Arabia: Dream of reality
Israel seems to consider its control over Jerusalem the symbol of its domination over Islam. And precisely that urge for control reinforces the Palestinian urge to destroy their enemy and at the same time deprives Palestine of hope of statehood.
THE ARABS
In his classic History of the Arabs Professor Philip K. Hitti—a text from the time of my Islamic studies at Munich University—notes that of all the lands comparable to Arabia in size and of peoples approaching the Arabs in historical importance, no country and no nationality has received so little consideration in modern times. “What is not known about it is out of all proportion to what is known.”
Arabia is the fount of the Semitic family of peoples which later migrated to the Fertile Crescent and became the Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenecians and Hebrews. Arabia, Hitti recalls, is also the fount of the rudimentary elements of the three monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The great cities of Algiers and Cairo, Beirut, Damascus and once Baghdad, are emblematic of one Arab spirit, that of the townsfolk. Contemporary with Charlemagne in 9th century Europe, Baghdad under Harun al-Rashid was the world’s greatest city of culture and science and wealth.
Another Arab soul is the Bedouin, the nomad of the desert, about which the novelist Paul Bowles (b.Jamaica, New York, City in 1910; d. Tangier in 1999) in his Moroccan exile wrote so passionately. For many Arabs the desert is their real home. In the same way northerners cannot live without the sea, Arabs cannot live without the desert. The sands are their sea. The desert is the source of energy, oil and water, underground, and above, there is the wind and the sun. “The desert,” Hitti writes, “is the Bedouin’s first defense against encroachment from the outside world.”
The artistic world of the nearly forgotten Bowles, who lived 52 years in Tangier, is frequently set in Arabian deserts just on the edge of Europe. In the desert the Westerner is lost. Natural man defeats the neurotic product of technological society. Primitive man, Bowles believed, has retained things that western man has lost; he can operate in natural surroundings. And Americans, he noted, are less prepared than Europeans in such circumstances because they think everyone must do it the American way. Therefore it’s hard for Americans to establish contact with others. Self-subsistent primitive man is also more adapted for communal life than is dependent western man. Primitives have a communal life. No one owns anything. Everything belongs to all.
As soon as personal property appears, you have to invent another system. Before arriving in the desert, Bowles’ protagonist in Under The Sheltering Sky said he didn’t need a passport to prove he is a member of mankind but when he loses his passport in the desert he is lost: he is only half a man without it, and no longer knows who he is.
Albert Camus’ hedonistic Arab differs dramatically from that projected in the New World as barbarous and fanatic. According to Camus whose roots were in the Arab world, “Man must live within the circle of his flesh (l’homme doit vivre dans le cercle de sa chair), because the real evil, the writer believed, is abstraction. Speaking of the people of Algiers, Camus declared: “Cette race est indifferent à l’esprit.”
An Arab friend used to tell me that in everything concerning Islam it was important to keep their language in mind. According to an Arab saying ‘wisdom alighted on the tongue of the Arabs’ … for it is the language of the Koran and the wisdom of an ancient people. Alla-a-ah akhbar echoing across the world from Morocco to Indonesia, from Hamburg to Sudan is a reminder that holy people of Islam consider the Arabic language the basis for the “genuineness” of their faith. After the birth of Islam, Arabic became also the language of diplomacy and social intercourse from Central Asia, across North Africa to Spain.
The Bedouin is an Arabic-speaking purist, proud of his genealogy, who traces his lineage back to Adam. Bedouins were nomads, the original Arabs, barbarians and pagans. “The time of ignorance” Arab historians call pre-Islamic time, a time of guerrilla wars and plundering, but with little bloodshed. They stole from each other but it stopped there. The pagan Bedouin was not eager to get killed and had no concept of heaven and angels.
The Semitic Berbers of Morocco, Algeria, and Libya, “free men” or Berber Arabs, (historically known also as Numidians or Moors, who occupied much of Spain), also speak related Arab dialects.
The prophet Mohammad fought many wars for the unity of the diverse and dispersed Arabs. Arab scholars teach that Arab unity is the real meaning of Islam. Thus Pan-Islam and Pan-Arabism are related concepts. Fired by anti-imperialism and today by anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiments, Arab nationalism has turned into regional nationalisms, while Pan-Islam is the glue for all Moslems such non-Arab Iranians and Afghans and others farther to the East and the South.
