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CHAPTER 1
SEMITES AND ARABS
It is important to begin any discussion of the Middle East with an accounting of terminology. Terms are often used either inaccurately or in a falsely interchangeable manner when the region is discussed. Important terms in that discussion include but are not limited to: "Semite," "Arab," "Muslim," "Jew," "Israeli," "Palestinian." The term "Semite" grows out of the changing academic landscape of nineteenth-century Europe. In that landscape, as the Bible was increasingly subject to secularized analysis and discussion, and as, at the same time, the colonial urge brought with it an increasing interest in how to understand and categorize the world in its entirety, the term "Semite" grew out of a web spun out of the book of Genesis. There, Noah's three sons include "Shem." As the discipline of anthropology evolved, the human race came to be understood as falling into three categories derived — actually or symbolically — from those three sons. Those descended from Shem were labeled Shemites, or Semites. In turn, the emerging field of comparative historical linguistics appropriated the term sometime between the 1780s and the 1830s to refer to a group of languages spoken by Semites. Thus Hebrew and Arabic, for example, came to be called Semitic languages, whereas English, say, or Turkish or Farsi are not.
There is a paradox and an irony in the shaping of this biblically based racial and linguistic category. The biblical Shem is represented in Genesis 9:23 — 27 as the wisest and most responsible of Noah's sons, and both Jewish and Christian medieval biblical commentators had already interpreted the statement that he would have dominion over his brothers as a divinely ordained authority accorded to the descendants of Shem over the other races on the planet. But by the late nineteenth century, the twisting of the linguistic term back toward racial category gave it a reversed, pejorative connotation. Thus when Wilhelm Marr, seeking election to the Prussian Reichstag in 1879 used the term "Semite," he applied it specifically to the Jews. His intention was to marginalize them as a group. By presenting the Jews to Prussian voters as a racial category, and by implication a group apart from the non-Semitic Europeans, he could assert the legitimacy and the importance of his vow to protect his fellow Prussians from such dangerous outsider-interlopers.
The racialization of Jews by Marr and others, utilizing terminology that had been disconnected from its language-associative roots, was intended to suggest a direct connection between all Jews and the Near East, regardless of the fact that, historically, such a direct connection could neither be so clear and direct nor in any case expressible in pure racial terms. It also ignored others who — assuming that the term "Semite" might refer to various groups inhabiting the Near East and speaking certain languages — should have been included in its purview. Among these other groups certainly the Arabic-speakers — i.e., Arabs — should be included. But that term, "Arab," itself refers not to speakers of Arabic (although most or all Arabs may be Arabic-speakers) but to those whose ancestry is traceable back to a geographic location. The 'arav is the western, central part of the peninsula that bears the same name (the Arabian peninsula). All those who are called Arabs, in theory, trace their ancestry to that part of the peninsula in that corner of our planet, even as, based on the language category into which they all fit, they might also be labeled "Semites."
But understanding the roots and evolution of the term is not that simple. "'Arav" is cognate with the linguistically Semitic Hebrew term "'aravah," referring to steppe-like wilderness. The connotation of the Arabic term is of an association with nomadism — that is, Bedouin, as opposed to town dwellers. A form of the term appears early in the history of the region at large, on an 853 BCE Assyrian inscription (Assyrian being another member of the family of Semitic languages) of Shalmaneser III in which, in boasting of his defeat of a series of princelings he includes in the list of those he conquered one Gindibu Arabi, together with his army of one thousand camels. Both Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions of the next two hundred years refer variously to Aribi,Arabu and Urbi; by about 530 BCE Achaemenid Persian documents begin to refer to Arabaya.
Not long thereafter, the Greek playwright, Aeschylus, in his play, The Persians mentions a Magos Arabos as one of the commanders in Xerxes's army; perhaps he was an Arab. In Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus refers to Arabia as a distant place from which come warriors with sharp-pointed spears. Other Greek writers, like Herodotos, and subsequently, Roman writers, extend the use of terms such as "Arab" and "Arabia" to include the entire peninsula between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean and its inhabitants. It is in such literature as well that the term "Saracen" first appears. While the word appears originally to have referred to a particular desert tribe in the Sinai region, it continued in use into the medieval period to refer to nomads generally. Indeed, in the era of the Crusades that began at the end of the eleventh century, Christian writers began using the term "Arab" to offer a nomadic, Bedouin, piratical connotation, while using the term "Saracen" to refer to the Muslim population at large.
The first Arab use of some version of the term "Arab" is in south Arabian inscriptions where the term seems to refer once again to Bedouins or raiders — i.e., nomadic tribes that are different from (and pose a threat to) sedentary groups. Such tribes are distinguished from dwellers in key centers such as Makka and Madina, yet the term "Arabic" comfortably refers to the language used by both the Bedouin and the dwellers in those centers, and ultimately "Arabic" will refer to the language in which the Qur'an will be written. In other words, a term with pejorative connotations in one context reverses its connotation to be emphatically positive (the Qur'an, after all, is no less than God's word, dictated through the Prophet Muhammad, and that it was dictated in Arabic offers a powerful statement of the positive quality associated with the language called by that name). For that matter, Muhammad himself is an Arab in the following specific sense contemporary with his early life: while ostensibly from Makka, he was orphaned early and, impoverished, was raised most likely by his grandfather away from the city. Thus, he would have been called an "Arab" in the non-sedentary, away-from-the-city-and-its-culture sense. This would also help account for the illiteracy ascribed to him by most scholars.
But Muhammad would grow up to bring out of the desert a form of faith that would sweep half the world. Within the context of terms that we have been reviewing, Islam, a religion, swept out of the 'arav, carried by Semitic Arabs, in the seventh century. It is important for this discussion that we keep in mind that Islam is a religion — a Muslim is someone who defines him/herself by the religious principles of Islam — and specifically one of the three faiths which, like Judaism and Christianity, see their point of spiritual origin in the figure of Abraham.
It is a truism of the Abrahamic religions (as with most forms of faith) that they begin with revelation: the constituents of Judaism or Christianity or Islam, or any of the other forms of faith that may be seen as offshoots of these, all believe that their founders were prophets to whom and through whom God spoke directly. So, too, all of these faiths continue forward in history by means of two modes of interpretation. The first generations after the founding prophets are gone argue as to whether (t)he(y) said this or that (i.e., what was said). Subsequent generations devote most of their energy — for the obvious reason: God's word is at issue — to clarifying what the prophet(s) meant by the words that are finally agreed upon and written down.
So Jews vary as to whether they believe that Moses brought down a mere ten commandments from Sinai (ca. 1400 BCE) or the entirety of the Torah's 613 commandments; whether he wrote all of the Torah or whether it was written down over time and whether Ezra merely fine-tuned the text into its definitive form — the traditionally understood date for Ezra's redaction is 444 BCE — or substantially edited constituent parts written down at different times and places, which were then woven together by him. (For the purposes of this discussion, I am ignoring those who question whether or not Moses existed.) And Jewish history is gloriously rampant with argument over every word in the Torah, whether in the fanciful discussions over whether God created the heavens or the earth first or over what, precisely "thou shall not seethe a kid in its mother's milk" (in Exodus 23:19, among other places) means. How that phrase ends up meaning that a traditional Jew may not consume a cheeseburger is overrun with interpretive discussion.
Mainstream Christianity begins with no less than four variants on the theme of Jesus's life, times, and words, none of which was written down earlier than forty years after the Crucifixion. The patristic and scholastic students of those words, from Augustine to Aquinas, pour rivers of ink into the question of how ultimately to understand what lies beneath them. And Islam is no different from Judaism and Christianity in this respect: if it begins with Muhammad, viewed as the final prophet whose words are the ultimate expression of God's wishes for how we should be, its history is fraught with disagreement and argumentation as to how to understand the prophet's words — or rather, God's words spoken through the Prophet. Those words are recorded in nonchronological sequence in the Qur'an, a text written down a generation after Muhammad's death and to which a second text — with words not universally accepted as coming from him and sometimes merely speaking about him — is, as it were, appended, as we shall see.
CHAPTER 2
MUHAMMAD AND THE BIRTH OF ISLAM
Muhammad was born in 570 CE in Makka, a city in the central-western Arabian Peninsula — an area called the hijaz. Makka was an important trading center because it was both coastal and central. It could mediate between traders from East and North Africa and those of the Persian Gulf, and between those coming from the southern tip of the peninsula and those coming from the north: Egypt on the one hand and Syro-Palestine (and beyond it, both Anatolia and Mesopotamia) on the other. A central point between very different economic trade worlds, Makka was a cosmopolitan city and also a largely pagan city.
We have fairly good evidence of the spirituality of the Makkans. They seem to have centered their cults in a shrine the central element of which was a black stone that had fallen from the sky — perhaps a meteorite. That shrine was called the Ka'ba and was, together with the images around it, associated with gods of nature. Ritual defined the sacred area around the Ka'ba. Makkans consecrated other spaces as well. They made an annual spring pilgrimage — a hajj — to a site two miles east of the city, where three mounds of stone (jamras) were piled. There they left cuttings of hair and made animal sacrifices. These elements formed part of the rich religious tradition of the Makka of Muhammad's youth. Other parts probably included Christianity and certainly Judaism. The Judaism of Muhammad's time had developed in various directions and was an archipelago of spiritual and cultural islands within seas of other faiths, which themselves were not monolithic, but diverse in their sensibilities and spiritualities — and Makka was one of the places in which an island of Jews could be found.
The Prophet had a proclivity for wandering outside the city in the surrounding hills. At the age of forty, in the year 610, according to the preponderant tradition, during a spring pilgrimage out to those hills, a common custom of the pagan community of which he was part, he experienced the first of a series of visions in a cave on Mount Hira outside Makka; these visions would continue for the rest of his life. He was inspired by the angel Gabriel who spoke the words of God — the Arabic word for which is "Allah" — directly to him. According to Muslim tradition, Gabriel had communicated God's word to Abraham, Moses, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, and to John the Baptist and Jesus, among twenty-eight major and scores of lesser prophetic figures — twenty-four of which, from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, are mentioned by name in the Qur'an. All, including Jesus, are understood to be prophets, then, forerunners of Muhammad.
After his vision, Muhammad returned into Makka preaching repentance and an Armageddon accompanied by judgment to be meted out against those who do not repent. Those who did repent would form a group who submitted to the will of God. Thus, the faith that Muhammad was beginning to articulate is called in Arabic, Islam, commonly translated as meaning "submission" (some misrender it as "commitment" or "commission"): submission to the will of God. Its followers are called Muslims — those who submit themselves to God's will.
Muhammad preached in Makka for about a dozen years, gathering a small group of followers. Ultimately the authorities came to perceive his preaching as a threat; by the year 620 he began to plan a strategy that included a departure from the city of his birth. In 622, he and his followers went to — were invited to — an oasis town some 210 miles (ca. 340 kilometers) to the north, called Yathrib. The tribal conflicts within Yathrib and Muhammad's reputation as an adjudicator and peacemaker combined to make him welcome there. The year of the migration — the Hijra, as it is called in Arabic — marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar. Yathrib would later be known as al'Madina (more commonly rendered simply as Madina) — "the City" — because of the importance that it would assume in the life of the Prophet.
Madina/Yathrib, at the time of Muhammad's arrival, was inhabited not only by pagans but also by Christians and Jews — to be specific, three Christian and five Jewish tribes are known by name to have resided there. Some have argued that the Jews actually dominated the town numerically. These Jewish tribes were distant from the Jewish mainstream, but were apparently familiar with the rabbinic traditions of commentary on the Torah and adjudication of everyday issues and problems by means of referring to the Torah and other parts of the Hebrew Bible, known as Midrash (Torah commentary) and Talmud (adjudication of issues). In the course of Muhammad's years in Madina, as he developed both a political organization and a more systematic spiritual foundation for Islam, he seems to have had a good deal of contact with the Jews as well as with their Christian counterparts.
If Muhammad arrived as a peacemaker, he seems to have unified the divergent groups in Yathrib by about 627/8 — which was also the time when a powerful force of Makkans, outnumbering the Prophet's followers nearly five-to-one, attacked and nearly destroyed the small Muslim community of Yathrib. But after nearly three years of conflict marked by three crucial and unexpected, zeal-and-inspiration-driven victories, Muhammad not only defeated them, he entered Makka in triumph. Contrary to the expected norm, he did not destroy his conquered enemies, but embraced them as they embraced his faith. He did destroy the idols that are said to have festooned the Ka'ba — but not the central stone itself. In other words, he didn't completely sever the connection between the Makkans and their ancestors.
He adopted and adapted the cult centered in the Ka'ba, suggesting that the rock from heaven symbolized 'Allah's abiding interest in and relationship with us — and moreover associating it with Abraham and Ishmael, as related in the second Sura (chapter) of the Qur'an, where we read that Abraham and Ishmael established the Ka'ba together, making it the first shrine in the Abrahamic tradition. The spiritual and the secular, the religious and the political, intermingled as Muhammad's form of faith completed its beginnings.
With the political power signified by control of both Madina and Makka, the consolidation of Islam's internal world began, and the term 'umma (cognate with the Hebrew word 'am, and meaning "people/nation" defined by a spiritual bloodline connection) came into use for his Muslim constituents. The tribal-based, ethnically driven self-definition endemic to the two cities was superseded by the faith-based spiritually driven reality that Muhammad's revolution had brought about.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Untangling the Middle East"
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Copyright © 2017 Ori Soltes.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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