Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires (2018) by Tim Mackintosh-Smith5/22/2021
Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The hourglass that swallows you” or "I am done with digging" Whereas other history books I’ve read focus on Islamic history, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires (2019) by Tim Mackintosh-Smith details Arabs and their history and culture. The book of course has lots on Mohammed and his successors and their initial great wave of expansion and early division and dynasties and declining periods and reawakening periods and modern situation, but it interestingly starts the history of Arabs 1000 years or so before Mohammed. “When we do take that longer, wider view, we find that Islam was not something that shot up suddenly in Mecca. It is a vast slow growth whose roots lie deep in time and all over the Peninsula, particularly in its South, where they cultivated by a people who did not even call themselves Arabs.” And Mackintosh-Smith’s book is illuminating and entertaining. I learned many things from it, like the following: --Arabs had no identity as Arabs until outside imperial forces (e.g., Rome and Persia) started meddling and exploiting and being manipulated by them etc. --The Arabs’ unique combination of the camel (to carry supplies) and the horse (to charge into battle) led their nomads to become formidable mercenaries and then power brokers and then power breakers. --Arabs tend to value rhetorical truth more highly than empirical truth, the way one says things (especially in high Arabic) being more important than what one says, with great Arabic leaders usually being eloquent (“swordsmen and wordsmen”), for words were and still are seen as cultural products and defensive walls and tools of war. --The great glue holding Arabs together in their fractious identity—along with the Koran and Islam—has been high Arabic language (fusa, or pure milk). --Arabic did not originally show vowels and has no capital letters, and due to its cursive calligraphy was very difficult to print with moveable type, which limited and slowed Arabic development during the time of the western Renaissance. --One vital Arabic quality (linguistic and cultural) is a dualistic yin-yang ethos, which manifests in the fluid interaction between nomad and settled (Bedouin and citified, tribes and peoples, raiders and traders, etc.) and in the many cases in Arabic of the same words being used for opposite (or very different) things like black and white, big and small, unity and division, tradition and modern, collection/union and disunion/division, voice and vote, master and dependent, martyrdom and school certificate, bad regime and order. Mackintosh-Smith provides other interesting etymological features of Arabic, like the same word meaning herd and citizens, or the word for politics deriving from the word for the management and training of camels and horses. He also points out that Arabic is a language of many synonyms: eighty synonyms for honey, two hundred for beard, five hundred for lion, eight hundred for sword, and at least a thousand for camel. (Arabists say that every word in Arabic has at least three meanings: itself, its opposite, and a camel!) Indeed, Mackintosh-Smith really likes language in general and Arabic in particular, and brings it all vividly to life as he tells the history of the Arab people, whether in his translations of Arabic texts (poems, sermons, speeches, letters, books, etc.) or in his own prose, for he often coins nifty words (e.g., demonarchs, anarcharchs, and tyrannosaurs/tyrants) and turns a fine phrase, like the following: --“In my first book, I wrote that in Yemen I felt like both the guest at the feast and the fly on the wall. Nowadays, I feel more like the skeleton at the feast and the fly in the soup… Seeing the land I live in and love falling apart is like watching an old and dear friend losing his mind and committing slow, considered suicide.” --“Like so many revolutions, Mohammed's included, it was begun by those who are hungry for justice but was hijacked by those who are hungry for power.” --“Meaning was mummified.” --“No checks and balances, only checkbooks and bank balances, held ultimately by one man, but if nothing else, the system has the imprimatur of long usage.” --“A strange dark symbiosis, the continual presence of an aggressive Israel, behaving with grotesque injustice towards the people of the territories it occupies in the face of international law, merely prolongs the life of Tyrannosaurus Rex Arabicus, also aggressive, also unjust towards his own countrymen.” One interesting, at times devastating feature of the book is the way that Mackintosh-Smith—who’s lived in Yemen for decades—links the past to the present, often saying things like, “Outside my window now, poets are persuading fourteen-year-old boys to blow themselves up while killing other Arabs.” Ralph Lister reads the book with gusto. Because I don’t know Arabic, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of his pronunciation of the many Arabic words, phrases, and names, but it all sounds exotic and consistent. However, Lister sometimes swallows or quickens (English) words or syllables at the ends of sentences or phrases, such that I sometimes miss the last word in such a case. Otherwise, he's a good reader with an appealing quality to his voice. Readers interested in Arabs, Arabic, and Islam in relation to other cultures and religions in the past and present should find much to learn and think about with this book. View all my reviews
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