• Complain

Tim Mackintosh-Smith - Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

Here you can read online Tim Mackintosh-Smith - Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2019, publisher: Yale University Press, genre: History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires
  • Book:
    Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Yale University Press
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2019
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

A riveting, comprehensive history of the Arab peoples and tribes that explores the role of language as a cultural touchstoneThis kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia. Mackintosh-Smith reveals how linguistic developmentsfrom pre-Islamic poetry to the growth of script, Muhammads use of writing, and the later problems of printing Arabichave helped and hindered the progress of Arab history, and investigates how, even in todays politically fractured postArab Spring environment, Arabic itself is still a source of unity and disunity.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith: author's other books


Who wrote Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

ARABS

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-Baghdadis description of Egypt; forthcoming)

Fiction

Bloodstone (2017)

Copyright 2019 Tim Mackintosh-Smith All rights reserved This book may not be - photo 1

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:

Europe Office:

Set in Fournier MT by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd

Printed in Great Britain by Gomer Press Ltd, Llandysul, Ceredigion, Wales

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968579

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

Shab:... 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.

Quran 11:118

Thus we had upwards of 1,400 separate tribal governments in the two [Hadhrami] states. There were also several hundred autonomous towns of unarmed men... Altogether I calculated there were about 2,000 separate governments in the Hadhramaut.

Harold Ingrams, Arabia and the Isles

In memory of a unified Yemen (19902014)
and of Ali Husayn Ashab (19982016)
and all the others who died with it.

Picture 2

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS ILLUSTRATIONS MAPS FOREWORD THE WHEEL AND THE - photo 3

ILLUSTRATIONS
AND MAPS

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

FOREWORD

THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS I did not think that time would ever wear out - photo 4

THE WHEEL AND THE HOURGLASS

I did not think that time would ever wear out what was new or that its changes - photo 5

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

Twenty-seven years ago I began work on my first book, an exploration of the land and history of Yemen, the country in which I was living, and where I still live now. The two former parts of the country had been unified not long before, in May 1990, just ahead of German unification. Walls were coming down, iron curtains parting, and a line in the wilderness was being erased. In Yemen, it was a time of optimism. Admittedly, there was a short war of attempted secession in 1994, in which the former regime in the south shot almost as many Scud missiles at us in Sana as Saddam Husayn had launched at Israel three years earlier; in response, our rulers in the north inflicted a horde of straggle-bearded islamists on Aden who trashed, inter alia, the only brewery in Arabia. But the unified Yemen survived. Bygones, it seemed, became bygones.

That first book of mine was a homage to a land that had held on to much from its past, to its millennial cultural unity. Between the lines, the book was 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; Egypts 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 earths 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 interventions 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.

Of course, disunity is hardly an Arab monopoly. Much of the map of Europe was a crazy paving of statelets well into the modern age. That German reunification of 1990, itself part of a contrary process that fragmented the Soviet Union, was a return to a unity that was then a mere two lifetimes old. During those lifetimes, Europe had been the epicentre of wars that blasted apart the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and led to the gentler meltdown of the British empire but out of which came the United Nations and the European Union (those well-known bastions of unanimity). All the worlds a crucible in which once-stable compounds are continually breaking down and new ones forming. If there were no such change, there would be no history. Union and division are part of the same process. Hence the first epigraph to this book, from Lanes Arabic-English Lexicon:

Shab:... Collection, or union; and also separation, division, or disunion... A nation, people, race, or family of mankind...

(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

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires»

Look at similar books to Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires»

Discussion, reviews of the book Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.