knowledge. Although corresponding references in the Qur’an also provide support for this idea, it is yet to gain traction in Western accounts of the period. 40

11.3 POLITICAL CONSOLIDATION AND ITS REQUIREMENTS

The specific character of the Arab sphere meant that, for various reasons, Islam was forced to diverge from the monotheistic and proto-monotheistic trends and traditions that had influenced it. Moreover, Islam had to make use of elements like a distinctively Arab scripture in order to propagate its message. This made it difficult to integrate some of the Arab hanifs into Islam. There were probably instances – as in the other great religions – of archaic pagan elements being included alongside monotheistic ideas. 41 For many of the original monotheist hanifs, such syncretism may have seemed unacceptable, prompting them to relocate to Christian areas. 42 An alternative suggestion is that the hanifs were less monotheistic than has been assumed, and that while they could therefore function quite well as a sort of bridge between Islamic and pagan society, they could not always cross it. It is interesting to note that the Arab Christians too were often less strictly monotheistic than is sometimes thought: “Why was Quraysh against the new message? Not because it promised new, pure teachings, but because it upset the existing system (in Mecca) by ‘dividing the community.’ The See especially the idea of the garden (al-Janna) that was based on pagan fertility groves (the Old Testament cult of high places). Lüling, Über den Urkoran, 6. 42 Osman, “Pre-Islamic Converts to Christianity.” 41

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Arab Christians never attempted to do anything similar. In fact, astonishingly few Christians objected to the worship of the Kaaba and other idol temples alongside their monotheistic faith.” 43 Bowersock points out that the word hanif is rather ambiguous, and can just as well refer to an attachment to pagan as to monotheistic ideas. 44 Despite the necessity of integrating these polytheists or proto-monotheists, Bowersock suggests that it may not have been possible to do so because Muhammad advocated an even stronger form of monotheism than them. 45 There may also have been some devout hanifs who found Christianity’s acceptance of their individuality more tolerable than Islam, which from this point on grew more strictly monotheistic and more bound up in rules. This was, in fact, the real innovation of the new faith: it had an inclusive message that absorbed elements of tribal culture but yet was even more strictly monotheistic than the older religions, and especially Trinitarian Christianity. Christianity in its Hellenistic form had little in common with its origQāshā, Ṣafḥāt min Tārīkh, 237. “The paradoxical double sense of the word hanif or hanafi, which allows it to describe both a believer and a pagan, implies a world in which there could be true and false monotheisms.” Glen W. Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 130. Wellhausen also sees the hanifs as a bridge to the Islamic movement in Arabia: “Muhammad hat von den frommen Dissenters in Mekka seine ersten Anregungen empfangen und von diesen schlägt der Name Hanif eine Brücke zu den christlichen Asceten, von denen auch anderweitig bekannt ist, dass sie einen gewaltigen Eindruck auf die Gemüter der Araber gemacht haben.” Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums, 240. 45 Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis, 126ff, refutes Crone’s theory, which shares some ground with Lüling in the assumption that the pagan Arabs were actually monotheists. Patricia Crone, “The Religion of the Qur’ānic Pagans: God and the Lesser Deities,” Arabica 46 (2010), 151–200, here 160. According to Bowersock, it would be sensible to distinguish between hanifs and pagans, as the Arabic sources do. Even if the worship of Allah was the expression of a form of monotheistic thought before Islam, he was still worshipped as a member of a divine pantheon. This is clearly different from pure monotheism, in which the other “gods” are only messengers (angelos) and not members of the pantheon in their own right. Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis, 131. 43 44

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inal Semitic form, and it no longer seemed to suit the Arabs’ circumstances or requirements: “While the Greeks were engrossed in their attempts to define the nature of God, the Arabs were more interested in what God wanted them to do. In actual fact, both Judaism and Christianity also had at first been practical religions, concerned with how man should obey God’s will, for both religions had originated among Semitic tribesmen and peasants akin to the Arabs. But Christianity did not reach Arabs from the Jews (…). It reached them several centuries later, filtered through the intellectual subtlety of the Greeks.” 46 The Arabs were able to accept and “exploit” this Hellenized form of Christianity, 47 but it did not always seem to require a genuine change of consciousness. Ultimately, such a concept of religion could not have served as the basis for the process of political consolidation and state formation. On the other hand, the rulebased structure of Islam’s rigorous monotheism – in which it closely resembled Judaism – was capable of effecting change: “As a result it presented to the simple Arab mind a more satisfying basis of life than did the incomprehensible hairsplitting dogmas of the Greek. In this sense Islam may indeed have been an unduly vehement protest against the fact that the real message of Christianity had been submerged by the subtleties of Greek dogma.” 48 The original Christian message might have been more effective, but it could no longer be transmitted in that form: “It is no exaggeration to say that without the doctrine that Christ was the Son of God, the hearts of the Arabs would have been more moved by the Christian teachings of peace and love.” 49 The Muslims’ goal was to formulate a monotheistic message that could move hearts, and to develop a contractual framework Glubb, The Great Arab Conquests, 30. “Arab humanism provides the reason why Arabs could accept the type of Christianity which they met, since religion existed to be exploited by man, not to challenge and change man.” Triminham, Christianity, 244. 48 Ibid. 49 Qāshā, Ṣafḥāt min Tārīkh, 44. 46 47

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for the relationship between God and man that would enable the movement to transcend the horizons of tribal thought and achieve wider relevance. In the 1930s, long before the current debate, the famous Iraqi poet and philosopher al-Ruṣāfī could already see that this strict interpretation of monotheism was Muhammad’s real achievement. He also showed that the contradictions inherent in the decision to reject Arab pagans but not Christians could not be resolved using religious arguments: if Muhammad denied that the pagan angels and gods, who for the mushrikūn were part of Allah’s pantheon, were Allah’s partners, why did he tolerate the Christians, whose definition of Jesus as the Son of God created a similar situation? 50 Al-Ruṣāfī saw that the message’s political requirements and global goals were ultimately decisive: “If Muhammad accepted their [Jews’ and Christians’] ‘tribute’ but not that of the Arab mushrikūn, this shows that he was not aiming at religious renewal but rather an Arab religious, social and political renewal, which would be Arab to begin with but which would later encompass all mankind. The Arabs would start the renewal and mankind would complete it.” 51 Bowersock believes that political unrest in Arabia at the time of Muhammad had a massive influence on the form of the Islamic message. 52 As described above, as well as the ongoing conflict between Rome and the Persians there were also disagreements between Arab Jews and Christians in southern Arabia, and re-Christianized southern Arabia’s attack on Mecca. Uncertain times are certainly fertile ground for the development

“The Christians make Christ the Son of God (…) There is therefore no difference between them and the Arab mushrikun. (…) If they raise a man to be a God, there is no difference between that and the worship of a tree or a planet.” Ma‘rūf al-Ruṣāfī, al-Shakhṣiyya al-Muḥammadiyya [Muhammad’s Personality] (Cologne: Al-Kamel Verlag, 2002) [Baghdad/Fallujah, 1933], 20. 51 Ibid. 52 Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis, 130ff. 50

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of a monotheistic message. 53 This is above all due to the psychological characteristics of monotheism and its political and religious institutionalization. Leaving aside the inner merits of monotheistic religion and faith, it is possible to identify psychological conditions that encourage the growth and triumph of monotheistic ideas. Eric Dodds convincingly described some such conditions in his study of Christianity’s victory over the pagans, and there is no reason they cannot be applied equally to our situation: in conditions of uncertainty, the refusal to accept other forms of worship is a fundamental strength. The religious tolerance of the Romans and Greeks led to a confusing accumulation of spiritual alternatives. Monotheism wiped the slate clean: “It lifted the burden of freedom from the shoulders of the individual: one choice, one irrevocable choice, and the road to salvation was clear.” 54 Moreover, an inclusive organization with no particular entry restrictions has the potential to mobilize huge numbers of people. This is even truer when the religion in question can also forgive sins by offering the chance of a better life in the hereafter. 55 As was the case in the clash against the individualistic, secular lifestyle of the Arab Bedouins, this organizational capacity was absolutely necessary for achieving political and military mobilization. 56 The political institutionalization of centuries of monotheistic thought in the Arab sphere marked the conclusion of a long On the crisis of the elites in Mecca caused by the Roman-Persian war and its effects on the economy, see Kamal S. Salibi, A History of Arabia (New York: Caravan Books, 1980), 76. 54 Eric R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (Cambridge: CUP, 1965), 133. 55 Ibid. 56 “The success of the conquests was, then, first and foremost the product of an organizational breakthrough of proportions unparalleled in the history of Arabian society until modern times.” Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, 269. This competence was bestowed upon the umma by the Quraysh tribe: “Meccan statecraft played a vital part in holding the expanding umma together and in ensuring that it acted as a single corporate entity.” Howard-Johnston, Witnesses, 471. 53

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process that crystallized in the person of the Prophet, who managed to take advantage of existing tendencies and political circumstances: great uncertainty on the one hand, and on the other the potential to fill the power vacuum left by Heraclius’ victory over the Persians. The formulation of an inclusive but strictly monotheistic message was an ideal way to exploit this situation. This does not necessarily mean that the shift to the Islamic form of monotheism was easy, even in Arabia. On the contrary, we must assume that for a long time many Arabs clung to their old gods, who often took the form of personal guardian deities like the Roman Lares. 57 However, if the Arab sphere was a breeding ground for monotheistic thought long before the Prophet, a new perspective opens up on the emergence of Islam. Even members of the revisionist school have recently begun to cautiously concede that an integrative approach to Arabia and the Arabs seems more and more sensible: “Arabia seems to have been a much more developed place than most Islamicists (myself included) had ever suspected – not just in the north and south, but also in the middle. We are beginning to get a much more nuanced sense of the place, and again it is clear that we should think of it as more closely tied in with the rest of the Near East than we used to do.” 58 If so, it is no longer necessary to explain the Qur’an as a retroactive, legitimizing plagiary. 59 Monotheism and its ideas Michael Lecker believes the pagan Arabs’ loyalty to their gods has been underestimated. Michael Lecker, “Was Arabian Idol Worship Declining on the Eve of Islam?” in Michael Lecker (Ed.), People, Tribes and Society in Arabia around the Time of Moḥammad (London: Routledge, 2005), 1–43. Lecker suggests that Muhammad was only able to establish his monotheism in Mecca and Medina after ten years of laborious persuasion (36). In view of the impact this process of conversion had on world history, it was still an astonishingly short time. 58 Patricia Crone, “What Do We Actually Know About Mohammed?” Open Democracy, June 10, 2008, available online: http://www.opendemocracy.net/faitheurope_islam/mohammed_3866.jsp, as of 08/18/2017. 59 “John Wansbrough’s attempt to posit a text still under construction as late as c. 800 has collapsed thanks in part to discovery and study of early Umayyad or even pre-Umayyad Qur’ān manuscripts. The canonization was strikingly faster and more straightforward than for the Jewish or Christian Bibles.” Fowden, 57

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were present in Arabia and Oriens centuries before Islam, in Christian, Jewish, and hanifistic forms. This monotheistic discourse formed the basis of the religious message and political coming-into-being of the Arabs in the seventh century. There is no need for a conspiratorial circle of Qur’an editors. Instead, we can work on the assumption that monotheistic thought was already so widespread as to be general knowledge, and that it had developed over the centuries into a specifically Arab form that was now institutionalized, inclusively structured, and so also politically activated. 60 This political process naturally required the extensive use and finally formalization of the Arabic vernacular, which now became the standard language, as well as the use of the Arabic script to write that language. Again, this was by no means a unique measure and the Muslims were not the first to introduce it. As has been shown, Ghassān and the Lakhmids used the Arabic script increasingly in their realms in the

Before and After Muḥammad, 190. A Qur’anic manuscript recently discovered at the University of Birmingham seems to support the existence of sophisticated Arabic writing traditions at the time of the revelation: it is quite possible that the newly found version was written by somebody living at the time of the Prophet. Controversies remain, but the text also seems to be very close to the form of the Qur’an that is read today, supporting the idea that the text has undergone little or no alteration. Birmingham University, “Birmingham Qur’an manuscript dated among the oldest in the world”, available online: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2015/07/quran-manuscript-22–07– 15.aspx, as of 08/08/2017. 60 Lüling, who defines Arab monotheism as Arab-Christian, makes a similar argument: “Die Eigenheit der islamischen Entscheidung in dieser zentral-arabischmekkanischen Situation einer notwendig gewordenen Wandlung des arabischen Christentums liegt darin, daß der Islam die mit dem Urqur’an bezeichnete archaisch-christliche Position – die in gewissem Sinne infolge ihrer ansehnlichen Tradition in Arabien auch schon als ‚national-arabisch‘ gelten konnte – nicht in Richtung auf eine sich (politisch) von außen anbietende konfessionelle Einengung und Abhängigkeit verließ, sondern in Richtung auf sich selbst, d.h. in der Besinnung und im Rückgriff auf die eigenen altarabischen religiösen Traditionen.” Lüling, Über den Urkoran, 11.

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period before Muhammad. 61 In general, the Arabic script was used increasingly in areas where “the Roman garrison retreated, and Arab political formations solidified.” 62 If the Arab principalities had a “(…) sense of the worth of their own language and a strong attachment to it and (…) it was intimately bound up with their identity and self-perception,” then an Islam built on the Arab cultural sphere and koine would also need to follow this path. 63 And, contrary to the perceptions of the revisionist school, when making this decision the Muslims were able to draw on a wealth of experience and tradition with the Arabic language and script. 64 The “secret” of Islam’s victory and the sudden expansion of the Arab element now seems less enigmatic, at least in terms of the Islamic message. Mysterious manipulation is no longer necessary to explain how it came into being. In a remarkable feat, the Arabs appeared for the first time in world history, defeated “(…) it is clear that this move to write Arabic in Arabic script rather than prestige scripts in the centuries preceding Muḥammad (…) was in the broad sense a political act and deliberate choice.” Al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity, 148. For the use of Arabic in the Muslim administration shortly after the Islamic conquest, see chapter 5.1. 62 Al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity, 151. 63 Hoyland, Arabia, 242. 64 The Ghassānids and others increasingly used the Nabetean and Aramaic scripts to write in Arabic, leading to the gradual evolution of the Arabic script that was in use in the sixth century (Hoyland, Arab Kings, 392). One example is the Usays inscription of 529. It was written by Ibn al-Mughīra, a military commander appointed by the Ghassānid king Arethas to hold a fort. The other is an ecclesiastical inscription carved by a Ghassānid phylarch in a church dedicated to St. John in Ḥarrān, in Trachonitis. “The two inscriptions evidence the involvement of the Ghassānids in the development of this Arabic script, involvement that is explained by two main factors. First, sixth-century Oriens contained energetic kings and bishops who were aware of their Arab identity; especially influential were Arethas and Theodore, who controlled federate Oriens between 540 and 570. Even more relevant to the development of the script is the spread of monasticism and the proliferation of monasteries in the Oriens of the Ghassānids.” Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Vol. II, Part 2, 298. 61

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two world powers, and then founded a world religion. The success of the Islamic message was not yet militarily or institutionally guaranteed, but the Arabs would perhaps have been aware that they were part of a movement whose time had finally come. In his study of Muhammad’s personality, al-Ruṣāfī expressed the “normality” or inevitability of this development in his own distinctive style: “This all shows that Muhammad had left behind the traditions and ideas of his clan long before his Prophethood. (…) Nevertheless he was not alone in departing from these traditions. The denunciation of idols did not require extensive or profound thought. (…) Muhammad was not the first to reject the idols, many people in the land of the Arabs had done so before him.” 65

65 Al-Ruṣāfī, al-Shakhṣiyya al-Muḥammadiyya, 128. Glen W. Bowersock. The Crucible of Islam (London: HUP, 2017), 59, has amplified this point “(…) the fact is that he was by no means alone in proclaiming revelations that were both cognizant of Jewish and Christian monotheism and arose in a pagan context. His were the revelations that ultimately prevailed.” See on this also Al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity, 358ff.

12.

CONCLUSION Many Arab scholars do not share the Western view that the Arabs were an obscure group who only emerged onto the world stage shortly before the Islamic conquest. They see them instead as the core of what Western scholars call the Semites. If the Arabs and the Semites/proto-Semites – modern-day Yemenites – are treated as largely the same group, a completely new perspective on Arab/Semitic history opens up. Their history can now be seen as a longue durée that encompasses thousands of years of Arab/Semitic migrations. Arab/Semitic groups established cities, “civilizations” and dialects/languages in various parts of the Arab world. Their migrations, which to some extent are still going on today, created a civilizational area inhabited by people who shared certain cultural and linguistic similarities. They may even have been aware of something like a common identity, reflected in culture and language but also in the imaginary, in collective unconscious archetypes. In any case, the fact that classical Arabic can be used to read other Semitic texts seems to be a clear indicator that Arabic had all the characteristics of a matrix language in the “Semitic” area. The Western analysis that the modern Arabic script only developed in the fifth century is correct. However, in our view the Arabian Peninsula with its more than 90,000 Musnad inscriptions, and Oriens with its thousands of Safaitic ones, were home to much older scripts, which were used to write inscriptions that can be read as Arabic and which are, therefore, probable precursors of the later North Arabian script. 203

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A central finding of this study is the divergence between the Western and Arab evaluations of the Arab presence in Arabia. The two perspectives are fundamentally different despite agreeing on many key points. Migrations from southern Arabia to the north appear in both accounts, but in the West they are labelled as Semitic migrations; the numerous different civilizations they founded apparently soon stopped interacting with each other and had already forgotten their common ancestry by antiquity. In this Western view, the important phase in which Arabs spread out across Arabia and Oriens and split into different groups is missing from Arab history, which is only thought to begin thousands of years later in the fourth or even fifth century. The use of the artificial label “Semitic” has de-Arabized the Arab element by deconstructing it into individual parts that are then treated as specialist subjects, making their shared structures ever harder to see. The amalgamation of these parts into an artificial Semitic category has obscured the development of Arab civilization and pushed the similarities and shared history of the individual Arab/Semitic groups into the background. The Arabs’ memories of their southern Arabian home and of the Musnad script as their former script have been ignored by the West and dismissed as a nationalistic construct that disregards the achievements of specialized fields of study (which only became necessary because of deconstruction). The de-Arabization process can also be seen at work in the history of the Roman Empire, where it was supplemented by prejudices and negative characterizations. This biased view predominated despite the fact that Arabs reached the highest levels of government in the Roman Empire, were mainly Christian, and were responsible for the defense of Rome’s eastern border. Perhaps it was precisely this close interconnectedness and interdependence that provoked such negative attitudes from the Romans: concern or even fear of a too powerful, foreign Orient. The prejudice and condescension engendered by this fear helped strengthen the Romans’ own position. The Orientalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries then adopted Roman prejudices as their own. In their conscious or unconscious hostility towards the Oriental or the Semitic, towards Arab nationalism,

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and towards Islam for driving Christianity out of the Orient, the Orientalists borrowed directly from Hellenistic and Roman attitudes that saw the Arabs as barbarians and as a threat to the empire. This old portrait has found a new use in the current “Clash of Civilizations” discourse: concern or fear in the West leads to disparagement of the “old rival.” Arab shortcomings are traced back right to the beginning of their history. Fear is counteracted by the use of negative characterizations and the truncation or deconstruction of the rival’s history. The problem de-Arabization creates is that in the deArabized view of Arab history, the emergence of Arab Islam and its victory over Rome are impossible to explain. In the longue durée perspective, on the other hand, the Arabs’ cultural, religious, and political development began centuries or even millennia earlier, but has all too often been rendered invisible by Western labels and deconstructions. It is astonishing how many Western scholars scour Mecca for possible Qur’anic editors even though many, if not most, Arabs at that time – at least in Oriens – were probably Christians or Jews, and monotheistic ideas were widespread throughout the region. Arab monotheism was influenced and strengthened by these monotheistic trends long before the revelation, and Islam “simply” marked the culmination of its development. It does not seem likely that the Western and Arab views of history will be reconciled in the foreseeable future. The Western sub-disciplines have probably advanced too far to allow the reconstruction of Arab pre-Islamic history, even if the task could be attempted in cooperation with Arab historians.

13.

APPENDIX. DIFFUSION: DILMUN, GILGAMESH, ALKHIDR AND THE QUR’AN – THE POWER OF THE IMAGINARY IN THE ARAB REGION

The previous chapters were an attempt to sketch out an Arab historical space, brought into being by the “Semitic” migrations and extending over the Arabian Peninsula and the Roman province of Oriens. If history is considered as a longue durée, free from the veiling effects of deconstruction, one cannot fail to recognize the sustained development of a civilization that encompassed all the different but mutually dependent groups in the region, guiding them all along the same broad lines. Close ties between related languages/dialects, scripts, cultures, and beliefs can help us imagine this sort of shared historical space. From the Arab perspective, the “civilizations” created by the migrations retained certain similarities, and they never stopped communicating and intermingling. The example in this chapter should help illustrate the role of one of the most important mechanisms of diffusion in the region: the imaginary. The imaginary is a world located somewhere between the sacred and material spheres. It is where our subconscious archetypes can be

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found: timeless, pre-existing paradigms that have a powerful effect on our consciousness and actions. 1 These archetypes can be transmitted through stories and myths, but also adapted and modified to fit new circumstances or integrated into other religions or cultures. Without myths and stories that are capable of being transmitted in different forms and by different groups over a long period of time, the kind of diverse but interrelated cultural space we are suggesting cannot exist. The imaginary poses a number of problems for science, but they are not really new. The earliest historians were aware of the power of fiction and the imaginary, and were forced to confront the question of how to separate fact and fiction. In the last ten years of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius’ life, thinkers were grappling with a great problem: that since Homer’s time, the history of the Mediterranean appeared to have been encrusted in myth and legend. This was not a new problem, but as communication and transportation in the Roman Empire improved, local stories and marvels began to reach a wider audience. The result was a proliferation of fantasy and the supernatural. The Romans and Greeks struggled to “distinguish corrosion from the hard core” among all the legends. 2 The heroic age was blended into the works of Solon and Cleisthenes, while Romulus, Remus, and Numa were the ancestors of the Gracchi and Cicero. History was simply a story, not a precise biography: “(…) it was the received account of the past that reached back into mythical times without a break.” 3 The hazy line between the real and the imaginary in the Orient has rarely been better described than by Egon Friedell in his work on Sargon the Great. Friedell emphazised – or rather reintroduced – the notion that history must include the mystic and legendary past: “His early life is already cloaked in legend. It was said that his mother gave birth to him in secret and abandoned him in a basket of rushes: a story that would also be told about Krishna, 1 2 3

Carl G. Jung, Archetypen, 16th ed. (Munich: Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2010), 45ff. Bowersock, Fiction as History, 1. Ibid, 7.

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Moses, Cyrus and Romulus. Yet it would be foolish to doubt his historicity because of this. (…) The legend of Sargon contains the same motives as the legend of Moses, just as a leitmotiv marks the hero’s appearance on stage (…). In the grip of early, narrow-minded rationalism, it was even said that any character around whom legends had crystallized must for that reason be considered as suspect. (…) In the truest sense, legends are perhaps the only historical tradition not based on fabrications, because they cannot be invented. It is impossible to imagine a poet, let alone a people, who would be capable of creating a single one of the great heroes and saints. We should certainly believe in ‘legends; and the more so the more absurd they are.” 4 When it comes to the origins and sources of the “Arab” sphere outlined here – one with common roots and in which there were contacts, exchanges, and smooth transitions between religions, regions, and languages – there are few better examples than that of Dilmun, the Sumerian paradise and the place where Gilgamesh went to seek immortality. Imagination and fiction play a crucial connecting role, creating timeless myths that have persisted from the dawn of history right down to the present day, and which have appeared in some form or other in the region’s most important religious and literary works. The power of the imaginary can transform ideas, expressed as fiction or “fact,” into specific experiences and reflections, and can do so over the course of thousands of years. The name Dilmun appears in one of the first written records in history, in the still experimental Sumerian cuneiform script, dated to about 3000 B.C. The tablets were discovered in a temple of the goddess Inanna in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, in the south of modern Iraq. 5 Dilmun was a very special place for the Sumerians. It was described as a “pure” and “sacred” place; a paradise of flowing water and lush vegetation. In the Sumerian creation myth of Enki and Ninhursag, Dilmun is the Egon Friedell, Kulturgeschichte Ägyptens und des Alten Orients, 6th ed. (Nördlingen, 1996), 247f. (Own translation) 5 Harriet Crawford, Dilmun and its Gulf Neighbours (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), 1. 4

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place where Ninhursag scatters Enki’s seed. 6 Their story contains what are probably the most famous and beautiful lines about this paradise: “Pure are the cities — and you are the ones to whom they are allotted. Pure is Dilmun land. Pure is Sumer — and you are the ones to whom it is allotted. Pure is Dilmun land. Pure is Dilmun land. Virginal is Dilmun land. Pristine is Dilmun land. In Dilmun the raven was not yet cawing, the partridge not cackling. The lion did not slay, the wolf was not carrying off lambs, the dog had not been taught to make kids curl up, and the pig had not learned that grain was to be eaten. When a widow had spread malt on the roof, the birds did not yet eat that malt up there. The pigeon then did not tuck its head under its wing. No eye-diseases said there, ‘I am the eye disease.’ No headache said there, ‘I am the headache.’ No old woman belonging to it said there, ‘I am an old woman.’ No old man belonging to it said there, ‘I am an old man.’ No maiden in her unwashed state resided in the city. No man dredging a river said there, ‘It is getting dark.’ No herald made the rounds in his border district. No singer sang an elulam there. No wailings” 7

On closer inspection, this is not really a description of a paradise, but rather a place where cosmic and temporal laws have Ibid., 2. Printed in Beatrice André-Salvini, “‘The land where the sun rises…’ The Representation of Dilmun in Sumerian Literature,” in Harriet Crawford & Michael Rice (Eds.), Traces of Paradise: The Archaeology of Bahrain (London: Dilmun Committee, 2000), 28–35, here 32.

6 7

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yet to be imposed, and which is still in a completely natural state. 8 In the Gilgamesh epic, however, it does start to resemble paradise, or rather some sort of sacred place. The mythical hero travels to visit King Utnapishtim (or Ziusudra in the Sumerian version), the hero of the pre-Biblical Sumerian flood story and the only one to have survived the catastrophe. In thanks, the gods have given him the gift of eternal life. Utnapishtim/Ziusudra’s home is never named in the Gilgamesh epic, where he is simply said to reside at the “mouth of the rivers,” but in the fragments of the earlier Sumerian flood story it is named as Dilmun, a land “where the sun rises.” 9 After the death of his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh visited Ziusudra in order to learn the secret of eternal life. When Ziusudra told him that the “prickly plant” that grows on the sea bed (pearl oyster?) bestows immortality, Gilgamesh dived down to collect it and bring it to the surface. Exhausted, he fell asleep as soon as he returned, and a snake devoured the plant. Since that time, snakes and their skin-shedding have been seen as symbols of immortality and rebirth. Realizing that somebody who is unable resist sleep will also be unable to conquer death, a chastened Gilgamesh returned to Uruk and decided to win immortality through earthly achievements as king of Uruk instead. That is as far as the text in Tablet XI goes. 10 It was not just in myths that Dilmun gradually became more substantial. When the archaeologist Leonard Woolley excavated a residential area in Ur, in the south of modern Iraq, he discovered the house of one Ea-Nasir, an Alik Tilmun, or Dilmun trader. The house contained numerous tablets recording his commercial correspondence. 11 Dilmun was obviously not just a Ibid. “At that time, the king Ziusudra / Who protected the seed of mankind at the time (?) of destruction, / They settled in an overseas country, in the orient, in Dilmun.” Wilfred G. Lambert, Alan R. Millard, & Miguel Civil, Atraḫasīs: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (Oxford: Clarendon,1969), 145. 10 Walter Röllig, Gilgamesh Epos (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2009), 107ff. 11 Joan Oates, Babylon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 77. 8 9

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mystical paradise, but also a trading center for important goods – especially copper – located somewhere between Sumer/Babylon, distant Meluhha (probably the Indus Valley civilization), and Makkan (Oman). Over time, the original perception of Dilmun as a paradise was fleshed out with a tangible, economic side, apparently without causing Dilmun to lose its sacred character. This duality of the sacred/imaginary and the real is unusual, but not unheard of: “A somewhat similar situation can perhaps be seen in nineteenth-century Western Europe where Jerusalem, which in much of the medieval period was inaccessible to the West, was seen as a synonym for perfection. By the late nineteenth century enough travellers had visited the city to know that the reality was very different, but its mythical status was too well established to be dented and remained a powerful metaphor.” 12 Suddenly, it seemed that Dilmun was a real place, and it accordingly attracted a certain amount of academic interest. However, the geographical information about Dilmun in the Gilgamesh epic and other texts was very imprecise. Sargon II described Dilmun as being about thirty beru away from Sumer, in the middle of the sea. Assuming that it is possible to sail about ten miles in a beru (a period of time corresponding to two hours), this gives a distance of about three hundred miles from the coast of southern Iraq. 13 Relatively early on, archaeologists used this figure to suggest that the island of Bahrain must be Dilmun. The distances certainly seem to fit well. The hypothesis was strengthened when an Englishman, Captain Durand, found a stone in Bahrain in 1879 on which was an inscription reading: “The palace of Rinum, servant of the god Enzak.” Enzak was already familiar to scholars as a deity of Dilmun thanks to a Mesopotamian hymn in which he is identified as such. 14 And there was still another important detail that supported the idenCrawford, Dilmun and its Gulf Neighbours, 3. On the Sumerian texts about Dilmun see ibid., 2ff. 14 Durand’s report is printed in Michael Rice, Dilmun Discovered: The Early Years of Archaeology in Bahrain (London: Longman Group, 1984), 9–37. The stone was destroyed during the London Blitz. 12 13

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tification of Bahrain with the Sumerian paradise: it has one of the greatest concentrations of prehistoric tumuli in the world. Large areas of the island are covered with small and large grave mounds, which are now slowly but steadily falling victim to the creep of urbanization. It seemed plausible, therefore, that Sumerian pilgrims might have visited the place in order to die on sacred ground, just as for Shiite believers being buried in the Iraqi city of Najaf is a holy act. In addition, Bahrain is one of the few places in the Arabian Gulf to have an abundance of freshwater sources and lush vegetation, making it seem a “paradise” indeed in contrast to the barren surrounding area. In Arabia’s Hellenistic phase, reports on Dilmun grow more numerous. When Alexander the Great wanted to conquer the Arabian Peninsula, he sent three exploratory expeditions into the Arabian Gulf, commanded by Admirals Archias, Androsthenes, and Hieron. According to Arrian, Archias told Alexander about an island called Tylos – clearly the Greek variant of Dilmun/Tilmun – and praised its lush vegetation. Finally, Nearchus wrote his famous Periplus, a report on a sea voyage, in which he mentioned the existence of a large island called Tylos and a small one called Arados. 15 The island of Muharraq, opposite the peninsula, was still called Arados at the time of Carsten Niebuhr’s expedition in 1765 (in fact the word Muharraq itself preserves a trace of the ancient name). 16 These Hellenistic reports also contain references to the migrations of the Arab/Semitic peoples from the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean. Strabo’s Geography repeats them: “On sailing further, See the summary of Greek and Roman reports on Tylos in Potts, Arabian Gulf, 103–145. For the travel reports see also Schuol, Die Charakene, 260ff. For the change from Dilmun to Tylos see Potts, Arabian Gulf, 127: “As for the obvious similarity between Greek Tylos and Akkadian Tilmun, this transformation has recently been explained by (…) the disappearance of the Akkadian labial m via w, positing an original ‘*Tylwos.’ The m/w substitution in Aramaic names derived from Akkadian is also apparent in the Syrian form of the name, TLWN (…).” 16 Ibid. 15

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there are other islands, Tyre and Aradus, which have temples resembling those of the Phoenicians. The inhabitants of these islands (if we are to believe them) say that the islands and cities bearing the same name as those of the Phoenicians are their own colonies.” 17 The theory that the Phoenicians originated in Dilmun has been a topic of controversy since Strabo’s time. It is certainly striking that the two cities in the Arabian Gulf, Tylos/Tyros and Arados, have almost exactly the same names as two Phoenician cities (Tyre and Arad), both of which are also on an island. It is not implausible that the traditional history of a connection between the two regions could be an echo of the migrations of the Arab/Semitic peoples, who were engaged in their cyclical northerly movements at that time. 18 In the 1950s, the archaeologist Geoffrey Bibby visited the island in search of proof of Dilmun’s identification with modern Bahrain. He began his excavations on one of the island’s highest areas. 19 Near the capital city, Manama, was a Portuguese fort that had used the high ground formed by a debris heap as a defensive location. Success came relatively quickly. Bibby excavated there and found several layers of “cities,” one on top of the other, five to ten meters below the surface. He dated City I to 3000 B.C., in other words right at the beginning of human civilization, and before Gilgamesh. Alongside these cities he made two other crucial discoveries. Not far from Manama, in the small town of Barbar, he discovered a Sumerian temple with a striking architectural feature: via a staircase, worshippers could reach a carefully chiseled, walled-in freshwater spring, which only dried up recently. 20 An important aspect of the Sumerian belief system Strabo, Geography, 16.3.4. Glen W. Bowersock, “Tylos and Tyre: Bahrain in the Graeco-Roman World,” in Shaika H. A. Al-Khalifa & Michael Rice (Eds.), Bahrain through the Ages (London: Kegan Paul International, 1986), 399–406, here 400f. 19 Geoffrey Bibby, Looking for Dilmun (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969). 20 Bowersock, “Tylos and Tyre,” 404f., points out that Androsthenes in his Periplus had recorded the word berberi as the local word for mollusc, and that this is probably the origin of the Arab name for the village near the excavations: 17 18

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was the idea that there was a freshwater ocean beneath the earth. This Abzu was ruled by the god Enki – the god who in the story of Ninhursag created life in Dilmun. 21 Bibby also conducted excavations in neighboring areas of Saudi Arabia, including the island of Failakā, which today is part of Kuwait and is visible from the mainland. On Failakā, Bibby uncovered a small temple and a fort from the Hellenistic period. The temple contained an inscription that named the island as Ikaros, which allowed him to identify the settlement as dating from the time of Alexander the Great. Another inscription in the temple was dedicated to the god Enzak, hinting at a connection between Dilmun and Failakā. Alongside these sensational finds, which provided yet more evidence that the Greeks had settled in this inhospitable region, local workers pointed out a small artificial tell, or hill, built of layers of stone and decorated with numerous flags. They told Bibby that it was the shrine of an Islamic saint, al-Khidr, which in Arabic simply means “the green man.” 22 Worshippers at the shrine tended to come particularly from the Shiite population. According to local tradition, women who wanted to get pregnant would pray at the shrine of al-Khidr on Tuesday nights. At the time, Bibby could not make much of this story, and it was only several years later that he was able to see the name’s significance. While writing his research report, Bibby came across an unsolved problem: if Dilmun is Bahrain, then the name “Bahrain” is no older than Islam. Bahrain is an Arabic dual that means Barbar. There is also a possible connection to the Phoenician city of Tyre: “There is no trace whatever in Nonnos of immigration from the Gulf – unless, by chance, it is to be found in the name of a local water-nymph, who is invoked in a description of the site of Ras al-cain at Tyre. She is called Ἀβαρβαρή (Abarbare), and one cannot help wondering whether here in this strange name there is perhaps an echo of the people who long before, in the Arabian Gulf, had fished for berberi.” 21 The word abzu is the only Sumerian word to have been borrowed into English: as abyss. 22 On the various spellings of Khidr see A. J. Wensick & J. H. Kramers (Eds.), Handwörterbuch des Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1941), 286ff.

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“two seas/lakes.” This meaning is extremely interesting in the context of the Sumerian concept of the two lakes – the freshwater underground Abzu and the saltwater of the sea. In that sense, the Arabic name “Bahrain” continues the Sumerian myth. But there was still the problem that the name was relatively recent. Bibby tried to find out whether Bahrain might in fact be an older name for a geographical location. The Qur’an, the oldest book in Arabic, seemed an obvious place to look, and indeed he found three mentions of Bahrain, two of which are relatively brief. It was the third mention that aroused his curiosity. The word “Bahrain” appears in the second third of the Sura of the Cave (Sura 18, 59–82) in a peculiar story that it is worth printing in full here. 23 “[As for] Moses, he said to his servant, ‘I will not rest until I reach the place where the two seas meet, even if it takes me years!’ but when they reached the place where the two seas meet, they had forgotten all about their fish, which made its way into the sea and swam away. They journeyed on, and then Moses said to his servant, ‘Give us our morning meal! This journey of ours is very tiring,’ and [the servant] said, ‘Remember when we were resting by the rock? I forgot the fish – Satan made me forget to pay attention to it – and it [must have] made its way into the sea.’ ‘How strange!’ Moses said, ‘Then that was the place we were looking for,’ So the two turned back, retraced their footsteps, and found one of Our servants – a man to whom We had granted Our mercy and whom We had given knowledge of Our own. Moses said to him, ‘May I follow you so that you can teach me some of the right guidance you have been taught?’ The man said, ‘You will not be able to bear with me patiently. How could you be patient in matters beyond your knowledge?’ Moses said, ‘God willing, you will find me patient. I will not disobey you in any way.’ The man said, ‘If you follow me then, In the translation by M.A.S Abdel Haleem, The Qur’an, revised ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 187f.

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13. APPENDIX do not query anything I do before I mention it to you myself.’ They travelled on. Later, when they got into a boat, and the man made a hole in it, Moses said, ‘How could you make a hole in it? Do you want to drown its passengers? What a strange thing to do!’ He replied, ‘Did I not tell you that you would never be able to bear with me patiently?’ Moses said, ‘Forgive me for forgetting. Do not make it too hard for me to follow you.’ And so they travelled on. Then, when they met a young boy and the man killed him, Moses said, ‘How could you kill an innocent person? He has not killed anyone! What a terrible thing to do!’ He replied, ‘Did I not tell you that you would never be able to bear with me patiently?’ Moses said, ‘From now on, if I query anything you do, banish me from your company – you have put up with enough from me.’ And so they travelled on. Then, when they came to a town and asked the inhabitants for food but were refused hospitality, they saw a wall there that was on the point of falling down and the man repaired it. Moses said,’ But if you had wished you could have taken payment for doing that.’ He said, ‘This is where you and I part company. I will tell you the meaning of the things you could not bear with patiently: the boat belonged to some needy people who made their living from the sea and I damaged it because I knew that coming after them was a king who was seizing every [serviceable] boat by force. The young boy had parents who were people of faith, and so, fearing he would trouble them through wickedness and disbelief, we wished that their Lord should give them another child – purer and more compassionate – in his place. The wall belonged to two young orphans in the town and there was buried treasure beneath it belonging to them. Their father had been a righteous man, so your Lord intended them to reach maturity and then dig up their treasure as a mercy from your Lord. I did not do [these things] of my own accord: these are the explanations for those things you could not bear with patience.’”

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Clearly, this is a theodicy. Such stories often take the form of a hero who experiences something that makes him doubt the justice of God, but who then regains his faith once the background to the situation is explained. In the 18th Sura these doubts are expressed in an extreme form: infanticide is the most terrible sin imaginable, and the greatest challenge to theodicy (one thinks of the sacrifice of Isaac or Ishmael demanded by God, or of the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem). 24 Bibby realized the role of this “Servant of God” who Moses met at the “meetingplace of the two seas”: in the hadiths and traditions, he was identified with Khidr, 25 the same Khidr whose shrine had been found on Failakā near the Hellenistic and Dilmunic excavations. 26 Khidr appears in several different Arabic versions of the story of Alexander the Great as a scholar with supernatural knowledge who can solve riddles that nobody else can. He is linked to various natural elements, associated with the holy places of Islam, and above all integrated into Islamic cosmogony and eschatology. 27 Khidr legends or stories about meetings with the immortal one, as he is known, circulate throughout the Islamic world, 28 and even in Europe he is not completely unknown. 29 He is immortal because he has drunk from the fountain Patrick Franke, Begegnungen mit Khidr (Beirut: Franz Steiner, 2000), 72. See the Arabic sources in Franke, Begegnungen mit Khidr, 70ff. 26 Bibby, Dilmun, 255ff., says that he only realized the connection between Khidr and Bahrain/Dilmun/Tilmun/Tylos after excavating in the Gulf for many years. But this may be simply a narrative flourish. In 1928, the Jesuit Burrows had mentioned the connection between Khidr and the Servant of God at the meeting of the seas in the 18th Sura in his hand-written report “Bahrain, Tilmun, Paradise” (printed in Rice, Dilmun, 166–192). It is difficult to believe that Bibby had never come across that article. 27 Franke, Khidr, 2. 28 See the summary of “sightings” of Khidr in the Islamic world in ibid., 7ff. 29 Khidr appears at the beginning of Goethe’s West-Östlicher-Diwan, where he calls for a hegira to Chisers Quell: ‘Nord und West und Süd zersplittern, Throne bersten, Reiche zittern: Flüchte du, im reinen Osten Patriarchenluft zu kosten, 24 25

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of life. But why does Khidr meet Moses in the Qur’an, when in the tale of Alexander he is Alexander’s servant? Bibby suspected that he was dealing with a Sumerian/Babylonian story that had found its way into the Qur’an, just as the Sumerian flood story had found its way into the Bible: “It looks as though we have here an alternative story of Gilgamesh, rather different from the Babylonian and Sumerian versions, and transferred by the Koran from the hero Gilgamesh, who was forgotten in the Prophet’s time, to the hero Moses, who was known to every Arab.” 30 If Moses represents Gilgamesh or Enki, then who could Khidr be? Following the storyline of the Gilgamesh epic, Khidr could be identified with Utnapishtim/Ziusudra, who was also immortal and who also lived at the “meeting-place of the two seas.” 31 And so, throughout the ages, transcendental elements like paradise or immortality are manifested and combined in ways that are always new and yet always familiar. Even the Shiite women praying for a child at Khidr’s shrine on Failakā are in a sense asking for immortality... This story reveals the longue durée of the historical events, myths, and concepts associated with the Arab/Semitic peoples: stories that stretch back to the dawn of human civilization have been transmitted and transformed in many different ways by the various Arab/Semitic tribes/peoples and their languages/dialects. The interchange and intermingling that occurred as the Arabs migrated from place to place took different forms depending on the particular circumstances of each meeting. The basic elements were always expressed in new ways, but they are still recognizable after thousands of years. This is the imaginary’s role: as a mechanism for transmitting ideas about fundamental themes like death, immortality, or belief. The imaginary encompasses the sphere of experience that lies hidden behind the familiar horizons of time and space. It is located in

30 31

Unter Lieben, Trinken, Singen Soll dich Chisers Quell verjüngen.’ Bibby, Dilmun, 260. Ibid.

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an intermediate sphere between religion, literature, art, and politics. It includes all the ideas that make up a particular group of people’s image of the world. 32 The power of the imaginary is so persistent because of its deep psychological components. C.G. Jung subjected the 18th Sura to scrutiny, and came to the conclusion that the confluence of the “two seas” could also represent the meeting of the conscious and unconscious minds. The fish that was found and then lost was knowledge. In Jungian terms, Khidr, who represents the archetype of the “self” stored in the unconscious (the self represents the union of the conscious and unconscious in the ideal personality), guides the conscious “ego,” represented by Moses, to wisdom: “Khidr may well be a symbol of the self. His qualities signalize him as such: he is said to have born in a cave, i.e. in darkness. He is the ‘LongLived One,’ who continually renews himself, like Elijah. Like Osiris, he is dismembered at the end of time, by Antichrist, but is able to restore himself to life. He is analogous to the Second Adam, with whom the reanimated fish is identified; he is a counsellor, a Paraclete, ‘Brother Khidr.’ (…) Khidr symbolizes not only the higher wisdom but also a way of acting which is in accord with this wisdom and transcends reason.” 33 The imaginary exists because human beings themselves exist in two worlds, the real one and the imaginary one of dreams and ideas. 34 It is human nature – as Dodds showed in his analysis of supposedly rational Greek culture – to try to break out of the narrow confines of the real world and seek explanations for fundamental questions that have still never been explained: “For Franke, Khidr, 1. Carl G. Jung, “Concerning Rebirth: A Typical Set of Symbols Illustrating the Process of Transformation,” in Gerhard Adler et al. (Eds.), Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 247. Partially reprinted in Jung, Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster, trans. R. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 74f. 34 Évelyne Patlagean, “Die Geschichte des Imaginären,” in Jacques Le Goff et al. (Eds.), Die Rückoberung des historischen Denkens. Grundlagen der Neuen Geschichtswissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), 244–279. 32 33

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normal men it is the sole experience in which they escape the offensive and incomprehensible bondage of time and space.” 35 And in the Islamic world too, especially in the medieval Islamic world, the imaginary – in the form of the ‘alam al-mithāl, the imaginary world of analogies – has been especially important for oppressed groups searching for a level of expression that they no longer have access to in real life. 36 Naturally, the attempt to define the border between the two worlds is an endless task. It generally involves parts of the imaginary being integrated into folk traditions and beliefs, while other borders are redrawn so that certain behaviors or practices can be labelled and ostracized as obsession or madness. 37 Figures like Khidr function as transmission devices or crystallization points for the themes of the imaginary. Khidr is particularly well-suited to this role in Islam because he does not actually appear in the religious texts, and so offers more freedom and flexibility for recording and integrating archetypal myths and events that have moved people since the pre-Islamic period. Khidr “reveals to Moses the secret mystic truth… that transcends the shari’a, and this explains why the spirituality inaugurated by Khidr is free from the servitude of literal reli-

E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: UCP, 1951), 102. See the role of the imaginary in the oppressed Sufi culture: “Without formally denying the reality of the physical world, the Muslim spiritualists – in a milieu of political uncertainty, socioeconomic unbalance, and general external deterioration – sought refuge in a realm that was more satisfying and certainly more liquid and amenable to imaginative powers.” Faizlur Rahman, “Dream, Imagination and ‘Alam al-mithāl,” in Gustav H. von Grunebaum & Roger Caillois (Eds.), The Dream in Human Societies (Berkeley: UCP, 1966), 409–420, here 419. 37 Michel Foucault, in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. R. Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1965), illustrates how Western culture has drawn these borders within its own system by defining the contours of madness. On madness in Classical Greek culture, which was seen positively as “divine mania,” see Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 64. Khidr’s worship is not uncontroversial within Islam itself, and is dismissed by some Wahhabi scholars as heresy and blasphemy. See Franke, Khidr, 264. 35 36

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gion.” 38 In this way Khidr helped to create an important religious continuity. In a sense, the imaginary and the fictional are always also important parts of history, and indeed people have often acted as if there was as much truth in fiction as in history itself. 39 In the Arab region, these sorts of interminglings and exchanges are in no way unusual, and it is clear that a sphere such as this, crisscrossed by wanderings and migrations, is not just brought into being by similar and related languages and cultures, but also – and perhaps even more fundamentally, as the examples of Gilgamesh and Khidr demonstrate – by archetypes that recur in different narratives and address the fundamental questions of life.

38 Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the Earth (New York: SUNY Press, 2005), 70. 39 Bowersock, Fiction as History, 13.

14.

ADDENDUM TO THE GERMAN EDITION: THE RETURN OF THE ORIENTAL The German edition of this book was published at a time of substantial political upheaval and confrontation. As a consequence of armed conflicts in Syria and Iraq, the former heartland of Roman Oriens, hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled their homes and headed for Europe, often only arriving after walking for weeks. The Arab, the distant other, suddenly appeared in the heart of Europe. The long and often troubled relationship between the Orient and Europe was no longer confined to academic discussion, but became a practical, political matter. In response to this mass migration, European political discourse was flooded with pictures and narratives that will be strangely familiar to the reader of this book. Anxiety about losing control of the border to peripheral forces such as the Arabs, fear of changes to the social fabric of Europe – deep-rooted ideas such as these, which were discussed in this book, resurfaced almost immediately. Regaining control of the border suddenly became a political manifesto on which careers could be built! Other Roman strategies re-emerged too, among them the quest to align the Arab countries and Turkey in order to create a buff-

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er or shield against migrants from the Arab region and Africa. 1 Alongside these developments, debate raged about the possibility of integrating these people who were perceived as so strange and different. Could, for instance, German identity be imprinted onto Arabs? Could they be stripped of their traditional identity? Or was it more realistic to imagine that a hybrid, melting-pot form of Germanness would emerge? 2 It is remarkable that, after all these centuries, not only the political situation but also reactions to it and strategies for tackling it seem largely unchanged. The common history of East and West, their shared cultural and linguistic roots and similarities, seem no more than a distant memory, if remembered at all. The Arab – more than ever before – is a stranger to the European. Terror attacks and the emergence of Islamic State into the vacuum created by conflict only encourage and legitimate this divide. European reactions have included the desire to exclude migrants completely, the rise of ethno-nationalistic movements, and negative or racist comments in the press. 3 It is clear that although the history discussed in this book is a thing of the past, its negative patterns remain intact, and indeed seem to gain strength and vigor as the crisis continues. As discussed above, when Oriens was separated from Europe the two sides were compelled to reinvent themselves, dis1 For a discussion of this book in the context of Arab mass migrations to Europe, see Michael Krug, “Araber und Deutsche: Prof. Ayad Al-Ani sieht das Verhältnis durch Historische Bilder belastet,” Sachsen Depesche, 10/24/2016, available online: https://www.hessen-depesche.de/politik/araber-und-deutsche-prof-ayadal-ani-sieht-das-verh%C3%A4ltnis-durch-%E2%80%9Ehistorischebilder%E2%80%9C-belastet.html (07/05/2017). 2 The Economist, “Germany’s election campaign ignores the country’s deeper challenges,” The Economist, 08/03/2017, available online: https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21725805–all-not-dreamy-angelamerkels-coast-victory-makes-it-seem-germanys-election-campaign (08/10/2017). 3 For a comprehensive review of anti-Islamic remarks in the European press see Enes Bayekali & Farid Hafez (Eds.), European Islamophobia Report 2016 (Istanbul: Turkuvaz Haberleşme ve Yayıncılık, 2016).

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carding anything that could hamper the construction of a new identity. It is hard to avoid the feeling that the current situation is quite similar. In such a climate, where otherness is asserted in order to strengthen one’s own position, the search for commonalities or the remembrance of a shared past is clearly out of place – and yet more necessary than ever before. However, this sudden recent proximity between Europeans and Arabs may turn out to stimulate more than just old and new prejudices. It might be possible to find new common ground, aided by a reinvigoration of the cultural and religious similarities described in this book. For that purpose, we need to develop an unbiased view of our shared history as a basis for understanding the commonalities between Arabs and Europeans. The historical era described here may provide some of the necessary material. After all, the Arabs and the West are closely connected and intertwined. This point has seldom been made more clearly than by Ian Morris: “Plenty of political pundits in our own century find it convenient, like Gibbon’s eighteenth-century critics, to imagine Islamic civilization as being outside of and opposed to ‘Western’ civilization (by which they generally mean northwest Europe and its overseas colonies). But that ignores the historical realities. By 700 the Islamic world more or less was the Western core, and Christendom was merely a periphery along its northern edge.” 4 Thus, although they have often found themselves in competition, Arabs and Europeans are part of the same historical space and system. And despite that competition, common ground can be found.

Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now. The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (London: Profile Books, 2010), n. 5551.

4

PLATES

The magnificently chiseled well chamber of the Barbar temple of the Dilmun period, modern Bahrain. The well represents the Abzu or Abyss, the ocean of fresh water under the earth. Enki, the lord of the Abzu is strongly tied to Dilmun and the Gilgamesh legend: it was Enki who intervened to save Utnapishtim/Ziusudra from the Deluge, and Ziusudra settled in Dilmun. Courtesy: Moesgaard Museum.

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A digital elevation model of the site of Alexandria-on-theTigris, later known as Charax Spasinou, modern Basra province, Iraq (picture above). The remains are spread over more than five square kilometres. The still impressive, eroded ramparts are between 4 meters high and 15-20 meters wide (picture below). The ramparts were integrated into the Iraqi defence lines in the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88). Courtesy: Charax Spasinou Project.

PLATES

Image from the early 1960s excavations of a temple at Ikaros island, modern Failakā, Kuwait. The temple plan has classical Greek features with an east-facing altar, albeit on a modest scale. The Ionic columns rest, however, on bases in Persian Achaemenid style. Close to the entrance of the temple, the stele of Ikadion, a Seleucid official, was found. The text of the stele addresses the islanders: “Anaxarchos to the inhabitants of Ikaros greetings. Hereafter we are conveying to you the transcript of a letter Ikadion gave us. When you then receive this letter, having engraved it on a stele expose it in the sanctuary …”. Courtesy: Moesgaard Museum.

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Mosaic from the eight-century church of St. Stephen in Castron Mefaa, modern Umm al-Raṣāṣ, Jordan. Long after the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik had eliminated Greek from the Arab administration, the style and accompanied explanatory text in Greek hint to the presence of a strong tradition unabated by the new rulers. The mosaic city vignettes attempt to show urban centres of the Oriens in an architecturally realistic way: Castron Mafaa (first on the right from the top) is shown with its recently excavated walled castrum in the background and a free-standing object, the ancient emblem of Mefaa, in the center. Courtesy: Ian Bottle/Alamy Stock Photo.

MAPS

Map 1: Important centers of Hellenistic and Roman Oriens mentioned in Chapter 5. The Strata Diocletiana, which ran from Damascus to the Euphrates, was a central part of the Roman limes arabicus and formed the border between Rome’s Arab foederati and the Arab vassals of the Sassanids, the Lakhmids.

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Map 2: Locations and battle sites mentioned in the discussion in Chapters 6 and 7 of the period of transition from the Roman Empire to the emergent Islamic Empire. Starting in Mecca and Medina, Muhammad’s Arabs first fought an inconclusive battle against the Romans and the Arab foederati at Mu’ta (629) and then won an overwhelming victory at Jābiya-Yarmūk in 636. Damascus and Jerusalem were conquered soon afterwards.

MAPS

Map 3: Places in the Arabian Gulf mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh discussed in Chapter 13 (Ur, Dilmun). Alexander’s admirals referred to Sumerian Dilmun and modern Bahrain as Tylos and Arados respectively. Dilmun/Tylos had a central role in the copper trade between Sumer/Babylon and Makkan (Oman) and Meluhha (Indus Valley civilization).

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INDEX Abbasids 11, 160, 163–5 ‘Abd al-Malik, Caliph 69, 147, 155, 230 ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib 32 Abgar, King 77n38 Abraham 114, 182n9, 187 Abraham (advisor to Justinian) 108 Abrahamic ecumene 156, 161, 163 Abū Bakr 131n8, 136n23 Abu’l-Barakāt 166n21 Abydenus 71 Abzu/Abyss 215–16, 227 Actia Dusaria 97 Adrianople, Battle of 115 Aelius Gallus 102 Aemilius Iuncus (plotter) 99 Afghanistan 62, 154 Aḥūdemeh (Metropolitan) 31n40, 188 Aischylos 70 Aivitus (prefect) 102n126 Akkadian 37, 213n15 Al-’Akhṭal 157n15 Alamoundaras see Mundhir Al-‘Aqaba 135

Al-Balādhurī 11, 69 Aleppo 138n27, 164 Alexander the Great 12, 19, 62–5, 113n162, 121, 213, 215, 218–19, 233 Attack on Gaza 64 Conquest of Arabia xvi Conquest of Babylon 71 Conquest of Tyre 64 Death 63, 65 Victory over Persian Empire 63 Alexandria 102n126, 113n162 Alexandria-on-the-Tigris see Charax Spasinou Al-Ḥārith see Arethas Al-Khidr 215, 218–22 Al-Mahdī (caliph) 164–5 Al-Manṣur (caliph) 163 Almoundaros see AlMundhir Al-Mu‘allaqāt 105, 191 Al-Mundhir (Ghassānid Basileus) 83, 133–4 Al-Qa’ida 130n6 Al-Ruṣāfī 196, 201 257

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Al-Samaw’al bin ‘Ādiyā’ 105 Al-Ṭabarī 11, 153n2 Al-Ya‘qūbī 164 Amalekites 24–5 Ammianus 63, 104, 113, 115–16 ‘Amr bin al-‘Aṣ 163 ‘Amr bin ‘Adī (Tanūkh king) 100 ‘Amr ibn Luḥai 66 Anatolia 10, 153 Andalusia see Spain Androsthenes (admiral) 213 Annonae 101, 111n156 Antigonus 19 Antioch 75n33, 115–16, 134n15, 138n27 Antipater (grandfather of Herod) 78 Anti-Semitism ix, 174 Appolodorus (Babylonian scientist) 71 Arab Spring xiii Arabia Deserta 36 Arabia Felix 36 Arabian Peninsula xiv, 3, 5–6, 10, 14, 17, 23–4, 27, 32, 36–7, 40, 43, 46, 51, 59, 63, 65, 75, 103, 128–30, 133, 145, 155, 180, 182, 186, 203, 207, 213 Arabic And Proto-Semitic 27 And Sabean 8–9

As Matrix language/koine 37–9, 41, 44, 46–50, 143–4, 149, 159, 162, 185, 200 Formalization as vernacular 199 Poetry 22, 148 Proto-Arabic 42 Use of by Greeks 75 Words drawn from Roman military vocabulary 83 Arabization of Oriens 10, 22, 30, 75, 79, 104–9, 127, 130, 139, 159 Arabs And Monotheism 56, 67, 95, 180–4, 186–7, 190–2, 194, 197, 199, 205 As Cives 22, 79, 115, 117 As Foederati 3–4, 10, 17, 22, 57, 80–5, 101, 103–5, 107–8, 110–13, 115–18, 127–8, 130, 132–3, 137, 144, 151n27, 154, 164, 172, 176, 231–2 As Kulturnation 50, 147, 149, 185 As Tayaye 10 Jewish 144, 151, 184 Power in Roman Empire 86–8, 90–105, 109, 113

INDEX Rebellion against Roman rule 97–104 Taking Greek and Roman names 20, 62, 74, 87 Tolerance of other ethnic groups 146 Viewed as barbarians vii, x, 3, 54–5, 70n21, 86, 112–13, 115–17, 172, 205 Viewed as descended from the slave, Hagar 114 Viewed as scenitae 112, 114–16 Viewed as thieves 114 Arad 214 Arados see Muharraq Aramaic 3, 10, 18, 21, 27, 30–1, 41n12, 46, 49, 75, 88n72, 102, 149, 179, 181, 187–9, 200n64, 213n15 in France 124 in Qu’ran 5, 7 Arameans 10, 18–19, 24, 30, 40, 51, 75 Archias (admiral) 213 Aretas (Nabatean king) 18 Arethas (Ghassānid Phylarch) 41n12, 84, 108–9, 117, 200n64 Arethusa 87n72 Aristobulus 64n5 Aristotle 113n162, 156 Armenia 163 Armenians 18n1

259 Assyria 13, 40, 73, 108n147 Athens 20 Augustus 93, 97, 102 Aurelian 100–1 Avidius Cassius 97–100 Babylon 13, 64–5, 71, 73, 154, 212, 233(map) Babylonian 27, 38 Baghdad 62, 155 Bahrain 35n51, 65, 155, 212–16, 218n26, 227, 233(map) Barbar (Bahrain) 214–15, 227 Bashear, Suliman 58–9 Basra 65n7, 76n37, 191n33, 228 Batis (Arab commander) 64 Becker, Carl 120–1 Beit Arabiya 94 Belisarius (Roman general) 108n147, 117 Ben Koreish, Jehuda 28–9, 46 Benedict (Pope) 171 Beth Qatraye 154–5 Bethlehem 161 Church of 163 Massacre of the Innocents 218 Bibby, Geoffrey 214–16, 218–19 Bible 13, 23, 25, 29, 59, 174n18, 187, 219 Bostra 66, 97, 107, 131, 231(map) Brünnow, Rudolph 81n52

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Burhān al-Dīn Dallū 52 Callinicum, Battle of 116– 18 Callinicus (Nabatean sophist) 20 Canaanite 23, 30, 43 Canaanites 40 Caracalla 20, 78, 87–9, 92 Carrhae 76 Cartagena 123 Carthage 123 Chalcis 77, 151, 231(map) Battle of 109 Charax Spasinou 65n7, 75– 6, 228, 231(map) Charlemagne 122, 156n12 Christ xv, 42n15, 77n38, 82, 115, 182, 187, 195– 6 Christianity ix–x, xvi, 2, 15–16, 41, 81–3, 92, 95n101–2, 101–2, 112, 115–16, 124n195, 129, 135, 139, 144–5, 153–4, 157, 159–61, 163n13, 167, 169–71, 175–6, 181–2, 187–90, 194–5, 205 Cicero 88, 113, 208 Cilicians 98 Clash of Civilizations ix, 12, 15, 56–7, 174, 205; see also Lewis, Bernhard Cleisthenes 208 Cleopatra 100, 103 Colonialism ix, 55; see also Imperialism Commodus 98–9

Constantine 82, 101n124, 116 Constantine (Pope) 189n30 Constantinople 53, 84, 103–5, 115–16, 134n15, 151–2, 159–60 Copts 120, 146 Cordoba 123 Crone, Patricia 180-81, 198 Crucifix Introduction to Europe by the Syrians 124n195 Crusades ix, 15, 169 Cuneiform 29–30, 38, 209 Cyrus 70, 209 Dadanitic 9 Damascus 31, 39, 66, 138, 152, 163, 231–2(map) Danube 93, 125 Dārīn see Tārūt Darius 36 De-Arabization xiv–xv, 2– 7, 9–16, 19, 22, 25–7, 33–5, 39–41, 51, 54–6, 58, 62, 73n29, 76n37, 86, 94–5, 128–9, 131, 138, 143, 149, 167, 169, 172, 174, 179–81, 185, 190, 204–5 Decius 93 Dedan 36 Dilmun 187n21, 209–15, 218, 227, 233(map); see also Bahrain, Tylos Dio, Cassius 87n72, 89, 98 Diocletian 80, 106 Diodorus 19

INDEX Diogenes 71–2 Dionysus, cult of 68 Dūma 36 Durand (English captain) 212 Edessa 41, 75–7, 94 Egypt xiii, 1n1, 6, 8, 30, 36, 43n18, 61, 63, 71, 76, 94, 98, 100 Elagabalus 78, 85, 88, 90– 3, 96n104, 101, 182n9 Elam/Elamites 23 Elusa 188n25 Emesa 66, 77, 87, 101, 138, 231(map) Enki 209–10, 215, 219, 227 Enzak 212, 215 Ethiopia 23, 163n13, 192 Euphrates 22n15, 30n39, 75, 77, 117, 161, 231 Eusebius of Caesarea 77–8, 115–16, 124 Eutychius 163 Failakā 65, 215, 218–19, 229, 233(map) Farasan 102n126 Faustina (daughter of Antoninus Pius) 98 Faw (Al–Faw) 43n17, 68, 232(map) Fertile Crescent 31, 55, 94, 102, 129 Foedus 84, 103, 115 Forat 75 Gallienus 99 Gaza 64–5, 111n156, 131n7, 153n1, 231(map)

261 Genethlius (Nabatean) 20 Gerasa 107 Ghassān/Ghassānids 53, 81n52, 83–5, 96, 107–9, 111, 117, 131–5, 138, 151, 153, 199, 200n64 Gibbon, Edward 118, 173 Gilgamesh 38, 187n21, 209, 211–12, 214, 219, 222, 227, 233 Glock, Albert 4, 13–14, 58 Gordian 93, 95 Goths 84, 103 Battle for Constantinople 115–16 Gracchi 208 Greek Use of in Arabia 68–70, 72, 74 Gregory III (Pope) 189n30 Hadrian 91, 94n98 Hadrian’s Wall 125 Hagar (slave) 31n39, 114 Hagia Sofia 111 Hanifs 181–2, 185n18, 187n22, 192–4, 199 Hatra/Hatrans 41, 76, 88n72, 94 Hauran 75, 81n52, 95n101 Hebrew 23, 27, 29–30, 38, 46, 75, 189n29 Hebrews 24, 28–30 Hegel, Georg W. F. 175–6 Heine, Heinrich 176–7 Heliodorus 20, 74, 98 Hellenism 34, 57, 62–3, 65, 67–74, 76, 144, 153, 167, 182

262

THE ARABS FROM ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Hellenization 66, 74–5 Heraclius 2, 84, 110–11, 132, 134–5, 137, 139– 40, 150–2, 162, 169, 198 Herod 18, 78 Herodotus 70 Hieroglyphic 30 Hieron (admiral) 213 Hijaz 181n7 Hijazi 27 Ḥīra 11n26, 22n15, 132–3, 154, 232(map) Hishām (caliph) 164 Homer 72, 208 Homs see Emesa Ḥusain, Ṭāhā 57–8, 73, 191 Iamblichus 20, 87n72 Ibn Barun 46 Ibn Khaldun 45n20, 95n101, 157 Ibn Koraish, Judah see Ben Koreish, Jehuda Idumeans 25n23, 77–8 As Arabs 18–19 Ikaros see Failakā Imperialism ix, 61; see also Colonialism Imru’ al-Qais (son of ‘Amr bin ‘Adī) 100; see also Namāra inscription India 62, 154, 157, 167 Indignae viii, 10, 79 Indonesia xiii Iran 160, 228 Iraq 1–2, 6, 11, 63, 65n7, 75–6, 88, 94, 131–2, 136, 144, 154, 163, 209,

211–13, 223, 228; see also Babylon Isaac ibn Ezra 166n21 Ishmael 114, 150, 218 Islam And Christianity 145, 170–1 And Monotheism 150, 160–2, 166, 180, 193–6, 198–9, 205 Integration of Jews and Christians 14–15, 160– 2, 180 Islamic art 120 Islamophobia 56–7, 224n3 Israel 1n1, 3–4, 59n22, 73n29 Iturians 77 Jabala ibn al-’Aiham 85, 108n147, 151–3 Jābiya 1, 81n52, 109, 132, 232(map); see also Yarmūk, Battle of Jafnids 110n154 Jāhilī 187, 191 Jawād ‘Alī 26, 32, 52 Jazm (script) 43–4 Jerome 188n25 Jerusalem 111n157, 114n165, 135, 141, 160n3, 162–4, 212, 232(map) Church of Constantine 163 Destruction 123 Jews 13, 15, 19, 41, 74–5, 86–7, 113, 138n27, 144,

INDEX 146, 155, 157, 160, 184, 187, 193, 195–6, 205 And Aramaic 10 Conversion to Islam 165–6 Integration into Islamic Empire 150 Synagogues 163n13 Jidh‘ (Salīḥ chief) 82 John of Dailam 155–6 John of Damascus 157 Jordan 1–2, 47, 59, 63, 68, 70, 77, 153n1, 230 Josephus 18–19 Judaism 19, 78, 160, 163n13, 166–7, 170, 181, 190, 192, 195 Julia Domna 85–9, 92, 103, 112, 172–3 Julia Maesa (sister of Julia Domna) 88 Julia Mammaea (mother of Severus Alexander) 88 Julia Soemias (mother of Elagabalus) 88 Julius Caesar 93 Victory over Pompey 78 Jung, Carl 220 Justin I 107 Justin II 84 Justinian 54n6, 83, 107– 10, 117, 134 Kaaba 66, 114n165, 151, 182 Khalid al-Qasri (Umayyad governor of Iraq) 163 Khālid b. al-Walīd 132n8

263 Kidenas/Kidinnu (Babylonian) 71 Kūfa 154, 163, 191n33 Kuwait 65, 215, 229 Lakhmids 11n26, 36n54, 83n58, 107, 109, 132, 154, 199, 231 Lares 198 Latin 21–2, 25, 38, 57, 83, 176n24 Lebanon 1–2, 77, 79 Legio II Traiana Fortis 102n126 Leptis Magna see Libya Lewis, Bernhard ix, xiii, 56, 61, 173 Libya xiii, 87 Limes Arabicus 80–1, 83–4, 99, 106–9, 111, 114, 133, 153n1, 231 Limitanei 80, 106–8, 133 Livy 113n162 Lucian 72, 74n29 Lucilla (sister of Commodus) 97–8 Lucius Julius Salamallianus 87 Lüling, Günther 181, 191– 2, 194n45, 199n60 Luxenberg, Christoph 5, 181 Maimonides 166n21 Makkan 212, 233(map) Malchius see Porphyry Manama (Bahrain) 214 Mandaeans 41 Mandaic 27 Manichees 41

264

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Manuel II (Byzantine emperor) 171 Marcus Aurelius 87, 97–9, 208 Marcus Julius Philippus 78, 85–6, 89, 93–7, 100, 112, 115–16, 174 Marj Rāhiṭ, Battle of 111– 12 Marx, Karl 20 Mas‘ūdī (historian) 184n14, 186 Mavia 83–4, 96, 103–5, 115–16, 189 Mecca 102, 133–4, 136, 180, 182, 184–5, 193, 196–8, 205, 232(map) Medina 131n7, 135–6, 198n57, 232(map) Mesēne see Charax Spasinou Mesopotamia 13, 18n1, 30n39, 36, 55, 76–7, 87, 93, 120, 127, 162, 209 Literature 70 Mithras (deity) 91n89 Monophysitism 80, 84n62, 104, 118, 133 Monotheism 56, 67, 92–3, 95, 101, 144, 150, 156, 160–2, 164, 166, 180–4, 186–7, 190–9, 201n65, 205 Moses 209, 216–21 Moses (Arab Orthodox bishop) 84, 103 Mu‘āwiya I (caliph) 138, 147, 159, 163

Muhammad xiii, 5–6, 11, 31, 66, 69, 85n63, 119n175, 122, 131, 133–5, 147, 173, 180–5, 192, 194, 196, 200–1, 219 Muḥammad ‘Aql 24 Muharraq 213–14, 233(map) Mundhir (Lakhmid king) 107–9, 133–4 Musnad script 42–5, 68, 187n22, 203–4 Mu’ta, Battle of 111, 135, 232(map) Muthannā b. Hāritha alSaybān (tribal leader) 136n23 Nabatea/Nabateans 10, 31n41, 36n55, 41, 43, 51, 77, 94, 124 Arab 18–20 Fall 101 Nabatean 9, 43, 47, 49 Inscriptions in Rome 124 Najaf 11n26, 154, 213 Najrān 8, 102, 182n8, 188n26, 232(map) Namāra inscription 50, 100 Napoleon Occupation of Egypt 61 Naṣrids 110n154 Nationalism Arab 23, 53, 204 Nearchus (admiral) 213 Negev desert 69, 188n25

INDEX Nestorian Church 62, 148n20, 154–6, 160 New York 4n7 Nicephorus 153n2 Niebuhr, Carsten 213 Ninhursag 209–10, 215 Nöldeke, Theodor 12n34, 23–5, 32, 53, 83–4, 118n172, 160, 186 Nome Arabia 36 Nu‘mān (Lakhmid king) 154 Numidia 87 Odenathus (king of the Palmyrans) 78, 87, 99 Oman see Makkan Oriens vii, xiv–xvi, 1–3, 5– 6, 9–10, 15, 17, 21–2, 27, 30–1, 37, 40–1, 47– 9, 51, 54, 57, 63, 68–70, 73–7, 79–80, 84–6, 88, 99–111, 119n175, 127– 39, 143–7, 149–51, 153– 6, 159–61, 164–5, 169– 70, 172, 176, 180, 184, 188–90, 204–5, 207, 223–4, 230–1 Definition of 1n1 Orientalism xn3, xvi, 3, 12, 15, 40, 51, 56, 61, 63, 86, 89–91, 94, 96, 110– 23, 170–4, 176, 204 Origins 112–23 Orientalization xvi, 15, 57, 89–90, 173 Origen of Alexandria 78n43 Osroeni 77

265 Palestine 1–2, 6, 13–14, 28, 36, 43n18, 58–9, 63, 77, 111n156, 128n1, 137n24, 169 Palmyra/Palmyrenes 41, 66, 75, 77–8, 99–103, 231(map) Fall 101–2 Funerary memorial in Northumberland 125 Rebellion 81–2 Palmyrene Inscriptions in Rome 124 Papinian (advisor to Caracalla) 92 Parthians 77, 80, 113n162 Peregrini 20; see also Rhomaioi Persia xv, 2, 4, 11, 63, 65n5, 76, 82, 84–5, 93, 95, 99, 105–11, 117, 128, 132–40, 154, 161– 2, 196–8 Petra 20, 77, 231(map) Philadelphia (Amman) 107 Philip the Arab see Marcus Julius Philippus Philippopolis see Shahbā Phoenicia/Phoenicians 19n7, 23, 35n51, 51, 64, 123, 123, 214–15 Phoenician 27, 43, 75 Pindar 105 Pirenne, Henri 122–4 Plato 72 Poitiers, Battle of 189n30 Pompey 77–8, 93

266

THE ARABS FROM ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Conquest of the Arabs 61 Reorganization of Oriens xvi, 14, 77 Porphyry 20 Procopius 54, 63, 107–8, 116–18, 124 Proto-Semites 6, 203 Provincia Arabia 14, 70, 97, 124, 131n7 Definition 36 Puteoli 123–4 Qatar 155 Qinnasrīn see Chalcis Qu’ran 24, 45–6, 52n1, 56n13, 130, 162, 179– 83, 185, 192–3, 198–9, 205, 216, 219 Language 5–7 Quraysh tribe 134, 193, 197n56 Quss bin Sā‘ida (Bishop of Najrān) 184 Racism 55, 113, 174 Red Sea 29n35, 36, 43n18, 94 Renaissance 121 Retsö, Jan 9, 19, 21–22, 33–4, 52, 146 Rhomaioi 10, 20, 48, 62, 73, 87n67, 89, 99, 110, 112, 130, 138n27, 144 Ridda wars 131–2 Riegl, Alois 120 Romulus 208–9 Sabaic/Sabean 8–9, 21, 45n19, 49 Safaitic 47, 49, 124, 203

Said, Edward ix–x, 12, 61, 63, 170, 173–4 Saif ibn dhī Yazan (Yemenite ruler) 32 Salibi, Kamal 59 Salīḥ (tribe) 82–3 Ṣammā al-Bardān 66 Samau’al al-Maghribi 166n21 Sampsiceramus 87n72 San Francisco 4n7 Saracens viii, 10, 34n48, 62, 103, 108n147, 113, 115–17, 119n175, 157n15, 173 Sargon II 212 Sargon of Agade 70, 208–9 Sargon the Great see Sargon of Agade Sassanids xv, 4, 53, 79–80, 127, 130–1, 136, 162, 231 Saudi Arabia 10, 59, 68, 155, 182n8, 215 Sebokht, Severus 73 Seleucids 63, 65, 74n33, 100, 229 Seleucus 71 Semites viii, xv, 6–7, 18– 19, 23–6, 35n52, 40, 96n104, 195, 203 Semitic languages 5–9, 14, 22–30, 37–41, 43, 46, 75, 189, 203 And Indo–European languages 28 Proto–Semitic 37

INDEX Septimius Severus 78, 85, 87–8, 94n98 Severans 57, 86, 88–9, 92– 3, 100, 172–3 Severus Alexander 78n42, 88–9, 93–4, 182n9 Persian War 124–5 Shahbā 96 Shahîd, Irfan 8, 12, 17–18, 53–5, 84n62, 103, 113, 117, 131n7 Shapur I 99 Shem (son of Noah) 23 Sicily 125, 134 Simon ben Yoḥai (Rabbi) 150 Sinai 1n1, 36, 114n165 Singara 76, 94 Sisinnius (Pope) 189n30 Socrates (ecclesiastical historian) 104 Solon 208 Sophia (wife of Justin II) 84n62 Sophronius (patriarch of Jerusalem) 161 Sozomen (ecclesiastical historian) 103–4 Spain 11, 123, 125, 148, 156n13, 166, 176 St. Stephen’s church, Umm al-Raṣāṣ, Jordan 70, 230 Strabo 18, 36n54, 64, 76n37, 87n72, 213–14 Strzygowski, Josef 120 Sūsa, ’Aḥmad 12

267 Syria 1–2, 6, 18–19, 31n40, 36, 43n18, 47, 57, 63–6, 74–9, 86–7, 89n78, 93– 5, 97–9, 109, 117, 128n1, 132–4, 138, 149, 159n1, 165n19, 192, 223 Syriac 31, 45n19, 144, 188–9 Syrians 10, 18, 73, 89, 93– 5, 99, 113, 123, 189 In Britain, France, Germany and Italy 124–5 Taghlib (tribe) 151, 165n19 Taimā’ 36 Tanūkh (tribe) 31n40, 82– 3, 99–100, 164–5 Tariq Ibn Ziyad 125 Tārūt 155 Taurus Mountains 1n1, 8, 30 Thaim (son of Sa’ad) 124 Thamudic 47 Theodoret (ecclesiastical historian) 104 Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus 87, 98 Tibet 62, 154 Tiglath-Pileser I 31n39 Timothy I (Catholicus) 155–6 Trajan 94n98, 172 Tripoli 138n27 Tylos 65, 213-14, 218n26, 233(map); see also Bahrain, Dilmun Tyre 64, 214–15

268

THE ARABS FROM ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Tyros see Tylos ‘Udhra tribe 176 Ugaritic 38–9 ‘Ukāẓ 183–4 Ulpian (advisor to Caracalla) 92 Umar I (caliph) 136n23, 147, 151, 162, 165n19 Umayyads 69, 154–5, 159, 163–4, 198n59 Ur 211, 233(map) Urhāi see Edessa Ur–Semites/Ur–Semitic 6 Uruk 72n24, 209, 211 Utnapishtim 211, 219, 227 Vaelius Rufus (plotter) 99 Valens 83–4, 103, 115 Vespasian 86–7 Victor (Roman officer) 84 Vologasia 76 Von Domaszewski, Alfred (German Orientalist) 89, 92, 96n104 Von Grunebaum, Gustave 34–5, 146

Von Oppenheim, Max 121 von Schlözer, August Ludwig 5, 23 Wansbrough, John 179, 198n59 Wellhausen, Julius 25n22, 67, 183, 194n44 Yarmūk, Battle of 1–2, 4, 9–10, 61–2, 81n52, 83– 5, 110–12, 127–41, 143, 147, 151, 153, 161–2, 164, 232(map) Yazid I (caliph) 157n15 Yazīd II (caliph) 163–4 Yemen xiii, xv, 37, 46, 102n126, 184 Yemenites 42, 45, 203 Proto-Arabic 42 Zagros Mountains 8, 30 Zenobia 78, 96, 99–101, 103–4 Ziusudra see Utnapishtim Zosimus 63, 88, 95–6, 116