Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [23]
The legends of Ubar and Iram, I learned, had much in common. In fact, they had too much in common. Both were allegedly feckless cities destroyed by an angry Allah. They flourished and fell at the same time. Moreover, they were in the same area, a region of the Rub' al-Khali known as the desert of al-Ahqaf.5 Most telling, they were both built by the same tribe, the shadowy "People of'Ad." Was Iram another name for Ubar? Yes, I thought.
This identification had a bonus: far more was written about Iram than about Ubar. An early faint remembrance of a place and its people may be embedded in the meaning of the proper names "Iram" and "'Ad."6 At its Semitic root, "Iram" means a pile of stones erected as a way marker, and "'Ad" is most likely the same as "Gad," the god of fortune once revered throughout the Semitic world. Thus we might conjure up an image of a city that was a landmark in an unknown land, and an image of a people pursuing fortune, a people enamored of wealth and its trappings.
This, of course, was a major conjectural leap, yet when Iram and 'Ad appear in surviving pre-Islamic poetry—a mirror of life in ancient Arabia—there is more than a hint that these people were living a worldly life and having a good time of it. One poet pondered what it would have been like "had I been a man of the race of'Ad and of Iram":
Roast flesh, the glow of fiery wine,
to speed on camel fleet and sure...
White women statue-like that trail
rich robes of price with golden hem,
Wealth, easy lot, not dread of ill...7
Fragments of other poems imply that the People of 'Ad—and even their camels—were a wicked lot. Seeking a superlative for nastiness, one poet comes up with: "of ill omen, eviler than Ahmar of 'Ad." Describing the aftermath of warfare, another intones: "She [War] brought forth Distress and Ruin, monsters full-grown, each of them as deformed as the dun camel of 'Ad."8
It is interesting that in pre-Islamic poetry, which dates back to 500 A.D., perhaps earlier, the 'Ad appear as a past-tense people, gone from Arabia and even from the face of the earth. What became of them? And of their city? The prophet Muhammad knew. Preaching in Mecca around 640–650, he declaimed: "Arrogant and unjust were the men of 'Ad. 'Who is mightier than we?' they used to say. Could they not see that Allah, who had created them, was mightier than they? Yet they denied our revelations. So over a few ill-omened days, We let loose on them a howling gale, that they might taste a dire punishment in this life; but more terrible will be the punishment of the life to come."9
Muhammad's preachings, gathered into the Koran, make much of Iram's destruction by a "hurricane bringing a woeful scourge," a sudden and dramatic end for the People of 'Ad: "When morning came there was nothing to be seen besides their ruined dwellings. Thus We reward the wrongdoers."
In the Koran's account of Iram's violent demise, two major figures appear: the worldly King Shaddad and the prophet Hud, who warns the 'Ad that their wicked ways will bring them to a bad end. Regrettably, little more is said of either character or of the full story of Iram. In the Koran, tales are never told from beginning to end as historical accounts; rather they are repeatedly—and fragmentarily—cited to drive home a moral point. For the 'Ad, the moral point is a thunderous warning: "You squandered away your precious gifts in your earthly life and took your fill of pleasure. An ignominious punishment shall be yours this day, because you behaved with pride and injustice of the earth and committed evil ... Serve none but Allah. Beware of the torment of a fateful day."
In the Koran, Muhammad gave the People of 'Ad a resounding stamp of disapproval—and thereupon licensed a host of Islamic historians, geographers, travelers, and storytellers to decry the city and people of Iram. What better theme than comeuppance for the wicked? By medieval times, the tale of the city's rise and fall had been told and retold dozens of times and had been seized upon and woven into the fabric of the Arabian