In a time when Arab nationalism represents an important international issue, and the Arab nationalists evoke the Arab past, it becomes a question of some moment as to who the Arabs really were, and what they actually accomplished on the world historical scene. A. G. Horon has spent half a lifetime studying, writing, and lecturing (in English, French, and Hebrew) on the interlocking problems of Semitic history and current Middle East affairs. The present essay is the condensation of a chapter in his forthcoming book on “Pan-Arabism and the Mediterranean.”

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Islam arose in Arabia. But from the ethnographic standpoint Arabia proper comprised at first only the Nejd and the Hejaz, the vast desert lands of the nomadic Bedouins in the center and northwest of the Arabian peninsula. It is the Greeks and Romans who stretched the name of Arabia until it was made to include the less barren south of the peninsula—“Arabia Felix,” i.e. the country from which frankincense came and which was inhabited by sedentary, relatively civilized peoples. However, the peoples of Arabia Felix neither were nor called themselves Arabs, and their languages—Sabaean, Minean, and related dialects, either extinct or still spoken today—are more closely akin to the Semitic tongues of Ethiopia than to Arabic.

During the formative period of Islam, Judaism still played a cultural and even a political role both in the Orient and in Africa. The last pre-Islamic state in the Arabian peninsula was the kingdom of the Himyarites (who were the heirs of the Sabaeans and lived in what is now Yemen and Hadramaut), which had become Jewish in religion before being destroyed by the Christian Ethiopians around 525 C.E., some forty or fifty years prior to the birth of Mohammed. The fall of the Himyarite kingdom was followed by a period of chaos, tribal unrest, and migration, the memory of which is preserved in Moslem tradition under the name of jahaliya (time of “ignorance” or “barbarism”). In North Africa, too, there were in the 7th century several important groups of Berber “Jews,” or rather Judaizers, notably among the powerful Zenata tribes, who inflicted some resounding defeats on the Arab invaders and thus delayed the progress of Islam in the West until the beginning of the 8th century. Even after the triumph of Islam the Jews retained, or regained for some time, their economic and political importance in several regions around the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins. One of the great powers of the early Middle Ages, the empire of the Khazars (a people akin to the Turks), which dominated the southern and eastern parts of what is now European Russia, professed Judaism from the 8th to the 10th centuries.

In the early 7th century, Jews and Judaizers were still numerous and influential in the Arabian peninsula itself. Mohammed (born about 570) belonged to one of the very few merchant and urban communities of Arabia proper, and at first believed his mission to consist as much in providing guidance to the Jews as in converting the Bedouins. Two events transformed emergent Islam¹ into a truly indigenous sect: the hostility, or at least the indifference, of the Jews in Arabia toward the new prophet, and the blow suffered by Judaism throughout the East as a result of the disastrous outcome of the ferocious duel fought between the Byzantine and the Iranian (Sassanid) empires. At an earlier stage of the seesaw struggle—around 614, upon the approach of the Iranian armies—the Jews of Palestine had risen in revolt against the Byzantines; but their hopes for a restoration had come to nothing, and by 625 the Byzantine counter-offensive was in full swing; the final victory of the Christian power (628), climaxed by frightful reprisals, broke the back of Palestinian Jewry and imperiled the principal centers of Jewish life, which lay then in Mesopotamia.

These dates should be borne in mind in order to understand Mohammed’s turning away from Judaism, his literal about-face. At the time of the hejira—the “emigration” of Mohammed and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622—he still was a Judaizer and the Moslems prayed facing toward Jerusalem; but from about 625 on they turned toward Mecca in prayer—this marked the beginning of a purely Arab Islam.

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II

The historic role of this Arab Islam consisted in bringing together, for a brief span—just before and after the death of the Prophet in 632—many of the anarchic tribes of Bedouins who had once been the vassals, or clients, or hirelings of the Himyarite kingdom or of the Byzantine and Sassanid empires. However, as a result of the Moslem conquests, the absorption of foreign elements into Islam became so great that the new religion ceased to be a specifically Arab movement.

Thus, if primitive Islam can be defined as an exiguous form of Judaism grafted onto local pagan traditions and placed within easier reach of the Bedouin mentality, this definition no longer holds true after the second or third Moslem generation. For then Islam began to develop and split up along lines which would soon have little to do with Arabia and the Arabs. Even before the end of the 7th century, it becomes essential not to confuse the terms “Arab” and “Moslem”—and this despite the persistence of Arabic as the sacred tongue of the new world religion. Such transformations of the original basic character of a religion, which sever it from the ethnic environment in which it originated, are not at all uncommon. Christianity began as a Jewish sect, yet it became the creed of the Roman world and then of the entire Western world. And Buddhism, born in India, after a number of centuries ceased being Indian and took roots in Central Asia and the Far East.

Impressed by the spectacular, almost miraculous expansion of primitive Islam, modern European historians first sought its explanation in an alleged outburst of Bedouin religious fanaticism, as well as in an imagined drying up of the Arabian peninsula and a consequent “wave” of mass migration. But there has been no notable change of any kind in the climate of Arabia within the historical period; and a better knowledge of the facts shows that most of the Arabs of the 7th century were quite indifferent in matters of religion, with a few individual exceptions; indeed, the nomadic Bedouins have remained to the present day notoriously uninterested in religious questions. Therefore, if the reason for the success of primitive Islam is to be sought among the Arabs, it should be found in some more tangible causes, such as the social and economic structure of Mohammed’s Arabia and the immediately preceding history of the peninsula as a whole.

The fall of the Himyarite kingdom, coinciding as it did with the beginning of one of the worst crises yet suffered by civilization in the Orient, had destroyed what little political organization there was in the Arabian peninsula, together with the caravan trade on which it rested. Left to their own devices, the Bedouins—half-starved shepherds, camel drivers, and marauders—had no resource but brigandage. This they carried on among their various clans, according to the time-honored custom of internecine guerrilla, and later on also upon a much larger scale—when occasion arose and a pretext was offered. The pretext happened to be a religious one, Islam, and the occasion was the exhaustion of the civilized world following the endless wars between the great powers of East and West. The citizens of Mecca, Medina, and the few other Arabian townships were a mere handful of settled people, amid the unruly nomadic majority of the Bedouin tribes. But the Meccans were crafty enough to realize that Bedouin anarchy could be somehow channeled and controlled by the novel means of Islam. Abu-Bekr and especially Omar (murdered in 644)—the first two successors of the Prophet but almost the only ones having real authority as his “lieutenants” or caliphs—became organizers of forays on the grand scale. The aim of these raids was booty and prestige, not territorial acquisition. No one had foreseen the political consequences of Arab raiding.

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III

From the very start, the decisive factors and circumstances operated not inside, but outside Arabia—in those thickly populated lands of ancient sedentary civilization which were then provinces of the Byzantine and Iranian empires. In Syria and Egypt, a majority of the native Aramaic- and Coptic-speaking masses belonged to the Monophysitic church, which was heretical in the eyes of both Rome and Constantinople. While suffering under the Byzantine yoke and hating the Greeks, these Monophysites also feared the zeal of the Sassanid “fire-worshipers,” devotees of the Persian god Ahura-Mazda. Similar conditions prevailed in Mesopotamia, a mostly Aramaic-speaking country under Iranian domination (Ctesiphon, the Sassanid capital, was on the Tigris). The native mass of “heretical” (Nestorian) Christians, and a numerous, and well-organized “Babylonian” Jewry, had reason to loathe their Iranian suzerain, yet even greater reason to fear the Byzantine emperor.

Thus pretty much everywhere, from the Nile to the Tigris, the newly arrived bands of Moslems, little given to proselytizing (contrary to modern legend) and as yet neutral in religious matters, were welcomed as the lesser evil. Both the Byzantine and the Sassanid auxiliary troops were made up, on the Arabian borders, largely of pagan or superficially Christianized Arabs. Poorly paid, these mercenaries deserted en masse, thus becoming the first recruits to Islam outside Arabia. In such circumstances, warfare was often little more than a formality. Provincial authorities and local communities reached direct agreement with the Arabs, granting them political suzerainty and financial aid in return for guarantees of communal and religious freedom. Palestine and Syria, then Iraq and Upper Mesopotamia, and finally Egypt gave themselves up, conditionally and (so it was thought) temporarily, to the enemies of their own oppressors. This is the real secret of the Moslem “miracle.”

The Moslem conquest, or rather occupation, of the countries between the Tigris and the Nile was accomplished in a few years, during the lifetime of Omar. It completely changed the character of Islam. For a brief spell Islam became a political force centered upon Damascus and wielded by the Arab commander in Syria, Moawiya, who was later to found the Omayyad dynasty by taking over the caliphate (660/661). The result was that Arabia, more divided than ever and drained of its best warriors, fell back into utter insignificance. Its central role had lasted a mere fifteen or, at most, twenty-five years.² The Arabian chapter of Islamic history, whatever its tremendous consequences outside Arabia, turned out to be an episode without deep cause or real future. At the peak of his fortunes, just before he died, Mohammed hardly controlled more than the territory of Hejaz; the attempts of the first caliphs to unify Arabia proper miscarried; and though the Arabian peninsula quickly accepted Islam, it never formed a political whole, for the states in the south and southeast (Yemen, Oman, etc.) retained their independence and the Bedouin tribes their anarchic autonomy. Our “historical” maps which show this entire peninsula unified under Mohammed, or ruled by the Omayyads and later by the Abbassids, are the products of fantasy.

Nor were the ruling Arabs outside Arabia more than a handful, a few thousand people, Meccans for the most part, who formed an exalted governing caste, but a caste which from the second generation on was incorporated into the structure of the lands it governed by intermarriage and every kind of commingling. This upper class was finally slaughtered, almost to a man, in the factional wars and dynastic struggles of the 7th and 8th centuries. On the other hand, the Bedouin tribes—those who made up the bulk of the first invaders, and those who now swarmed in to get their share of the booty—remained always a foreign body. One should not exaggerate their numbers: a total of a few tens of thousands of fighting men, a few hundred thousand people if one counts their dependents—such is the size of the Bedouin invasions which followed in the wake of Moslem conquests. These Bedouins were a troublesome lot; they had to be segregated, pensioned off, and closely watched in semi-military camps: Kufa, Bassora in Iraq, Fostat in Egypt, and later Kairouan in Tunisia, etc. Moreover, they were used as the vanguard in new raiding expeditions, which the Arab potentates partly undertook just to rid themselves of their obnoxious kinsmen. Very few survived the forays of the 7th century, which ranged as far as the Caspian Sea and the Atlas Mountains. Properly speaking, there was no Arab colonization, and the Bedouin contribution to the motley ethnography of the Moslem world remained infinitesimal; Oriental and Mediterranean societies were not really Arabized.

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Encamped from the Nile to the Tigris in countries which were at that time among the wealthiest on earth, and supported by unhoped-for resources which, however, they could only use with relative moderation for fear of antagonizing the more massive and cohesive peoples among whom they dwelt, the Arabs quickly began to look to new fields of conquest. Despite its improved organization, this second phase of Moslem expansion met with more obstacles than the first; it was resisted all the way from Iran to Turkestan and the Indus, and from North Africa to beyond the Pyrenees. As against the few years needed for the purely Arab episode, this second or international stage of early Islamic conquest lasted approximately a hundred years: from the invasion of Iran in 641 to the battle of Poitiers in 732—when the Moslem tide reached its highest mark in the West—and to the final collapse, in 743, of the Omayyad caliphate in the East. The extension of the new religion over so vast an area spelled the doom of the weak Arab minority; the triumph of Islam in the great region between Central Asia and the Atlantic signified, by the middle of the 8th century, the victory of provincial, indigenous elements over the foreign Arabs. The latter, insofar as they survived at all, became mere figureheads or venerable ciphers, manipulated by contending Moslem forces which were no longer Arab in fact.

The Arabs, lost in the immensity of their success, had never really cooperated with, or even managed to tolerate, one another. Discord and civil wars never ceased to rage among them even for a moment. Regional factions—the Hejazian, the Syrian, the Iraqian, etc.—were pitted against each other. Clans carried on their bitter feuds with rival clans: “Yemenites” of South Arabian extraction fought the self-styled Ishmaelites or “true” Arabs. Sects warred upon sects: Shiites who supported the “legitimate” successors of Mohammed rose against the so-called orthodox Sunnites, who recognized the usurping caliphs, and contended with the Kharijites who, being anarchists on principle, recognized no one. Emirs quarreled with emirs: military commanders or gubernatorial satraps supported or opposed the authority of the various caliphs, or fought among themselves over the delegation of the caliphate’s nominal powers. Last but not least, every caliph was constantly obliged to fight other caliphs or pretenders. After the death of Mohammed, his son-in-law Ali and the latter’s descendants intrigued incessantly against the Medinese caliphs, battled with the Omayyads, and defied the Abbassids; whereas the presence of a single Omayyad survivor in Spain was sufficient cause (or pretext) for the creation of a separatist emirate in Cordova, which later became an independent Moorish caliphate.

Amid this chaos, even at the most glorious moments of the so-called Arab empire, there was no trace of central government, except in theory. The leaders who stayed longest in power were those who massacred with least compunction their brother Bedouins. The fact is that the conquering Arabs literally destroyed each other as a people. The dynasties that endured for a while were those that appeased their non-Arab subjects. The last Omayyads of Damascus, when they were unwise enough to attempt the creation of an Arab state, provoked immediate universal hostility, followed in a few decades by their extermination. Under the earlier Arab rule in the Levant, from about 640 to the beginning of the 8th century, all branches of administration, which had been inherited from the Byzantine-Sassanid period, remained essentially native in personnel and language (chiefly Greek or Aramaic). The Omayyads Abd el-Malik (685-705) and Walid (705-715) were the first to coin money inscribed in Arabic. Amid ceaseless revolts, they struggled to control the administrative machinery by introducing Arabic into public affairs. But their motley empire was not thereby unified; each province merely became bilingual or trilingual. Anarchy, worse than ever, flared up in 715-724, and the final explosion came two decades later, after a brief respite in the early years of Hisham (724-743).

Following this a new caliphate was established under the half-Arab, half-Persian Abbassids, truly a recreation of Sassanid pre-Islamic theocracy. The Abbassid caliphs soon enough became the prisoners of their Iranian supporters and advisers, and then the captives of their own bodyguard—the Turkish emirs and their slave soldiers. No Abbassid was ever free to act as an Arab (assuming that he felt so inclined), not even Harun al-Rashid, the celebrated contemporary of Charlemagne, whose very capital, Baghdad, bore a Persian name. Similar conditions prevailed in the African and Moorish Occident.

To sum up: Arab divisions and Moslem slogans were simply taken over by non-Arabs, and thus gave expression to cultures, religious movements, and political rivalries which had little or nothing to do with Arabia. The old ethno-geographic entities re-emerged, but superficially coated with Arabism: Andalusia (i.e. Spain); Morocco (ancient Mauretania) and Tunisia (the formerly Punic Africa); eternal Egypt; the Syro-Palestinian Levant; a Lower Mesopotamian Iraq; Persia proper; a Farther Iran or Khorassan; and the Hither India of the Punjab, etc. Or, new formations appeared, entirely unconnected with the Bedouin episode—notably the various Turkish and Berber empires. Contrary to a widespread belief, Islam, far from signifying the Arabization of Africa and the Orient, was so to speak the means by which the Africans and Orientals got rid of the Arabs.

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IV

Even before the end of the Arab conquests, a hundred years after the hejira, the non-Arab proselytes to Islam—though still a minority among the population of most countries—were already far more numerous than the immigrants from Arabia. (Today the nomad Bedouins together with the authentic Arabs among the settled peoples hardly make up more than 2 per cent of Islam’s world-wide total or around 350 million; should we count all Arabic-speaking Moslems, of all dialects and origins, as Arabs, they would still represent rather less than 15 per cent of Islam.)

The mawali³ or neophytes—individually and later as entire peoples—created international Islam and thereby defeated Arabism. With the triumph of the Abbassids (743-750), their victory was complete. From about 750 on, for twelve out of the thirteen centuries that have elapsed since the death of Mohammed, the genuine Arabs played no part in history, except as figureheads for other forces or prowlers of the deserts of Arabia and the Sahara. What, then, were the non-Arab forces that acted on the Islamic stage around the Mediterranean basin?

In Africa, from the epoch of Islamization to the period of the Crusades, the three major forces were represented by the following:

1. Egypt, which had remained largely Christian (and to some extent Jewish) and where the Coptic language survived. Starting with the 9th century, however, the land of the Nile was governed in turn by Turks, by Arabo-Berber Shiites—the Fatimids from the Maghreb (a North African “West”)—by Kurds (Saladin and his Ayyubid dynasty), and finally by Turks again (the first Mamelukes).
2. The cities of the Maghreb, notably those of Tunisia, which were of Punic (that is, Canaanite) origin; they had become Arabized in speech and Islamized in religion—except for the still numerous Jews, and many native Christians who held on for several centuries.
3. Finally, and chiefly, the Berbers, who were Moslems in their own often dissenting fashion, and who spoke the Berber tongue in their vast majority.

Farther to the west, in Spain, Arabic served as a lingua franca for all peoples and religions. But on the whole, the peninsula remained Romano-Iberian, though in part it had become “Moorish,” that is Arabo-Berber. Yet genuine Arabs were always very few, even in Andalusia proper. The great empires of the Almoravids and Almohads which dominated the Maghreb and established themselves astride Africa and Spain (11th-13th centuries) were purely Berber; the lesser “Saracenic” principalities that ruled Tunisia, Sicily, and the Central Mediterranean (9th-10th centuries), were half-Berber, half-Arab, like the Moors of Spain. In the east of Africa the Arabo-Berber caliphate of the Fatimids—possibly the greatest power in Moslem Africa—was created under the Shiite banner by a 10th-century Berber tribe, the Ketama from Algerian Kabylia. However, this caliphate was destined to become Egyptian (the Fatimids are the actual founders of Cairo), and it stayed Egyptian, despite occasional extensions into the coastlands of the Levant.

In Asia, the essentially non-Arab Abbassid caliphate of Baghdad lasted only from 750 to about 850; its disintegration as a temporal (if not as a spiritual) power started well before the end of the 9th century. The dynasties which in the 10th and 11th centuries succeeded it on the secular level were purely Iranian. These in turn were superseded by Turkish rulers. The event that set off the First Crusade was the threat posed by the sudden growth of the mighty if ephemeral empire of the Seljuk Turks Previously, an uneasy equilibrium had been reached in the Levant between the Byzantines and Fatimids, wherein the Arab princelings of Aleppo and Mossul found themselves in the paradoxical situation of defending the independence of districts which were essentially Aramean and in good part Christian, or otherwise non-Moslem. But they too were soon subdued by the Seljuks, and then by the Crusaders. The latter found themselves facing not Arabs but Turkish hordes, warring dynasts and tribal chieftains (the “Atabegs”), and also the motley forces of Fatimid Egypt.

Saladin, the great conqueror of the Crusaders, was himself a Kurd (and therefore an “Indo-European”); and the nondescript Ayyubid empire (about 1200), of which he was the founder, defies all ethnic classification, as does the Mameluke empire which succeeded it. Both had Egypt for a base and the Turk for a sword—this is about all that can be said of them.

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V

The 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries saw the destruction of native forces to the south and east of the Mediterranean and the ruin of ancient lands which to this day have not recovered from the catastrophe. Crusades and counter-crusades decimated Oriental Christendom, broke up the Moorish civilization of Spain, and dispersed the Jews once more around the Mediterranean basin. The terrible Mongol invasions under the successors of Genghis Khan completed the work of extermination. For three hundred years the Levant served as a battlefield for the contending Mamelukes, Tamerlane’s Tartars, Ottoman Turks, and Turco-Persians. Finally, in the early 16th century, the Levant fell into the hands of the Ottoman sultan-caliphs, the political heirs of Byzantium.

The Ottoman Turks, who misruled Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, looked down on the Levantines and despised the Arabs, to the point of disregarding the main tenet of the caliphate, though they themselves professed to be strict Sunnites. (According to orthodox doctrine, a caliph, either “legitimate” or “usurping,” had to be at the very least a member of the Meccan tribe of Qoreish, if not of its Hashemite clan, which was the clan of the Prophet.⁴) The sacrilege represented by the Turkish caliphate evoked only indifference, even from the orthodox section of the Moslem world. Arabism was thus losing its last symbol of prestige, its quality of an Islamic fetish. Moreover, except in matters of religion, literary Arabic also fell more and more into neglect. At the court of Selim, of Soliman the Magnificent, and of their successors (even until our own 20th century), Persian was cultivated instead, Latin, and later on French.

From the Sahara to the Eurasian steppes, the Sublime Porte was now the only major power. Europe trembled before the Great Turk, and North Africa—whose fate is inseparable from that of the Levant—either passed into the Ottoman political orbit or fell into chaos. Morocco withdrew into itself, while the “Barbary States” became under Ottoman guidance a lair of international piracy. Such conditions prevailed well into the 19th century, when the decay and fall of the Ottoman empire permitted Europe again to intervene decisively in the southern and eastern Mediterranean.

These hundreds of years of desolation (from the 13th to the 19th centuries) gave the Bedouins one more chance to play a role—a negative one. For during this period additional nomadic tribes from Arabia infiltrated little by little into the formerly prosperous but now devastated regions of settlement and created—more effectively than any change of climate might have done—that desert landscape which suits the Bedouin way of life.

The great Moslem historian of the Berbers, Ibn-Khaldun, a Hispano-African scholar and gentleman of the 14th century, paints a striking picture of the camel-riding Bedouins—the only true Arabs he recognizes. Their presence, he writes, is incompatible with any form of civilization; their barbarous speech is shocking to the ears of a cultured Moor; spoliation and degradation accompanies their parasitic way of life.

All the uprooted, discontented and ne’er-do-well Moslems and non-Moslems of every description (Berber pastoralists in Algeria or elsewhere along the Sahara; rebellious Druzes, Kurds, and other sectarians or clansmen in the Levant; adventurers, fugitives, dissenters, from the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, etc., etc.)—all more enterprising and better equipped than the Bedouins—banded together or fought each other in a permanent state of lawlessness, abetted by the impotent tolerance or the self-seeking complicity of pashas, beys, deys, and other local Ottoman authorities. Amid this unending chaos, the less disorganized groups of sedentary people had no other recourse but to bar themselves in their impoverished towns, villages, or oases and conduct a passive-occasionally active—resistance against the anarchy without. Such were the Kabyles in the Atlas, the Moorish exiles from Spain, the Mozabites; such also, in Egypt, the Islamized peasants (“fellaheen”) and Christian Copts; the Catholic Maronites in Lebanon, often allied with the Druzes; the semi-pagan Nosairians (“Alawites”) of coastal Syria; the “Assyrian” Christians of Kurdistan; the Shiites of Iraq; the Jews, both the natives of Asia and Africa, and the refugees from Spain; and many more communities, whose ethno-religious traditions and—quite frequently—languages were not of Arabian origin.

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VI

Such is the political and social history of the Arabs since Islam. But what about the cultural aspects of their past? The so-called “Arab” civilization was extinguished many centuries ago. However, when it shone during the early Middle Ages, in exactly what sense was it Arab? This word is highly ambiguous. In the Middle Ages, too, there was a “Latin” culture which was Latin in its literary language but hardly in anything else. The coeval culture which is now labeled “Arab” (though formerly one used to call it Moorish or Saracenic) is something equally difficult to define, and even more complex. Like our European or Western civilization, it was international and interdenominational. The Arabs had an exceedingly small part in it; even the imprint of Islam, however deep, was not, on the whole, decisive. Many other traditions, Judaic and Graeco-Roman, pagan and Christian, Oriental and Occidental, stemming from antiquity or arising in the Middle Ages themselves, exercised, in their totality, a more decisive influence on “Arab” civilization.

Should we then call this civilization “Arab” only because its language was Arabic? The facts are not as simple as that; many other tongues contributed to the culture of the period and region under consideration. In the nearer and the farther East alike, the Aramaic of Oriental Christians and Jews, the Persian tongue used by Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Moslems, and several other idioms, held a place no less important than that of Arabic. In Asia, in Africa, and along the Mediterranean this epoch witnessed the golden age of Persian poetry, the beginnings of Turkish literature, a flowering of “Syriac” (i.e. Christian Aramaic) writings, a renaissance of Hebrew letters, and a final Coptic production. Written Arabic owed only its barest origin to the Arabs. Its development and enrichment as a “classical” medium of expression was the work of grammarians who flourished after the hundred years of Arab dominance. These scholars were Persians, Arameans, Jews, Moors, etc., very seldom Arabs. The same remark applies to most of the writers in Arabic. They were no more Arabs for having couched many of their writings in Arabic (the international language of scholarship in their day) than Duns Scotus or Dante Alighieri were Romans for having written so abundantly in medieval Latin. Among all the many authors there is hardly one Bedouin. No wonder: the great period of Arabic literature did not begin before the 8th or even the 9th century, by which time very little was left of the original conquerors, whereas the Arabic language had become a medium of communication used by the elites in countries between India and the Atlantic. (The mass of the peoples continued to speak their own vernaculars, or to develop new vernaculars more or less derived from Arabian dialects.)

However, Arabic, the language of the Koran and the Moslem religion, is the only reality to which our modern notion of an “Arab civilization” could be attached. Indeed, the Koran, which was composed in Medina after the death of the Prophet, is the one and only Book of the Arabs. Pre-Islamic Arabs had no written literature, and their brief and trivial inscriptions, mostly funerary, give evidence of a much lower level of culture than that of their non-Arab neighbors in the peninsula, the Sabaeans and kindred peoples. In later times, the only work of belles-lettres in Arabic to attain world-wide fame, the Thousand and One Nights, had nothing particularly Arab about it. It is a compendium of Oriental folklore and light entertainment: Persian, Indian, even Chinese; Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Judaic, etc. These “Arabian Nights” are set in all climes of the Orient except Arabia. With regard to other aspects of culture, not linguistic or purely literary, it is noteworthy that both masters and workmen, teachers and pupils, were in nearly all cases non-Arabs, and that the sources, methods, procedures, and styles were of non-Arabian origin, deriving mostly from Oriental and Mediterranean antiquity. Thus the famous “Mosque of Omar” (which does not date from Omar but from the early 8th century) was built on the site of the Temple of Solomon by architects and craftsmen none of whom were Arabs. And the Arabic version of Aristotle—which contributed so much to the shaping of medieval Moslem, Christian, and Judaic thought—was the work of Christian-Aramean translators and commentators who were often Judeo-Spaniards. For even the celebrated “Arab philosophy” is a complete misnomer. Its great authorities were Iranians⁵ like Avicenna (Ibn-Sinna), Turco-Iranians like Al-Farabi, Moors like Averroes (Ibn-Roshd), or Spanish Jews like Avicebron (Ibn-Gabirol), and, above all, Maimonides.

The contribution of true Arabs to this falsely styled Arab civilization is therefore meager; in theology, a minimum; in the humanities, still less; in the sciences, almost nothing; in the arts, absolutely nothing. “Arabian” architecture is Byzantine, Persian, Levantine, Moorish. The “Arabic” numerals are Hindu (though the principle of the zero seems to go back to the Sumerians). Even the “Arab” horse is of Syrian or Syro-Mesopotamian breed (but domesticated first on the steppes of Eurasia). Only the dromedary—perhaps⁶—is Arabian, together with the landscape which befits it. For, truly, the void from which Arabism sprang remains its sole creation. As a well-informed Englishman, a former governor of Sinai, once remarked: the “sons of the desert” deserve more properly to be called “fathers of the desert.”⁷

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¹ Islam means “conversion, surrender” (to Allah's will); a Moslem is “he who surrenders, who accepts Islam.”

² From 630 (submission of Mecca to Mohammed) to 644 (murder of Omar); or at most to 655 (murder of Othman, the last caliph of Medina). Thereafter the seat of the caliphate ceased to be even nominally in Arabia.

³ Originally the “clients” of an Arab tribe or faction.

⁴ The Omayyads were Qoreishites, though not Hashemites; whereas the Abbassids were Hashemites, like the Alids or Fatimids whom they had managed to supersede.

⁵ Al-Kindi, “Philosopher of the Arabs,” provides an exception. This Iraqi scholar was of genuinely Arabian origin, whence his traditional nickname.

⁶ Yet this too is doubtful. The first domestication of the dromedary, like that of the two-humped Bactrian camel, may have taken place somewhere on the northeastern confines of Iran. As to systematic camel raising in Arabia, it started toward the end of the Bronze Age (about the 13th century B.C.) among Midianites and other south Semitic tribes. But these were more closely related to the Hebrews than to even the pre-Koranic Arabs.

⁷ C. S. Jarvis, Three Deserts, p. 161.