William Robertson Smith
historical figure · 1 work · 6 mentions · 18 anchored passages
Robertson Smith · صاحب طوتمية العرب · our author · the author of the totemism of the Arabs · روبرتسن سميث · صاحبنا · Smith · the Professor · the advocate of the Arabs' totemism · الاستاذ
in the texts
Ansāb al-ʻArab al-qudamāʼ
Scottish Orientalist and Semitist, author of Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia and of a work on Semitic religion, who held that the earliest Arabs were totemic and matrilineal; he is the principal adversary of this treatise.
We look now at the matter only from the side that touches us, and we shut our eyes to the soundness or the unsoundness of this doctrine, and inquire into what Professor Robertson Smith intended by applying it to the Arabs before Islam.
﴾ Smith's view of the totemism of the Arabs ﴿ Smith holds that the Arabs in their most ancient times traced their descent to fathers among the animals or the plants, which they worshipped or held sacred and by whose names they called themselves, and that their case in marriage and mother-right and the rest was like the case of the savage tribes in Australia and America.
Had you looked into Professor Robertson Smith's book on the genealogies and marriage of the Arabs of the Jāhilīyah (Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia), you would have seen a wide difference between what is well known among us and what is set down in your book.