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The BlomCast looks at turning points in history, which have always fascinated me. My name is Philipp Blom, I am a historian and broadcaster and author of many books about the Enlightenment, the story of modernity and climate history. The climate catastrophe places us at the greatest historical turning point hin human history. What, if anything, can we learn from moments in the past in which a model of life seemed to change, or had to change, in which whole societies were transformed?
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BlomCast
[47] Tim Mackintosh-Smith: Being Arab Throughout History and Ibn Khaldoun
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As a scholar of Arabic language and literature, Tim has made classic Arabic literature his life’s work, and has lived in Yemen until 2019. His special interest at the moment is the great scholar Ibn Khaldoun, who lived in the 14th century and who was one of the great thinkers about power, society, and, yes, being Arab, a concept linked to language more than to territory or ethnicity — or even religion. Ibn Khaldoun created an analytical lens through which societal dynamics and turning points become very clear. So, what does being Arab really mean, what did it mean at the time of the writing of the Quran, and what does it mean today? How did the love of the language influence the confrontation with new technologies such as printing with moveable type, and, lately, social media? What did it mean to be Arab for the demonstrators of the Arab Spring, and what can it mean in a time when language is so much shaped by social media?
Blomcast. Turning points in history. Welcome to the Blomcast, the podcast that looks at turning points in history. We've been away for a week, just a mini summer holiday, but we are back, and we are back with a bang. With a bang that echoes through 3,000 years of history, because we're looking at nothing less than the history of the Arabs. And our travel guide is the best possible travel guide we could have. Tim Macintosh Smith, author of the book The Arabs. And let me get the subtitle, all right? 3,000 Years of History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires. We will do look at this book, do read this book, but also welcome its author, Tim Macintosh Smith. Tim, hello.
SPEAKER_00Thank you very much. I made a face when you said the Arabs, because it is very specifically, it's very specifically called Arabs. And I know in the German translation they had to look hard for what to call Arabs on their own without a definite article. And I specifically called it Arabs without a definite article.
SPEAKER_01So let's just make this clear. The book's title is Arabs, and that has a great significance, to which we will come back. But Tim, we catch you in Abu Dhabi where you are visiting Professor, but usually, as most good English people do, you live in Yemen in Sanaa, in a medieval tower, as you uh write yourself. So tell us a little bit about that journey.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the tower, is it medieval? It is um it kind of passes upwards through the middle of different ages. So in that sense it's medieval. The bottom bit is very old, and it gets younger as you go up. The top bit I built on myself. Um how did I end up in Sana? Well, basically I was studying Arabic and I wanted to learn how to speak it. I mean, I think after however many years, year or two of Arabic, I couldn't have asked the way to go to the loo. So I thought, oh, must do something about this, and chose Yemen as being a place where you probably would have to speak Arabic. And and went there and really fell in love with it. And um that was back in 1982, which makes me feel tremendously old. Uh and um I I've been there, I don't use the past tense, until 2019, so a good many years in in Sunnah. I haven't been back since then because the new rulers in the north are a bit problematic, but um it's it's still very much my home and it's it's where the heart is.
SPEAKER_01But tell me, I mean, in the West, at least from what we hear from the media, and this I think will be a little bit of a motif throughout this podcast, um, what we learn about the Arab world in the West, um, and what your observations about it may be. In the West, um Yemen is seen as a backward, war-torn country where life is hard and people are poor and probably fanatic. Um you obviously have a different perspective on that.
SPEAKER_00Uh well some of what you said is true. Uh backward uh no, I wouldn't use that word.
SPEAKER_01No, I caricaturize, but I I show a perception.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I know. Um uh it it it has had a different um history of progress, particularly in recent years, uh, and it has had some reverses. So in that sense it has gone backwards. Uh war torn, certainly. Uh poor, certainly, very, very sadly. Um what what are the other words you used to characterize it?
SPEAKER_01Fanatical.
SPEAKER_00Some of the words you've used are correct. Uh war torn, it certainly is, very, very sadly. Poor, it certainly is, very, very sadly. Um it you know it breaks my heart to think that when I first went there uh over 40 years ago, it was the poorest Arab country and one of the poorest countries in the world, and it still is. Um Backward? Well, it's had a different history of progress. Yes, I know you were caricaturing, I suppose. Um it's had leaps forward, but unfortunately it's gone backward. I think it's in it's in rather in reverse at the moment. Um the last word you use, fanatical.
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, what you see on Western television screens are Islamist and militias driving around on Toyoka pickup trucks.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Uh uh I I I would say that that does not include most of the population. We do have a a group in the old north where I uh you know where I've lived, um, which has taken over at the moment, who are fanatical. Uh I mean their slogan is one of death and curses, uh, and and they um they rejoice in driving around festooned with bandoliers and hung with hand grenades and uh and and weaponry of all sorts.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's unfortunately the perception.
SPEAKER_00Yes, but of course, uh Yemenis by and large are not like that. So uh of course we have fanatics in all countries. Um it's just rather unfortunate that in Yemen at the moment they're at the f they've come to the fore because the processes of change for the better, um democratization have have broken down very, very sadly.
SPEAKER_01You said at the beginning that you chose to go to Yemen to learn Arabic and that you figured that there you would probably have to speak Arabic. Um what kind of Arabic do the Yemenis speak? I mean the Syrians, the Egyptians are sort of proud of their Arabic, but Arabic is a language that works very differently from other languages in that respect.
SPEAKER_00Yes. I mean I I would say that there are many Arabics, and many of them are largely mutually comprehensible. So you can talk about an Arabic language and dialects of it. Um generally speaking, well, where where I've always lived in in Yemen, in Sanaa, even though it's an urban setting, they they actually kind of speak as sort of uh roughly speaking as sort of Bedouin Arabic, even though they're very much settled. Uh if you go down to the south, they have very different sounds. So um within the country there's a there's a large um variation in the way people speak. And of course, that that's really the case across the Arab world. But then we have standard Arabic written Arabic, uh which is which is one form.
SPEAKER_01So what you would have learned at university would have been the standard written Arabic, which you might encounter in literature, in the news, on television, perhaps in um broadsheet newspapers, but practically never on the street.
SPEAKER_00Well, I remember when I first went to Sana, uh you know, I I might say walk into a tea shop and say I'm exaggerating slightly, um, yeah, sobbali kaasan minashai, you know, verily, oh master of the uh coffee shop, um pour for me uh a goblet of of tea. Um and you know, I very soon people would kind of go. And they all laughed. Well, they wouldn't laugh. They would look at me as if I was some sort of uh apparition from somewhere else, which of course I was.
SPEAKER_01So you were sort of sort of addressing them in in in Latin or in Anglo-Saxon or something like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, actually Latin Latin is quite a good uh it's it is quite a good comparison.
SPEAKER_01Going to a coffee bar in Rome or in Lisbon and talking Latin to the people there.
SPEAKER_00Exactly, yes, and I soon learned to say, you know, uh Dili Shaiau lad, or so you know, give me T O boy, or uh that's sorry, that sounds rather curt, doesn't it? But but that's the kind of thing people say. Um so um but I kind of rejoice in the in this richness.
SPEAKER_01But uh we mentioned this because in your book Arabs without definite article, um you make the point that it is extraordinarily impossible extraordinarily important that this whole culture, if you can call it a culture, or perhaps this whole subset world of cultures congeals around one language and its fixation in writing, and that really there is very little ethnic bond. There was for a long time very loose religious bonds, but there was the language.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I wouldn't say very little ethnic bond. Um there are there are ethnic bonds, yes. Uh, but they were very early on turned rather into into um legends if if if if not myths, and and and sort of very um very carefully channeled into neat family trees and and and uh tribal trees, things like that. And of course the picture is more complicated. So yeah, ethnicity does it does play a part. Um but in the end I think you're dealing, as with any other people on earth, you're sort of dealing with a construct. Communities as um Benedict Anderson famously called his book, Imagined Communities.
SPEAKER_01Imagined communities, yes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, communities are are are imagined, they're constructed. Uh and um there's some evidence to say that uh that the original meaning of Arab did mean rather a mixture of people. Um it certainly meant very early on, people who lived uh in desert regions and and and kept camels and subsisted by using these camels. But uh as for some sort of um magic single origin for them, uh let alone for the Arab world as it is now, no, I th I think we can dismiss that.
SPEAKER_01But that's very important.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, I was gonna say the magic of language, uh, and the language in itself is a construct, um as we use it now. But it's that magic that really brought people together.
SPEAKER_01It's really interesting because what you say about these imagined communities, in the West we've got a different kind of imagined community. We have the nation state, um, and that is its own mythology, that is its own retrospective history in which we reconstruct ethnic origins, national origins in history, and that is our default way of seeing the world, with colonialism that also came into the Arab world, pushed into the Arab world, and the struggle between these two concepts of identity says a lot about Arab history, I think, between the idea of the nation state and an idea of Arabness that is much more a cultural and almost linguistic idea.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you're right, but I wouldn't draw such a hard and fast boundary, and I would take you back to um scholars like Herder. Um you know, uh what was he, late 18th century?
SPEAKER_01Late 18th, early 19th, yes. Great romantic thinker, father of the idea of cultural nationalism in Germany.
SPEAKER_00Yes, exactly. And Germany not being so dissimilar, perhaps, from the Arabian Peninsula. You had a lot of different ways of speaking, whether you call them dialects or what, I don't know.
SPEAKER_01There was a notion of Germanness, but no German state, and all these little statelets with their dialects and different masters.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and I know the notion of a unified Germanness came what almost a century after Herdach. Yes. But he came up with the idea, I think as he put it in roughly as many words, that the poet can create a nation. Uh, and I've quoted him on on that in my big history of of Arabs, because I I think it rather applies to Arabs as well.
SPEAKER_01But that's really interesting because it wouldn't be true for France. I mean, France is a royal creation, centralized under Louis XIV. It wouldn't be true for Britain, very probably, where you know, but the probably geography was very important for the forming of a national identity, an island. It was true for Germany, it was probably true for Italy in the nineteenth century that poets played a great role in an idea of national identity, and you say it is also true for many Arab societies.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and I'm not saying that it the poetic construction of identity worked in the same way in the Arab world, but I would say that you began to get people who were called kings, kings of Arabs, or kings of the Arabs early on, who were r really appointed as such by by the neighboring empires. So the the Romans or the Byzantines would have their sort of pet uh Arab kings and the Persians also. And uh, you know, in what sense were these guys kings? They were really sort of enlarged tribal chiefs. Well, they sort of made themselves kings by having courts, albeit their courts might have been intended encampments uh to begin with, but they would attract people and they would attract poets. And you know, we're talking about certainly in the sixth century AD, but very probably before that. And because there was this kind of poetic Arabic, uh a special Arabic for uh soothsaying, for seers, for poets, uh, for tribal orators, um, they would use this and they would bring this to the courts uh and and sort of solidify this uh identity, this identity. So, you know, you get somebody very early on, um like uh Imral Keis, uh not a poet, there was a poet with a with the same name later on, but there was a king Imrul Kays. Uh I'm a historian who's bad on dates, was he early fifth century? Um and and he he is called in his uh uh funeral inscription, in his um uh uh sepulchral inscription, he's called the king of all the Arabs. Uh uh and and he seems to be one of these people who was involved in attracting um poets to the court. Certainly his dynasty was later on. So um it, you know, the fact that you attract poets to the court, the poetry becomes exciting and important and much loved and then spreads out. So it's a kind of um reflexive process.
SPEAKER_01Now we are moving with giant steps to the actual subject of this uh conversation, which is the great scholar Ibn Khaldun. But um we before we I think it's very important that we lay the groundwork by um giving attention to the language and the importance of the language for Arabic culture. And so let's just spend a few moments on reflecting what was, of course, the seminal event for an Arab culture. Um, the fixation in writing of the Quran. And you've just described this code poetry, this court poetry, this poetry of soothsayers, and um a very heightened, magically charged language, and that was poured into that one prophetic document that became the Quran.
SPEAKER_00And and the Quran is a you know, as well as being a sacred book and um the word of God Himself, if you are a pious uh believing Muslim, it is a it you're right to say poured into it. It's it's a vessel, if you like, for the preservation of um of uh of Arabic. And it was interesting that it it all came about uh uh early in the seventh century AD, and shortly before that, it seems that the the people in Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad's um home city, who were great merchants, they were beginning to use writing. Uh uh and and there's a poem which I see is absolutely seminal. I d I mean I don't know if it's if it's genuinely of the time, late 6th century, but it's congrat it's congratulating the Meccans on getting their own writing uh in which to write their Arabic language. And and the poet says, now you don't have to bother with the writing of the Persians or of the Romans or of the um Hemiris or the Sabaeans, uh he calls it Musnad. Um so he's he he's saying, in effect, that these three great neighboring empires, okay, the South Arabian Hemiri uh Empire was was was really finished by that time, but but he was really saying uh oh these Arabs, these people in Mecca, they're kind of joining that club by having their own writing. And then on top of that, directly on top of that, you get the Quran coming. And um if the importance of writing to early Islamic history were to be doubted, uh, I think we can look at the first four caliphs, the rightly guided caliphs, if you like, the immediate successors of Muhammad, um, and and realize that they all worked as scribes for him. Um so the connection between the language, the writing of the language, um uh uh the the the writing of the Quran, that first Arabic book, uh uh and the importance of people who knew writing at this very early stage of Arabic writing, it it all comes together beautifully. And the Quran itself, you know, it says um uh it says, Oh God has taught you by the pen. It elevates the pen into a into a sort of um, if you like, uh almost a magical divine symbol.
SPEAKER_01You describe rather entertainingly the main um, as it were, pivotal activities of Arab culture at the time as raiding and poetry. Um but we will come back to that, and I think we will also come back to the importance of the language, but let's just fast forward 600 or so years from the writing to the Quran to the life of Ibn Khaldun, one of the great scholars of the Arabic world, um, a major inspiration as well for scholars beyond his world. Can you give us a thumbnail sketch of what his life looked like, just to sort of contextualize and situate him?
SPEAKER_00It's a bit difficult for me to make it into a thumbnail because I'm currently editing and translating the first full translation, his uh his own autobiography. So I'm sort of uh you know, I'm not I'm like pressed up against the screen.
SPEAKER_01Take twenty steps back and tell us what you still see.
SPEAKER_00Ibn Haldun. To go back to his ancestry, because we we we leapt over those 600 odd years, um, but his ancestry kind of fills in that leap. Uh they came from uh his ancestor in the time of Muhammad, so early 7th century, came from Hadramaut, uh, so part of Yemen, Southern Arabia. Uh he was a companion of the Prophet. Um in time he or his offspring moved up to sort of Iraq and were uh settled in the new garrison cities, and then at some time they made it over to.
SPEAKER_01Roughly which century are we talking? Yes.
SPEAKER_00We're talking about ninth, tenth centuries. Um the the uh the the Muslims got to Spain before that, early in the eighth century, but uh but um uh sorry, later eighth century, the Umayyad caliphate was um or Umayyad rule was set up in Spain. And Ibn Haldun's ancestors, he's not even sure when they got there himself. Uh there seem to be missing generations in his genealogy, but sometime after that. And they were prominent citizens, eventually in Seville, Ishbilia in Arabic, uh, with the fall of Seville to the Reconquista later on, uh they they they went to North Africa and eventually ended up in in Tunis, which is where Ibn Khaldun was born. So that that journey from Southern Arabia to Mecca, meeting the Prophet, to Iraq, the garrison cities across right across to the far end of uh of the Arab Empire, and then the retreat as the Christian reconquest happens to North Africa. It kind of encapsulates a lot of Arabic of Arab history. Um so that's his background. Uh he himself, how can I describe him? I think he was he was a sort of prodigy and he knew it. He he's quite um bumptious, if that's the right word, from an early age. Uh he's employed in the court in Tunis, and then uh everything falls apart with Black Death uh and and he ends up in Fez, uh is employed there. Uh and then he sort of does a a pinball progress around the courts of North Africa and Spain. He's um he works for the Sultan of uh Sultan of Granada, he goes on an embassy to Pedro the Cruel of Castile, who says, um, oh, your ancestors were in Seville, you can come and work for me, and you can have your ancestral uh property back. Um but that doesn't happen. He eventually and he sort of falls out with everyone because he is so bumptious and um clever and a bit big-headed, I think. Uh, and he ends up in Cairo.
SPEAKER_01So he was a politician, basically, who wasn't good at politics.
SPEAKER_00I don't think you can call I mean were there any politics? There weren't really any politics at the time.
SPEAKER_01No, but there was certainly diplomacy.
SPEAKER_00There was certainly diplomacy, they were certainly statesmen. Uh you've got to kind of do a bit of a mental flip and think of the people who were actually in control, militarily, the sultans, as mostly being from tribal backgrounds. North Africa, they were all at the time they were all from Amazig uh bur you know, Berber backgrounds. Um and always over them hung this question of legitimacy. And one way they got legitimacy was by attracting scholars like Ibn Khaldun to their courts. So uh he wasn't really a politician, but he was a a prop for various sultans. And um he yeah, I mean to cut the very long story short, he ended up in Egypt and and got on very well with the the Mamluk Sultan there, uh, and got appointed Chief Justice, uh at least of the Maliki form of uh jurisprudence, uh, and he got dismissed, and he was appointed and dismissed no fewer than six times, uh because he fell out with everyone. Uh and during the course of this he got to meet Tamilane Timur, uh the great um Turco Turco-Mongol, Mongolo-Turkic, I don't know what you really call him, world conqueror, who uh was um he met while he was besieging and sacking Damascus. So he had this amazingly fascinating career. Um but, and this is the important point, he kept getting fed up with it and taking himself off. So sometimes he'd sort of go into retreat at a place called the Shrine of Um Abu Median. Boomedian, it's still there, uh in um Algeria. But at one point he took it he took himself off for four whole years uh uh and sort of holed up in this castle in the in the in the mountains of Algeria, where he wrote his his famous work.
SPEAKER_01This famous work we will come back to, but you just mentioned two things that I just want to highlight, perhaps also for orientation. You said everything fell apart with the Black Death. Now this puts us in the middle of the 14th century, 1850, to be precise. Europe loses a third of its population, some areas lose half of their population. Um, in Europe, there's an interesting controversy about uh by historians about the effect of this catastrophe. Um, I still learned at university that this was basically the end of the Middle Ages, and that because, for instance, the value of individual work became so individual labor became so much greater because there were so many fewer people, this was the beginning of a middle class. Now I think a newer analysis says actually there was relatively little change, remarkably little change in European societies through the Black Death. There was we got the uh dans macabre as a as a um as an artistic motif, but basically it there was no the cesura wasn't that great. How big was that cesura in the Arab world?
SPEAKER_00I think it's more like the revisionist view of what happened in Europe, in that there wasn't actually as much change as you might expect.
SPEAKER_01But there was a lot of death as well.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah. I mean the deaths were uh from what we know, they they were equal to the death in Europe, um in the Middle East and North Africa. Yeah, a third to a half. Uh all you have to do is look at the um figures in someone like Ibn Battuta, who talks about oh, memory. Uh was it over a thousand uh the prayers, funeral prayers held for over a thousand people a day at one point in Alexandria. And if you look at the population of Alexandria at the time, you know, it's it's uh no, it's it was it was something comparable to what happened in Europe. I would say, of course, that in Europe you started off with a system that was very different, where you had um serfdom, and um, you know, I think in the traditional view it's that that was changed.
SPEAKER_01Only it of course it didn't really, but um, or not so much.
SPEAKER_00This is the revisionist view, yeah. But there wasn't, of course, that social system in the Middle East and North Africa at the time. Um, so there wasn't that to be changed. There's a kind of different attitude to towards the plague, I think, in the Islamic world, in that you know, uh I hadn't really thought I haven't really thought about this before, but I think in the in Christendom you tend to think of it as a as a as a uh as a a punishment from God. Um and you might review your life and say, well, what can I do to make this better? To make this better, uh to make my relationship with God uh better. But in Islam, plague is more something that you sort of b uh you put up with, uh, but you don't philosophize.
SPEAKER_01It's a fantastic thing because I did a little bit of work while I wrote a book about the little ice age in Europe and the cultural effects of the little ice age. And you can very clearly see that the first reactions to unseasonal cold, to harsh winters, to the failing harvests are religious responses. They make processions, they burn witches, they carry relics around. But, you know, after 200 years or so, they become different, they become more pragmatic responses. But so, you know, this this very Christian way of seeing things as a divine punishment. But if we're now looking at the 14th century, here's one turning point that Ibn Khaldun also describes or participates in as an observer. And you say Tamilen was sacking Damascus, one of the most important cities of Islam at that time. Um, this is a time of downturn for the Islamic world, and it is a very unusual for Western eyes. I mean, you know, Western societies are basically reckoned to begin their brilliant career around this time. For Islam, this is a very different period.
SPEAKER_00It's interesting talking about turning points, and I know that is your interest. Um it's what can I say? I think Ibn Haldun has a lovely little section where he talks about a pendulum, he doesn't call it a pendulum, but he talks about a sort of pendulum swing of history. He was quite he was very much into cyclical history, how dynasties arise and fall.
SPEAKER_01Did he know his Plato, or was that independent of Plato? You know, Plato's idea of the succession of forms of rule from democracy to Tyrannis and back again.
SPEAKER_00I'm not sure that I I can't answer you on that. I'm sure people have written about it. There is a huge bibliography on Ibn Khdoun, which I'm which I'm not completely au fay with. I'm more au fay with Ibn but uh with Ibn Khaldun the man. Um I I wouldn't uh I wouldn't I wouldn't put it past him to have known that. I mean certainly his things like his his um his circle of um his circle his cycle of goodness uh the state is a wall that um defends its people, uh the wall is built from justice, justice is administered by the ruler, etc. And it comes around in the circle. I think that's um that goes back to Plato uh and to various other sages.
SPEAKER_01It wasn't an unusual idea of the time, but Ibn Khadun makes a fascinating point. Um you describe the Arab culture as divided between the city and the Bedouins, and the settled and the and the un the not yet settled, the settled and the itinerant.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Well there there I'm I'm being a bit Haldunian there.
SPEAKER_01That is a point that he makes, and uh a point that is not only perhaps interesting if you look at Arab societies or Islamic societies, namely the relation between the center and the periphery. And that the center is built up and strengthens itself basically until it becomes unviable and gets taken over by the periphery.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it keeps on imploding and imploding and imploding and can you describe that process?
SPEAKER_01Because it's really fascinating how Ibn Khaldun describes that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and then I want to cut and then I want to come back to the pendulum, so don't let me forget about the pendulum.
SPEAKER_01Oh sorry, yes, we will get back to the pendulum.
SPEAKER_00But but let's talk about the the uh the um the escape wheel, if that if that's in horology. I don't know if it's the correct metaphor. But anyway, one of those things that goes round. Um and yeah, basically, and it's his very, very famous uh theory of the cyclicality of history, um, you have um a nomadic group, and when he says nomadic, he's being a bit prescriptive, it could be semi-nomadic or whatever, but basically people from the periphery uh who manage to get something which he calls asabia, and it's his it's his famous word, okay, and and it really means something like group solidarity. Uh it's been translated as esprit de corps and and various other things. I'm sure there's a lovely German term that you could call it as well. I can't I don't know enough German, but it's this group solidarity, and it can be as a result of uh something like religion. And of course, the great uh example is Islam, bringing Arabs together, uh uh uh but also language. Um, and Ibn Khand said uh very importantly that the Prophet Muhammad brought Arabs together, he united them upon the word of Islam. Okay, that's my my I've got a slight obsession with language, as you might know. Um but this Asabiyah, this group solidarity comes about, and then you take over power by defeating the corrupt and rotten um uh people ruling the city who are wallowing in luxury, who haven't uh bothered about um paying their army properly, and they've got mercenaries and they can't pay them because they can't get the taxes, so it all implodes, and then uh the the the the new people take over. And then they get infected by the luxury, uh, and then they in two or three, three or four generations they implode too. Uh uh and and that's his his kind of um cyclical theory. Uh and you know, uh for what he was observing, yes, it it it does it can be seen to work. It doesn't work uh over the whole um scene, uh but it but it it certainly worked from time to time.
SPEAKER_01Now this this thought is taken out of this great book that he wrote while being in seclusion, the Mukadima. Um but when you say okay this cyclical theory is kind of interesting, but you know, it was probably right before and it's a little bit schematic, what fascinates you about him so much that you have spent years with him?
SPEAKER_00I think it's his brain. The fact that he's an independent thinker and he's brilliant. Uh he seemed by some to be kind of ahead of his time, uh and the father of sociology and the father of uh one of the founders of economic history, etc. And there's a certain amount of truth in that. He was very much of his time, in some ways, but he was an independent thinker. And I think the reason he became one was this number one being up against all these sultans and problems and knowing the court, uh also being sent out as a tax collector among the tribes, uh whether they were Amazir or Arab in North Africa. So he saw the center, he saw the periphery, he got to know both very well. And when everything went wrong, as it did, uh uh inevitably, invariably with him, he would take himself off, as I said, and he took himself off to this place in Algeria called Qalat ibn Salama, uh, which was really isolated. Um, and he lived in a sort of fortress for four years, and he complains at the end of it about having no books. Uh and he said, Oh, you know, I had to go to the city, so I went to and then I went to Tunis, to Tunis to um uh to look at uh the the sources there. But it was the fact that he didn't have the books, I think, and that it was just him and his obviously brilliant brain for four years, uh having been a kind of fly on the wall of so much of what was happening in the in the world of states and their collapse, uh and then going away and and pondering it for four years without feeling, oh, I've got to look up you know, I've got to look up in this book and that book, and I've got to quote X, Y, and Z. Um, that was the originality. And he says, Oh, there was such a he uses this strange word cha'abib, uh, and uh he says something like there was a such an outflux, an outpouring uh of thought upon words and words upon thought, or word words without effect, and it was all churned up together like butter. Uh uh and and and you know, in the end the butter of the the the uh the the cream was turned into butter and it turned into this book. And he knew that he was on something new. He said, Nobody else has been led to the conclusions that I've been led to. So yes, he was an original thinker.
SPEAKER_01So what were those conclusions? The Mukandima was supposed to be the for the preface to a world history, which he also wrote, but which is less read today, perhaps, than the pr than the introduction. But um what were his original conclusions?
SPEAKER_00It's really the opposite of a conclusion. That you it's more a hypothesis that you have to start by looking at human society uh before you can talk about human history. And you have to understand the processes through which societies go. Uh uh and everything that underpins them and how cities work, how people live together, how they get on economically, socially. Uh you've got to understand this before you can look at history. Uh so really it's it's I mean it's why it's called a m mukedima, as you say, it's it's it's an introduction to history. Uh it's sometimes called the the the proligomena.
SPEAKER_01But it is it is an empirical um interest, basically. You have to you have to look at how people really live and have to understand how their societies live, and then you can talk about this society not. You have to look at a holy book and see how it should be, and then perhaps you can see what people are not doing, or Yeah, absolutely. Which is what people what people did in the renaissance of the Enlightenment in Europe, namely to say, let's look at the world from the world and not from the Bible.
SPEAKER_00And this is why Ibn Khaldun seems so kind of modern. He was describing, he wasn't prescribing.
SPEAKER_01At the same time, and moving perhaps a little bit beyond Ibn Khaldun, um, although I think his perspective can accompany us. You have made the point very insistently and very brilliantly that writing is so central, that language is so central, and then comes this thing called the printable type printing in Europe. And Arabic lends itself spectacularly badly to printing in that way. But not only that, this is not only a technical problem, a typesetting problem, but also the authorities are not in love with the idea. Why?
SPEAKER_00You can go back and look at accounts of Istanbul, for example, uh and uh I think there were proclamations made about you know the uh we don't want printing and that kind of thing, and the the 5,000 scribes, or who however many there were in Istanbul, it was something like that, I think.
SPEAKER_01I think there were 10,000, but it was forbidden. Printing printing books was for certainly printing books in Arabic was forbidden. And just to to to solve the teaser with the Arabic type, I mean, as a cursive, joined up letters are very difficult to reproduce in early typeface.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and and personally, I mean I yeah, when you say it was forbidden, I think it was it was uh there were edicts issued from time to time.
SPEAKER_01Certainly the Ottoman Empire, there were.
SPEAKER_00It wasn't as if it was sort of forbidden by holy writ. No, far from it. Um but um but it was certainly frowned upon. And I think the reason is personally that it it's aesthetic as much as anything else, uh and technical. That the way Arabic works, uh I mean you can have a letter like that, nice, you know, you can make a nice die cast of it. Exactly. But it's got to because it's cursive, it's got to attach to other things. So you have to have uh, you know, the letter on its own, letter with something before, letter with something after, the letter in the terminal position. Um and then you've got the problem of the vowels.
SPEAKER_01Which are little signs above or below the letters.
SPEAKER_00Which you don't write in. So you've got to have each of those four or whatever manifestations of of a single letter with um what would it be? I don't know, half a dozen or so different different vowel vowel signs, more than that. And the upshot of it, uh again, what are the numbers? I mean, I think an Arabic font uh early on, it contained uh getting on for a thousand permutations, yes.
SPEAKER_01And uh you know, in the European alphabet you had thirty or forty.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, maybe a bit a bit more than that, with upper and lower case, but but uh but generally speaking less than a hundred. Uh I know. I was uh I did a stint as a letterpress typographer uh in my teens. It was wonderful. I really enjoyed it. You know, you were uh com composing uh great fun, but to do it with a f with a font of a thousand characters it would drive you nuts. Um and of course, in the end, the results don't look very beautiful. So uh that's I I think that's largely what held what held things back.
SPEAKER_01But it was, I mean, it was the beginning of a shearing apart of European and Islamic cultures. Um the Europeans were calm were commonly known as the Franks by the Arabs for a while and not considered terribly exciting or important. And now these Franks develop technologies such as printing, they also discover the way um around Africa and to the Americas, to Asia, and that in itself has a huge impact on Arab culture. Why?
SPEAKER_00You know, literally the Cape of Good Hope is a turning point. I mean it's a literal turning point if you look at the map, uh which people didn't realize until the Europeans came round. I mean, if you look at a uh I wish I had one to hand, but um basically a map of the world, uh, so you know, Eurasia plus Africa in those days, um, before the 15th century, it would have had two enclosed bodies of water uh from where you are, that's the Mediterranean, and that's the Indian Ocean. Indian Ocean a bit bigger, but not much, but almost enclosed by an Africa that bent like that and almost touched China. Okay. And then there's a lovely moment in um is it Ahmed ibn Majid or Suleiman al-Mahri, one of the two writers on navigation, Arabic writers, uh, and he says that, oh, in recent years the Franks, or whatever he calls them, have got to uh Bunas Ferrance, a place they call Bunes Farance, and it's Bong Speranza. Good hope, the Cape of Good Hope. Uh and um, oh, by the way, uh they have revealed that in fact Africa extends much further south than we thought, and it doesn't curl round. It extends to where I forget which star side is five fingers above the horizon, but you know, he fixed it um quite uh quite accurately with that. And that was unexpected. You know, the the the Europeans have suddenly uh okay, they had Mare Nostrum or bits of it, or they contended with people from North Africa and the Levant over the Mediterranean, but the Indian Ocean was a sort of organic uh trading pool that was open to to everyone who lived on its shores. And then these guys turn up around the corner with their carracks and their cannons and everything else, and they want to monopolize everything. Uh and they build fortresses and they, you know, they massacre people left, right, and centre. So yes, it was a turning point. It was literally what I mean, I think that's the meaning, if I remember my Greek, my rusty Greek, it was a catastrophe, a catastrophe. And a catastrophe, if I remember, is it's it's kind of a turning round.
SPEAKER_01It's a point of inclination, yes. Um is it would it be right to say that what happened to some of the great trading cities of the Arab world was what happened also to Venice at the time, namely that with the discovery of new maritime routes via the Atlantic, um trade over the Silk Road rather dried up because it was more hazardous, it was more expensive, it took a longer time. And I mean Venice's greatness was because of the Silk Road and big because of being a receiving harbour for all of that. And now the stuff came in, I don't know, to Amsterdam and to London, and this routes were no longer so frequented, so of course the centres that were lying there were rather atrophying.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I think atrophying for certainly for a period, because you know, eventually after the initial shock, uh and that succession, that nice Haldunian succession for different reasons of European empires, uh what the Portuguese, the Dutch, um uh the Brits or the English, um I suppose, but effectively the Brits, um things did calm down. And then the fact that you did get people like the British getting uh or making quite a large uh trading empire around the Indian Ocean off the back of that, then you got a resurgence of uh of trade and travel from uh from um for example from South Southern Arabia and you know a lot of the shape of what we think of as the Islamic world today. Uh obviously you had the Arab Empire in the 7th and 8th centuries, um uh the that initial one, but then you had a great efflorescence in the 14th century, navigation, but then also a kind of solidifying Ibn Khaldun's time. Ibn Khaldun's time, Ibn Battuta's time, the famous traveller, he was witness to that.
SPEAKER_01Sort of pendant to Marco Polo of the Islamic world.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I I always wish it was the other way around.
SPEAKER_01Perhaps it is the other way around.
SPEAKER_00So m Marco Polo is the um Venetian or the Dalmatian uh Ibn Battuta. Perhaps they will one day. I've done my best in publicising Ibn Batutta, but um uh but there was, you know, uh from the 17th to the 18th centuries and onwards, there was again a sort of resurgence in at least cultural um spread of Islam and trade. So that and you began to get big, big trading houses like in in Singapore and places in the 19th century, Arabs from from uh Southern Arabia. So it it it wasn't that you know everything came to a grinding halt as far as the old ports went, but there were certainly changes. Huge changes.
SPEAKER_01We began with the idea of being Arab and what it might have meant, um, with the importance of language. If you look through Ibn Battuta's lens today at the Arab world today, what does it still mean to be an Arab? What does Arab culture still mean today? And what has, for instance, technology done to it or with it?
SPEAKER_00Ibn Battuta or Ibn Hhaldun? I'm sorry. Well, you know, it could be either. They're very different kinds of observers, but they were both observers. Uh yeah, what does it mean to be Arab today? Uh I think there is there is this lasting feeling of uh spiritual emotional attachment to being Arab, which is which is kind of predicated on the language, and of course for Muslims on the fact that the Quran is this vessel as as as as I called it of preservation. Um what it means in practical terms is is is a bit more difficult to say. Uh if you look at, say, the Gulf where I am at the moment, um you know, I'm a bit worried about uh the future of Arabic here.
SPEAKER_01Why?
SPEAKER_00Well there there's a sort of opening up to the Anglosphere uh to the extent that uh, you know, young people perhaps aren't brought up knowing the classics of Arabic as as they might have done a few generations ago.
SPEAKER_01Did they really? I mean, you know, this is uh let me let me just just push back and say this sounds a little bit like the cultural nostalgia that we have in Europe. Kids don't read the classics anymore, kids don't read books anymore, kids get all their language from television. Now you said in your book very beautifully that you know the complexity of Arabic is such that every word linguists say, every word can mean what it means, its exact opposite. And a camel. Yes.
SPEAKER_00It's not strictly true there.
SPEAKER_01No, but it is rich and rich in ambiguity.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I can give you one example. Rush. It means it means to eat a lot, to eat a little, and for some reason a r a rush as a noun is also a camel hairy behind the ears. So uh um, but yeah, okay, no, you found me out. I'm I'm an old softie for Arabic. Uh I am a cultural um uh sufferer from cultural nostalgia.
SPEAKER_01No, it may also be true. It may be nostalgic, but also not wrong.
SPEAKER_00Well, ask me when I've been teaching. I haven't started to I'm I'm teaching masterpieces of Arabic literature in the coming semester.
SPEAKER_01Did you teach that 30 years ago as well?
SPEAKER_00No, but I kind of studied it 40 something years ago. Uh and no, all right, let's be honest. Um Standard Arabic, classical Arabic, whatever you want to call it, Quranic Arabic, has always been up on a pedestal. Uh and not many people get up to the pedestal. They will be deeply, deeply affected by it. I'll give you an example. I have some um kind of god children, surrogate children, I never know what to call them, who are uh first language Arabic speakers. And sometimes if I'm translating a poem and I get stuck on a verse, I'll try it on them. And they say, um, oh, it's beautiful. And I say, yes, but what does it mean? I've I've got to translate the darn thing. And they say, it's really beautiful. So uh, you know, that there's this emotional attachment. Uh Arabic has always been, as I say, on a pedestal, but it's it's almost like sort of being patriotic. And who is it? Um uhmad Munsaf al-Marzuki, who was the first president of um Tunisia after the Arab Spring Revolution, um, and who is uh uh you know a writer on Arabic and culture. He he said um uh we Arabs uh don't live in a land, we live in a language, which is it's got a lot of truth to it. So you know, this still strong, strong emotional attachment. Political unity, you know, it's it's off with the fairies, but um but but cultural unity, emotional unity, uh in practice, well, this is why it's so important to keep up cultural institutions and and and to carry on teaching the classics. It's so important for people to read the Quran uh and and and really try and understand it.
SPEAKER_01You are thinking that's getting lost in the Arab world as well.
SPEAKER_00No, no, no, not the not the Quran. Um but but to to kind of really think about the words and and to read the the tafasir, the the uh exegeses, um you know, you can't you can't do better than that. And all these all these old uh Arabic writers that I'm in love with are you know they all started off with the Quran and pre-Islamic poetry.
SPEAKER_01But I mean that is very much again like European history, where all the poets basically came out of religious schools, out of monastery schools, um, the Jewish boys who went in part becoming that culture, such as um Spinoza, you know, had been at the Yeshiva at the Torah school, um the Arabic poets had been to the madrasa, and they had also received a religious education. Surely when that is replaced with a secular education, that changes the language and therefore also the identity.
SPEAKER_00That's the great danger. Is that a danger? Oh I'd have to ask Ibn Haldun about that. Um I'd have to resurrect him. Um well, all right, not danger, risk, risk then. Um because it's you know, maybe it's taking us to another turning point. I tend to look back. Uh that's why I say danger. Um I just think you know, you can you you can't see it. It's it's it's it's behind my camera, but on the shelf on the other side of my room, um I've got um volumes and volumes which are produced by the Library of Arabic Literature, uh of which I'm uh fellow uh and also a jobbing editor and translator. And you know, this this great heritage, you know, I just wanted to be a living heritage. And and the heritage is tied up with identity, it's tied up with with being Arab.
SPEAKER_01I mean, this is a such an interesting question and such a very important question because it's not just true for Arab identities, it is true for all sorts of, shall we say, traditional or uh identities that have a little bit of a ta longer tail, shall we say, throughout history. And that that tail may first of all be a very ambivalent thing from our perspective, from our moral perspective today, but ambivalent or not, it's still there and it still means something to people. It is still something that people base their identities on, and you have this feel-the feeling that with modern technologies, um, such as first of all satellite television and then social media, language changes. Um, the knowledge of and attitude to this um older identity shifts as well. That's happening in European societies very strongly. Um it's also very interesting to see how differently these influences can go when people of a critical bend talk about social media in the West. They usually talk about how it destroys, um, how destructive it is to democratic processes, to uh how it changes ideas of selfhood, how it makes different people very, very important. Now, if we think of something that has the word Arab in its name, namely the Arab Spring. Social media were also a very emancipatory thing because um the whole organization of these protests could not have happened without them, and since then dictators have used to control these things in their countries. But um I just for the for the end of our conversation, I want to touch upon this: namely, the Arab Spring was a projection also of a different kind of Arab identities by a younger generation for their future. And probably you could have to say that it's been largely stomped upon. Um, it's had some successes, for instance, in Tunisia. Um, it ended up in murderous catastrophes in Syria and in Lib in Libya, um, but really it did not bring about the kind of democratic revival that the protesters demanded anywhere. So, what about this younger, new projected way of being Arab of an Arab identity?
SPEAKER_00In my book that we we've talked about, um Arabs, I've I've talked about recent ages being an age of hope, and I'm thinking about the time of Jamal Abdul Nasser, um the great um uh the yeah, the ruler of Egypt from the 50s until 1970. Um and uh you know, to some extent thinking about uh social media and technology, that's you know, he he he he rode on the back of the transistor radio, this is quite well known. Um, as you say, the Arab Spring, it was uh social media helped with that. It's you know, 2011 smartphones were coming about then, weren't they? Uh surveillance technology develops very soon on the back of that, so we have a return to authoritarianism. Um but yeah, where is it going? I mean that that as I understand, that's that's really the the drift of your question.
SPEAKER_01What what is it like being Arab in the 21st century?
SPEAKER_00It's like being, again, uh the metaphor I used earlier. I think it's being like for me, it's like uh not that I'm Arab, but it's it's like being pressed up against the screen and not really knowing what's going on. I think I everything seems to be in suspense.
SPEAKER_01I do have to ask this question, Tim. Um I expect being Arab, not only being Muslim and being but also being Arab, is very strongly influenced by what's happening in Gaza at the moment. There an Arab population is being starved by the IDF. Um there are serious allegations that people are shot when they're looking for food, when they're trying to get some food. There are war crimes happening there.
SPEAKER_00And uh not to forget the 58,000 dead.
SPEAKER_01Not to forget the 58,000 dead, and up to none uh that we know about. And I must say, people who know me on this podcast, I don't think I have to totemically also condemn the 7th of October attacks. Of course they were an atrocity, but um we are now talking with and about an Arab perception of what's happening in Gaza today and what that means for an Arab identity. You spend your time in Arab countries and speak to um Arabic speaking, usually, I suppose, Muslim friends. Now, what is the impact of that?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's difficult to say, or the it rather it varies from from place to place.
SPEAKER_01Uh you know, if if if I was in Yemen at the moment, uh the Houthis uh have have quite made their mind up on the matter.
SPEAKER_00Uh yes, that's but but Yemenis have. Always been very pro-Palestinian, and and I as I would say most Arabs in the street have. But if you look at the sort of movers and shakers um where I am now, uh there isn't really very much discussion. And indeed, um, you know, that's to put it uh mildly. Uh discussion is rather frowned upon.
SPEAKER_01Or suppressed.
SPEAKER_00Uh yes. So um uh uh you know I can't really I d I don't really know what's going on in people's minds here. I mean I th I I think to an extent if you don't talk about something you do forget it. But you can't help seeing the pictures. Uh there's certainly no doubt that in you know in the street, the Arab street in in Yemen, there's huge support and and and a huge feeling of of solidarity. Uh what's happening in Egypt, for example? I don't know. I mean, you know, I don't doubt that most Egyptians in their hearts are absolutely a hundred percent with the with the oppressed people of Gaza and the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, but um we don't really hear very much about it. It's difficult to say. This is why this is where I t I take refuge in being a historian and say it's not in the past yet. That no, no, that's that is that is very lily-livered. It's very um it's pathetic to say that, but I don't I don't know. I can't predict. To put it in this in this way, in a world where the norms of humanity and international law appear to be totally in suspense, I really can't tell where things are going.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you for that very honest answer. And perhaps we'll have an opportunity to talk about where things are going at some future date. I'd also love to um provoke your love of the Arabic language and of the language of the Quran by perhaps doing a whole conversation about that. Um, and about language, because I do think that language is so important because, you know, again, a long controversy, but I must say I do come very firmlessly firmly down on one side. Language does form our thinking and our view of the world, it forms it very profoundly. What we have words for is something that we can perceive earlier, see more quickly, also even neurologically, but also, of course, think about more easily. I've come to think of language a little bit as a sort of, you know, these farm sets that kids get to play with with different kinds of animals. And if you think, you know, you've got you've got a word for each animal, and you've got, but what do you do when you encounter animals that you don't have words for, you find words that there's no animal for, um, then things get really confusing, and that that's when translation becomes interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Just uh uh out of interest, um uh next semester I'm teaching masterpieces of Arabic literature. I'm also teaching a course called Once Upon a Time, Fairy Stories, uh, folktales and the human imagination. I think that's the full title. And I kind of thought, you know, I'm really an Arabist, I'm a historian, why am I teaching this? And thinking about it, I realized, yeah, it's words, it's stories that actually make us human. It's the fact that we have these vocal bits and pieces in our mouths and in our throats that can make words and which connect with our brains, and that we can tell narratives. The narratives we tell the narratives, but the narratives shape us. So, you know, not just language in the sense of words, but language in the sense of narrative is is is is what drives so much of being human.
SPEAKER_01Tim McIntosh Smith's thank thank you very much for talking not about what makes us human, but what makes Arab people Arab, and has done so over the last many hundred years, and maybe doing so in the future, and perhaps we'll have the opportunity to talk about that again. Thank you for being my guest on the blogcast.