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The Political Usage of Religious and Non-Religious Terms for Community in Medieval South Arabia: a Comparative Response to Gerda Heydemann’S Chapter

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The Political Usage of Religious and Non-Religious Terms for Community in Medieval South Arabia: a Comparative Response to Gerda Heydemann’S Chapter chapter 2 The Political Usage of Religious and Non-religious Terms for Community in Medieval South Arabia: A Comparative Response to Gerda Heydemann’s Chapter Johann Heiss and Eirik Hovden Introduction This comparative response, or perhaps rather “reflection”, will provide com- parative cases to be seen in relation to Gerda Heydemann’s article “People(s) of God? Biblical Exegesis and the Language of Community in Late Antique and Early Medieval Europe” in this volume. It will focus on several comparable community-related terms. However, some fundamental epistemological considerations have first to be introduced in order to establish further comparability. A comparison of terms only, used in different regions, languages, and periods would not lead very far, since their meaning, potential, and significance are very much related to the way in which they are used by actors in specific contexts. An analysis based on one or more written “texts” certainly has some merits as a starting point and an orientation. However, it makes sense to take account of a wider range of pri- mary and secondary context-related data, especially (but not only) consider- ing community-related terms. The basic object of comparison must contain ideal and literal contents, in addition to a more or less “real”, graspable histori- cal context. Agency has to be included in the analysis, even though some of the terms used seem at the first glance to be remarkably stable across time and space, as if existing in their own right. A term itself has no agency, but the usage and belief in the term does. For us, the various community-related terms indicate the ability of people to (re)present, claim or resist visions of commu- nity, reflecting political aims, social realities or political-religious hierarchies. We do not intend to take an extreme instrumentalist position and claim that our study objects (people with agency and a particular usage of terms) did not “believe” in their community-related terms. Most of those using these terms may even have taken them for granted. However, most of our sources were written by highly educated individuals who chose to use specific terms delib- erately and in specific ways, employing advanced conceptual apparatuses to © johann heiss and eirik hovden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�5693_004 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0) License. Johann Heiss and Eirik Hovden - 9789004315693 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:46:09AM via free access <UN> 62 Heiss and Hovden describe the social and ideal world around them, influenced by their particular interests or the interests of their patrons. In the following, selected community-related terms will be analysed with- out taking extensive account of the usual modern political/religious divide. The separation between “religious” and “political”1 terms of communities is problematic on a theoretical/analytical level. However, there are certainly terms that are more frequently used in religious/theological discourse, while others refer to peoples and groups not directly involved in religious hierar- chies, or not primarily related to religious discourse. In Arabic as in Latin and Greek, terms denoting groups (and many others) are taken from existing pre- Christian or pre-Islamic, often non-religious contexts (such as pre-Islamic poetry) and used in, and adapted to religious and other settings. As is to be expected, our comparative cases are only apparently similar, at first glance resembling the European cases, which are used as a starting point for our response. The similarities but also the differences will be elaborated upon. The Term Umma/Umam Many meanings are ascribed to this word, among them one that many research- ers would at first rightly refer to, which is “the Islamic community”.2 But there are other usages. In its most basic sense, its plural umam means “categories” or “peoples” as found in the Quran.3 The 10th-century South-Arabian author al-Hamdānī uses the term this way. In the first part of his geographical work “Description of the Arab Peninsula” (Ṣifat jazīrat al-ʿArab), he gives a thorough description of the inhabited world, where he uses, comments on and cites an Arabic translation of Ptolemy’s (between ca. 100 and 150) Tetrabiblos.4 The word 1 The research for this article was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (fwf): F42 Visions of Community. The concept of “ethnicity” used by Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann is partly different from its usage(s) in present day anthropology. We cannot go into the theoretical debates in depth here, but refer to the introduction to this volume. 2 Lewis, “Umma”. 3 Quran 46:18: “It is [such as] these upon whom the sentence [of doom] will fall due, together with the [other sinful] communities [umam] of invisible beings and humans that have passed away before their time. Verily, they will be lost”. This and the following quotations from the Quran are modified renderings of Asad’s translation. See also the contribution by Lohlker in this volume. 4 Nowhere does al-Hamdānī give an indication that he read Greek, so he presumably used an Arabic translation of Ptolemy’s work. Johann Heiss and Eirik Hovden - 9789004315693 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:46:09AM via free access <UN> A Comparative Response to Gerda Heydemann’s Chapter 63 ἔθνη (ethnē, plural of ethnos) used by Ptolemy is rendered as umam.5 Among other random examples, the same plural occurs in the description of the earth of al-Idrīsī (1099 or 1100–1165 or 66), who, writing around 1154 in Sicily, used the term umam to describe the “peoples” along the East African Coast or Turkic peoples in Central Asia.6 At least in the plural, the term umma could be used as a very general expression for “peoples”, comparable to the Latin gens, but cer- tainly without the etymological implications of common descent. The most common meaning of the term in its singular is the invocation of the totality of the Muslim community, e.g. when the Yemeni imam al-Manṣūr al-Qāsim b. ʿAlī al-ʿIyānī (reigned 999–1003) wrote in a letter of appointment to one of his governors: “The fuqahāʾ [legal experts] are the specialists of religion and the wise men of the umma”.7 However, this concept of “the Islamic com- munity” is highly ideal, just like its notions of unity. By using the term umma, the imam addressed an ideally egalitarian community; yet at the same time implicitly saw himself at the top of the hierarchy. Around 200 years later, Imam ʿAbd Allāh b. Ḥamza (reigned 1187–1217) did not hesitate to call his internal Yemeni Zaydi enemies unbelievers,8 thus in effect placing them outside the umma. The umma is therefore used as an idealized vision of a community. With this idea as a tool, internal, “heterodox” enemies could be excluded, with potentially severe consequences for them. The term umma is just one of many such all-encompassing, ideal religious community terms which can be appro- priated by a self declared “orthodox” group and used against another group, with varying degrees of hostility, clearly depending on context. Umma can even carry a notion of “chosen people”, e.g. in Quran 3:110: “You are the best of peoples” (kuntum khayra ummatin). But when in the Quran 2:213 the begin- ning of human society is alluded to, umma is used in a possibly not, or not only, religious way: “Mankind was once a single community” (kāna al-nāsu ummatan wāḥidatan). The terms “Muslims”, “Islam” and “believers” can be used almost synony- mously to umma. However, these terms can also be used in a less politico-legal way to describe and invoke an ideal moral community. Musallam al-Laḥjī (died around 1150) wrote a large biographical collection of the members of the 5 Cf. Uhden, “Das Erdbild”, 321. For ἔθνη see Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos 2.3, ed. Robbins, p. 132; for umam as translation of Ptolemy’s text see al-Hamdānī, Ṣifat jazīrat al-ʿArab, 39. 6 Al-Idrīsī, Opus geographicum, ed. Bombaci, 58; 849. 7 Al-Ḥusayn b. Aḥmad, Sīrat al-Imām al-Manṣūr, 114; in Imam al-Qāsim’s description of the duties of the fuqahāʾ, al-Ḥusayn b. Aḥmad uses the word umma again three times, ibid., 114–15. 8 Abū Firās b. Diʿtham, al-Sīra al-sharīfa, 852–93. Johann Heiss and Eirik Hovden - 9789004315693 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:46:09AM via free access <UN> 64 Heiss and Hovden Muṭarrifiyya (a Yemeni Zaydi branch). When he uses the term “Muslims”, such as “the Muslims of the town of Shibām”,9 he vaguely implies that not everyone there was “Muslim” in his eyes. Perhaps his claim should be interpreted as an appeal to the ideal moral individual as part of an equally ideal community of moral and pious men, something that is clearly the overall theme of his work (of course according to al-Laḥjī’s version of morality focusing on ideal notions, rather than using the term in strict inclusive/exclusive legal ways). The use of umma as a community with clear borders, a common law, sharīʿa, common activities, and its implied claim to universal validity corresponds in many respects to the term populus in a Christian sense, the populus Christianus, as shown by Heydemann.10 But especially in the plural, umam (like the gentes) can be defined as geographic units, without the notion of common descent as implied with gentes; in its singular, it frequently refers to the universal Muslim community, and in the plural to the many peoples which constitute it or to its pagan and heterodox opponents.
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