chapter 1 Literature

In celebrating the memory of certain thieves, Arabic literature participates in a nearly universal literary phenomenon of fashioning ‘outlaw heroes’.The hon- our is difficult to obtain: the average pickpocket, horse rustler, burglar or fraud- ster has almost no hope of becoming the subject of literary lore and historical interest, but a handful of thieves seem to have been earmarked by literature for great posthumous careers as heroes with elaborate legends and charismatic appeal. Quite why those particular thieves become outlaw heroes, and the rea- sons why ostensibly establishment writers narrate bandit tales along patterns that reappear with intriguing congruences across disparate literatures across centuries and continents invokes fundamental questions about myth, the hero figure, and the functions of history and literature. These questions are the start- ing point of my broader-scope study, Arabian : Memory and Myth in the Making of Pre-Islam; for present purposes, it is instructive to outline the seminal theoretical works in the nascent field of outlaw studies, since they have yet to be integrated into analysis of Middle Eastern criminality,1 and a brief survey here can sketch their salient findings about the complex inter- play of fact and fiction in outlaw characterisation that may inform strategies to interpret the narratives in al-Maqrīzī’s ‘Arab Thieves’ and elsewhere in Ara- bic literature. First, the matters of fact. Although the world’s most famous outlaw hero by far, Robin Hood, was almost certainly not a real person,2 the majority of outlaw figures memorialised in literature were actual criminals who can be identified in historical records.3 Because most outlaw tales have this real historic basis, and because the biographies of outlaw heroes across the world share remark- able parallels, Eric Hobsbawm conjectured that particular social-political con- ditions experienced similarly in different parts of the world must have given rise to the careers of the outlaws who became memorialised as heroes. His path-breaking work resulted in his 1969 Social Bandits,4 which argued that

1 Cooperson (2015) is a notable exception, but the article is a contribution to a wider volume on violence in Islam, and was not afforded the scope to focus on methods of reading bandit theory (see the brief comments 191–192). 2 Hobsbawm (2000): 139; Knight (2015): 42, 109. 3 Seal (2011): 6–12, 52–57. 4 He published an earlier account, Primitive Rebels in 1963, but the main argument traced here

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386952_003 10 chapter 1 when the status quo of pre-modern agrarian communities was threatened by the sudden encroachment of the modern bureaucratic state and capitalist reor- ganisation of the countryside, locals resisted in order to preserve the status quo. Resistance took the form of intimidation against the encroaching outsiders and their local agents, theft, and sometimes murder. These acts were seen as crim- inal transgressions in officialdom, but from the perspective of the peasants, they seemed more like the necessarily desperate measures needed to preserve their traditions and lifestyle. When the forces of the ‘law’ eventually caught (and usually killed) the local resistance figure, they deemed him a vile thief, but local lore converted him into a heroic martyr—a “social bandit.”5 Herein were the seeds for narrative expansion that would gather scattered memories into coherent outlaw hero sagas, à la Lampião, Sandor Ròsza, Salvatore Giuliano, Ned Kelly, et al. Hobsbawm reasoned that social was predominantly a feature of the early-modern world, since it was the aggressive expansion of the nation state which, in Hobsbawm’s view, nurtured conditions most fertile to breed social bandits, but he also accepted that similar situations in differ- ent historical contexts had the potential to spawn analogous kinds of heroic banditry. He concluded that where a group is subject to a form of injustice, a member of that group who refuses to tolerate it will be revered, and his resis- tance in the form of thievery and violence will be lionised as social banditry.6 Social bandit narratives could thereby be read as the carriers of memories of oppression, and their abiding popularity and the regular patterns which repeat in their narrative structure across cultures lie in the human impulse to empathise with victims of powerful and tyrannical forces. The difference between a social bandit and a regular criminal would thus hinge on the fact that the social bandit represents the cause of the oppressed, and that elements of his character render him a sympathetic figure. To develop this thesis, Hobs- bawm devised a checklist of the basic elements of the “noble robber” persona that distinguish him7 from an ordinary gangster. For instance, the noble robber is usually portrayed as unwilling to embark upon a career of criminality and

outlines the much revised thesis as it appeared in the 1969 Social Bandits and as reworked in Hobsbawm’s 1971 and 2000 editions. 5 Hobsbawm (2000): 19–23. 6 Hobsbawm (2000): 20–21, 141–144. 7 Hobsbawm (2000): 7, 36–41 notes that banditry is by-and-large a male dominated demo- graphic, the limited role of women and rare cases of female banditry are noted (2000): 146– 147. Blok (1989): 35–38 gives further details of female banditry based on close analysis of the eighteenth century Dutch Bokkerrijders; however, in literature, celebrated outlaws are almost universally male (Seal (2011): 26; Seal considers the rise in female outlaw heroes as a develop- ment of the twentieth century (2011): 148–149).