Arabs summary

Due to bureaucratic mismanagement and threat of invasion from African kingdoms just across the Red Sea, civilization in southern Arabia began to crumble in the first century CE. Tribes filtered north, looking for better opportunities. Two families, the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids, established themselves as clients of the Byzantines and the Persians, respectively. They kept mobile courts, moving from camp to luxury camp, and fought each other on behalf of their imperial benefactors. 

Poets were revered in the courts of both dynasties, and in the sixth century Arabic poetry reached what some believe was its all-time zenith. The refinement of the language began to establish a unified voice in terms of art, identity, and politics. It was this cultural and linguistic unity that would make possible both Islam and the idea of Arabs as a unified people.

To the ruling clans of Mecca, Muhammad was a dangerous dissident, upsetting pagan traditions and, more importantly, the mercantile norms that kept them in frankincense and fine robes. Muhammad saw the writing on the wall. His solution was a hijrah ㄣ– he migrated. In 622, he and his followers made for the city of Medina, where his grandfather had been raised. 

If the Meccan years were the spiritual underpinnings of Islam, the years in Medina established it as a sociopolitical force. We’re not totally sure why, but when Muhammad arrived in Medina, citizens there put him in charge of the city immediately. Aware of the new power of writing, Muhammad immediately set down a constitution for the city, and organized a series of raids to build up Medina’s coffers. Muslim power rapidly grew. 

The defeat of the Byzantines and Persians opened up the world to the Arabs. They moved fast: within only a few generations, Arab armies conquered vast tracts of land, from Portugal to Tajikistan, from Aden to Azerbaijan. As generations passed, populations across their territories became Arabized. But Arab culture itself was diluted by the indigenous cultures of the conquered lands. Being Arab became more like being a citizen of today’s United States – less about ethnic background and more about shared language and culture. 

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing in the Arabian metropole, Medina. Uthman succeeded Caliph Umar when he died in 644. Corruption spread under his leadership. He rewarded his own tribe, the Umayyads, with cushy jobs and the fabulous riches that began pouring in from the growing empire. 

The clan that finally brought down the Umayyads was descended of Abbas, the uncle of Muhammad. The Abbasids brought together various factions disaffected by Umayyad rule, from Persian peasants to solemn Muslims fed up with the Umayyads’ dissolute ways. The rebel Abbasid armies easily wiped out the Umayyad armies, which were themselves annoyed at not having been paid. Arab power, and the caliphate, shifted east from Damascus to Baghdad, in Iraq.

While the Umayyads had ruled largely in the manner of pre-Islamic kings, the Abbasids had a more flexible approach to leadership. While they ultimately lost their territorial empire, they managed to cling to the symbolic power of the caliphate for nearly 800 years. 

The Abbasid fall finally came in 1055, when the Turkic Saljuq tribe took Baghdad from the Turkic warlords who had been running the show in the Arab caliph’s name. Rival groups in Persia, Syria, and Iraq also wrested power from the fracturing empire. The breakup of the Abbasid empire spelled a new reality for unified Arab territorial power – a decline. 

But Arab culture, or at least hybridized versions of it, was on the upswing throughout the world. Arab power in Spain flourished, intellectually, architecturally, and linguistically – Spanish has at least 4,000 loan words from Arabic. Islam now stretched from West Africa to Indonesia.

The Mongol ravages pushed Arabs in a new direction: to sea. Starting in the thirteenth century, Arabs’ oceanic wanderings – from Tanzania across the Indian Ocean to Java – became as important as the military expansions of the seventh and eighth centuries, as they set the stage for today’s Islamic world. With wind in their sails from regular monsoons, Arabs made fortunes from the wealth of the oceans and coastal lands: gold, gems, pearls, ivory, ebony, sandalwood, nutmeg, and cloves were all harvested and traded from port to port. 

It got to the point where Arab wanderers were a common sight all over Asia and Africa. In one instance, the explorer Ibn Battutah ran into someone from the Moroccan village that neighbored his own, in Delhi!

One of the things that made Egyptians Egyptian was their language. So, Arabic became the official language of Egypt. But Egyptians also realized they could still be Egyptian even with European things like the steam engine, an opera house, and a modern canal – and a massive canal at that. Suez connected the Mediterranean and Indian oceans via the Red Sea. 

Across that Red Sea, another awakening was rocking Arab society: the Wahhabi tribesmen in the Arabian Peninsula were on a mission to disinfect the Islamic faith from things like opera houses. They unleashed a wave of vandalism across the peninsula, desecrating anything they viewed as polytheistic, including the long-revered tombs of Muhammad’s companions. They didn’t stop there, either: in southern Iraq, they massacred a village of people. 

Egypt threw off the yoke of colonialism more flamboyantly than most. In 1952, a group of army officers, led boldly by the movie-star-handsome Gamal Abdul Nasser, overthrew the king. Nasser, the first Egyptian to rule Egypt since the pharaohs, would set Egypt on a new course – its own, for perhaps the first time. 

Nasser electrified the Arab world with his voice, which was broadcast via radio to millions. His brazenness in dealing with Western powers was thrilling to many; he humiliated the British by nationalizing the Suez Canal, and spurned the US by doing an arms deal with the Soviet Union. He seemed unstoppable.