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ARABS
i
OTHER WORKS BY THE AUTHOR
Travel/History
Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land (1997)
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of
Ibn Battutah (2001)
The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with
Ibn Battutah (2005)
Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah (2010)
Editions/Translations
The Travels of Ibn Battutah (2002)
Two Arabic Travel Books (with James E. Montgomery; 2014)
Kitab al-Ifadah (Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi’s description of Egypt;
forthcoming)
Fiction
Bloodstone (2017)
ii
AR ABS
A 3,000-YEAR HISTORY OF
PEOPLES, TRIBES AND EMPIRES
TIM MACKINTOSH-SMITH
iii
Copyright © 2019 Tim Mackintosh-Smith
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the
public press) without written permission from the publishers.
For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:
U.S. Office: [email protected] yalebooks.com
Europe Office: [email protected] yalebooks.co.uk
ISBN 978-0-300-18028-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
iv
Sha’b: . . . Collection, or union; and also separation, division, or disunion
. . . A nation, people, race, or family of mankind . . .
Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon
And if your Lord had so willed, He could surely have made mankind one
community. But they will not cease to disagree.
Qur’an 11:118
v
In memory of a unified Yemen (1990—2014)
and of Ali Husayn Ash’ab (1998—2016)
and all the others who died with it.
vi
CONTENTS
REVOLUTION: 600–630
5 Revelation, Revolution: Muhammad and the Qur’an 115
6 God and Caesar: The State of Medina 147
DOMINANCE: 630–900
7 Crescaders: Openings-Up 177
8 The Kingdom of Damascus: Umayyad Rule 223
9 The Empire of Baghdad: Abbasid Sovereignty 262
DECLINE: 900–1350
10 Counter-Cultures, Counter-Caliphs: The Empire Breaks Up 305
11 The Genius in the Bottle: The Hordes Close In 348
vii
CONTENTS
ECLIPSE: 1350–1800
12 Masters of the Monsoon: Arabs around the Indian Ocean 381
RE-EMERGENCE: 1800–NOW
13 Identity Rediscovered: Awakenings 413
14 The Age of Hope: Nasserism, Ba’thism, Liberation, Oil 459
15 The Age of Disappointment: Autocrats, Islamocrats,
Anacharchs 488
Chronology 537
Notes 559
Bibliography 602
Index 609
viii
ILLUSTRATIONS
AND MAPS
ILLUSTRATIONS
ix
I L L U S T R AT I O N S A N D M A P S
x
I L L U S T R AT I O N S A N D M A P S
MAPS
xi
FOREWORD
ُال أَحْ ِسبُ الد ْھ َر يُبْلي ِج ﱠدةً أبداً وال تُقَ ﱢس ُم شعبًا واح ًدا ُش َعب
I did not think that time would ever wear out what was new,
or that its changes would divide a people who were one.
Dhu ’l-Rummah
xii
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
also homage to its renewed political unity. Yemen had been a unified state
in earlier periods: in pre-Islamic times, briefly in the fourteenth century,
briefly again in the seventeenth. To many Yemenis, as to me, that unity
seemed, still seems, to be somehow right and proper, something natural. It
seemed right at least as long ago as the fourteenth century: ‘If Yemen were
to be united under one ruler,’ wrote an observer in Egypt, ‘its importance
would increase and its position among the eminent nations would be
strengthened’.
In fact, for more than nine-tenths of its known history, Yemen has not
been unified; far from it. Now, as I write, it appears to be falling apart again.
So too, seemingly, are Iraq and Libya; Syria may hold together, just, under
brute force; Egypt’s integrity looks safe, but its society is deeply riven.
These five countries contain half the population of the Arabic-speaking
world. According to a recent United Nations report, that ‘world’ is home to
5 per cent of humanity, but generates 58 per cent of the earth’s refugees and
68 per cent of its ‘battle-related deaths’ . . . Sometimes it seems that only one
thing unites Arabs, and that is their inability to get along with each other.
Why this disunity? Why this extraordinary level of self-harm?
‘The absence of democracy and its institutions,’ Westerners (shorthand
but useful) would say. They may have a point; but recent foreign interven-
tions allegedly aiming to promote democracy appear only to have added to
the mayhem. And when there are free and fair elections, the islamists tend to
win them; the elections are annulled in a military coup, and the Westerners
go strangely silent. Mouths and money do not go together, it seems.
‘The failure of Islam to unify itself,’ the islamists (again, shorthand)
would say. But that unity has itself been a mirage almost from the Islamic
year dot. Battles over authority and legitimacy have been fought within the
community of Muslims, with words and other weapons, since the fourth
decade of the Islamic era.
‘The legacy of imperialism,’ Arab nationalists (there are still a few left)
would say. But nearly every attempt at unity in the post-imperial age has
failed, usually because of inter-Arab suspicions and squabbles. One Arab
commentator, in a post-mortem on the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, wrote that
‘The Arabs would have won the battle for Palestine had there not been
something false and rotten in themselves’. That ‘something’ was mutual
distrust, resentment and fear. It was the rottenness of bad blood, and it has
bubbled up time and again through Arab history.
xiii
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
(Things become slightly clearer when we see how this apparent contradiction
in terms works: as well as a ‘people’ and all these other things, a sha’b is also a
cranial suture, the place where the bones of the skull both meet and are sepa-
rated; the bones themselves are called qabilahs, otherwise meaning ‘tribes’ . . .
It is as if the human head, with its ‘peoples’ and ‘tribes’, provides an Arabic
anatomy of humankind itself.)
And yet the Arabs always seem a special case. Don’t we, and they them-
selves, usually call them just that – ‘the’ Arabs, as if they were a discrete and
clearly identifiable body of people? If they are, then who are they? And
why do they seem so particularly fissile, so reactive? Should there not be at
least an Arab Union, or even a United Arabian States? . . . Come to think of
it, there was a United Arab States (UAS), forgotten by most histories: it was
a confederation formed of the United Arab Republic (UAR) – itself a polit-
ical union of Egypt and Syria in the brief heyday of pan-Arabism – joined
by the then Kingdom of North Yemen. The UAS and UAR lasted all of
forty-four months, from 1958 to 1961.
There is no reason why political unity should be a good thing per se. But
I believe there is a case for claiming that unity in at least a general sense –
that of harmony, the absence of strife, peaceful coexistence and cooperation
– is better for human society than fragmentation and violent competition.
xiv
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
On a small planet with too many people and too few resources, and particu-
larly in crowded countries like Syria, Egypt and Yemen, it seems to hold out
the only hope.
Unless we kill each other and start all over again.
Histories of Arabs tend to begin with Islam; perhaps with a prefatory nod to
what came before. Islam certainly furnishes an identifiable body of people,
unified for a great moment in history. But it was a unity that was apparent, not
real. According to traditional accounts, the tribes of Arabia came together
in 630−1, the Year of Delegations, when tribal representatives visited the
Prophet Muhammad and paid allegiance to him and the state he had founded.
Within two years, on the death of Muhammad, most of those tribes had gone
back to their old independences and old squabbles. At first the splits were
patched up, and the extraordinary conquests that took Arabs out of Arabia
forged among them an esprit de corps that seemed miraculous – indeed,
God-given. But the underlying tribal divisions were never healed. Within 300
years united Arab rule was only an elaborately cherished memory, and for the
next thousand years or so Arabs, with few exceptions, were themselves
divided and ruled by Turks, Persians, Berbers, Europeans and others. Their
own empire had been amputated; the pain would subside in time, but the
memory of it would remain, like that of a phantom limb.
The historiographical upshot of this is that political histories of Arabs
by modern writers nearly always turn, when they reach about AD 900, into
histories of Arabic culture, then – while Arabs themselves all but disappear
from the picture – morph into histories of other peoples’ empires. Part of
the problem is the word ‘Arab’ itself. Like any name, it is not identical with
the thing it denotes, but is a label placed on that thing. Labels are useful but
confusing. They can cover up a multitude of differences and can hold splits
together; they can tell lies. In time, a label fades and gets over-written, while
its original meaning – if it ever had just the one – is forgotten. In reality, we
are all like old-fashioned travelling trunks, covered with many labels,
geographical, genetic, linguistic and so on (inter alia, I am British/English/
Scottish/Anglo-Saxon/Celtic/European/Indo-European/Yemeni/
Arabian/Arab(ic) . . .); few sections of humanity are as belabelled as the
long-travelled people known as Arabs. But, in the end, most of us get stuck
xv
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
with just one label, and adhere to it, as it does to us. The broader it is, the
harder it sticks.
‘Arab’ is a label that is very broad, very sticky (it has been around for
almost 3,000 years), and yet very slippery. It has signified different things to
different people at different times. The meaning has shape-shifted, expired
and resurrected so often that it is misleading to talk about ‘the’ Arabs, and
that is why this book does not. To do so would be to try to pin down Proteus.
All one can say is that, for more of known history than not, the word has
tended to mean tribal groups who live beyond the reach of settled society.
That is probably what Arabs were during much of the long period up
to Islam; it is certainly what they were throughout most of the second AD
millennium. During both periods, there is good reason for transliterating
them as a common noun, in italics, not as a ‘proper’ people: as ’arab, not
‘Arabs’. What is surprising is that those peripheral, mobile, numerically
insignificant people – people without a capital letter, let alone a capital city –
have been so central to an identity. From Greek city-states in the fifth century
BC, through imperial China, to recently colonial Europe, societies have
defined and simplified themselves in contradistinction to the nomad, the
‘uncivilized’, the ‘barbarian’. Arabs, however, take not only their name but
also their only consistent defining feature, their language, from the epitome
of nomadism and footlooseness, those tribal ’arab.
The people we know today as Arabs are an ethnic compound. The
two main founding elements, nomadic or semi-nomadic ’arab tribes and
settled South Arabian peoples, may both have originated in the Fertile
Crescent to the north of Arabia in prehistoric times; their languages
descended from the same old ‘Semitic’ family. But over time their tongues
had forked and split, and so too had their lifestyles: the South Arabians had
developed settled societies based on irrigation systems and agriculture (they
may well have inherited these systems from older, indigenous peoples
already established in the Arabian south, with whom they intermingled);
’arab, in contrast, practised pastoral transhumance, their wanderings
directed by wells, rains and raids. Mutual interests, both commercial and
political, meant that these two founding elements began to come together in
the centuries before Islam. In early Islamic times, the shared experience
of empire-building made the compound more cohesive for a time – but
also more complex, as peoples from beyond the Arabian Peninsula were
assimilated to the mix. Throughout this long process, tribal ’arab were part
xvi
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
of – indeed, at the heart of – Arabs in the wider sense; they still are, despite
their tiny numbers. But they themselves have always complicated Arab
history from the inside. For the tensions between the settled and unsettled
elements of the compound have generated great strengths, but also fatal
instabilities. We will examine these strengths and weaknesses in the coming
chapters.
One force above all has brought the compound together, and held it
together: language – not everyday speech, but the rich, strange, subtle,
suavely hypnotic, magically persuasive, maddeningly difficult ‘high’ Arabic
language that evolved on the tongues of tribal soothsayers and poets – has
long, perhaps always, been the catalyst of a larger Arab identity. Shared
language is important to any ethnic identity. It is an attempt to reverse the
divinely inflicted disunity of Babel, that babble of misunderstanding that
prevents people from coming together. For Arabs, it has acted not just as an
ethnic marker, but as the ethnic genius: ‘It is said,’ goes an adage that was
already old in the ninth century AD, ‘that wisdom descended from the
heavens on three organs of the people of the earth: the brains of the Greeks,
the hands of the Chinese, and the tongues of the Arabs.’
For this reason, while history is often seen as a succession of men of
action, Arab history is as much, or even more, a series of men (and some
women) of words – poets, preachers, orators, authors; notably, the author
(or, for Muslims, the transmitter) of the first Arabic book, the Qur’an. They
and the words they have used will be prominent in this book. They are the
ones who have formed identity, forged unity and forced the march of history.
From time to time, therefore, for a page or two, we will take stock of how
language has impelled progress, and at times impeded it. Progress and
regress continue. Recent events, not least the ‘Arab Spring’ and its messy
aftermath, have shown how words – slogans, chants, propaganda, mis- and
disinformation, the old mesmerizing magic both white and black – still
shape the course of the Arab world.
Or, rather, the Arabic world, the Arabosphere. Language is still its
defining feature and its genius, and ‘the Arabs’ are really arabophones. To
call everyone from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Strait of Hormuz ‘the
Arabs’ would be like calling all North Americans, South Africans,
Australasians, Irish and British, regardless of origin, ‘the English’ – or even
‘the Angles’, another group of wandering clans whose language was to end
up as the tide-wrack of a long-ebbed empire.
xvii
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
To explore the origins of the shared identity that – despite everything – has
led Arabs to chase the mirage of unity, we must therefore listen to their
language. We must also go back way beyond Islam. The pre-Islamic past is
certainly less well known and much less knowable. But in terms of written
history it is as long as the period since that fateful Islamic eruption from
Arabia. The first known ancient inscription mentioning Arabs dates from
853 BC; I am writing the first draft of these words in AD 2017; according to
tradition, the boy Muhammad was first recognized as a prophet in AD 582 –
the precise mid-point between that inscription and now.
Islam began with such a flash that it tends to blind us to what was there
before. Equally, the flash has cast its own powerful illumination over all
subsequent history, throwing much into shadow. We need to look at the
whole historical picture, and in a more even light; to give a stereoscopic
view, one that sees what has happened since the Islamic year zero as only
half of a panorama that goes back at least as far again.
What did begin with Islam, and gives the impression that a unified Arab
narrative begins then too, was Arabic information technology – in other words,
new ways to use and control language, and thus to shape identity. Before Islam,
literature, culture, history, identity were largely oral. From Islam onwards,
new technologies have underlain most of the major developments in Arab
history. We will look more closely at them as they crop up over time; for now,
a summary will give an idea of just how important they are to the story. In the
early seventh century, the first, belated, Arabic book appeared – the Qur’an:
overnight, in the terms of our 3,000-year timescale, it made a language and the
various people who used it legible, visible. Suddenly they were there on their
own page, in black and white. They already had a past; now they entered their
historic present, and with an energy that won them a vast empire.
In about 700, a snap decision to ditch the inherited Greek and Persian
languages of imperial administration in favour of Arabic also arabicized
that whole empire and its peoples with amazing speed: Arabic became the
new Latin. In the later eighth century, Arab paper-making stole a long
march on a Europe still wrapped up in an age of parchment, and released an
outpouring of Arabic words and ideas. Seven centuries later, with printing,
Europe stole its own march; cursive Arabic script never worked happily as
xviii
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
moveable type, and typeset Arabic was long viewed in its homeland rather
as tinned spaghetti is in Italy. When at long last, in the nineteenth century,
Arabic presses did grind slowly into action, so too did an Arab renaissance,
the Nahdah or ‘awakening’. Another hundred years on, and a new and
thrilling pan-Arab nationalism was broadcast by the border-defying tran-
sistor radio. A generation later, Arabic typesetters finally found the antidote
to the cursive curse – word-processing; at the same time satellite TV took
off, and the words flew further and faster. Most recently, the social media of
the early twenty-first century began to subvert old rhetorics and air alterna-
tive truths . . . until the reactionaries got on to Facebook too. Now digital
dinosaurs do their best to dominate media and minds.
And yet the pre-Islamic half of history had its social media, its domi-
nating voices; words flew then, too. Most of them flew away on the wind.
But some were caught – on stones, in memories – and we can and must still
try to listen to them.
I find that Ibn Khaldun’s model, his elegant paradigm, still works. But I
believe it can be further tuned in ways that make its workings clearer still,
and more clearly applicable over the three millennia or so of recorded Arab
xx
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
history. The most important feature is still ’asabiyyah, that collective poten-
tial energy that catalyses a short-lived unity:
’asabiyyah, in time, builds the momentum for
. . . a successful raid, conquest or, mutatis mutandis, coup d’état;
. . . as a result of the raid/conquest/coup, and of the group’s
resulting monopoly of resources (camels, taxes, oil and gas), the group
prospers;
. . . either the resources are not enough for the group as it increases in
size, and/or its leaders fall out over the division of wealth, so . . . unity
fragments.
Eventually a new ’asabiyyah will form, and the process will repeat
itself.
I find also that Ibn Khaldun was right to see ‘nomads’ as the reservoir of
change, and I believe – strange though it sounds – that in a sense this is still
true today, even though the number of Arabs who actually live from
nomadism is now infinitesimally small. Ibn Khaldun’s two basic systems of
human society are still in place:
hadari, or ‘settled’, political society, a (relatively) static system charac-
terized by the related word hadarah – often translated as ‘civilization’, in the
sense of people living together in a settlement, a town (Latin civitas, Greek
polis); and
badawi, or ‘bedouin’, apolitical society, a dynamic system in which
people live beyond the civil polity, and in which the basic ‘institution’ is that
of the ghazw or raid (or conquest or coup d’état).
My point is that, while actual Bedouin are now a dying breed, there are
still plenty of major players in the Arab game whose actions accord perfectly
with that second, ‘bedouin’ system. The two systems, settled ‘peoples’ and
bedouin ‘tribes’, are mentioned in a famous verse of the Qur’an, from which
I take part of the subtitle of this book:
O mankind, We have created you from male and female, and made you
into peoples and tribes, that you may know one another.
The duality has been in place since the beginning of recorded Arab time,
and it has not always been a question of opposition. That first mention of
Arabs in 853 BC concerns the employment by the Assyrian state of a trans-
port contractor, a certain Gindibu (‘Locust’), an Arab chieftain who owned
xxi
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
But which rationality is the more ‘Arab’? Herein is a great dilemma of Arab
identity: the term ‘Arab’, as I have said, has most often been applied to tribal
groups who live outside settled society, beyond the pale and the politics of
civil institutions. In one sense, therefore, the more Arabs submit to civil
society, the less ‘Arab’ they become; they lose something of their ethos. In a
globalized, urbanizing world of blurring identities, the prospect of losing
that ancient aspect of arabness, of becoming part of the global blur, is painful.
There is more to the story than peoples and tribes. Draw back, look at
the bigger picture on the map and over time, and it becomes clear that the
cycle of unification and fragmentation sketched out above has been in
motion within a context of empires – Assyrian, Roman, Persian, Byzantine,
Ottoman, British, American. It is a cycle that has teeth, but is not necessarily
vicious: sometimes the teeth have meshed with imperial interests at the
points of contact – the two Fertile Crescents (more on them later), Egypt
and Iran; at other times they have clashed. In both cases there is friction,
heat, conflagration: the cycle is a wheel of fire, both creative and destruc-
tive, melding, melting and remoulding Arab identities over 3,000 years.
In telling the Arab story, this book will look more at that seemingly
eternal and often tragic round of unity and fragmentation, and also at that
force that feeds the fire, fuels revolutions and has, more than anything,
defined Arabs across a history of shifting and regrouping identities: the
Arabic language. Language is what ties together all those key historical
developments based on information technology, from the word of God
captured in writing, to word-processing, and on to mind-processing by
newly reactionary regimes. Language is the thread that all would-be Arab
leaders have tried to grasp: their aim has always been to create ’asabiyyah,
that ‘bindedness’ or unanimity – to ‘gather the word’ of their peoples and
tribes, as Arabic also puts it.
This is a history of Arabs, not of Arabic. But to follow the linguistic
thread through it is to explore the deepest strand of ‘being Arab’ in all its
different senses. That thread is the only bond that has ever been able to keep
Arabs together, to give them identity and unity; even the unity brought
about by Islam was based, ultimately, on words. For modern Europeans
and their heirs, as Thomas Carlyle pointed out, gunpowder, printing and
xxiii
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
Protestantism underlay power; for Arabs and theirs, it has been words,
rhymes and rhetoric.
The problem is that words can blow apart as well as bring together. That
is what is happening now, both where I live and in many other Arab lands,
and it is why unity remains a mirage. How all this has come about, over
the entire known Arab timescale of nearly three millennia, is the subject of
this book.
One last word of my own before the gathering of the Arab word. As well as
listening to people and their voices, we will occasionally examine things.
What might be called tangibilia are a good way of getting a grasp on the
past; they can act as metaphors for time or times, handles on complexity.
They can be as big as a whole building assembled from fragments – a mosque
that salvages both pagan and Christian materials – or as small as an Arabic
coin minted by King Offa in the English Midlands; they can be charged with
enigma, like a talisman with Allah on one side and Krishna on the other, or
loaded with irony, like a Colt revolver inscribed by a Cold War president
of the United States. They are rather like what Jorge Luis Borges, minting a
new meaning for an old Arabic coinage, called ‘the Zahir’: a visible and
haunting object that takes on different shapes in different places and ages.
Other, more literary metaphors are useful too for the story to come. The
wheel of fire is one; the allusion to legendary sufferings – of Ixion, subverter
of divine order, of King Lear, tragic divider of his own realm, both of them
‘bound / Upon a wheel of fire’ – is not coincidental. Wheels, moreover, are
good vehicles for histories: they travel along an ever-extending line – time
– yet their own motion is cyclical; they combine the constant and the vari-
able. But, for Arab history, they are not the only image to keep in mind.
In my first book I wrote that, in Yemen, the past is ever present. I didn’t
realize at the time that Harold Ingrams, the imperial administrator and
Arabian traveller, had also written in his Yemen book, ‘This is a country
where the past is ever present’.
A generation and a revolution or two separated our statements, but the
past we wrote about was the same, still present. It is present now, another
generation and a few more revolutions on. And it is not only the Yemeni
past as seen by British observers that is inescapable. Near the beginning of
xxiv
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
his sprawling book on Stasis and Change, the Syrian poet and critic Adonis
writes of the tendency across the Arabic world ‘to make the past ever
present’. This ever-present past was what led that astute observer, Jan
Morris, to call the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ‘an antique autocracy’ in 1955,
only two years after its founding autocrat had died.
We must all be stating the blinding obvious. What only becomes obvious
with time is how that ever-present past also contains the future – contains in
both senses: comprises, but also confines. An ever-present past can have
positive effects, for it keeps societies rooted in themselves. Equally, it can
entrap those same societies and stifle their futures. It can be an incubus, an
undead weight. The recent and obvious example is that of the Arab Spring,
the rolling revolution that began in 2011 and gave expression to a younger
generation’s aspirations – only to be smothered, almost everywhere, by the
reactionary forces of the Arab past.
Exploring Arab history thus means stepping now and again off the
time-line; looking ahead as well as back. ‘Time present and time past,’ as
Eliot knew,
This complexity is the bane of all historians, but maybe most of all for histo-
rians of Arabs: years and pages turn in sequence; but not necessarily action
and reaction, cause and effect. Causes, factors, tragic flaws may remain
latent for centuries, even millennia, until they work themselves out, if they
ever do. An extreme though trifling instance is one in which, in the mid-
twentieth century, a village shaykh (chief ) demanded that the British colo-
nial authorities in Aden should pay for an old well to be dug out and rein-
stated. His argument was that the well had been filled in by a Roman
expeditionary force in 26 BC, and that the Romans and the British were
both species of ‘Frank’ – that is, European. A more serious instance is that
concerning the transfer and nature of power in the post-Muhammadan state:
the problem has boiled up intermittently but bloodily over the past 1,400
years. Clearly, the wheel alone, trundling steadily along its time-line, is not
always enough. We need another image, repetitious yet arbitrary.
As often, poets have the answer. The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani saw the
ever-present Arab past as
xxv
THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS
That past is the sand in the bottom of the glass, waiting for the next turn of
events. Qabbani knew that history is no mere timepiece or pastime, but a
player in its own right, often malevolent. It is the hourglass, squatting there,
marking time, not measuring it – until it is turned once more, and then you
see the grains are human lives, or human deaths, for the people are both the
quicksand and its victims.
You can count the grains: 6,660 civilians killed by the war in my adoptive
land; at least 50,000 dead combatants, many of them no more than boys;
perhaps 85,000 younger children, infants under five, starved quietly to death
by war’s old ally, poverty. These are the stark statistics – so far – from the
UN, ACLED and Save the Children, as I let go of this book at the end of
2018. Would those who turned the hourglass have done so if they’d known,
or even if they could have guessed?
xxvi
Land over 2,000m
0 500 km
0 500 miles
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Asia Minor
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Sea
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Himyaris
Axum Zafar
Muza Socotra
Aden
Bab al-Mandab
Strait
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E T H I O P I A / Africa
A B Y S S I N I A
I n d i a n
O c e a n
Atlantic F R A N C E
Venice
Ocean
Crimea
Pyre Black
nee
León s
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L
Constantinople
UGA
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Toledo Anatolia
P ORT
al-Andalus Calabria
Amorium
Murcia Palermo
Cordova
Seville Sicily
r Granada
i
q uiv Algiers Tunis
dal Gibraltar TUNISIA
GuaTangier
Tahart
ain s al-Qayrawan Mediterranean
Mo unt Sea
At Fez las ALGERIA
MOROCCO
Damietta
Alexandria
Cairo Negev
al-Fustat
E G Y P T Sinai
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S A H A R A
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Upper
Des
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al-Raqqah
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S Y R I A
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0 100 km
Golan
al-Yarmuk
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Caesarea
Sea of Galilee
Jordan
Valley
L
Khirbat al-Mafjar
Jerusalem Qusayr Amrah
Jericho