Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

A riveting, comprehensive history of the Arab peoples and tribes that explores the role of language as a cultural touchstone

This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia.

Mackintosh-Smith reveals how linguistic developments—from pre-Islamic poetry to the growth of script, Muhammad’s use of writing, and the later problems of printing Arabic—have helped and hindered the progress of Arab history, and investigates how, even in today’s politically fractured post–Arab Spring environment, Arabic itself is still a source of unity and disunity.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Middle East, Religion, Islam, World History, Audiobook

656 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Tim Mackintosh-Smith is an eminent Arabist, translator, and traveler whose previous publications include Travels with a Tangerine and Yemen. He has lived in the Arab world for thirty-five years and is a senior fellow of the Library of Arabic Literature.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may not be a perfect book, but you are not going to get another history of Arabs quite like it. It's the kind of book that only comes along once in a blue moon, and the kind that only this author could have written.

Most books of this sort in English (and I've read a couple) are written by historians sitting in university libraries in places like Oxford or New Haven, and are full of incisive scholarship and polite appreciation of their subject. Tim Mackintosh-Smith wrote this from his home in a medieval tower house in central Sana'a, the Yemeni capital, and his excellent historical research is repeatedly connected to his thirty years spent living in the Arab world and to the events happening around him.

‘Had I written this book ten years ago, it would have turned out differently,’ he says near the end. ‘Recent events have made it darker than it might have been.’ There is a constant sense in here that history is alive, and that its consequences are playing out in the incidental stories of the author's friends who have become radicalised, the sons who have been blown up, the slogans scrawled on the walls and the sleepless nights spent listening to missiles falling on the city. He comments, for instance, that

the theme of Arabs versus Persians has played throughout history, with variations: tribes versus empires, shaykhs versus shahs, Arab cultural reactionaries versus Persian cultural revivalists, Sunnah versus Shi'ah, Iraq versus Iran, and now, outside my window, what is in part (or at least in the imagination and the rhetoric of both sides) a proxy war between Riyadh and Tehran.

These moments of concertinaing history into the present are vertiginous and thrilling, and reminded me immediately of what Rebecca West does with Balkan history in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon – though she was a traveller, whereas Mackintosh-Smith is essentially a native. It is perhaps for this reason that he is not afraid of asking pointed questions.

Sometimes it seems that only one thing unites Arabs, and that is their inability to get along with each other. Why this disunity? Why this extraordinary level of self-harm?

…and of being unsatisfied with well-meaning but lazy answers like, ‘because of colonialism’ (although obviously he is very clear on the evils of colonialism). This is a theme that becomes increasingly pressing as his history nears the present day.

It takes a long time to get there, however. Most Arab histories basically begin with Islam – here, there is a very gratifying attention to pre-Islamic history, and Muhammad doesn't even pop up for a good two hundred pages. These early sections are among the most fascinating, not least because they draw attention to the central challenge of what exactly an ‘Arab’ is. Perhaps there was never a real ‘pure’ answer to this; in fact the word may have originally meant something like ‘mixed people’. Over time it developed into what Mackintosh-Smith calls a Kulturnation, which comes down, as do most things in this book, to language.

Whatever ‘Arab’ has meant in the past – marginal camel herds, cultic guardians, tribal raiders – it now means, primarily, users of the Arabic language.

This has some authority behind it – Muhammad is supposed to have said, ‘He who speaks Arabic is an Arab’ – but Mackintosh-Smith, with the weary authority of the fluent foreign speaker, notes that for ‘most Arabs, it cut no ice…I have found [he says] that to speak Arabic is at first praised and encouraged – until one speaks it well enough to disagree with its owners.’

And that requires some mastery. The Arabic language, which I was lucky enough to study at school, is like a fantasy novelist's mad dream, with 80 words for ‘honey’, 200 for ‘beard’, 800 for ‘sword’ and at least a thousand for ‘camel’. Linguists are generally sceptical of claims like this, but Arabic is a bit of a special case. If you start looking into Arabic dictionaries you will find baffling things, such as that jawn means ‘black’ but also ‘white’, while jalal means ‘great’ as well as ‘small’.

[A]n old saw among Arabists that says every Arabic word means three things – itself, its opposite, and a camel – is not entirely untrue.

This is of more than incidental importance. Language is the foundation not just of Arabness, but of Arab religion as well. The Qur'an, as has been much pointed out, is not the equivalent of the Christian Bible, but rather of Christ, the Logos, the incarnation of God as the Word. ‘Earlier miracles were supernatural; Muhammad's was superlinguistic.’ And yet this language is not something that any Arab has ever spoken, as Mackintosh-Smith is at pains to stress.

Arabs do not ‘speak Arabic’ – that is, they do not speak the high Arabic of the Qur'an; they never have done, or not as a ‘native’ language of daily life. That is the point of the Qur'an; it is elevated beyond human expression.

Even so-called ‘Modern Standard Arabic’, which is what you study nowadays, is just a kind of stripped-down version of Qur'anic Arabic which, again, is not really used as a real language. This was clear to me when I lived in Morocco, but then Morocco is on the outer edge of the Arab world in all kinds of ways; I hadn't appreciated how true it also is for people in places like the Arabian Peninsula itself. Mackintosh-Smith points out that

very few Arabs feel comfortable writing their own ‘national’ language, and even fewer are comfortable speaking it. Over time, in fact, most Arabs have been scared speechless by the language that bears their name

…which is why dual-language versions of the Qur'an, like the one I have, are so often relied on by Muslims themselves around the world. But the implications go beyond just religious stuff. While Europe had a Renaissance which ensured the success of vernacular languages, the exact opposite happened in the Arab world: their renaissance cemented the victory of the old high language as the sole written medium.

The European equivalent would have been for the continent to have rediscovered Virgil, but never to have had a Dante or a Chaucer; for the Latin Vulgate Bible to have had no rivals, and for Luther and Wycliffe never to have been born.

This is a fascinating way to think of it. And language also has some responsibility, Mackintosh-Smith suggests, for the way new ideas have been adopted in the Arab world: the printing revolution, for instance, had rather little effect in areas where the script poses such insoluble problems for typographers. As a consequence, many parts of the Arab world almost went directly from manuscripts to social media.

Many Arabs may thus have leapt straight from ‘pre-truth’ to ‘post-truth’ without going through the intervening stage.

The political implications start to become obvious. It is a miserable process reading through Mackintosh-Smith's summary of the Arab Spring (‘The Spring That Had No Summer’, as one of his subheadings calls it) and being shown how revolution was coopted by authoritarian regimes at every turn (with Tunisia – perhaps – as the sole success story). ‘It might be said that Arab history is a series of stolen revolutions.’

[W]hile in the present…most Arabs are in AD 2020 [Anno Hegirae 1441] as far as their smartphones go, almost all might be in about AD 1441 in terms of comparative sociopolitical development: before, that is, Gutenberg, Reformations, Enlightenments, French and Russian Revolutions, World Wars, Springs (at least, successful ones).

This is the kind of argument that is sometimes made from a place of ignorance, but it sounds very different here after several hundred pages of lovingly considered linguistic exegesis and political history. Mackintosh-Smith sees many Arab populations as caught in a kind of ‘Mass Stockholm Syndrome’, in thrall to strong-man leaders whose responsibility for hundreds of thousands of Arabic deaths is ignored because of their minor successes against Israel or the ‘imperialist’ West. ‘Where civil liberties do not exist,’ he says incisively, ‘the void where they should be is often occupied by national pride.’

Mackintosh-Smith's view of Israel is fairly gloomy, though so is his view of the Arab world right now. It certainly seems ridiculous to see reviews accusing him of ‘antisemitism’ (by which I suppose is meant ‘anti-Jewishness’, since Arabs are also Semitic); what he does diagnose is a ‘strange dark symbiosis’ between a militaristic Israel and Arab dictatorships, which depend on the fear of each other for their power. But in the end his history is primarily an act of hope – for Arabs themselves to discover parts of their own history that have been neglected.

They will find that individualism, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, inclusiveness, civil society, objective truth are not part of some ‘Western crusade’, but are part of their own past.

It is a joy to read a history as comprehensive as this written by someone who is really a writer, not a historian – someone with a real prose style (albeit sometimes a little intrusive), someone moreover with a constant lively intelligence and a wealth of experience that are everywhere present in this book. It's in some ways one of the most subjective and partial histories of its subject, but it also feels like the most heartfelt and essential one.

[Aurelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is very hard to summarize the scope of this book in a review; the book itself tries to summarize the History of one of the most complicated human groups ever. It is a group whose identity has always been controversial. Their sudden appearance on world stage History is difficult to comprehend, their status in modern History and current events is still more problematic. What this author does is to find a link through all of these elements and make sense of them, at the same time destroying some preconceptions and myths which plagued the study and the historiography of this civilization.


The History of Arabs did not begin with Islam. They existed long before that VIIth century religious phenomena. But who were those Arabs? The groups which inhabited the Peninsula were much diversified, socially and politically, they were also not isolated from the world as it is often imagined. In the north, groups like Nabateans, Ghassanids and Lakhmids located in the periphery of the Fertile Crescent, and were heavily influenced by its great civilizations: Assyria and Babylon, later Persia and Byzantium. In the south, settled urbanized states like Himyar and Sabaa kingdoms exposed to the African Horn civilizations and Persia through the Gulf. Bedouin nomads in central Arabia linked these two groups and acted as middle men between them. Religiously they were as eclectic as ever, mixing native deities to imported abrahamic monotheism. To complicate this mosaic even more, the south Arabians did not speak a Semitic language, but a completely different language called Sabaean. In the north, the Aramean and Greek languages were very present. It seems that nothing predestined this group to unity. But soon they will create it. Under the pressure of neighboring Empires, who crowned ‘Arab’ Kings and used them as buffer states or mercenaries, and because of a certain cultural prosperity which came with this political acknowledgement, the group will little by little construct its identity. This is a pattern which will repeat itself throughout their History. Their identity was defined by other groups and in opposition to them. The medium of this identity will be the High Arabic Language. It was the language of poets, seers, prophets, and later of the Qur’an.


The paradigm of language is extremely important to the author. No one actually has ever spoken in the High Arabic, not even Arabs themselves. It was created to mediate an eloquence which was considered divine; later it would become the language of God himself. It is difficult to understand how a language can have a mystic dimension. It is the only way we can explain one of the most perplexing claims of the Qur’an (perplexing at least to western observers): that the Qur’an is the most eloquent text ever, it is its own literary miracle. We can only make sense of this when it is written in a language which is considered to bring the divine directly to earth. Native speakers are hardly conscious with how much sanctity they give their language. Recently I told some colleagues that I was considering reading the Qur’an in English, only to have them jump off their seats to tell me that its beauty and meaning will be lost in translation, that no ever language can actually grasp it. Not only its implicit holiness, but add to that the amount of how much it is repeated. The author addresses this matter. In fact one of the reasons why I contemplated the English Qur’an experience is that we hear it so much that you always have it in the back of your head, even if you have never read the whole thing. You hear it in public transportation, in shops, at your local butcher, it does not matter (perhaps it never mattered) if you did not understand; if that is a VIIth century Arabic vocabulary or that the syntax is absolutely unintelligible. This is of huge consequences to the Arab intellect. Truth will thus be rhetorical, associated with the text, rather than experimental observations or logical conclusion, a sharp contrast with the Royal Society’s motto: Nullius in verba, on no one’s word. In Arabic society word is power, in the mouth of seers and poets in pre-islamic Arabia, a literal word of God with the Qur’an, and lately with fanatic demagogues in the modern times. If not the word of the Qur’an then that of the sayings of Muhammed, then of his descendents, then his descendants’ descendents or his companions and so on. Objective and experimental truth never mattered. It is a cult of the word, an Arabic word. Exegeses and commentaries of these words will multiply throughout the ages, in order to grasp the Truth and the power which lay in them. Reason or Nature will be put aside, silenced to this day.


When it comes to the political theory, one does not need to go further than the framework provided by Ibn Khaldoun. Arabs were a society which combined two contradictory but complimentary elements. It made its strength, but also its fatal weakness. First the Bedouins, which means mobility and adaptability, but also tribalism and looting neighbors not only as a career but as a state of mind if not as an established institution. Second, the settled societies such as the south Arabian kingdoms, Lakhmid and Ghassanid client kings in the north, later Quraich and Medina in the Hijaz, where an abstract state was successfully constructed, and thus surpassed the anarchy of tribalism, and provided the stability needed to create a civilization and spread a culture. But the dependence of the latter on the first, as agents or mercenaries often disrupts this very fragile equilibrium. The moment of glory came with Muhammed and his revolution; he was able to exploit the advantages of Quraich as a commercial hub with a far reaching communication web, and the mobility of the Bedouins and their military prowess, around a promise of power and wealth the like of which they have never dreamed of. If his message was not an innovation when it comes to theology, it was certainly of great genius when it comes to politics. An egalitarian, Universalist message which eliminates the tribal nature of Arabia and replaces it with a new identity: now being a Muslim is all what mattered. But the tremendous success will be short lived, tribal tensions will soon arise over booty, and Quraichi mercantile elite will again monopolize power with the caliph Uthman and Mu’awiya of the Umayyads after him. With the territorial expansion, the bloody clash between established Quraichi elites and new muslim social climbers will only be a prelude to a greater clash between Arab and non Arab, with even more violence to come. The rise of the heavily persianized Abbassids was a response to the melting pot created by the conquest. It is also a climax before the downfall of Arabs as a driving political force. Security and Administration will be gradually outsourced to Persians and Turks in order limit the access of fellow tribal competitors to power. It won’t take much of time before that these mercenaries/slave soldiers push the descendants of Muhammed and their tribes aside.


The political and historical marginalization of Arabs will be strangely compensated by the thriving of their language and culture. It started with Umayyads creating Islamic Art almost Ex Nihilo, then Abbassids setting the oral language into writing; they also transformed Islam from a tribal cult to an ethical system, with texts, rules and jurisprudence adapted to an urban life. It will continue to shine long after them. After Bagdad’s decline, Cairo will be the centre of the Arab world, although under Turkish rule for centuries, state funded schools of Islamic jurisprudence, grammar and ancient Arab poetry will solidify the legacy of the first Arab expansion. Arab culture kept absorbing foreign peoples. Wanderers and traders will spread it across the Indian Ocean, continental India and China.


Arab culture’s prestige will be at its lowest under the much more persianized Ottomans. For centuries, Arabs and their culture will go through one of the most fascinating historical lethargies. The wakeup call was Napoleon’s troops marching to Egypt and smashing Mamluk’s army in a blow. A new world opened to Arabs. New notions and inventions: nation-states, mechanized warfare, secularism, political parties… Again neighboring imperial pressures will revive the Arab identity. The response this time will be double faced as Janus. Secular intellectuals, poets and essayists advocated for a revival of Arab identity and pride, with their Nahda, the Arabic renaissance movement, which was more of a Christian Arab Levantine renaissance, just like its key figures. On the other side, Wahhabi reactionnists, who wanted to reproduce the political experience of early Islam, and they did succeed to a great degree, at least in central Arabia. The twentieth century will sure be a tumultuous time for the Arab world. Patterns of tribalism and violent power struggles between demagogues will perpetuate themselves, under new denominations: nationalists, Islamists. Two new factors will further complicate the scene, the vast riches of oil which will transform Arabs to a key player on the international arena, and the creation of a mighty but tiny empire called Israel in the very centre of the Arab world.  Arab nationalism was perhaps the first causality of this new change, and the rise of Political Islam and Islamic fanatics followed along.


Everything is of course much complicated than what it sounds. But the saga of Arabs continues. The scholarship of the author is of the highest levels. His knowledge of the language and History is immense. More than the experimental facts, he has a hold on the very spirit of Arabness. Truly a tremendous work which I am grateful to have access to, one which I would recommend to anyone ready to take up the challenges of understanding a complicated people and their History.

[Tariq Mahmood · Rating 5 out of 5]

With little written history, but a whole lot of oral tradition, its little wonder that Tim has taken writing about the Arabs focusing on their language and cultural traditions, which makes this book very unique. The Arabs have pretty much maintained their rich tribal culture of raiding and pillaging through the pre-Islamic era to the modern times of ISIS type raids. It's a culture which to this day glorifies the Beduin way of life over stable urban life which is completely opposite to most western cultures. And urban Arabs will form temporary groups to counter an external enemy and in the absence of an external enemy, they will fight against each other, making the concept of an Arab unity nonsensical by definition. Arabs also have a very rich tradition of hiring mercenaries to fight their wars, a practice which to this day is obvious in the economy as well as their armies. This prolonged exposure to internecine warfare must have given the Arabs the ability to judge the quality of their enemy. That must have been a reason why the Arabs are divided over how to counter Israel today and have resorted back to infighting instead.

[Alex O'Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most fascinating books I have ever read. Mackintosh Smith masterfully weaves the history of the Arabs through the lens of the evolution of the Arabic language, articulating his mastery of the Arabic language and how it has shaped the people in turn. I learned a massive amount from this book. The history read like a thriller, and the author is an incredible story teller.

However, towards the end of the book, the author's hatred of Israel and Zionism came out very strongly, as could be expected in a book like this. It was a shame the book was written that way, but was also very informative to the Arab view of Zionism.

Nonetheless, the book is fascinating and I probably will read it again.

[Leonard Singer]

This book can’t be rated. The author is rabidly anti-Israel. As examples:

-the books says that the only place that post holocaustJews could be sent without causing a problem was Antartica. p 442

- the book cites pre-1948 Jewish terrorism but no Arab terrorism against the Jews. eg, p. 462

- the book does not mention the UN resolution about Israel, the Israelis acceptance of the UN boundaries, or the other nations’ recognition of Israel.

- the book states that the “disaster of 1948” will not be remedied until the Palestinians are returned to their homeland. p 463

- the book calls Israel the “dagger in the map” p 461

- regarding the 1967 war, the book does not refer to the Arabs’ blockade of international waters, mass hysteria for war, and troop movements for staging an attack on Israel. p 477

- the book calls the outcome of the 1973 war a “stalemate”. p 556

- the book deplores the conditions in Gaza but does not state that Israel turned over Gaza to the Palestinians who promptly destroyed the infrastructure. The book calls Gaza a “giant concentration camp.” p 499

- the book repeatedly is enthralled by the Koran’s statement that Allah is the one and only God but mentions nothing about the Torah or Ten Commandments. eg, p 140

The author has a right to his opinions. The author’s choice to omit material facts undermines the credibility of the whole work.








-

[Nigel Kotani · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1992 on a flight from Cairo to Sana'a I found myself sitting next to an Englishman of almost exactly my age who was returning to his home in Yemen. Smalltalk developed into conversation, which developed into an offer of a lift from the airport into the city. Once he had blagged his way through immigration - he didn't have a visa - the lift developed into an offer to stay at his house for the night, which led to me using his house as my base for the next six weeks as I explored that magnificent country and got to know its extraordinary people. That in turn led on to a friendship which has now lasted nearly 30 years.

During that six weeks Tim began work on his first book, Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land. That won the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year in 1998 – bizarrely, another friend was also shortlisted for the prize that year - and he then went on to write a number of books (and appear in a TV travelogue) on Ibn Battuta, whose 14th century voyages Tim spent a decade retracing.

Great though those books were, this latest of his is in another league entirely and deserves to become one of the classics of Middle-Eastern scholarship. (This is not bias through friendship: I’ve given low marks for friends’ books on this website before.) Most extraordinary of all, he wrote it in the middle of a civil war – I have an email from him dated about 18 months before publication in which he talks poignantly of a dinner party he attended at our house only two or three years earlier belonging to an ‘unreachable past’ – and throughout the book he makes frequent references to ‘the conflict outside my window’.

The book is very much ‘a’ history of the Arabs, rather than ‘the’ history of the Arabs. It starts in pre-historic times and, as with all histories that begin in pre-history, that section of the book is problematic, being based on very limited information and necessarily being very speculative. That said, he deals with this difficult period admirably and, whilst it may not be the most gripping section of the book, it is far more absorbing than most pre-historic sections in history books (more than one of which has caused me to abandon a book).

What makes the pre-historic section particularly interesting is that much of it is an exploration of exactly who the Arabs are. This question develops into a central theme, if not the central theme, of the book. Are they the settled agrarians of Southern Mesopotamia and Arabia Felix? Are they the nomads of the desert region in between? Are they the people who embraced Islam in the initial 7th century conquests and who (unlike the Turks and Persians) still preserve that culture? Are they, as the modern pan-Arabists would have it, anyone who speaks Arabic?

As the book progresses it becomes more rooted in recorded history and therefore more accessible, getting fully into its stride when it reaches the time of Mohammad. Even then, and as he progresses from Mohammed through the Umayyads and Abbasids, he treats the chronology as being less important than the central theme of the book, namely the exploration of the very identity of the Arabs. Covering that period he focuses therefore not on who conquered which territory and when but on the wider history of how the Arabs took their culture, belief and identity to distant regions and saw them adopted by the inhabitants of those regions, only for the conquerors themselves to gradually become isolated and disempowered not only in the lands that they had conquered but also in their own home territories. This will frustrate someone looking for a conventional history or someone looking for an ‘entry-level’ introduction to the Arabs. He spends longer, for example, covering the tradition of foreign rulers sending an empty palanquin to Mecca for the Hajj than he does on the Suez Crisis, the former being a vehicle to explore and highlight bigger themes of identity, change and belief than the latter, which arguably had a greater impact on Britain and France than it did on the Arab World anyway.

A basic grounding in the Arab World and the Arabs will therefore help the reader, and the better one knows them the more one is likely to take from this book. His exploration of their ability – probably not unique amongst Arabs, but arguably refined by them to levels that no-one else has achieved - to pretend to ignore incontrovertible evidence in front of their eyes in order to preserve a societal belief system and not rock the boat particularly resonated with me. Something I learnt indirectly through the book is that the Arabs’ love of conspiracy theories, with which I have had a lifelong frustration because of the extent to which it impedes self-knowledge and growth, seems to be rooted less in blaming outsiders, as I have always thought, than (though no less destructive) in supporting and preserving the societal status quo by not blaming their own leaders.

Tim is a big lover and student of language, often using the etymology of Arabic words to explore hidden meanings behind them. His love of language extends to English, with his use of written English being unquestionably scholarly. I was grateful to be reading on a Kindle, which enabled me to easily look up some of his more erudite language – something I’ve never felt a need to do when conversing with him, his spoken English being that of a ‘regular Joe’. This raises interesting questions as to whom the book will appeal to. As I wrote above, the better one knows the Arab World the more one will get out of this book, but for those actually themselves from the region the very scholarship of the book – and I must emphasise that the book is one of lively scholarship and not dry academia – is going to be a barrier: you need to speak good English, arguably better than most native English-speakers, to really get to grips with this book entirely. A mutual (Arab) friend tells me that Tim's working on a translation of the book, adding that this will undoubtedly mean that it's censored in some countries, thereby making it a 'must read' and therefore a best seller on the black market (which comment is consistent with my previous point about pretending to ignore in order not to rock the boat).

The modern sections of the book, dealing with the 19th century awakening, Nasser & pan-Arabism and the rise of the autocrats and Islamists are, by reason of their proximity, the most accessible in the book. What is remarkable about his coverage of those periods is his understanding and analysis of the significance of very recent and even contemporary events in the wider sociological, political and geopolitical development of the region over a period of time that runs into the millennia. It is extremely hard to understand the wider significance of events as they are unfolding around you: Tim does that convincingly, though only time will tell if he has done so accurately.

This is a book that starts strongly and then just gets stronger and stronger as it becomes more and more contemporary. Very, very impressive. A must-read for those with an interest in the region.

[Omar Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tim Mackintosh Smith is one of those romantic Englishmen who used to go and settle in far off lands and "go native". He lives in Yemen (apparently still there, even during the civil war) and has been writing about the region and the Arab people for several decades. This book is the culmination of a lifetime of study, a comprehensive history of a people and civilization to which he has become attached and about whom he knows more than most. It is well worth reading.

He begins by making it clear that this is a history of the Arabs, not a history of Islam. The first mention of the word Arab actually occurs in "in 853 BC (and) concerns the employment by the Assyrian state of a transport contractor, a certain Gindibu (‘Locust’), an Arab chieftain who owned vast herds of camels". This is about 3000 years ago, and the coming of Islam lies about halfway through this history. While we know relatively little of the early (pre-Islamic) history of these people, Mackintosh-Smith wants us to be aware that the Arabs existed long before Islam did.

The word "Arab" itself  means "tribal groups who live beyond the reach of settled society". It was mostly used for the nomadic people of the Arabian peninsula, among whom the high Arabic language evolved. This group and their more settled brethren in Southern Arabia (Yemen) were likely descended from people who migrated into the peninsula from the fertile crescent and with the coming of Islam, they were united into one nation, bound together by religion and by the high Arabic language of the poets and soothsayers, the language that became the language of the Quran. He emphasizes, again and again, that this language, above all else, is what defines an Arab. Yet it is not the everyday language of anyone who is "Arab". The everyday dialects of Arabic change every few hundred miles (or less), but this "rich, strange, subtle, suavely hypnotic, magically persuasive, maddeningly difficult ‘high’ Arabic language that evolved on the tongues of tribal soothsayers and poets" remains the ideal, the language of literature and poetry, and the language of the Quran, the quintessential "Arabic" book. But the fact that it is not (and never was) the everyday language of any people has consequences for all dreams of unity and is a feature of Arab civilization that outsiders sometimes miss. For Mackintosh-Smith, it is ultimately this language that defines the Arabs, even before the rise of Islam. Not because they speak it everyday (they do not, and never did) but because their prophets and poets spoke it, and it bound them together in one greater civilization, above and beyond the divisions of tribe and local dialect.

The other great theme of the book is the conflict between settled people (hadar) and nomads (Beddu). The trademark of the nomads is the ghazw or raid, and the author says that even though the nomads are almost gone, the tradition of the raid survives in the countless coups and counter-coups of the Arab world. "For much of Arab history, two rationalities have coexisted, those of the ‘settled’ and of the ‘bedouin’, the peoples and the tribes, seemingly in perpetual duality, clashing yet embracing, loving and hating, yin and yang."

He covers, of course, the rise of Islam, the explosive growth of the Arab empire, its decision to use to Arabic as the language of administration (and the resulting, astoundingly rapid conversion of conquered people from Morocco to Iraq into "Arabs"). He discusses the rise of Arab literature, science and philosophy (as in, all these were written in the Arabic language, in an Arab-dominated empire) and the benefits of their early use of paper (which they learned to make from the Chinese, but developed into a fine art and used very widely long before it made its way to Europe), but he also points out how short this flash of brilliance and expansion was (only 300 years from the coming of Islam to the fall of the Abbasids, from absolute rulers to puppets of their Persian and then Turkic overlords).
But while most histories of the Arabs peter out at this point, he points out that the Arabs (or at least, some Arabs, the ones in Oman and Yemen) enjoyed another long twilight expansion long after the caliphate had slipped out of their hands; after the caliphate had fallen to the Turks and been ravaged by the Mongols, Arab traders maintained and enlarged a new domain around the Indian ocean, converting people from Sri Lanka and India to Malaysia, Indonesia and East Africa to Islam, and creating a second (and less known) expansion of their language, culture and religion.

Finally, he describes the various attempts at mondernization, rennaissance and recovery that occured after the arrival of the modern Europeans in Arab lands (starting with Napoleon in Egypt). Unlike many histories, he does not stop a 100 years ago, but brings the story up to the present (even commenting on the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi). He does say that the book might have had a more optimistic ending if written ten years ago (before the rise and fall of the Arab spring), but now “Seeing the land I live in and love falling apart is like watching an old and dear friend losing his mind”. 

The book is very well written, flush with delightful anecdotes and clever turns of phrase. It is probably the most comprehensive, up to date and detailed history of the Arabs that is out there and is a must read for anyone interested in the region and the people. The author is clearly in love with his subject, and has a generally sympathetic view of the Arabs, a fact that may upset some Zionist readers (he is blunt in his criticism of Israel), but even for them, it should be a source of insights, information and delightful anecdotes. Highly recommended.

"How far Arabic penetrated the languages themselves can be judged from numbers of loan words. In post-Ottoman Turkish in 1931, 51 per cent of newspaper vocabulary was Arabic; even after a generation of de-arabicization, the proportion in 1965 was still 26 per cent. In Farsi, there were attempts to persianize the lexicon in the nineteenth century, but at least 30 per cent of the vocabulary remains Arabic. Arabic travelled via Persian to the Indian subcontinent, where not only Hindi and particularly Urdu but also many of the related languages are rich in Arabic words; thus, for example, a concept as indigenous as Sikh khalsa can turn out to have an Arabic name – khalisah is ‘pure’. India’s recent colonial history also meant that a minor secondary wave of Arabic words made it the long way round to Europe, and particularly with the nabobs (the nawab, Arabic ‘deputies’) to ‘Blighty’ – itself from Arabic wilayah, ‘dominion, realm’, via Persian into Indian bilayati ‘of the foreign land, especially Europe/Britain’. Arabicization is continuing in at least one part of the Indian subcontinent, as Bangladeshi Bengali replaces Sanskrit loan words with new ones of Arabic origin. Further south and east around the ocean arc, Arabic has bequeathed modern Indonesian as many as 3,000 loan words. From the East Indies, it still had further to go – not just to Ibn Battutah’s hazy Kaylukari but also to Elcho Island, off Australia’s Arnhem Land: there, the Aboriginal name for God, ‘Walitha’walitha’, apparently came via early contacts with Makassar Muslims from the Arabic phrase Allahu ta’ala, ‘Allah, exalted is He’. In the opposite direction, in Africa, the belated Arab tribal migrations of the Banu Hilal and others from the eleventh century onwards arabicized the lowlands, but Arabic would also steal into the Berber languages, a quarter to a third of whose vocabulary is now Arabic. From the Maghrib, traders, missionaries and tribesmen also took Arabic itself as far south as Bornu in northern Nigeria, where a form of the language is still spoken by inhabitants of Arab origin. No less importantly, from the sawahil, the coasts of the western arm of the oceanic arc, Swahili spread inland through trade to become the national language of Kenya and Tanzania. Swahili is a Bantu language, but Arabic has loaned it perhaps as much as half of its vocabulary"

"an identity that had begun to form before the Christian era, had coalesced under the Lakhmid and Ghassanid kings, had solidified with Islam and reached its firmest form under the Umayyads and earlier Abbasids, but then had weakened and decayed around the time of the death of the last ‘real’ caliph in the mid-tenth century. What had happened since then was that Arab identity had reverted to its herding-raiding beginnings. The idea of ’urubah, arabness, had been almost as mobile and various across time as the peoples and tribes to whom it attached; under the Ottomans, it entered a 300-year dip in the road, and became invisible"

"And there was another irony of empire in these centuries: the high point of Arab unity – in terms of the greatest population under a single rule over the longest time and the widest geographical extent – was achieved under the Ottomans. Arab unity was purchased at the expense of Arab independence, and in many ways also of Arab identity"

"most propaganda is still in high Arabic. And the propaganda has power: the old sacred tongue, the ‘dead language that refuses to die’, as Paul Bowles called it, still bewitches, mystifies and silences the masses as it did in the mouths of pre-Islamic poets and seers. It still has a weight and a volume that mutes the twittering. And it remains the most potent symbol of a long-elusive unity: ‘We do not live in a land, but in a language.’ Do away with that one shared territory, that almost impossibly difficult language, and you do away with the only aspect of unity that is not a mirage"

"Whatever the exact figures, they are the reason why, in the United States, a Syrian-Lebanese quarter sprouted in what its inhabitants called ‘Nayy Yark’; why, more recently, Salman Rushdie could find ‘Egyptian’ (in fact Lebanese) shops in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, run by the likes of Armando Mustafa and Manolo Saleh; and why on a visit to Dakar my breakfasts comprised Franco-Levantine pain au chocolat, Turkish coffee and Lebanese ladies with hairdos and Marlboros. They are also the reason why Argentina has had an Arab-origin president (Carlos Menem), Brazil another (Michel Temer), followed, in 2018, by an Arab-orign presidential runner-up (Fernando Haddad), and why Brazil’s Arab-origin citizens now number twelve million, making it the ninth biggest Arab country by population – bigger than Lebanon. They went forth, multiplied and left the old country behind in every way"

"Blame it as they might on other peoples’ empires, Arabs had never been a happy family: not since the division of the spoils of Islam; not since the pre-Islamic War of al-Basus, that forty-year super-squabble over grazing rights. They had never really been a family at all, except in tribal fictions of shared descent. If empires were to blame, it was as much as anything for inspiring, by reflex, the myths and mirages of unattainable union. Imperialists certainly divided and ruled, but more often than not they were driving their wedges into old splits."

"Today, those individual voices that were raised have been silenced again. Another spring has had no summer; like so many revolutions, Muhammad’s included, it was begun by those who were hungry for justice, but was hijacked by those who were hungry for power. In several cases, notably that of Egypt, it was a double hijacking: first by the self-styled proponents of the ancienne révolution, the islamists – for the straggly beards soon ousted the shaggy heads – and then by the anciens régimes themselves, the insatiable tyrannosaurs. It might be said that Arab history is a series of stolen revolutions"

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a humane, scholarly but highly readable book by one of that diminishing breed, the sensitive British Arabist who is as much Arab as British and who manages to be both detached in observation and engaged as a liberal who loves his adopted culture.

He is based in Yemen. South Arabian and Yemeni examples and anecdotes pepper the book giving perhaps a slight bias against the Maghreb and Mashriq in favour of the complexities of the Arabian heartlands. But you can only do so much in 536 pages.

Order has to be given to a tale of 3,000 years. Arab origins in the tension between 'badawah' and 'haradah' and the importance of the Arab poetic heritage are to be found in the Arabian Peninsular and are central to understanding what may be to be an 'Arab'. The bias is legitimate.

I say 'what it may be to be an Arab' because being an Arab is an uncertain business (much as being a European is). Mackintosh-Smith does an excellent job in working through those uncertainties and the reinventions and variations on what 'being an Arab' means at any one point in history.

He does two things that give perspective. First, he refuses to tell the tale as the same tale as the rise of Islam giving due weight to the 1,500 years before Muhammed as much as to the 1,450 or so since his arrival as unifier of the Peninsula under a particularly dynamic form of monotheism.

The second thing he does is not define Arab by particular uses of the term 'arab as it shifts and changes over time but by its truly salient characteristic which is the use of an Arabic language derived from Arabian poetry (still a political force) and the Quran (a poetic book).

I can express an interest here as not being an Arabist (deliberately so) but having worked with Arabs for a quarter of a century (as well as 'Zionists' for a decade before that) - Saudis and Syrians intimately, Moroccans, Iraqis and Emiratis seriously and many others tangentially.

I can attest to the pecularities of the culture, its simultaneous unity and divisions, the effects of foreign empires, the continuing importance of rhetoric and the poetic phrase, the brutal realism, the intellectual melancholy and the ambiguities involved in truth-telling.

Mackintosh-Smith brought it all together for me quite nicely and gave this experience context. It confirmed an intuition that cultures taken as a whole (whether English or Chinese, Arab or Persian) have deep roots where the use of language helps to frame the freedom of any individual.

The book is not really a straight narrative so much as a chronological exploration of themes that becomes increasingly anecdotal towards the end. The last section (from 1800) is the weakest only because the anecdotes seem most disconnected and most affected by the author's sentiment.

The author does something I do not usually forgive (as you will see in my other reviews) but will forgive in him - distract us in the final moments of the book with the current existential despair of the modern liberal trying to cope with the monstrosities in view.

In this case, I forgive because his despair comes from having been at his post in war-torn Yemen, come under fire and stood his ground as long as he could in the tradition of many a medieval Arab intellectual and because he wears his liberal politics as lightly as his conscience permits.

And I forgive him for the insights and the fundamentally sound and substantial weaving of a deep knowledge of the Arabic language and sympathy for the speakers of the language with the tough realism of the natural historian.

He is also subtle enough (without abandoning his 'English' liberal values) to show respect for the possibility that the things that might make him despair about Arab political culture are a matter for Arabs to work through and not for outsiders.

So, we have a strange situation by the end of the book where he is trying to square his anger at the cruelty of 'anarcharchs' and 'demonocracy' and the Arab world's uneven (to say the least) relationship to truth-telling with his acceptance of it as a unique and independent culture.

My own experience and the book's solid exposition of the 'soul' of the Arab in history (slippery though the concept is through three thousand years of existence) could create a natural 'despair' that the culture will ever become 'good' like 'ours'. But is it really any of our business?

Of course, 'ours' is not at all 'good'. It just has its own rhetoric and a different history that allows the 'bad' to be more limited in scope. Mackintosh-Smith rightly regrets the lack of institutional structures that allow Arabs to choose their own paths rather than submit to autocrats.

But wishes are cheap. The blundering of neo-conservatives and, before that, of the insertion of Zionism like a wedge into the region (and imperialism before that) has not helped very much in creating the possibilities for organic institutional liberal democratic development.

Arabs, in short, have an inchoate but very real and complex culture that is quite separate from Islam yet heavily inflected by it just as Europeans have a very real and complex culture heavily inflected by Christianity but quite separate from it - both with pagan pasts as well.

The Arabs though are bound by a language constructed out of a book and tradition whereas, if Europe was also constructed out of a book and its competition with the classical tradition, Europe was to break into competitive languages that helped force through national institutional structures.

The Arabic language is both a binder of peoples from Morocco to Oman and Iraq to Sudan and also a 'false friend' insofar as the dialects across the region can be almost unintelligible to each other and the 'high' language tends to bind intellectuals and elites rather than peoples.

Arab nationalism (where one suspects the author has some sympathy, at least based on his account of Nasser) attempted to force the pace through radio and print rhetoric but such nationalisms can only be partially forced from above and then only over long periods of time on fertile ground.

The messiness of the last half century comes from traditional order-maintaining national autocrats maintaining the fiction of 'Arab-ness' and also trying to manage Islamic sentiment when that sentiment, in fact, does not and cannot include all Arabs and has dissident variants itself.

When 'Arab-ness' gets ideologised, it has a tendency to be closer to a form of soft fascism (in European terms) than anything more liberal - although one of the few areas of neglect in the book is the brief incursion of socialist ideas into the region in the last century.

I tend to conservative pessimism on all this (basically Mackintosh-Smith's liberal pessimism but without the undercurrent of suppressed outrage) but I agree with him when he suggests that it is for Arabs and not outsiders to define themselves.

The tide of Islamism now seems to have partially abated. This is probably as much to do with the passing of generations as to any 'counter-terrorist action'. But, as it recedes, the association of Arabism more firmly with Islam crowds out the very secular nationalisms that are its best hope.

Mackintosh-Smith is bitter about Bashar Al-Assad (as many liberal Arabs must be) but, in the brutal context between even 'moderate' Political Islam and secular nationalism, the Baathist may be a last bulwark against an inappropriate Sunni appropriation of an entire linguistic culture.

We might liken this to the neo-confucian appropriation of what it is to be Chinese by the Chinese Communist Party or the attempts (so far beaten off) to 'rediscover' Europe as a Christian entity by the emergent European populist Right.

Being Chinese or European or Arab is not coterminous with being Neo-Confucian, Christian or Muslim. In the first case because China is a multiplicity of traditions in itself and in the last two because these religions are global and yet not everyone in either culture accepts them.

Perhaps Nasser's main error was to construct out of very little a general Arab nationalism instead of accepting that there was the potential for many collaborating Arab nationalisms based on the many inheritances of the Arab conquests but where secularism had room for respected minorities.

But that was then and this is now. The error was historically comprehensible. All Arab 'errors' are historically comprehensible and, thanks to this book , we cannot say we cannot comprehend them. President Nonsense bin Nonsense might have benefited from it had it existed in 2003.

Ironically, the only modern Arab Leader who may be 'getting it' is MBS in Saudi Arabia, the heartland of the Arabs, who is busy building up a possibly viable Saudi nationalism as an ideology which permits greater difference within an historically determined Islamic framework.

And yet the general view of the West has to be that MBS is the autocrat's autocrat at the moment and he is not even King yet. The methodology is that of Henry VIII and Francis I. Both monarchs were consolidators of national feeling into a viable nation state with the dynastic as means.

So, all in all, for all the anecdotalism, an excellent guide to the creation and history of the Arab community that respects its subject and its readers and which I can strongly recommend. Incidentally, I also want to praise Yale for the attractive design and binding of this edition.

[Eleanor · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, and enormous (536 pages plus end matter), history of the Arab people (whatever that means; as Mackintosh-Smith shows, the definition is far from clear), from pre-Islamic times right up to the present day. He makes an important distinction between “Arab” and “Muslim”; not all of the former are the latter, and vice versa, although the global spread of Arabs and Arab-ness is due in large part to Islam and the empire won and enjoyed by early caliphs. Mostly, Mackintosh-Smith says, Arabs are defined by their use of the Arabic language. He’s a wonderful guide to it: wry, witty, widely read, and keenly alive to subtleties of dialect and register. One has to make an initial effort with this book, but it turns out delightfully readable, and obviously seminal.

Originally posted on my blog, Elle Thinks. If you like what I write, why not buy me a coffee?

[ⵎⵓⵏⵉⵔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was, overall, a pretty good book. One of its best aspects is the eloquent style and the depth of the author's knowledge of the subject matter.

Unfortunately however, his knowledge seems to be biased towards the Middle East proper (Arabia, Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt) about which he writes profusely, whereas the Maghreb is depicted with only some sketchy less satisfying details. Thus many uninformed readers might assume that history unrolled in a more or less similar manner in the Maghreb, as it did in the Middle East, and project the same events, mentalities, and aspirations on the the western part of the so-called "Arab world", and its population. This could not, however be further from the truth. While the author addressed some historical events, such as the Banu Hilal invasion in the 11-13th century, he did not explain how they contributed to the slow Arabization process of the Maghreb, and how most of the Arabization in fact, took place in the 20th century, under governments that sought to eradicate any aspect of non-Arab culture or language. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th century, both Morocco and Algeria had a majority Berber (aka Amazigh)-speaking population, while literacy in Standard Arabic, even after the independence from France was less than 5%. Aggressive Arabization policies succeeded, in less than 3 generations, to bring the number of native speakers of Amazigh from above 60-70% (conservative estimates) to less than 30%. And yet, even modern Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian cultures and dialects bear heavy influences from the old Amazigh culture and languages, open for view to those willing to look. It seems rather unfair to lump these countries in such a facile manner into an "Arab world", without looking at their individual differences. This is something that the author alludes to, but does not explicitly mention more than once perhaps, since it would shake the whole premise of the book (a common thread of Arab history, woven through the ages), or even bring it to naught. Indeed, this little fact lifts the mystery as to why "Arabs never unite", or are "always united in division", because the answer is really simple: there is no Arab world, there never has been and never will be. At least not in a wide geographical sense encompassing the whole region of MENA. It would be like trying to squeeze all of Europe into a "Latin world" and force Europeans to use Latin as the sole official language. It would not work.

What is called the "Arab civilization", was in fact a network of interconnected civilizations that relied heavily on the use of Arabic for religious, intellectual, and administrative purposes, and shared a common religion, Islam. But beyond that, there was little resemblance. The Moorish civilization in the territory of modern-day Morocco, Southern Iberia and West Algeria, had its own characteristics, such as a unique architecture, traditional clothing, cuisine, etc that distinguished it from the rest of the so-called "Arab world". I once sat with a Syrian colleague and we started comparing traditional dishes between our countries, with the assistance of Google Images. We could not find a a single common dish between Morocco and Syria, not a single one, zero, zilch. How can this be the "same civilization" or the "same culture", when not even the most basic thing, what people put on their tables, has anything in common?

This was however a nice ride through time to understand the evolution of the Middle East and North Africa, and I find the book quite valuable if only to provide good material for criticism. What failed the author in the end, is the very thing that he only shyly admitted: that there is no "Arab world", that it is in fact multiple intermingled worlds each with their own evolution and history, and that attempting to weld them into a single melting pot has most often resulted in disaster. A book that tries to draw "Arab history" into a common thread, would by definition have to fail in a similar manner.

We should simply stop this futile exercise, and each of our countries should figure out its own solutions for its own problems, build its own identity based on its own history and endemic properties, perhaps learning from each other, but not copy-pasting.

[Sagheer Afzal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves to be remembered as a modern day classic of scholarship. Tim Mackintosh Smith writes with great lucidity and insight, and he has a way with words. Throughout the book there are some nice alliterative flourishes. For instance describing the Abbasid Caliphate as ‘200 years of pathos, and 300 years of bathos’ as well some very insightful comments about Islam such as: ‘The Quran was embalmed in sanctity and shrouded in layers of exegesis. Public ritual tended to be more important than private spirituality.’

An insight that is eloquent, profound and absolutely true.

Tim vividly describes the Arab culture from which Islam gestated. Any religion needs to be understood in the context of the time in which it was purveyed. Tim made me aware of a scarcely known fact. That in pre-Islamic Arabia, a man’s veracity was indicated by his eloquence and this fact was the major marketing force for Islam. This is also alluded to in a few places within the Holy Quran when the challenge is thrown to the unbelievers:

‘And if you are in doubt about what We have sent down upon Our Servant [Muhammad], then produce a surah the like thereof and call upon your witnesses other than Allah, if you should be truthful.’

The book also reveals that during the time of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), there were solitary individuals called Hanif’s who were monotheists and like the Holy Prophet (PBUH) secluded themselves in caves for a short periods of time. And amongst the Sabatean (the Arabs who resided in South Arabia) it was a habit to make a pilgrimage to a temple during which no physical relations were permitted, similar to the Hajj.

The Bedouin Arabs were a people who loved raiding and poetry and I did feel that at times the author’s reverence for the Arabic language perhaps skewered some of his observations. He belabours a point that it was the classical High Arabic which gave the Arabs a sense of unity. If this were true why was internecine warfare between different tribes so frequent and bloody? He also seemed to suggest that a matador crying ‘Ole’ when confronted with a bull was reminiscent of an Arab footballer exclaiming: ’Allah’. I think you can more justifiably say the author got a little carried away with flights of fancy.

There were however aspects of his research that I disagreed with. I felt that his description of the third Caliph Uthman ibn Affan as a ‘Capable and hands on ruler’ contradicted the fact that Uthman ibn Affan’s nepotism caused widespread unrest culminating in his death.
I also found his reticence of the rule of Hazrat Ali ibn Talib to be puzzling. For an Arabphile he doesn’t seem to think that Nahjal-al balagha is worth mentioning. Even though it is commonly regarded as a book of eloquent classical Arabic.

Tim makes what I feel to be a hugely important point when you consider the trajectory of Islam from its genesis to the present day. A failed objective of the mission of the Holy Prophet (PBUH). That Arabs regard their kinship of faith superior to their tribal ones. This highlights another point the author makes:

"Blame it as they might on other peoples’ empires, Arabs had never been a happy family: not since the division of the spoils of Islam; not since the pre-Islamic War of al-Basus, that forty-year super-squabble over grazing rights. They had never really been a family at all, except in tribal fictions of shared descent. If empires were to blame, it was as much as anything for inspiring, by reflex, the myths and mirages of unattainable union. Imperialists certainly divided and ruled, but more often than not they were driving their wedges into old splits."

A lot of my Muslim brethren are burdened by historical grievances. But their bitterness towards the colonising superpowers of that time and the current time needs to take into an account an important fact. The Imperial English exploited the fissures that were already present within the Arabs. The influence of today’s Superpowers is due to the complicity of erstwhile Arab rulers who in their greed for power and riches happily co-opted overseas allies.

The history of the Arabs is for a significant part the history of Islam. Here the author has some interesting and revelatory things to say. I liked his observation regarding the Hadith:

‘The Hadith literature needs a cautious approach. Collectors of Hadith amassed as many as million which works out about one for every eight minutes of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) walking life. Of the million around 5,000 are supposed to be reliable...200:1 for the proportion of reliable hadith.’
The Arabs loved to memorise lists. Every tribe had a poet who could quote lineage for the past five hundred years. Quite a feat. As such I don’t think it is unreasonable to say this throws into doubt the legitimacy of ‘Isnads’ the chains of transmission for Hadith.

The latter part of the book shows how Pan Arabism, that need for Arabs to feel part of a nation, was born and died. I found this to be a very salient point.
As a second generation Pakistani, I was often told that Pakistan was a renaissance for Islam, a homeland for Muslims. That to disparage Pakistan is to disparage Islam. The reality of Pakistan is about as incompatible as you can get with the reality of Islam. And I think the same can be said for the Arab states.

Nationalism is a British construct, the most successful part of their destructive legacy. But Tribalism predates nationalism, and is the reason why nationalism failed to unite Muslims. Why ‘liberated countries’ such as Iraq failed to prosper under the canopy of democracy. Because as Tim rightly points out that freedom for an Iraqi any Arab means freedom to be dominated by someone of your own tribe or failing that, protection from someone from a different tribe. Not giving people ballot boxes through which they can democratically elect their leader.

This is the book to read if you want to understand the history of Arab. Forget Bernard Lewis’s ‘The Arabs In History.’ It pales into insignificance when compared with this very comprehensive and illuminating book.

[Raad Saqer · Rating 3 out of 5]

كتاب "العرب: 3000 سنة من التاريخ" يقدم بانوراما واسعة تكشف مسيرة العرب من الأسطورة إلى الدولة الحديثة، عبر جدلية الهوية والسلطة.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tim Mackintosh-Smith has written a fascinating book on the history of Arabs and their language.

There is a lot to like about this book. Endless erudition and the man certainly comes out swinging especially discussing the accumulated miseries of the last decades.

There is a lot to dislike about the book. The erudition can feel endless on more than one occasion. And the opinions are more than a little one sided occasionally veering into the severely biased.

But all in all a great slab of a book which does justice to its topic and while i certainly disagreed with much of what was posited I admire the willingness to throw circumspection out.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had me captivated, until we arrived at the modern period. What started as a brilliantly emphatic history of the Arabs from before Islam till our times, ended in a poor and biased coverage of the most recent hundred or so years. Written from his home in war-torn Yemen his cynism over the meddling of modern empires like Britain and France, and later of the United States in carving out modern borders can be excused. What can't be excused is the lack of balance and historical depth in the later narrative. I highly recommend the book for the history of the premodern Arab world, but it wont offer new insights in the recent history of the Arabs.

[Natalie]

I wanted to like this book, I really did. I listened to over 7 hours and I had to give up. I was looking for a more straight-forward history of the Arabs and I kept hoping this book would get there but it never did.

This author focuses the entire book on Arabic and how the language shapes history. Some people may love that, but it's not for me. I didn't want all these tangents about the language and quotes from Walt Whitman. It was boring and hard to follow. I realized that I'd listened to 7-hours and the only thing I'd really learned and retained was that they had over 1000 words for "camel." Time to throw in the towel.

Hopefully I'll find another book about this culture and region that aligns with my style. I'd really like to learn more.

[Lilisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ode to Arab people everywhere, this is a sprawling narrative that begins with pre-Islamic times and courses through to modern times. It’s about people, language and history across the Arab world. The author references healthy doses of quotes from scholars and literary greats from over the centuries, which were generally helpful to emphasis points, but at times way too many and repetitious, taking up precious real estate. The book does a brilliant job of pulling all the pieces together to present information and insights into three thousand years of a vibrant and rich history of the Arab world. It is definitely worth reading or listening to the audiobook, which I did.

[Arnis · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://poseidons99.wordpress.com/202...

[Smaranda Acatrinei · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excepțional și fascinant. Istoria arabilor și mai mult decât atât: istoria limbii, a culturii, a civilizației, a luptelor cu cei din afară și cei dinăuntru. O imagine vie si extrem de bine scrisa a unei lumi pe care o intelegem inca prea putin si o condamnam prea des pentru propriile noastre greșeli.

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had trouble getting into this book. The author often focuses on language - the spoken and written word (grammar, poetic stylings, rhetoric), and while those things are important, those sections left me flat and interrupted the flow of what he was talking about. The early parts of the book often read like academic ponderings more than anything else. I half-checked out of the book early on, and never fully got back in.

The very early Arabs were divided between a civilized/settled south and a nomadic north. Early on the two groups seemed very different, but eventually merged. Much of what later became seen as Arab came from the nomadic north, and was later adopted by the south. There was trade across the peninsula by the 6th century BC, with key products being aromatics (frankensense, myrrh). The nomads were often used as mercenaries by the south, and they became power brokers. Arabs became known as the best raiders in the region, due to their pairing of a camel and a horse.

The decline of southern Arabia's civilization (Saha) was tied to the fall of the Mari Dam. It literally fell in the early 7th century, when a break in it proved to be unrepairable. People moved away. Written Arabic developed. Arabs assert their own separate identity as they have more contact with others. One southern Arab king had converted to Judiasm. That was political, to oppose Ethiopia's Christian king. South Arabia was less united and northern Arab raids increased. Ethiopia invaded with its elephant (traditional date: 570). Poets helped create cultural unity. By the end of the 6th century, the notion of Arabs as their own ethnic/cultural group had emerged. It's possible that Persian encroachment helped cause Arab unity.

This sets the stage for Muhammad and all that. Arab identity and Islam went together. Tribes ended their allegiance upon Muhammad's death. New, would-be prophets emerge in his example. Egypt's Monophysites prefer Muslim rule to that of Byzantium. Mass resettlements occurred once Syria was captured. Leadership concensus begins to crack and internal Arab war began. Mu'amiyah ruled as a pre-Islamic king. The capital became Damascus. A single currency was used and an Arabic bureacracy. This all helped preserve the language. The Umayyads fell and Baghdad became the Abbasid capital. They were an established power among Arabs even before Muhammad. Arabs made advancements in medicine, math, and astrononomy. The book argues that they're central to the creation of Europe's Reinassance. The power of the caliphate became hollowed out over time. There was the Zanj Rebellion from 869-883 when slaves from East Africa rose up. Others challenged Arab supremacy. They relied on Turkic people more and more. Some were upset at inequality between Arabs and non-Arabs. Caliphs fall to Turks and the prestige of Arabs waned. The Fatimid Dynasty was the first non-Arabic caliphate. The Arabs were hemmed in by others: Crusaders, Spain's Reconquista, north Africa's Almohad dynasty. Baghdad falls to the Mongols. You get the Black Death and Tamerlane. Granada falls in 1492.

There was trade by Tanzania in the Indian Ocean. Arab traders were big there from the 13th to 15th centuries. The Arabic language spread there, as did Islam. Ottomans became powers. Print was adopted.

Napoleon's Egyptian campaign kicked off the era of European power in the Arabic world. The UK and French empires gained more sway. In Saudi Arabia, Wahhabi's movement began. The authors compares it to secular nationalism as ways that tried to unify people. The Saud family adopted the Wahhabi way, but not the traditional powers, the Qurayash. Arab nationalism began in the 19th century. Technology like steamships arrived. WWI happened and Europe had more power.

Egypt's 1952 revolution kicked off the era of Arab nationalism. It rose with Nasser began falling in 1967 with that disastrous war. (After all, Egypt had been the Arabic center since 1250). The oil boom happens. The author hates the Oslo Accords. The last chapter is called the Era of Disappointments, as that's what's going on. Political Islam rose due to 1) Israel, especially the 1948 and 1967 wars, 2) Iran's revolution, and 3) the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By 2005, polls showed that many saw themselves as Muslims more than as Arabs. Yemen (where the author lives) was intentionally re-tribalized in the 1990s. The Arab Spring failed for the most part - except for Tunisia. Yemen is a disaster. He notes that had he written this book 10 years earlier, it would've had a far less downbeat ending - so who knows how long this period will last?

[Sharly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es un tochaco! Me ha gustado bastante, aunque hubiera preferido que se centrase más en la historia del mundo árabe y algo menos en su cultura.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are a person for whom any negative opinions about Israel amount to anti-Semitism, don't bother with this book - it's about Arabs and Arab viewpoints and makes no pretense of including other viewpoints or the history of other peoples except when they (like Persia/Iran) impinge on or further the stories of Arabs.

Now that that's out of the way - this was fascinating. I know I haven't retained most of it, and couldn't keep all the individuals straight, but it was very enlightening about who all these peoples are and where they came from and how they inter-relate. Mackintosh-Smith is a British expatriate who resides in Yemen, a complicated place all by itself, and he traces the history of the concept of "arab" from its first appearances when it appeared to mean a person who is a raiding nomad speaking Arabic (which by the way did not include the peoples of the southern edge of the peninsula, who were settled and cosmopolitan). Language is the thread that has made Arabs a people at all, he suggests, and they themselves don't see themselves as a single people despite a few flickers of Arab identity put forward by a charismatic leader like Nasser. He also suggests that "democracy" isn't taking hold in Arab lands because historically, "freedom" to Arabs has meant control by someone of their own tribe; sort of "Yes he's a dictator but he's my dictator."

He gives short shrift to the Al-Saud house that basically built a power base on the strength of Wahhabi fundamentalists and then got rich from oil. If you didn't already know this, he explains that the boundaries between the countries in the Levant today were drawn somewhat arbitrarily by Britain and France for their own benefit and created nations that were always going to be unstable and riven with internal conflicts, even more so as the European powers receded and were replaced by the US and Russia in manipulating the region.

He definitely has an Arab point of view on Israel, referring to it as a dagger in the heart of the Arab middle east. While acknowledging the horrors and injustices experienced by European Jews, he also makes it clear that the British agreements that established the state of Israel were based on wishful thinking (we'll just say this new state will not harm the existing residents of the land in any way, and count on them to do that) that has not panned out. I know someone whose parents were born in that land, and their home towns no longer exist, they were destroyed. I also know people who love Israel and feel passionately about it. This book makes it clear more than ever how apparently insoluble this problem is.

He concludes with some sad pages about how even today Arab unity of any sort, and freedoms of most sorts, are unlikely to come to Arab lands as they stand. There is not and has not been any such thing as "the" Arabs, but various "Arabs", and that is likely to be the case for some time to come.

[Dan Squire · Rating 3 out of 5]

The contents of this book are fascinating, and give a really interesting and thorough view into Arab history. It has given me a new perspective on Middle Eastern history and Islam.

However, it's not that easy to read. Although the author is prone to a cute turn of phrase or clever piece of etymological wordplay, which adds some entertainment, the text is also dense with classical and linguistic allusions. It's a high barrier to entry, and is perhaps suited for Classics graduates but not necessarily for the general reader. Mackintosh-Smith is clearly an immensely intelligent author with an intimidating vocabulary and general knowledge – but he wields them both a bit too freely.

I also felt it was a bit bloated. It feels like every section goes over the same themes again and again, in an unnecessary attempt to ram a few key messages home. Every single sub-section mentions 'hadar and badw', the magnetism of the Arabic language, the dialectic between unity and disunity. The result is a 550 page book (in small font size) which could probably have been 450 pages long.

Overall, I found the subject matter interesting and I'm glad I persevered. But for a hobbyist reader, rather than a dedicated student of Arab history, it was a bit inaccessible.

[Roozbeh · Rating 2 out of 5]

The part about pre-Islam Arabs were amazing and well connected to the current situation of Islam and Arabs. I have not learned much from the other parts and it was disappointing. My expectations from a 2019 history book was more. Also I found over emphasis of culture and repetition of that as a barrier in the flow of the text narrative.
In my personal view what the author called Arabic culture in a lot of cases is Islamic culture. The distinction between these two could help the book.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful stuff about pre- and post- Mohammad Arabia, but lost a ⭐️ for smushing the last 200 years of history into 100 pages.

[Vlad Blaj · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ar fi trebuit sa se numeasca “evolutia limbii si culturii arabe”. Prea putina istorie propriu zisa. Ipoteza lui Tim este ca a existat disociere intre badw(popoarele nomade) si hadar(popoarele sedentare) iar asta i-a impiedicat pe arabi sa aiba o evolutie relativ asemanatoare cu statele vestice mai dezvoltate.

[Annikky]

One of my books of the year, but it’ll require some time to write a proper review.

[Jonathan Mckay · Rating 3 out of 5]

67th,61st books of 2020: Civilization is Just Another Tale...

Arabs: a 3000 year journey. “Ink is thicker than blood”

What does it mean to be an Arab? Western ideology is so enamored with the idea of a nation-state, that it has become difficult for us to imagine the world split on orthogonal axes. Nobody ever speaks of 'pan-romanism' as an influence in modern affairs, or the 'Romantic speaking world'. Without nations, peoples, or states to fall back upon, and unable to write histories without the enforced separation of church and state western historians are often lost when trying to understand العالم العربي 'the Arab world'.

To Mackintosh-Smith, ‘Arab’ starts with tribes and emerges via language. In pre-islamic times there was the distinction between the bedu and hadhr: nomads and civilization that defined the Arabian peninsula. The Romans may have had a Mediterranean sea trade network, but the empires of the east rose and fell on the land network that encircled the middle east. The Arabs, perennially sandwiched between other more powerful empires, were pawns on an imperial chessboard. All changed with Islam of course, but more than anything, what it meant to be Arab changed, as Arabs became a ruling class that Arabicized and Islamicized the lands they conquered, from Spain to India. The rightly guided caliphs were something like the military aggression of the Roman Empire combined with the melting pot salad bowl of 19th century America. In the same way that American identity has evolved, Arab identity necessarily went through a substantial revision in the Islamic golden age.

Succession proved to be the achilles heel of the Islamic empire, and the initial explosive expansion was able to hide underlying tribal feuds for about a generation before internecine warfare and inevitable decline took over. After all, “if a man hates at all he will hate his next door neighbor.”

Like the fall of Rome, the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates took centuries to wither and fade, to be finally subdued by new groups of militant nomads - the mongols from the east and Turks from the north. In the ‘long sleep’ of the Ottoman empire, Arab identity was nearly completely subdued, kept alive only through the unassailable redoubt of Arabic language and Islam. To succinctly describe this arc, the Islamic golden age was a “brief period of greatness followed by a long mourning of its fall”

The post-imperial middle east provided some of the right ingredients for an Arab renaissance, but through internal dictators and self-interested meddling from new neighboring empires, has led to a global age of disappointment. The identity of Arabness was more linguistic than cultural, with prominent Egyptians stating: “We live not in a country, but in a language.”

Destiny Disrupted: Western Version of Islam’s Autobiography

While we may ignore Islamic culture, they haven’t ignored us: “It’s harder to ignore the rock you are under than the rock you are on.”

Unlike the Arabs, who have a history reaching to antiquity, Islam is an almost modern invention. The true golden era was not the post WW2 boom, but rather the post-Islamic expansion after the rightly guided caliphs exploded onto the global arena in the 7th century. Later on, crusaders were little more than buzzing flies, compared with the god-defying disaster from the Mongols and utter devastation (~10m casualties!) from Tamerlane.

The Ottoman empire and a few others rose out of the ashes, but never flourished in the same way. Surprisingly, in the 18th century, and out of the barbarian inner forests of Europe, westerners started to infiltrate, dismantle, or otherwise dominate the fractured Islamic empires. Early waves of indigenous and sometimes militant modernity that started in places such as the Qajar and Mughal dynasties were tried and discarded as ineffective, leading to the conservative shift that has been pervasive across the islamic world post WW2. In the rump state of the Ottoman Empire, militant modernism won out, carving out the modern state of Turkey while leaving the rest of the Arab world to its own devices and whims of imperialist schemes.

[منال · Rating 5 out of 5]

March, 24th:
كالعادة إذا ما بلغت نهاية كتاب ما، تُختمُ مرحلة. لتبدأ أخرى أبحث فيها عن التالي، فإما أن أجده أو يجدني. وبعد الملحمة الطويلة مع بدو مدن الملح، ومع الصحراء وأهلها والغريبين عنها، تعاظمت في داخلي رغبة الاقتراب أكثر من جغرافيتهم وتاريخهم. وقراءة التاريخ بشكل خاص، إيلائه اهتماما من نوع جديدٍ وتسخير عقلي وذاكرتي في سبيله إثر تفاعلهما مع منيف وتشربهما لسقياه. بي فضول لأرى مالذي يبقى فيهما ويرسخ ومالذي يذهب عنهما وينسى بعد التسلسل الآتي. وهذا كتاب وجدتهُ منذ مدة ثم طواه الغياب لأجده مجددا محفوظا في ذاكرة هاتفي، كان ذلك قبل رحلتي مع منيف، وبترشيح من عارف حجاوي. ووقع عليه أخيرا اختياري.

August, 5th:
في ختام إخبارنا عن الخلافة العباسيّة فصل قصير تخير صاحبنا أن يكون عنوانه "موت الحلاج"، أتهيب وأتهيأ هنا لبداية النهاية. لأتفاجأ بعد ذلك بمجموعة من الصور المختارة بعناية ما بينَ الآثار والمنقوشات الأولى، والمنشآت المعمارية الكبرى: سد مأرب، جامع دمشق، بوابة في الرقة، نقوش وعملات ذهبية صممت في انجلترا لتحاكي نظيرتها العباسية العالمية آنذاك.. صور للأحداث الأخيرة، ومشاهد عجيبة تجمع بين الحاضر والماضي كأنها مرايا تعكس مرايا. القدافي، بشار الأسد، آل سعود ومنشآت أرامكو البيترولية في مقارنة لها بسد مأرب وثروته المائية..

وكأن تِم تحضُرهُ في معرضه الورقي المختصر مقولة ابن خلدون "الماضي أشبه بالآتي من الماء بالماء"

EMERGENCE ー نشوء
REVOLUTION ー ثورة
DOMINANCE ー سيادة
DECLINE ー إنحدار

October, 11th:
Reading this, as lacking as I am, and as detailed and broad and all-encompassing as it is, has been gloriously only possible thanks to the eloquence and rare Intelligence Tim Mackintosh Smith wrote with, this was a 7 month lasting pleasure even! However reviewing the book is just so out of my reach, I can only shy away from the prospect of it. Though I must give it a 5 star rating because, who am I to give it anything less ! For more than 7 months through this year Tim has been in many ways, a teacher, a friend, and a Portal to one's home, history and language. This was absolutely worth my patience with the Pdf, absolutely worth my time trying to retrace the way back from English to Arabic and rediscover Arabness from foreign'ness.. You could only expect this much dexterity and wisdom from a language fond lover.

قرأ بحب
واقتبس عنه بحبّ
وترجمَ شيء من عظمته بحبّ كذلك
t.me/re4dit

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

If every history book I read were like this one I would have no complaints. Long before I finished I was already having intimations that it would become one of my favorite books I've ever read, and it is. This is an astounding exploration of a history bound by language, if only rarely unified by any means (ethnic, religious, or political) whatsoever, and of the deep forces and dualities, the "wheels of fire" that drive it inward and outward and continue to turn. The author's style is dazzling, virtuosic, witty and linguistically adroit, featuring verses from each period covered in his own effortless translations, and anchored in his experience of the Arab heartlands as home. What impresses me most is his skill for sustained, affecting images at close and long range that keep not only key concepts at the forefront of the reader's attention and understanding, but also the many personages who step however briefly into the spotlights of his analysis. Thus he renders several aspects of his history unforgettable and promises readers the takeaway of a firm and empathetic background with which to view the Arab world at each stage of its development right up to the present.

[Vamsi Krishna KV · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, this is hardly a history book. The core of it contains this romantic idea of looking at the history through the lens of language. So it begins not at the origin of Islam like most traditional histories, but far back in time where past was illuminated only by the poetry of this language. The whole book reads like a love letter to the Arabic language, a musical ode to the historical currents, an elegy to the lost glory, thus almost an opera in its entirety. Tim's intoxicating love of Arab culture makes one overlook the giant omissions of key historical events, redundant narratives, and often incoherent ramblings which convey little except the mad excitement of the author.

Combine it with works of Albert Hourani and Eugene Rogan, voilà you have the perfect and potent Arab cocktail!