The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 08

by Unknown

People who are unlearned in the law, are apt to assume that it executes itself; or at least they think it absolutely necessary that law and the execution of law should go hand in hand. But in the primitive stages of human society it was not so. The law existed long before there was any magistracy to carry it into effect, and even after magisterial authority had been established, it frequently left, not only the pursuit, but the execution of law to the parties concerned. An instructive picture of such a state of things is found in the copious literature that has been preserved with regard to the Epic Period of the ancient Arabs, i.e., the period immediately preceding their amazing irruption into the world’s history through the gate of Islam.

The desert has imprinted its stamp upon the Arabs. They are particularly interesting for this very reason, that by the desert they have, so to speak, been arrested at what is in many respects a very primitive stage of development. Yet we must not imagine them roving about it like wild animals, gathering together for temporary ends and dispersing just as they please. As a matter of fact, they have no settled abodes, they are not tied to the soil nor linked with one another by a fixed domicile, and consequently they are not organised on the basis of locality, according to districts, towns, and villages. But they have instead an inner principle of association and organisation, of union and distinction, inherent in the very elements of race. It is the principle of consanguinity, of kinship. For the Arab, his political genus, his differentia specifica, are innate as indelible characteristics. He knows the clan to which he belongs, and the stock to which his clan belongs; the tribe or nation of which the stock is a part, and the larger group that includes the tribe or nation. Associations are regarded by them as natural units, founded on consanguinity, and they stand in a close and natural relationship, one to another, corresponding to nearer or remoter degrees of consanguinity (by the father’s side) so that their statistics assume the form of a genealogy.

Among the ancient Hebrews this form survived even after they had settled in towns and villages; Isaac was the father of the nations of Israel and Edom, Israel the father of twelve tribes, Judah the father of five lineages, and each lineage in its turn father or grandfather of clans and families. Such a principle of organisation is equally serviceable for settlement or migration, for war or peace; and being independent of all conditions of fixed localities, it makes the tribe as mobile as an army. For an army, too, must possess an organisation adaptable to every place, and as suitable to a hostile country as to its own. But an army is broken up into artificial divisions; the men may be put into one branch or another at will, and the place of the individual in the whole scheme is notified by artificial marks of distinction. With the Arabs, on the other hand, the form is indistinguishable from the substance, they are born into their cadres, and their uniform is, as it were, innate to them. The closer or remoter circles of kindred, from the clan to the nation, are their companies, battalions, and regiments, which include not only the fighting men, but their wives and children also, though the latter take no direct part in any fight.

The two most important stages of the political affinity are the highest and the lowest, the two poles, as it were, of the system; the intermediate stages are less important, because they assume the qualities of one pole or the other, according to circumstances. The highest association, which we call the tribe, includes all the families which migrate together regularly, i.e., which make the circuit of certain hunting-grounds, often great distances apart, according to the season of the year. One tribe will not contain more than a few thousand souls; if it exceeds that number, it becomes too large for common migration and pasturage and is obliged to divide. The lowest is the clan, which consists of families within the nearest degrees of kinship, which invariably pitch their tents close together in a common quarter (dâr).

Beyond the tribe the bond of consanguinity does not break off abruptly; it embraces also the group of such tribes which stand in any sort of historic relation to one another. But in this wider circle the ties of kinship cease to be really effective.

The Arabs as a whole, though linked together by community of speech, of intellectual acquirements and social forms, are not really a nation; neither can the larger groups into which they have split up be called nations; the nation is the tribe. The tribe is the source and the limit of political obligation; what lies outside the tribe is alien. This does not mean that a perpetual and open bellum omnium contra omnes prevails in Arabia; the relations of the tribes among themselves vary greatly, and may be friendly as a result of kinship and treaty. But inasmuch as the idea of common duty of man to man does not exist among them, and no moral law is valid beyond the tribe, everybody alien from the tribe is an enemy as a matter of course. If he is caught in the hunting-grounds of the tribe without a special security, he is an outlaw and fair game. “When I and my people were tormented with hunger,” says an old Bedouin, “God sent me a man who was travelling alone with his wife and his herd of camels; I slew him and took his wife and camels for my own.” He considers the murder perfectly lawful, and is only surprised that a stranger should presume to rove about the country with his wife and his cattle and without a strong escort.

Yet the narrow bounds of the tribal community are capable of enlargement. There are means whereby even the alien can attain the security of a member of the tribe. If he seizes the hem of his enemy’s garment from behind, or ties a knot in the end of his turban, or knots his rope with his own, he has nothing further to fear. If he succeeds in creeping into the other’s tent, or in being introduced and entertained there by the wife or child, his life is sacred. The sanctity of the hearth is unknown among the Arabs, even their altar is not a hearth and is without any fire; but, on the other hand, the tent and those within it are sacred, and even to touch the tent-cords from outside renders a stranger safe from attack. By a sacramental act, accompanied with a simple form of words, he disarms his enemy and assures his own safety. Of course protection is not always stolen, as it were, in this fashion, it may be extended voluntarily; for example, there are cases when the man who grants protection flings his mantle over the one who implores it, thus making him out as his own property which no man may injure.

If a foreign trader desires to travel through the tribe without peril, one of its members must give him a safe-conduct; very often he merely gives him some recognisable piece of his own property to take with him as a passport or charter of legitimation. The relations which arise in this manner are, for the most part, transitory.[42]

But there are also permanent and hereditary relations of this sort, based in part upon contract and oath. A member of a tribe may allow a stranger to sojourn permanently with his clan, and by adoption into the clan the sojourner is considered naturalised by the whole tribe. Not individuals only, but whole clans and families can thus be naturalised, and instances thereof are not uncommon. A fresh element is consequently grafted on the pure tribal stock in these sojourners or protégés. In a few generations they may amalgamate with the tribal stock, but as fresh batches are constantly coming in from without, the distinction between the two elements within the tribe remains.