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Tim Mackintosh-Smith is the author of Arabs.

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Name: Arabs
Rating: 4.2 (215 reviews)
Author: Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Tim Mackintosh-Smith

A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

4.2 (215 ratings)

30 mins

Brief summary

Arabs by Tim Mackintosh-Smith is a comprehensive and enlightening account of the history, culture, and identity of the Arab people. Through personal anecdotes and rigorous research, Mackintosh-Smith offers a nuanced and engaging exploration of the Arab world.

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Wars Anthropology Change & Evolution Islam

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Arabs
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What’s in it for me? A whistle-stop tour of Arab history, jam-packed with moments of high drama.

There is drama and personality aplenty to be had in the story of the people we know as Arabs. From ancient civilizations fixated on irrigation to their meteoric ascent to the world stage with Muhammad, through the louche Umayyad dynasty followed by the bookish Abbasids, from dastardly betrayals that have yet to be forgiven to forces of nature in the form of Mongol horsemen – the story of the Arabs is one whose oldest themes are still playing out today.

The Arab world hasn’t been unified politically since the seventh century. But in these blinks, you’ll get a sense of the forces that bind this disparate region together.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why people in Tang Dynasty China were sporting the latest Arab kaftans;
the origin of the English word “algebra”; and
why Indonesian has 3,000 loan words from Arabic.

The lives of early Arabs revolved around three things – water, trade, and war.

Landscapes have always shaped the destinies of people from the Arabian Peninsula. Geographically, the region can be divided into three zones: the rocky northwest, the arid and sandy central plateau, and the fertile southern part.

One thing connects all three areas: the lack of water. The people of the Arabian Peninsula developed two approaches to finding water: in the more fertile south, they captured and stored rainwater through large-scale agricultural works. This facilitated political and social organization. In the other parts of Arabia, people roamed the desert from well to oasis. These rootless roamers, who grouped themselves into tribes, were the first people to have been known as Arabs. Their nomadic freedom has been a hallmark of Arab culture ever since.

Eventually, the settled southern Arabs and the nomadic groups began to come together to trade. In the first century BCE, settled Arabians from the south began trading frankincense and other valuables across the mountains, traveling by camel. But luxury goods weren’t the only things to spread along the trade routes. Poetry was used by early Arabs to keep records, pray, and communicate in general, and it was wildly popular, passed across communities from north to south.

The first written reference to Arabs is by an Assyrian king, who fought a coalition of Arab tribes and thousands of their camels in 853. The reference is indicative of the relationships Arabs had with neighboring empires: to the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and later the Persians, Arabs were pests, raiding their trade caravans and stealing their camels.

Arabian tribes got a lot better at fighting each other, as well as outsiders, when they added horses to their arsenal. Camels were great for plodding to battle, but the speed and agility of horses, combined with new innovations like the saddlebow and stirrups, spurred Arabs to become an effective fighting force.

Arabs at the time didn’t consider themselves one people. But contact with two imperial enemies gradually changed this. From the west came the Romans; from the east came the Persians. Both these empires thought of the various Arab tribes as a group, and gradually Arabs began thinking of themselves that way, too.

Cultural, political, and religious advancements transformed the disparate Arabs into a unified force to be reckoned with.

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.

On the strength of Muhammad’s personality and the power of the Qur’an, Islam grew into an unstoppable force.

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.

As Arab armies marched across the world, trauma at home would forever shape the face of Islam.

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.

Under the Abbasids, Baghdad became an intellectual and cultural capital.

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.

A dark new period for Arabs loomed as its last great territorial empire fell.

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.

As Arab cultural influence spread via the Indian Ocean, it came into increasing competition with European power and innovation.

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!

Across the Arab world, groups reacted variably to European influence.

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.

From its high point of Nasser, the contemporary Arab world has reached a nadir of despair.

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.

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What is Arabs about?

Arabs (2021) is a deep dive into the 3,000-year history of the people we know as Arabs. It’s an exploration of the forces that gave birth to the idea of Arabs as a group – and the forces that have kept them apart ever since.

Arabs Review

Arabs (2002) is an intriguing exploration of Arab culture and history that is well worth a read. Here's why this book stands out:

It offers a fascinating deep dive into the rich and diverse world of Arab civilization, examining everything from language and religion to customs and traditions.
With meticulous research and compelling storytelling, it demystifies stereotypes and sheds light on the complexities and nuances of Arab identity.
The author's unique perspective as a Westerner living among Arabs provides a fresh and thought-provoking insight, making it a captivating read that never gets dull.

Who should read Arabs?

Lovers of a good yarn
Those fascinated by transnational histories
News junkies looking to go deeper

About the Author

Tim Mackintosh-Smith has lived for 30 years in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. He’s written several books about the Arab world, both vivid histories and travelogues alike. In 2011, Newsweek magazine named him one of the twelve finest travel writers of the past 100 years.

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