The biography is a well-established, albeit controversial, historiographical genre. In the field of Middle Eastern studies, biographies have been written about prominent political and social figures and about members of the lower strata of society. Nevertheless, biographical scholarship is not abundant. Our field could benefit from biographical research that endeavors to tell stories that are significant beyond the individuals concerned, that engage the reader with a sophisticated interpretation of the protagonists, and that pay attention to their protagonists’ interactions with the world within which they live.
The lacuna in Middle Eastern biographical scholarship is even more pronounced in terms of tribal societies. Biographical studies of tribal people are rare due to two major reasons. For one, “tribal studies” still do not attract much attention among Middle East experts (anthropologists excluded). Also, biographers studying tribal societies face major methodological problems, first and foremost of which is the paucity of written sources. Until recently, most tribal societies were illiterate and left a poor historical record.
This proposed panel calls attention to the potential in utilizing a biographical approach to better understand tribal societies. Four biographies, and the respective biographers' approaches, will be presented. The first revolves around a prominent Jordanian shaykh and his role in the creation of the Emirate of Transjordan and its consolidation during its formative period. The second presents a raiding narrative about a Bedouin slave from Transjordan in the 1920s, illustrating the limits of biography and racial discourse in modern Jordan, a country that has adopted tribalism as a governing technique. The third reconstructs the biography of a Yemeni shaykh who stood in opposition to the political system, thereby portraying northern Yemen’s history since the 1970s until the outbreak of the civil war in 2011 from a marginalized point of view. The fourth examines a 1958 Omani tribal history compared to traditions of Islamic, tribal, and Western biographical writing.
On this basis, we will exchange ideas about writing a biography and about dilemmas and pitfalls to be avoided: the imperative of adequate research questions and arguments; the balance between offering a chronological narrative and scholarly analysis, or between personality, course of events and historical context. Overall, we aim to promote biography as an alternative or additional way of telling the past and present of the Middle East in general and that of tribal societies in particular.
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Prof. Yoav Alon
Until recent decades most of the Middle East's population lived in rural areas and could be characterized as tribal in terms of political organization, social patterns of behaviors, ideology and economy. Even today, most Middle Eastern societies retain many features of tribal life, which modern conditions and the emergence of centralized states have been unable to erode. However, tribal societies and their leaders have received only limited attention from scholars, historians of the region in particular. Tribal shaykhs have led many societies in the region until recently; many still do to the present day. The important old office of the tribal shaykh has characterized these societies for hundreds of years and survived well into the twentieth century. It was then that it faced major challenges, sometimes leading to its complete disappearance. Surprisingly, this important and wide-spread office has been under-studied. Although tribal shaykhs crop up in many histories and ethnographies of the Middle East there is hardly any research dedicated to the understanding of such a critical political, social and cultural phenomenon.
This paper demonstrates the benefits in studying tribal shaykhs by focusing on the biography of one historical figure. For nearly seventy years, Shaykh Mithqal al-Fayiz played a central role in imperial, regional, national and tribal politics in the Middle East. The narrative of his life and work thus allows us to trace both a fascinating individual life story and a central social, political and cultural office as it evolved during a time of major change.
The paper shows that Mithqal al-Fayiz played a significant role in the development of modern Jordan. He had a great impact on the course of events that led to the creation of the Emirate in 1921 and to its consolidation as a new polity during the 1920s and 1930s. A wide range of archival sources in Jordan, Israel and the UK, together with press reports and oral testimonies, form the factual base of this study. This rich variety helps compensate for the lack of the – illiterate – shaykh’s own writings. The analysis draws on insights from the empirical and theoretical literature dealing with state-tribe relations. By doing so, it shows that Mithqal’s biography offers a basis for a broader conceptualization of the influential yet understudied office of tribal shaykh and thus greatly enhances our understanding of tribal societies in the Middle East in modern times.
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Mr. William Tamplin
This paper presents an oral-historical narrative about a tribal raiding expedition undertaken by Thani al-Dhiyabat, a Hwetat slave from Transjordan of East African descent, in northern Nejd in the early 1920s. Thani’s son Sulayman told me the story, which I recorded, in summer 2018.
Thani and his raiding party were captured by the Ikhwan, a fundamentalist Islamist movement that conquered territory for Ibn Saud. All of them were beheaded save Thani; the executioner, like Thani, was black and refused to execute another black man. Thani was transported to another city to be executed, but he escaped with the help of a black slave girl. Later he was recaptured and pardoned by the governor of Hayil, whereupon Thani returned to his tribe’s ancestral homeland in southern Jordan. Thani’s raid represents a number of “lasts” in modern Jordanian history: the last Bedouin raids and the last Jordanian slaves. Thani’s raid also anticipates the consolidation of the Emirate of Transjordan's power following the Arab Legion’s defeat of the Ikhwan in 1922-24. The story of Thani’s raid plays into a Jordanian master narrative insofar as it joins the glories of the Bedouin past with the anticipation of the modern state of Jordan. But the master narrative conceals a slave narrative in which Thani’s blackness and enslavement, central to the narrative’s flow, are conspicuously not discussed at length by his son Sulayman.
This paper aims to accomplish the following: 1) recount the story of Thani’s raid, 2) analyze Sulayman’s narrative techniques in recounting Thani’s raid, 3) demonstrate how this story plays into a Jordanian master narrative of state formation, 4) explore the limits of discourse on race in modern Jordan, 5) argue that this suppression is a result of state-sponsored, ingroup/outgroup tribalism that envisions the state as the tribe (yet excludes black Jordanians from the modern Jordanian mainstream) and regards the discussion of anti-black racism in Jordan as an external imposition of Western identity politics designed to divide and weaken Jordan, and 6) discuss the difficulties in writing this tribal biography: understanding Sulayman’s Arabic, transcribing it, translating it; dealing with taboo issues such as blackness and slavery in modern Jordan; and questioning Sulayman’s reliability and his tendency to lionize his father.
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Nadav Samin
This paper considers the question of biography in relation to a 1958 history of the ?Abr? tribe of interior Oman, which was authored by a member of that tribe who was also one of Oman’s leading Ib??? scholars. Whether cast as an early example of modern tribal history or as a late artifact of Arabian oral tradition, it is worth considering how the biographies of key figures in the history of the tribe and Oman more generally are rendered in the manuscript in or out of conformity with Western scholarly conventions. When cast against suppositions about the nature of valid historical knowledge, some unresolved questions emerge from the ?Abr? study: for instance, why does the author insist on unanimity of opinion concerning the facts of the tribe’s most remote history, yet temper any hope for certainty concerning the tribe’s modern history? Shouldn’t the opposite be true? In addition, broader questions about this text emerge in light of the panel’s purpose: for instance, is the celebration of individual tribal personalities a function of modernity and the politics of modern states, or is there precedent for such depiction and treatment in works such as the ?Abr? manuscript? What, according to the ?Abr? manuscript, does the individual tribal person amount to as a historiographical matter, if he is not wedded to some form of religious charisma? And lastly, is biography in the precolonial Muslim world synonymous with what we might call hagiography, and if so, what place does that leave in prose for the tribal hero?
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Dr. Marieke Brandt
This paper discusses the life trajectory of Shaykh Hamis Hamadan (pseudonym), during the momentous decades from the late 1970s to the Houthi expansions in 2011. Naturally, no narrative of a single person can make manifest Yemen’s historical processes in all their complexities and contradictions. The life of Hamis Hamadan would hardly deserve the telling if it were not these extra-personal dimensions that come to light in it: his personal biography is inextricably linked to the political biography of his time, incorporating the discords, protests, anxieties, and hopes of the age in his own self to a remarkable degree. The special feature of the Hamadan narrative is that it tells Yemeni history from the vantage point of one of those who were in opposition to the prevailing political system. The Hamadan narrative is, similar to those tribal narratives explored by Shryock (1997) in Jordan, by nature an oppositional one. In the Hamadan case, his firm opposition and associated status as outsider and “unperson” in the political system of the Yemeni republic(s) render his narrative a kind of alternative discourse that retells the recent history of northern Yemen from a marginalized and suppressed, “peripheral” point of view. His narrative at times corresponds with, at times differs from the discourse produced by the dominant “ingroup” (in Delgado’s phrase) – such as the memoirs of Abdullah al-Ahmar (2008), Sinan Abu Lahum (2004) and other representatives of the Yemeni state including the “historiography” of the former regime itself (the biographies of long-time president Ali Abdullah Salih). The subject of refusal and opposition to the prevailing political power structures and their representatives runs through Hamadan’s narrative, produces his life story, and enables him to offer a complementary view of recent Yemeni history “from the margins”. The result is a profound, original, even intimate insight into tribal life and the often turbulent relation between tribes and the state in 20th century Yemen.
