Anthony Sattin

Before the angel came

Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s magisterial work begins with the earliest tribes of the Arabian peninsula trading aromatics and other precious goods

In his first book, published in 1977, Tim Mackintosh-Smith described mentioning the idea of travelling to Yemen while studying Arabic at Oxford because he had heard that Yemenis spoke the purest form of Arabic. ‘They all say that, you
stupid boy,’ his tutor replied, suggesting he go ‘somewhere respectable’ instead.

The student went to Yemen all the same, and has been there ever since, living through sweet and also turbulent times, including civil war and the ongoing Saudi-stirred nightmare that has taken at least 60,000 lives through combat and some 85,000 from famine. But not so very long ago, the word Arab in this country conjured up images of a sleepy, hospitable and ineffective people. How the wheel has turned. One of the many significant achievements of Mackintosh-Smith’s brilliant new book is to put this current moment into a long and rich context, explaining how it fits into the 3,000-year history of peoples, tribes, empires and a language.

There have been three great waves of emergence or resurgence among Arabs, and we are currently living with the third, raised by the demons of nationalism, the power of the petrodollar and the end of European and Turkish empires. The second wave arose some 1,400 years ago, when the archangel Gabriel appeared to a not-so-successful trader from Mecca, which led to the creation of Islam.

These two waves are well known, both to many of us outside the Arab world and within, not least among the angry people who detonate bombs. Mackintosh-Smith’s Arabs is in some ways a call to engage not just with these two waves but with the earliest one — to remember what it meant to be an Arab before the advent of Islam. The ‘3,000 years’ of the book’s subtitle is a reminder that half of their known history belongs to the period before the angel appeared with the Koran.

The first wave, then, was a coming together of people who had a common way of life in the harsh land of the Arabian peninsula, a life that was mostly and by necessity lived on the move, herding camels in search of grazing.

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