** 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.