What's in a name?

Edward Mortimer

A HISTORY OF THE ARAB PEOPLES by Albert Hourani

Faber, f25, pp.551

The clue is in the title: that final 's'. Albert Hourani is much too wise and hon- est a historian to pretend that there is such a thing as a single Arab people, with a his- tory stretching back 1400 years. He wants us to feel the plurality of what is now called the Arab world, and the very long, gradual, untidy, still incomplete process by which the people living in it have come to think of themselves as sharing something which gives them a distinct culture, and perhaps a common nationality (whatever that means).

That something is, of course, the Arabic language; more precisely, the use of that language, or some recognisable form of it, for everyday purposes, in the home and in the street, not just for worship or learned discourse. It is a bit as though the Renaissance, instead of developing the sep- arate literature and syntax of the different Romance languages, had brought them back together into a single modified form of classical Latin, and had taught their speakers to think of themselves as forming a single, even if divided Roman people. No doubt there would have been some overlap between Roman nationalism and Roman Catholicism, but nationalists would have insisted on the special role and identity of those Catholics who actually spoke the Roman tongue, as opposed to merely using it in church or in scholarly works, and would have argued that Latin-speaking Protestants or Jews (or Muslims, if any)

were also full members of the Roman nation.

It did not happen, because that way of thinking was hardly known to the Renaissance. That way of thinking became common only in the 19th and 20th cen- turies, as literacy spread down from the few to the many and the state came to be ideal- ised as the embodiment of a nation, held together by a single national culture. By then the separate Romance languages and cultures were already fairly well devel- oped.

For speakers of Arabic, however, the Renaissance did not bring a flowering of separate regional cultures. On the contrary, it coincided for most of them with their incorporation into a single empire, whose rulers, the Ottoman Turks, did use Arabic for liturgical purposes, and for some at least of their learned discourse, but retained their own vernacular (though with many Arabic and Persian loan-words) for everyday use. Most Arabic-speaking peo- ple, from the 16th to the 19th century, were bound together by that empire, and by the older and stronger bond of Islam, rather than by their everyday language. The word `Arab' itself was generally used in Arabic until early this century to mean a bedouin tribesman. Not until then was there any strong reason for an Arabic-speaking Muslim to distinguish himself from other Muslims, or for that matter to identify with Arabic-speaking Christians. Once that is understood it is not very surprising that Hourani's book only really comes alive in the last 200 pages or so. All through it he strives to identify phenome- na, ranging from philosophical ideas to the design of artefacts and houses, which were broadly common to the whole area he is describing. But for the first two thirds of the book the effort involved is too visible. He begins with 'The making of a world (seventh-tenth century)'.The trouble is that that world was not the 'Arab world' as we now think of it. It was the world of classical and mediaeval Islam. Iran, central Asia and north India were no less part of it, in the minds of its inhabitants, than north Africa and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain, which seems to have been more thoroughly Arabised than Iran and which Hourani, fol- lowing modern Arab convention, has retro- spectively incorporated into the 'Arab world'). If anything, they were more so, at least so long as Baghdad was the seat of the caliphate, which it was from the eighth to the 13th century.

We are dealing here with three process- es, intimately related to each other but by no means identical: the Arab conquest, the spread of Islam, and the spread of Arabic as a language of everyday speech. The first was amazingly quick: within 100 years of Muhammad's death in 632 his successors ruled an empire stretching from the Punjab to the Pyrenees, and from Samarkand to the Sahara. The speed of the other two is much harder to assess: there are no statis- tics for mosque attendance in mediaeval times, and the language that people spoke among themselves was not a subject of great importance to mediaeval Muslim writers, most of whom would no more have written in a language other than Arabic than a mediaeval Western scholar would have thought of using a language other than Latin.

The first questions to be answered are where, when and how the acceptance of Islamic rule, and/or of Islamic belief, led to the substitution of Arabic for earlier ver- naculars as the language of everyday speech. Why, for instance, did a significant minority of Egyptians hold fast to their Christian faith while renouncing (except for liturgical purposes) their Coptic tongue, whereas no less significant minorities in western north Africa embraced Islam but continued to speak Berber? Why did Lebanese Maronites become 'Arabs' but not Muslims while Persians and Turks became Muslims but not Arabs?

No one should suppose that answering such questions is easy, but Hourani, as the most distinguished living historian of Arab thought and culture, certainly in this coun- try and possibly in the world, might have been expected to tackle them head on. Instead, he only touches on them in pass- ing, so that they almost get lost in the effort to provide a comprehensive account social, cultural and economic as well as political — of the history of the region.

With the Ottoman conquest of the Middle East in the early 16th century (fol- lowing closely on the final loss of Spain by the Muslims at the end of the 15th), the thematic unity of the book becomes less artificial. For, as Hourani says, . all the Arabic-speaking countries were included in the Ottoman Empire .. . except for parts of Arabia, the Sudan and Morocco.

Even so, there does not seem to be a great deal to say about a distinctively Arab experience in Ottoman times, until we get to 'the age of European empires (1800- 1939)'. Here at last, on territory familiar from his earlier writings (Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East), Hourani really gets into his stride.

The rise of nationalism gives him people to write about who share his basic premise — that 'Arab' is a meaningful cultural and political category. But there is more to it than that. Arab nationalism hardly existed before 1900, and Hourani makes no attempt to disguise that fact. But the pro- cess of European penetration into the Arabic-speaking universe had of course begun much earlier.

In describing this, and in bringing out the essential similarity of the social changes it caused in different Arab countries (although the political forms it took varied very widely), Hourani helps us understand why the nationalist premise came, in our own century, to be so widely accepted. When he says that behind the first 'stirrings of national self-consciousness' in the 19th century 'there lay something older and stronger: the wish of long-established soci- eties to continue their lives without inter- ruption', the statement somehow gains weight from what the reader has absorbed, perhaps subliminally, while trying to keep awake during the previous 300 pages. If 'Arabs' had not previously thought of themselves as such, it was perhaps because, secure in their Islamic cultural universe and latterly in their Ottoman political one, they had not needed to. But the arrival of Europe brought such radical upheavals in their world that they inevitably asked them- selves new questions about their identity, and came up with new answers.

Sadly, the answer contained in Arab nationalism, however satisfying intellectual- ly and emotionally, has so far proved much less so politically. Hourani is the first to recognise this, though he does remind us of some positive benefits which nationalist governments have brought to their peoples — land reform, large-scale infrastructural investments, above all mass education which in the present moment of despair are perhaps too easily overlooked.

Hourani is a very calm man, not given to wailing or gnashing his teeth. He depicts the wailing and gnashing of others in a mode of sympathetic detachment, some- what reminiscent of Piero della Francesca. He does not mock the righteous indigna- tion of Arab intellectuals, nor deny that they have much to be indignant about. He is reluctant, indeed, to draw political Morals of any sort. Yet he seems gently to hint that, if things are to get better, indig- nation must give way to compassion, to quiet and sober analysis, even to an appre- ciation of other people's points of view.