by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
A second way in which the realm of such elite individuals was evoked was in terms of territoriality demarcated units. These units were primarily for the purposes of extracting revenue and bureaucratic control, exemplified by the parganah in India.29 But they could also refer more generally to settled areas over which the sovereign exercised full authority. In these cases, we see the use of terms such as “rule,” “sovereignty,” “possession,”30 “protected,”31 and sarkār.32 What all these have in common is that they represent part of the larger entities over which the supreme rulers claimed jurisdiction. But interestingly there is no evidence in the language used by the arena’s participants of the existence of such larger entities in abstraction, which, in today’s parlance, we would refer to as “states” or “empires.” If such entities did in fact exist as meaningful, integrated, and self-perpetuating phenomena, then the closest that these contemporaries came to recognizing them was in terms of their constitutive units. Furthermore, as these units were grounded in land that was cultivated, settled, and taxable, they presumably had clear and fixed boundaries. The sources, however, offer no direct evidence for these.
Territoriality per se is less prominent in the third way in which the arena’s participants articulated legitimate and universal temporal authority. In addition to homing in on individuals or units of governance, there was the option of tapping a lexicon that may be described as canonically imperial (rūm) or folk-loric (’arab, ’ajam) or some combination of the two—īrān.33 All of these terms functioned as synecdoches, pointing rhetorically to large, ill-defined entities, with contemporaries fully cognizant of the fact that the whole referred to that part of it invested with agency. The differences between these terms lie in the location of this agency, be it in a people, a tribal confederation, or an imperial legacy, each with its own distinctive historical and cultural associations.
The image of sovereign power that emerges on the basis of these modes of thinking is that of a supreme but far-off individual who resided in his well-guarded capital surrounded by territory that was under his sway nearby, but over which his authority gradually waned with increasing distance until a kind of no-man’s-land was reached, separating formally adjacent polities. The sharply curtailed authority of the ruler and his inaccessibility that this picture highlights is in keeping with the lack of concern shown by the documents’ authors for their ambient political structures or the everyday machinations of the political elites. Only when sovereign acts directly impinged on their everyday affairs, such as changes to Nadir Shah’s taxation policies or a decree compelling the merchants of Baghdad to loan money to the governor’s treasury, were they moved to comment on the political situation.34 Even so, the discussions were usually anecdotal and brief, with no serious attempt made to place the events in a broader context or to interpret them from the viewpoint of their possible ramifications for their future prospects. Participants in the region’s arena of circulation and exchange generally behaved as if sovereign power were far removed from the realities of their daily lives. This may appear surprising in view of the exceptionally acute political upheavals that characterised the region over much of the eighteenth century.35
PEOPLE
In a region as diverse as Islamicate Eurasia, it was perhaps inevitable that a counterpart of the conceptual repertoire described above was an approach toward people that was broadly tolerant and pragmatic. This is reflected in the letters’ vocabulary and idiom. It suggests that the people with whom their authors dealt on a daily basis were viewed primarily through their markers of personal identity and through the collectives to which they belonged.
Personal identity was conceived mainly along cultural, relational, and social lines (see Table 7.2). By far the most widespread of the cultural markers were ethnicity, described by terms such as “Persian,” “Arab,” and “Abyssinian,” and subjecthood, indicated by terms such as “French” and “Dutch.”36 In contrast, the religious markers deployed in these documents were essentially limited to “Muslim” and “Christian.”37 On this matter, it is worth adding that, though an individual’s religious affiliation was without doubt a crucial aspect of his persona in public, this was usually left unstated. Religion, it seems, was subsidiary to ethnicity and subjecthood as a marker of difference.38 The second category of identifiers used to differentiate individuals was relational. These were chiefly intimate or respectful in nature and included terms such as “sir,” “the most generous,” “venerated,” “lord,” “spirit,” “soul,” and “life.” They reflected or asserted what the ties meant to those involved, and they were especially useful for signaling their—factual or imagined or desired—relationship and degree of proximity. Commonly, writers gestured to these ties not directly, with the focus primarily on the addressee, but more self-referentially, for example, by using phrases like “the one who prays [for you]” or “[your] servant.” As for social markers, terms such as “the presence,” “agent,” “haji,” and “viceroy” constituted the third (and very diverse) category of personal identifiers. They designated an individual’s formal status and function in the polity by means of his titles, occupation, rank, or office.
No less foundational in conceptualizing people were terms that denoted collectives (see Table 7.3). Normally bounded in number and self-aware as coherent groupings, they were expressed by means of a lexicon and rhetorical techniques that, notwithstanding their spare character, were flexible enough to capture the salient features of the pluralistic environment. The simplicity of this language resulted in part from the remarkable paucity in everyday parlance of specialized terms that referred to specific corporations or groups, such as the family firm, the mahājanī or the trade guild. This is despite the fact that collectives of these types were vital, and known to be so, for sustaining activities that had to do with circulation and exchange. Instead, a handful of generic nouns were tapped in order to signify a wide spectrum of collectives. So, for example, the basic meaning of tā’ifa is “people.” Depending on the context, however, it could stand for “clan,” “tribe,” “extended family,” “religious minority,” or “nation.”39 The term ahl is synonymous with tā’ifa when used in the sense of “people.” But in other scenarios, it might mean “inhabitants,” “followers,” or, more commonly, “kin,” “relatives,” or “local community.”40 Furthermore, the household and the family, the social constellations that exerted the greatest influence on the daily lives of the region’s inhabitants, were very often denoted by bayt and khānah.41
Table 7.2. Markers of personal identity in Islamicate Eurasia
Table 7.3. Collectives in Islamicate Eurasia
Although generic nouns such as tā’ifa and ahl were certainly not absent, it was much more common to deploy nominal phrases to articulate the region’s collectives. In these constructions, to one of several words that mean “inhabitants” or “collection” or “people” or “gathering” was attached the quality shared by each of its members. This could be residence, occupation, degree of intimacy, or religious affiliation (see Table 7.3). The resulting expression then functioned as a noun. Examples of these abound. In southern Iraq, one might talk about the extended family as “all of the relatives.”42 It was more frequent, however, to convey the idea of the family through the phrase “the people [or inhabitants] of the house.”43 When describing individuals from a certain place, ahl was used again, but in the form of “the people of [or from] Shiraz.”44Similarly, “all the merchants” stood for the body of recognized traders who resided locally,45 whereas on board a ship the officers and passengers (though not the ordinary crewmen) were designated by constructions such as “the group of the people of the ship” or “the men [or people] of the ship.”46 There were exceptions, such as the phrases “the great and little” and “the old and young,” which, in context, pointed to the extended family or the immediate community at home.47 Even so, these constructions, like all the others, acknowledged explicitly that social collectives were composed of individuals.
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What the everyday lexicon of these residents of Islamicate Eurasia shows is that the individuals whom they met in the course of their ordinary lives were generally identified by publicly visible personal attributes—cultural, relational, social—and by the collectives that laid bare their most pertinent biographical qualities. This lexicon’s great advantage was its precision and flexibility. It allowed the region’s inhabitants to distinguish effectively their arena’s many varied associations and at the same time account for the great diversity in the backgrounds of their individual participants.
CONCLUSION: ISLAMICATE EURASIA IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL EMPIRES
The preceding sections examine the ideas and images that had wide currency in Islamicate Eurasia in the mid-eighteenth century. These ideas and images were regularly invoked by a historically crucial segment of the population to generate what was for them a satisfactory outlook on their world. Although their conceptual repertoire reflected their everyday reality, it also powerfully moulded the arena of circulation of exchange within which their working lives were largely played out. The feature of this arena that today we can perhaps most readily appreciate is the prevalence of large distances. This was particularly visible wherever communication or transport was at issue. The state of technology at the time—essentially confined to a choice between foot, beasts of burden, and sail—imposed fundamental constraints. Long periods of silence commonly punctuated relations between correspondents; consignments of luxury and bulk goods often took weeks or months to reach their destination; the latest news from a far-off place might have been overtaken by events since its dispatch.
Due to the timescales involved, seasons mattered and major uncertainties were endemic to a great many prosaic though formative transactions. This had two immediate consequences. The first was that boundaries between spheres that are nowadays often viewed as distinct—notably, the private, public, economic, political, and social—were highly porous or, as is more likely, nonexistent. In other words, the signal divisions in everyday life were constructed on a set of foundations entirely different from those that are familiar to us. This may be seen, for example, in the morphology of letters typically exchanged among the arena’s participants. The operative distinction that they made in accounts of their daily affairs seems to have been between the personal realm and the realms that were accessible by external authoritative bodies, sovereign or otherwise. This follows quite naturally from the need to situate their activities within sufficiently broad parameters so that the information received by their correspondents was still of relevance on arrival. Thus, those who participated in the arena of circulation and exchange depicted a world shaped at once by social, political, economic, private, and public dynamics which, in their minds, could not be disentangled from one another.
The second direct consequence of the timescales that marked circulation and exchanges within the arena was the stress placed, as evidenced by their lexicon, on tolerance and pragmatism. These formed part of a troika of which the third member was trust.48 These three qualities were critical for enabling many of the transactions that made up the stuff of daily life. Given the distances typically involved, the arena’s plurality, and the prevalence of limited sovereignty, the significance accorded to tolerance, pragmatism, and trust is only to be expected. They introduced the flexibility, and facilitated access to the resources, necessary for bringing deferred, complex transactions within the reach of humble associations and even of individuals acting for their own account. Without adherence to this troika of values, the operations of the arena would have been greatly curtailed.
The arena’s plurality that this troika suggests, however, was far from comprehensive. Sovereign power was, at least formally, the preserve of a tiny portion of the region’s population, invariably determined by lineage. Moreover, ethnic and communal boundaries were rarely breached when it came to marriage or adoption. So there was little in the way of political and cultural plurality. There was, however, considerable plurality in economic and logistical dealings and in urban living arrangements. Many different types of associations, rooted in a remarkably diverse array of traditions, were in continuous interaction for purposes of trade, finance, communication, travel, and transport. Similarly, many different ethnic groups resided together in the region’s urban settlements, even if they tended to cluster in their own quarters. It is in these senses that the word “plural” is used when describing the arena of activities of those who were mobile, literate, and worldly.
At the same time, it should not be thought that this plurality, even in its qualified form, extended to all groups. There were absences, and perhaps the most prominent were the region’s conspicuous elites. Although happy to make use of the services offered by the arena, members of the ruling dynasties and government officials, as well as establishment clerics and intellectuals, were seldom involved as active participants. This separation was reinforced by the tendency of those in political authority to adopt a laissez-faire posture in relation to the arena of circulation and exchange. The vernacular mental maps conformed to this reality by ignoring political divisions in favor of ties that spanned the region. Thus, what gave this region coherence was not a unifying sovereign ideal or the existence of a single political community but rather a socioeconomic and sociocultural complex of structural connections and parallels that, respectively, linked together and were held in common by Eurasia’s Islamicate polities. Important examples of these include networks sustained by various Sufi orders, families, and family firms; the rhetorics of long-distance correspondence; and the art of negotiation and contract making. Pulling together all these strands, it is because of its qualified plurality, its Islamicate character, and its physical dimensions that the region within which the arena of circulation and exchange was embedded is best labeled, so I argue, an Islamicate Eurasia.
Though the present state of research into Islamicate Eurasia’s economic, social, and cultural history means that views on its formation are mostly at the stage of conjecture, there is much less doubt about its unravelling from the latter half of the eighteenth century. This coincided with the broadening and intensification of Europe’s engagement with the region. What had been since the sixteenth century a relationship based primarily on economic interests, especially trade in spices and textiles, maritime transport, and credit transactions, later became enmeshed with growing concerns over security, territorial control, and direct administration. Led by Russia in the north and Britain in the south, those presiding over the region’s polities became much more aware of their frontiers and were impelled as never before to police them. In the nineteenth century, these developments were reinforced by industrialization in Europe, speedier communication and travel, and the consolidation of Europe’s global empires. This occurred in step with the fall of Islamic dominion throughout much of the region, the emergence of well-defined sovereign borders, and the diffusion and internalization of previously unfamiliar categories promoted by regimes increasingly assertive at all levels of their polity. The result was a simultaneous contraction and reorientation of the everyday world of those who made their living through the circulation and exchange of people, tokens, knowledge, and goods.
The convergence of these events and trends had a transformative effect on the shared ideas and images that are the subject of this chapter. The deepening involvement in the region of centralizing regimes and the growing sa-liency of territoriality intersected with a more restricted plurality and with heightened religious and political dogma to produce a reconfigured ecumenism. Much of the conceptual repertoire of earlier times proved incompatible with this environment. The result was cognitive rupture. Islamicate Eurasia as a region was ultimately supplanted by global empires, nation-states, and multilateral associations and was divided between a Middle East and a South Asia. Faced with this, the descendants of Sayyid Mustafa and Sarina had no realistic choice but to craft and learn a fresh language more in keeping with the new, emerging world order.
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br /> SCORCHED EARTH
The Problematic Environmental History That Defines the Middle East
Diana K. Davis
Nowhere in all the waste around was there afoot of shade, and we were scorched to death ... in this blistering, naked, treeless land [Palestine].
—Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1869
[In Algeria]. . . the resplendent sun ... the almost imperceptible vibrating of the air above the scorched earth.
—Gustave Guillaumet, “Tableaux Algériens,” 1879
The Negeb is barren and sun-scorched, ... [and] marauding nomads ... swoop down ... killing. . . destroying ... [and] contribut[ing] to the creation of “man-made” deserts.
—Walter Lowdermilk, Palestine: Land of Promise, 1944
NO OTHER REGION ON THE PLANET, except, perhaps, the polar zones, has been more strongly defined by its environment than the Middle East. From Morocco to Afghanistan, many writings on the Middle East, penned today and in the past, contain detailed descriptions of the profound aridity and dearth of vegetation in most of the region. Phrases such as “the highest percentage of land at high risk for desertification in the world” are all too commonly applied to the Middle East. Such descriptions are also nearly inevitably accompanied by histories of environmental degradation wrought over centuries or millennia by ignorant and destructive indigenous populations. Deforestation, overgrazing, and over-irrigation by humans are most commonly blamed for ruining what is often claimed to have been a much lusher, more forested, and more fertile environment in the past (Figure 8.1). Such long-standing environmental histories of the Middle East, though, were largely constructed by European colonial (and Mandate) powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were based on questionable evidence.