The Year of the Elephant and Other Stories

This afternoon, before coming to the bookshop, I had my first Islamic Studies lecture, i.e. the prerequisite course to higher-level studies of the Culture and History of the Near East minor.

I had originally thought to skip it entirely this year because I like my Greek classes and there happens to be one at the same time, besides which the seminar would require a little schedule-cramming. But I sent an email to the Islamic Studies department and, though the response was helpful and its terms liberal, it did transpire that it would be best for me to take it.

So far I have not gone to a seminar. If the rooms in the large building wherein they are held are not too crowded, I am thinking of going to more than one. (I visited the building after class today so that I could figure out how to get there; or, in the worst case, how not to get there.)

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THE PROFESSOR began with a more cerebral approach than customary. For instance he acutely and very quickly argued-without-arguing which historical approach is best — a social focus, political focus, or what-have-you; story, empiricism, or theory — and announced that (as the lecture title implies) he would focus on Islamic society at various historical points. A corollary of which aim is that he does not intend to take a strictly schematic, chronological or geological approach, rattling off what happened where in a list. — Since I haven't thought much about it, the only thing that came to mind by way of social history is George Macaulay Trevelyan's English Social History from Opapa's bookshelf. I looked into it and seem to remember finding far too vague to be of utility.

Nevertheless he began at the beginning and tried to portray for our benefit something of the Arabian peninsula before the birth of Muhammad and the spread of his prophecies. It was a nexus of the Byzantine, West Roman, and Iranian empires (re. 'Iran': Persia, he said, is in fact a smaller region) or more specifically of the traders who shuttled silk, gold, slaves, myrrh, balsam, etc. between them, over a land route to Syria and along the Red Sea to or from the Mediterranean and through the Arabian Sea, or over the Silk Road, to India.

There were orthodox Christian sectors who were in opposition to the state religion of Constantinople: the Nestorians and the Monophysites. The Nestorians are also denominated Duophysites because they believed that the spirit of God is separate from Christ, and the Monophysites comprised the Copts and others who believe that Christ is God and man in unity. In Iran there were Zoroastrianists, who were monotheistic on the one hand but believed in the dual presence of good and evil on the other. There were tensions between which trading points supported which state and consequently its religion.

Contrary to common belief, Islam is not a "faith of the desert," since only a relatively small part of the Arabian peninsula consists of dunes in which no plant may grow; and at the time of its inception the trade routes meant that there were thriving little towns and kingdoms like Sabaa (the Queen of Sheba — the professor emphasized — may not have existed, but her kingdom certainly did) all over.

Mecca, with its Kaʿba — whose provenance is rather vague, though it is now considered Abraham's toil, but significance great — was one of the trading points, and one of the places where poets met and talked and developed in a subtle long-winding way what we consider the classical Arabic language, ʿarabiyya.

It was ruled within the great Quraysh tribe. In the old sense of proper government, the chief of a tribe was, as the professor put it, primus inter pares. Every man who was a tribesman, not a slave or an outsider (for instance the Roma, or gypsies), was considered to have equal rights. The chief was the mediator and where necessary the representative of the tribe in negotiations and relations with other tribes; every tribesman had a right to protection. Slaves, who were widespread there as they were in Europe, had no right to protection.

One of the poorer men who was not happy under the heel of the fellow Qurayshes, despite this nominal equality and freedom, was Muhammad, who lived on the outer margins of Mecca. He was born around 570 AD (in this case I will say CE), which is a little subject to controversy because by others his birth is attributed to the Year of the Elephant — apparently the year in which what would become Yemen was conquered by Ethiopian troops — but the dates don't fit. He married the widow of a comfortably-off tradesman and ended up travelling up to Syria and becoming acquainted with the religious traditions of his neighbours. Then he was privy to enlightenment by God through his intermediary, the angel Gabriel; after running afoul of the authorities he retired to Medina. There he wished to form an umma, or community, with a Jewish clan in the area, which ended in blood and presumably tears. He decided that it was his aim to return to Mecca — he did, and (by this point in the lecture the end of class was impending — so 'tell-tale compression' of events, etc.) by the time he died in 632 CE his religion was officially observed throughout the Arabian Peninsula. It is this kind of state religion which a sector of Islam insists on endeavouring to reinstate.

That was basically the end of the lecture. I've left a great deal out and I'm happy that there is so much more, because I like having a whole pile of facts and thoughts to sort through at leisure. I think I've remembered everything reasonably well, too, but this blog post isn't fact-checked, so reader beware and all that.

He is incidentally the only one of my professors who seems to read out a lecture from detailed notes or even a text — so far it seems a pithier and more content-rich and a little less condescending method than PowerPoint presentations and other methods which involve ex tempore commentary. I also liked that he clearly had lots of opinions and a lively interest in politics and controversies — during the beginning of the Iraq War he would probably have been one of those of us who talked about it with everyone he knew, read as many magazine articles about it as he could lay his hands on, sent letters to the editor, etc. — but that he didn't feel impelled to inflict them on us. Sometimes I come across people and have the urge to haul them home to meet the family, and as far as I can tell, he is one of them.

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My other classes were Greek (we're reviewing the sounds/phonemes, thank goodness, because I don't know all of them that well, and am sort of giving up on knowing when to use which pronunciation of ντ, for instance; today when I was gone we in the broad sense of the term we also learned "have" and "be," and the definite and indefinite articles, and maybe something I've forgotten) and Foundations of Ancient History. That class began with 19th-century Danish archaeologists who came up for instance with the three-period system (Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age) and ended with the, er, Schicklgrubrian reinterpretations and politicization of German and Scandinavian prehistory research. At the very end the lecture slid into the inevitable post-war repentance, discarding of the ideas formed in the shadow of the short mustache, and the rise of new technology, for instance radiocarbon dating.