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Review: The Great Arab Conquests

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  • Review: The Great Arab Conquests

    REVIEW: THE GREAT ARAB CONQUESTS
    By Max Rodenbeck

    The International Herald Tribune
    www.iht.com
    Friday, January 4, 2008

    The Great Arab Conquests How the Spread of Islam Changed the World
    We Live In. By Hugh Kennedy. Illustrated. 421 pages. $27.95. Da
    Capo Press.

    Few events in history have had so swift, profound and far-reaching an
    impact as the arrival of Islam. Within a mere 15 years of the Prophet
    Muhammad's death, in A.D. 632, his desert followers had conquered all
    the centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization. They had erased
    a great and enduring regional power, Persia; reduced its brilliant
    rival, Byzantium, to a rump state; and carved from their territories
    an empire as vast as that of Rome at its height. Within 100 years,
    Muslim armies were harrying the frontiers of Tang dynasty China in
    the east, while 5,000 miles to the west, they had charged across
    Spain to clash with the Merovingian princes of what is now France.

    The triumph was not just military. The explosive expansion of Islam
    severed at a stroke the 1,000-year-old links of commerce, culture,
    politics and religion that had bound the southern and northern
    shores of the Mediterranean. It created, for the first and only time,
    an empire based entirely upon a single faith, bound by its laws and
    devoted to its propagation. It uprooted long-embedded native religions,
    like Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in Central Asia and Hinduism
    in much of the Indus Valley. It transformed Arabic from a desert
    dialect into a world language that, for centuries, supplanted Latin
    and Greek as the main repository of human knowledge.

    And yet strangely, the question of how the Muslim Arabs achieved
    all this, in such a short time, remains puzzling. Not that no one
    has tried to explain it. The Arabs themselves built a rich literary
    tradition around the seemingly miraculous success of Islam. But these
    martial histories of the futuhat, or "openings," won by the new faith
    tended to focus on the moral superiority, zeal and courage of the
    victors rather than on more mundane factors that might have aided
    them. Much attention was paid to such details as the genealogy of
    Arab generals and the precise division of booty, at the expense of
    accurate chronology and geography.

    Modern historians have generally discounted the Arab histories,
    emphasizing instead how the calamitous upheavals of late antiquity
    sapped capacities to resist the Muslim invasions. Because of the
    difficult nature of textual sources, which include rare materials in
    Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Persian and even Chinese as well
    as Arabic, and because of the relative paucity of archaeological
    research into early Islam, recent scholarship has also tended to be
    area- and theme-specific. Not for a generation has anyone attempted
    a broad political history of Islam's first century.

    Few writers are better equipped for such a task than Hugh Kennedy. A
    professor of medieval history at the University of St. Andrews, in
    Scotland, he has written scores of articles and numerous books on
    the early period of Islam, including popular histories as well as
    scholarly studies. Kennedy is a fastidious historian, refraining
    from undue speculation and sticking close to his sources. He is
    also a judicious one. Rather than dismissing suspect material,
    like triumphalist Muslim histories, he prefers to sift through them
    in search of clues. Occasionally, he finds corroborating evidence
    that some of these accounts appear closer to the truth than fellow
    historians have assumed.

    Given the immense geographical scope of the work and the spotty,
    disjointed nature of the evidence, Kennedy has wisely chosen to
    organize the book simply, in more or less chronological fashion, one
    campaign after another. He begins, however, with a pair of useful
    chapters, one surveying the textual and archaeological sources for
    the period, the second outlining the shape of Arab society at the
    onset of the great Islamic expansion.

    Far from being wild, illiterate Bedouins, Kennedy shows, the early
    Muslim leaders were sophisticated townsmen and highly competent
    commanders. Once they had rallied a critical mass of converts, the
    swift adherence to the new faith of tribes from across the Arabian
    Peninsula created its own impetus for conquest. Arabian society had
    been geared to intertribal conflict. Having now submitted to the
    authority of a single leader, the Muslim caliph, nomadic warriors had
    to direct their energies outward or risk tearing the nascent Islamic
    nation apart. Their fighting spirit was further primed by the doctrine
    of jihad, which promised both earthly and heavenly rewards.

    Martyrs were assured a special place in paradise, while soldiers were
    allowed to keep four-fifths of captured booty.

    Yet the Muslims' esprit de corps, their desert-trained mobility
    and the cleverness of their generals still cannot explain how such
    astonishingly small armies - perhaps 30,000 men for the conquest of
    Syria, 10,000 for Iraq, 16,000 for Egypt - so swiftly overran these
    densely populated lands. Several other factors proved crucial. The
    most important was timing. Beginning around 540, repeated epidemics
    of bubonic plague appear to have drastically reduced populations
    across the Near East and the Mediterranean. Political turmoil was
    to weaken the region more. Using the assassination of the Byzantine
    emperor Maurice in 602 as a pretext, the shah of Sasanian Persia,
    Chosroes II, mounted a blitzkrieg that swept his armies through
    the rich provinces of Syria and Egypt, and across Anatolia as far
    as Constantinople. It was not until 624 that the Byzantines under
    Heraclius counter-attacked, landing an army on the shore of the Black
    Sea, behind Persian lines, that sacked and pillaged its way south
    through the Persian heartlands. Heraclius recaptured Jerusalem in 630,
    while Chosroes' son Kavad II, who ascended to the throne after his
    father was murdered in a coup, sued for peace.

    But the decades of war, in the manner of a Quentin Tarantino script,
    had left both Byzantium and Persia stunned and bleeding. The sudden
    Muslim advance found them completely unprepared. As Kennedy notes, "If
    Muhammad had been born a generation earlier and he and his successors
    had attempted to send armies against the great empires in, say, 600,
    it is hard to imagine they would have made any progress at all."

    Worse yet, for Heraclius, schism among Christian sects led many
    Egyptians and Syrians to side with the Arab invaders against the
    Byzantines, who had tried to impose orthodoxy by brute force. To the
    Muslims' further advantage, they demanded relatively lenient terms:
    those among the vanquished who did not embrace Islam could worship as
    they liked, on payment of an annual tax that was no more burdensome
    than what they had paid before.

    The Muslim advance was not always painless, as Kennedy reveals in
    a poignant chapter that gives voice to the conquered. On several
    occasions, cities that resisted were razed, their inhabitants
    slaughtered or enslaved. In North Africa, the scale of slave raiding
    was so large that it sparked a huge Berber uprising. Across much of
    the swiftly conquered territory, the Muslims' hold remained tenuous
    for generations. It is significant that the expansion out of Arabia
    happened in two waves. The first exploited the weakness of the
    collapsed neighboring empires. The second, two generations later,
    used the Muslims' newfound strength but failed to push borders back
    very far. It is remarkable, in fact, how stable the peripheries of
    Islam have remained ever since, excepting the loss of Spain to the
    Christian Reconquista and Muslim forays into India, the Balkans and
    the East Indies. But these events came centuries later, and Islam's
    final military triumphs were achieved not by Arabs, but by Turks.

    Kennedy's reluctance to pronounce sweeping judgments may disappoint
    general readers. His preference for dwelling on lesser-known episodes
    like the conquest of Central Asia, rather than on such oft-related
    exploits as the capture of Spain, is also more likely to please
    scholars than laymen. Fellow historians may fault Kennedy, too, for
    relying on textual evidence more than on archaeology. Nevertheless,
    this brisk yet richly detailed account is likely to remain the best
    we have for many years.

    ESSAY: Robert F. Worth is the Beirut bureau chief for The Times. ONE
    dark afternoon last winter, after too many hours spent studying
    Arabic verbs, I found myself staring uncomprehendingly at a video
    on my computer screen. An Arab man was holding forth tediously,
    his words half drowned by the rain outside. At first all I could
    make out was the usual farrago of angry consonants and strangled
    vowels. No progress there. Then, at last, the letters lighted up at
    the back of my brain. "I understand what he's saying!" I shrieked to
    the empty apartment, spinning backward in my desk chair. "I understand
    every word!"

    I felt a warm rush of gratitude to the speaker, a bespectacled
    doctor. It made no difference that he was Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda's
    No. 2 man, or that he was threatening to slaughter large numbers
    of Americans. He spoke a slow, clear fusha, the formal version of
    Arabic I had been struggling to decipher on the page for 10 hours a
    day. Even better, his words matched my limited vocabulary: arsala,
    "to send"; jaish, "army"; raees, "president." I was almost drunk
    with exhilaration.

    Moments later the darkness dropped again. The terrorist disappeared,
    his rarefied language replaced by the clipped, quotidian accents of a
    political analyst. This was closer to the ordinary Arabic I would need
    for my work, and I understood precisely nothing. Was I wasting my time?

    Learning Arabic has been like that: moments of elation alternating
    with grim, soul-churning despair. The language is not so much hard
    as it is vast, with dozens of ways to form the plural and words
    that vary from region to region, town to town. With every sign of
    progress it seems to deepen beneath you like a coastal shelf. It is
    only small comfort to read about the early struggles of distinguished
    Arabists like Gertrude Bell, who complained that she could pronounce
    the Arabic "h" only while holding down her tongue with one finger,
    or Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who writes of years spent in an alternate
    world called "Dictionary Land."

    But the rigors of study were a small price for the chance to catch up
    with my surroundings. After spending the better part of two years as
    a reporter in Baghdad, I was tired of playing the doltish Westerner,
    eyes always darting blankly between translator and interviewee. The
    scattered phrases I knew seemed only to underscore my ignorance: Wayn
    alinfijar? I'd say ("Where's the explosion?"), or Shaku maku? ("How's
    it going?"), and I'd get a condescending pat on the back. When my
    bosses offered a year of intensive language training, I jumped at
    the chance.

    For anyone who knows only European languages, to wade into Arabic
    is to discover an endlessly strange and yet oddly ordered lexical
    universe. Some words have definitions that go on for pages and seem
    to encompass all possible meanings; others are outlandishly precise.

    Paging through the dictionary one night, I found a word that means
    "to cut off the upper end of an okra." There are lovely verbs
    like sara, "to set out at night"; comical ones like tabaadawa,
    "to pose as a Bedouin"; and simply bizarre ones like dabiba, "to
    abound in lizards." Dabiba (presumably applied to towns or regions)
    is medieval, but I wouldn't put it past Dr. Zawahri to revive it. The
    language can also be surprisingly vague to a Western ear. I was always
    troubled by Arabic's tendency to elide the distinction between "a lot"
    and "too much." I will never forget hearing an Iraqi friend, as we
    walked down a crowded Brooklyn street together, say loudly in English,
    "There are too many black people here." At the same time, all Arabic
    words have simple three- or four-letter roots, with systematically
    derived cognates that allow you to unfold a whole range of meanings
    from a single word. The word for "to cook," for instance, is related
    in a predictable way to the words for "kitchen," "dish," "chef,"
    and so on. Arabic speakers are often dismayed to discover that the
    same principle is less common in English.

    As the months passed, the sounds of the language were gradually
    transformed. Arabic's hard "h" letter, so difficult to pronounce at
    first, began to seem like a lovely breath of air, as if countless
    tiny parachutes were lifting the words above their glottal base. The
    notorious "ayn" sound, which often takes months for English speakers to
    produce, lost its guttural edge and acquired, to my ear, the throaty
    rumble of a well-tuned sports car.

    Soon I began marching into the Arabic markets on Atlantic Avenue in
    Brooklyn, near where I live, and testing out my textbook phrases.

    Generally I was met with a confused look and then a smiling apology:
    "We don't hear too much fusha around here." Linguistically speaking,
    what I had done was a bit like asking an Italian for directions
    in Latin. Modern fusha, also known as Modern Standard Arabic,
    is a modified version of the Classical Arabic in the Koran. It is
    the language of public address, and of any newscast on Al Jazeera
    and other Arabic television stations. It also corresponds to the
    written language, and any educated Arab can understand it. Arabs
    have enormous respect for fusha ("eloquent" is the word's literal
    meaning), especially in its fully inflected Koranic form; that is why
    Al Qaeda's leaders, like clerics and most political leaders, place
    great emphasis on the classical idiom. But the language of the street
    is different. The colloquial versions of Arabic are derived from fusha,
    and they are dialects rather than wholly separate languages.

    Still, the gulf can be substantial in vocabulary as well as
    pronunciation, and takes getting used to. One of the pleasures of
    learning Arabic is hearing long-familiar words in their natural
    context, shorn of the poisonous ideological garb they often bear in
    this country. Once you begin to do that, American attitudes toward
    the language itself, along with all things Arab and Muslim, can begin
    to seem jarringly hostile and suspicious.

    To take a recent example: Last winter, New York City announced plans
    for a new Arabic-language public secondary school in Brooklyn. An
    aggressive campaign against the school soon sprang up, despite the
    uncontroversial presence of Chinese, Russian, Spanish and other
    dual-language schools in the city. Opponents and local newspaper
    columnists began branding the (as yet unopened) school a "jihad
    recruiting center" and a "madrassa" and demanding it be closed. For
    Arabic speakers, the very title of the "Stop the Madrassa" campaign -
    now national in scope - is bound to have an uncomfortable ring.

    Madrassa is the Arabic word for "school"; it could not be more
    wholesome. But as the school's opponents know, in this country it has
    taken on a far more sinister valence, thanks to press reports about
    religious schools in Pakistan that are said to teach Taliban-style
    militancy. The school's principal was later replaced after a fracas
    over another Arabic word, intifada, that has taken on a meaning here
    entirely different from the one it has among Arabs.

    One has to wonder whether these attitudes have inhibited our ability
    to train more Arabic speakers. Although enrollments in postsecondary
    Arabic study more than doubled from 2002 to 2006, the attrition rate
    is high, and the number of students who persist and become truly
    proficient - much harder to measure - is very small. The government
    and military are still struggling to find the translators they need.

    The reasons for this failure are many, and inseparable from the Arab
    world's long history of troubled relations with the West. But alongside
    them is the simple fact that even with the best of teachers - like
    mine - the language requires a degree of patience and commitment
    that verges on the absurd. "Don't worry," one of my teachers told
    me half-jokingly. "Arabic is only hard for the first 10 years. After
    that it gets easier."
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