The Arab world is enormously vast and diverse, in every imaginable way, and yet is deeply rooted in a lineage of shared values. Over three millennia, these evolving values have been transmitted from generation to generation, and traversed territories that stretch across the swathes of Western Asia and North Africa, connecting diverse Arab peoples.  

Coming from an Arabised background, travelling across much of the Arabdome in the medieval Islamic world, Ibn Battuta's depictions of Arab cultures as he encountered them provides a perfectly inspired itinerary as we delve into the multi-layered and composite history of the Arab peoples, tribes, and empires. 

Tim Mackintosh-Smith is an Arabist, historian, traveler, lecturer, and translator. Born in England and educated at Oxford University, he is one of the foremost scholars of the Moroccan traveler, Ibn Battuta. He has published a trilogy recounting his journeys in the footnotes of Ibn Battuta and made a three-part TV series for BBC on Ibn Battuta's travels. His most recent work Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires overs three millennia of Arab history and shines a light on the Arab peoples and tribes.

What we cover in this episode

• The elements which make the Arabs a Culture Nation,
• The earliest historic traces of the Arabs as a distinct body of people,
• The cultural connections between Arabs and their neighboring civilizations: Nabatean, Sabeans, Persian and Romans,
• The poetic spirit of Arabic language and its historic roots,
• The Arabs: cycles of unity and disunity.

Conversation key insights

• Chronologically, Islam comes in the middle of the Arabs history.
• Arabic language and constant migration are two central elements of the Arabs identity. 
• What holds the Arabs together is language. Arabs is a slippery but also a sticky label lasted for three thousand years. 
• The history of Arab peoples has been more like Odyssey than Iliad as Odyssey is an epic in motion, a constant search for home and identity. 
• Arabs political unity did not last long, but linguistic cultural unity is what lasted. 
• Arabs were the people who filled up the vacuum between two crescents: South fertile crescent in Yemen and North fertile crescent between the two rivers.
• Safaitic graffiti, which is believed to be the root of Arabic language, has a powerful poetic spirit full of declarations of love, loss, and genealogies. 
• One of the greatest achievements of Islam was bringing together the settled people of the south and the mobile tribes in Arabia. 
• Antisemitic means being anti to all the descendants of Sam-Noah’s son-including the Arabs. 

Terms

• Ḥaḍar (Arabic): Settled
• Badw (Arabic): Bedouin
• Sha’ab (Arabic): State-nation
• Ḥadith (Arabic): Tales, stories

A passage from the book

After we had enjoyed the privilege of visiting [the tomb of] the Commander of the Faithful 'Ali (peace be on him), the caravan went on to Baghdad. But I set out for al-Basra, in company with a large troop of the Khafaja Arabs, who are the occupants of that country....We set out from Mashhad ‘Ali (peace be on him) and halted [first] at al-Khawarnaq, the seat of al-Nu'man b. al-Mundhir and his ancestors, the kings of the house of Ma' al-Sama'. It is still inhabited, and there are remains of vast domes, lying on a wide plain on a canal derived from the Euphrates. Travels of Ibn Battuta translated by Hamilton Gibbs published by Hakluyt Society

We acknowledge the Aboriginal peoples as the enduring Custodians of the land from where this podcast is produced.