The pagans, however, oblivious to this transcendent truth, had persisted in visiting Mamre. More than a century after Constantine had attempted to ban their summer festival, they were still flocking to the sacred oak, where they would sacrifice cockerels, pour wine and throw cakes into Abraham’s well, and ostentatiously abstain from sex. Such behaviour, at a time when paganism elsewhere in the Holy Land was being harried and bullied into extinction, required a deal of nerve. Nor was it greatly surprising that most of the festival-goers came from beyond the borders of Palestine. Indeed that they belonged to a people widely scorned across the Near East as “the most superstitious and ignorant in the world,”65 and whose contempt for monarchs and their laws had long been notorious.
The Arabs, tribesmen who haunted the interminable wastes that stretched south of the Fertile Crescent, could boast a record of barbarism more venerable than the empires of either Persia or Rome. “Dwelling as they do in the distant desert, they know neither overseers nor officials”: a state of affairs so mind-bogglingly unnatural that even a king of Mesopotamia, back in the distant days when Solomon’s temple still stood in Jerusalem, had thought to make a note of it.66 A thousand years on, opinions had barely improved. The Arabs appeared as reluctant as ever to put down roots. They were despised not merely as pagans, but as pagans who lived in tents. To an aristocrat in his palace, as to a peasant in his field, the inveterate shiftlessness of such nomads was both a menace and an affront. That the Arabs, in their disdain for the norms of civilisation, were possessed of an almost timeless quality of ferocity, like that of the deserts where they lurked, was widely taken for granted. Less than human, they were something more than beasts. In battle, it was not unknown for them to drink their victims’ blood, while even in their love-making, so it was darkly rumoured, “they were quite explosively violent—women as well as men.”67 Nervous travellers venturing beyond the limits of cities and farms viewed the half-naked Arabs on their horses or camels as a menace no less deadly than the most ferocious desert predator: “For, like rapacious kites, which have only to catch sight of prey from on high to swoop down upon it with outstretched talons, they make off with whatever they can seize.”68
An insult that would no doubt have delighted the Arabs themselves. To be as free and as feared as a bird of prey was, in many ways, everything they most desired. What other peoples condemned as shiftlessness, they prized as liberty. “I journeyed with a brown whip, its handle bare of its original thonging, with its lash hanging from its loop”:69 to ride like this, alone with the horizon infinite all around, was to know oneself, with a rare and vaunting conviction, the utter opposite of a slave. Wherever Arabs gathered, whether in the shade of an embroidered tent or around a fire beneath the stars, they were sure to sing the praises of wine, slim-waisted women, and warriors who acknowledged no master. The nomads of the desert might have been despised—but they were also feared. When the Persians charged Dahag, the demon king, with having been one of their number, and the Romans condemned them for their slaving and kidnapping as agents of the Devil, the Arabs were being paid a form of tribute. Better a bandit than a dependant, after all. Who were the subjects of the Shahanshah or of Caesar to presume otherwise?
In truth, though, the Arabs were not quite the lone wolves of their victims’ paranoia. Their realm was an unremittingly harsh one, and no man could possibly survive amid the sand, salt flats and wind-weathered lava beds without others to watch out for him. Even to the hardiest and haughtiest warrior, family was everything. “We follow the ways of our forefathers, those who kindled wars and were faithful to the ties of kinship.”70 This resounding brag expressed the very essence of an Arab’s identity. Extended networks of relatives blurred seamlessly into tribe. All men who could claim descent, however implausibly, from a single imam—a founding father—were to be reckoned his sons. Bound by a single inheritance of custom and achievement, of Sunna, warriors who might otherwise have torn each other to shreds were enabled to unite without loss of face, and turn on all those neighbouring bands of rivals who might have done the same. The great joy of an Arab’s life, even more than the pillaging of caravans or the slaughtering of camels in honour of some ivory-skinned beauty, was to feud violently with another tribe. Much was bound to derive from it: honour, excitement, maybe even a well or two. That there was an essential pointlessness to such contests, an unvarying and remorseless quality much like that of the desert itself, did not in any way lessen the enjoyment of those who indulged in them. The great deeds performed by a tribe’s ancestors, rehearsed as they were in glowing, if suspiciously interchangeable, verses by its poets, offered its warriors both backdrop and inspiration. Memories of ancient battles, if gilded with sufficient imagination, might serve to dignify even the most squalid scuffle. As a result, among the Arabs, past and present were barely distinguishable. While it might be possible for one particularly recent and stirring episode to serve the tribe who commemorated it as a line drawn in the otherwise interminable sands of time, all it needed was for some new victory to be won, some new livestock or women to be seized, and the line would promptly be erased and quite forgotten. Certainly, the lore that every tribe lovingly preserved about itself was concerned with nothing so tedious as chronology. It was known quite simply as ayyam—“days.”
Yet in truth, even in the remotest stretches of the desert, the Arabs were never wholly immune to the tug of great events in the world beyond. The ebb and flow of great power politics had even, on occasion, come to alter their entire way of living. Time was, for instance, when Arab merchants had been famously sweet-smelling: for frankincense, an aromatic spice that had once been burned in near-industrial quantities on pagan altars, was cultivated exclusively in Himyar, on the southernmost tip of their peninsula. Back in the age of Solomon, the queen of this incense-growing land—Sheba, as it had then been known—had visited the great king in Jerusalem, trailing perfumed clouds of glory in her wake; while more recently, among the Romans, its inhabitants had been famed as the happiest and most prosperous of men. All that, however, had changed with the toppling of the pagan gods. Christ demanded no incense. The trade between Rome and the frankincense growers of Himyar had duly withered. The Arabs, no longer renowned for their perfumes, became notorious instead for their reek of leather and camel shit. Caravans might still toil across the desert, but those who rode alongside them now tended to play the demeaning and insecure role of middle men. That it was worth the while of camels freighted with all the luxuries of India—pepper, gemstones and castrated pageboys—to plod their way across the sands towards Palestine and Syria owed everything to the whims of distant emperors, to the calculations of bureaucrats. A treaty renegotiated here, a customs post closed down there, and everything would abruptly change. Merchants, camel-drivers, bandits: all might find themselves ruined overnight.
Prey as they were to such insecurity, there had always been some Arab tribes eager to set their fortunes on a firmer footing. Some, like the Nabataeans, a people who occupied the southern fringes of Palestine, had exploited their position between the trade routes of the desert and the Mediterranean to create a fabulously wealthy commercial hub, centred on their pink-hued capital of Petra. Others, looking to take a short cut to power, had aimed to infiltrate the cities of other peoples and then to seize their commanding heights: a policy of playing cuckoo in the nest that explained why the kings of Edessa had been of Arab descent. Nevertheless, the independence of such states, menaced as it was by the domineering shadow of Rome, had always been a rickety thing. As early as AD 106, the kingdom of Nabataea had been gobbled up entire, and reconstituted as the province of Arabia—and although Edessa held out against formal assimilation into the empire for a further 150 years, it had never been left in any doubt as to its thoroughly subordinate status. Riches and sophistication: these, it appeared, might certainly be obtained by the Arabs. The price, however, was a high one: the loss of honour, of liberty, of all that made an Arab.