3 — Mother-right among the Arabs

for it in the books of the Easterners, nor any hint of it in their legends, nor in their usages, nor in their religions, nor in anything of their remains?

Among the things it is not well to pass over is that the Arabs cannot soundly be measured, in their circumstances and their genealogies, against the people of the totem among the savage nations — the Indians of Australia and America and the Negroes of Africa — because the Arabs are among the nations most advanced in mind and in soul, and are a people of an ancient civilisation like the civilisation of the most advanced of the ancient peoples. Some of the investigators of the remains of al-Yaman and Ḥaḍramawt have held that the ancient Arab civilisation is the origin of the ancient Egyptian civilisation, that is, that the Pharaohs took their civilisation from the land of al-Yaman — and whatever be the standing of this saying as to soundness, it indicates the deep rootedness of the Arabs in civility these thousands of years. Leave aside the advancement of their language in its structure and its words, which bears witness to the advancement of the minds of its people from the most ancient times of history and before them. Is it then reasonable that they should take fathers from among the plants or the animals, as the nations most deeply rooted in savagery do today? Moreover the doctrine of totemism in itself is of such strangeness that it is hard for us to credit its existence among the savage nations, and we fear that the holding of it is built upon defective induction. Let us now advance to the examination of our author's proofs, looking first into what of them pertains to mother-right and then into what he has built upon it of totemism among the Arabs. We say:

3 — Mother-right among the Arabs

Mother-right in general

Mother-right is the tracing of descent to the mother; what is meant by it is the tracing of the people of the tribe or the nation to their mothers instead of to their fathers, so that one says fulān ibn fulānah (so-and-so, son of such a woman) as one says under father-right fulān ibn fulān. Mother-right is among the inquiries that arose in the middle of the last century after the spread of the doctrine of ascent (evolution). The first to draw eyes towards it was a German scholar named Bachofen, in a book he published in the year 1861; and the scholars of the social order gave heed to it because it differed from the familiar ordering of the family to which they were accustomed. The substance of his inquiry is that mother-right precedes father-right in the history of the family; for in his view marriage among the ancients was without order and without condition, and this is communal marriage. So when one of the women bore a boy, his father could not be determined, and he, clinging to his mother for suckling, was traced to her and known by her, so that the tracing of descent to the mothers became a general rule; and the woman came to have the first station in the social body, she being the possessor of authority as is the state of the man today.

Then appeared the book of the Englishman McLennan upon Marriage among the Ancients, Primitive Marriage, which he published in the year 1865. He took a line in the matter of mother-right whose foundation he made out-marriage — that is, the men's marrying daughters not of their tribe, by raiding, because of the fewness of daughters among them through the burying alive of girls (as he alleges). From this there arose, in his belief, an increase in the number of the men, so that every company of them was forced to content itself with a single woman, and this is polyandry; so descent was confined to the mother and her station rose. This is a saying of weak support and contradictory in sense — how can descent be preserved through the mothers when each of them is brought in from outside and has a descent of her own? Moreover McLennan's doctrine of the origin of the family did not long delay in falling by what the critics wrote upon it, and especially Morgan, the American scholar, author of the book The Ordering of Society among the Ancients, who demonstrated that in-marriage does not conflict with mother-right. More than one of the scholars of society among the Germans, the French, the English, the Russians and others have written upon mother-right and the ordering of the family — such as Bagehot, Dargun, Amira, Wilken, Starcke, Bride, Giraud, Smith, Westermarck and others, whose enumeration would be long for us; so we content ourselves with the last to plunge into this deep, Professor Wilken, the Orientalist in the college of Leiden, who composed a book upon mother-right among the Arabs in particular, writing it after perusing Professor Robertson Smith's book upon the totemism of the Arabs, agreeing with him in some respects and criticising him in others; yet he holds his view that mother-right prevailed among the Arabs before Islam and that the genealogies whose reports the Arabs hand down are fabricated. He cited in this regard the saying of Nöldeke, the celebrated German Orientalist, the sum of whose statement is that the Arab genealogies were devised by Ibn al-Kalbī and others after Islam, who pieced them together as a patchwork (1). This is a saying whose remoteness from possibility we have shown, and the completion of the discussion will follow.

Were we minded to bring forward the sayings of the investigators upon this subject, the room would be too strait for us; so we advance to the examination of the proofs of Smith, with which we are here concerned, and of those who say what he says:

Their proofs for the mother-right of the Arabs

There is in the proofs of Smith, or of any other, for mother-right among the Arabs no explicit statement nor established proof; they are only indications or hints which, had the mother-right of the Arabs been established, would have supported it — not that they alone should be a proof of it. The tracing of certain tribes or sub-tribes or clans to their mothers; the making of the names of the tribes feminine; the derivation of the word ummah (nation) from umm (mother); the applying of the word khāl (maternal uncle) to all the people of the mother; the possession by certain women of their own marriage-bond with the power of divorce; and the rest of what our author has leaned upon in establishing his saying, as we shall set forth — all these, if we suppose them established, may not be taken as a proof that the Arabs traced themselves to their mothers, or that the foundation of the family among them was the woman. For the existence of these conditions in the Jāhilīyah of the Arabs does not conflict with their tracing themselves to their fathers; rather they are to be reckoned of the nature of anomalies, or they came about by way of chance. And were it allowed us to make the anomalies into rules, our judgements would be corrupted and we should go astray in our sayings and our beliefs. What is established these many centuries is that among the Arabs and the rest of the Semitic peoples the ordering of society was as it is now — that is, that the man is the head of the family and its lord; and the word «baʻl», used for the husband and for the lord alike, supports this. Enough for you is the testimony of the Torah: for all the antiquity of its age, there has come in no text of its texts a passage hinting at mother-right, or indicating its existence, or any trace of its prevalence among the Semites or others, even by way of censure or prohibition or reform. Nor has anything of that come in the Qurʼān, nor has it been seen inscribed upon the remains in any kingdom of the kingdoms of the East, ancient or modern; rather all that has come to us by this road confirms the sovereignty of father-right among the Semites. And had we supposed its existence, it would have had to be before the books of Moses by a span whose measure we do not know, for when those books were written there was no trace of mother-right at all. Nay, its traces must have been effaced several centuries before Moses, for the code of Hammurabi, whose text they discovered of late, was set down about the twenty-first century before the Nativity (1), and all that has come in it concerning marriage and divorce and the like indicates that the ordering of the family in the age of Hammurabi was much as it is now — the man the master of the family.

There is in no text of the texts of his code, nor in its articles, a word or an expression or an indication pointing to the existence of mother-right, neither in plain words nor by allusion. Nor have we come upon mention of mother-right, or any hint towards it, in any of the ancient books bound up with the legends, for all that they contain of the tales of the gods and the like. Nor have the discoverers discovered upon any inscription among the inscriptions of the ruins the least hint of that — how then is it allowed to assert its existence, and to lean in establishing it upon certain weak indications?

The statement of Strabo

It appears that those who assert mother-right among the Arabs were alerted to it by what they read in the books of the travellers concerning the existence of communal marriage among certain savage tribes among the Indians of America and Australia and in Tibet and the like, and that the Arabs of the Jāhilīyah had a kind of this marriage; so they held that it prevailed before Islam, and especially after they had read what the traveller Strabo said about marriage among the Arabs in his age, that is, about the first century before the Nativity. There has come in the sixteenth book of his travels what translates thus:

«Marriage among them is shared between the brothers: all the brothers have one woman, and whichever of them goes in to her first leaves his staff at the door; but the night belongs to the eldest of them. They may go in to their mothers; and adulterers are punished with death, these being they who marry outside their tribe» (1). It may occur at the first glance to the mind of the reader that this passage supports mother-right; but the matter is not so, for this tale points only to the brothers' sharing in marriage with one woman, and not the people of the clan all together, so that it indicates the existence of the family and its independence — which is contrary to the conditions of mother-right. It points also to the forbidding of out-marriage, which is one of the foundations of mother-right with our friends; and Strabo says that the Arabs used to punish whoever committed it with death.

Grant that the text of this tale does not conflict with what they intend by mother-right: then mother-right was prevalent among the Arabs about the date of the Nativity. But Professor Smith's saying has already been given, that the Arabs, the Hebrews and the Aramaeans in their most ancient times were living together in the Arabian peninsula, and then the Hebrews and the Aramaeans went forth and the Arabs remained in their place. And we have shown before that among the Hebrews there is no mention of this marriage at all, nor have we heard of the like of it among the Aramaeans; and Hammurabi's leaving mention of it out of the texts of his code indicates that it was not known in his age between the two rivers or in what neighbours them. How then shall we credit its existence among the Arabs about the date of the Nativity? The likelier thing with us is that Strabo witnessed an incident of this kind among certain people and applied it to the Arabs at large; or that he heard it from certain narrators and credited it for its strangeness, setting it down with all its blemishes, as many of his like do who journey to the lands of the East and lean, in describing their people and their usages, upon what is thrown to them by some interpreter or passer-by, with whatever is in it of exaggeration or invention — they being the more eager to publish the strange, to draw the wonder of their readers, as happened in the Middle Ages and after them in the wake of the spread of Islam.

And notwithstanding the Franks' occupation with transferring learning from the Arabic books in the eleventh and twelfth centuries of the Nativity, and their mingling with the Muslims in Cordova and Toledo and elsewhere, they remained ignorant of the spelling of the Prophet's name, writing it now Mophomet, now Bophomet, and now Bafon; and they used to suppose Muḥammad an idol worshipped by the Muslims — even Eulogius, one of the learned priests of Cordova, for all his mingling with the Muslims in that capital, wrote of Islam fabrications that have no foundation in their books nor in their teachings: as when he said, for instance, that the Prophet announced to his companions that the angels would bear him to heaven three days after his death, alleging that he had transferred this from Latin drafts he came upon at Pamplona. Judge by this what those who do not know may invent, as has happened and happens every day down to a time not far past. Even those who dwell in our midst for years may transmit from us falsehoods for which God has sent down no authority; and they may see a strange incident committed by certain people out of ignorance or by chance and reckon it among the rules observed among all the individuals of the nation. We have before us numerous travel-books written and published in the course of the two last centuries about Syria and Egypt, in which are fabrications that have no foundation save in the mind of the writer or of his prompter. Had it not been for the spread of printing, and men's coming out into the light of learning, and the correcting of those fabrications, it would have become fixed in the minds of the people of the West that the Easterner sets his wife to the ploughing, and that he sows qawārmā (fried meat) believing that he will reap lambs from it, and sows charcoal to reap slaves. What then in the age of Strabo, more than nineteen centuries ago, when he was writing about a people whose tongue he did not know and among whom he had not dwelt? Supporting this is that the completion of his statement upon this subject indicates that he brought it forward by way of a tale, and did not omit to point to the weakness of its support, saying they allege (On dit). There is, then, no weight in what Strabo mentioned as regards mother-right — and it is, on the face of it, the plainest of the proofs of the author of the totemism of the Arabs. As for the rest of his proofs, they are only weak indications upon which reliance is not sound. And lest it be said that we have not dealt justly by him, we bring forward those proofs and look into each of them singly. They are:

1 — The tracing of descent to the mothers (pages 27 and 30 of his book)

As in their saying the Banū Khindif and the Banū Ẓāʻinah, each of which is the name of a woman to whom the tribe was traced. Yet were we to search among the hundreds of the names of the tribes, the sub-tribes and the clans, we should not find among them any traced to their mother save a very few. And what is strange in that, when among the families of today some ten in the hundred are traced to the mothers — such as the Āl Ẓarīfah, the Āl Thaqlā, the Āl Nūr, the Āl Nāʼilah and the Āl Māribah; and judge by this the people of the other languages. Is it then allowable to hold that these names are among the traces of mother-right among our forefathers? Or shall we account for them by the nearer road, namely that some of these families were traced to a woman who is their highest ancestress, because their ancestor died and she took them in charge and reared them, so that they became known by her name? And the father may be unknown through the pregnancy's arising from fornication, as happens in the Jāhilīyah and elsewhere, so that the child is born with no known father and they trace him to his mother — as befell Ziyād ibn Abīhi, the shrewd Companion, for he was known by his mother Sumayyah and was called Ziyād ibn Sumayyah; and had not Muʻāwiyah attached him to his own descent, his posterity would have been known as the Āl Sumayyah. Were the age of this family to grow remote and the report of its mother to be forgotten, our author would add it to the names of the mothers of the tribes and reckon it among the remnants of mother-right.

The tracing of descent to the mothers is frequent above all in nations whose men marry two women or more, so that two sons are born to a man of two mothers and he names them by one name; each of them is then traced to his mother, besides his being traced to his father, to distinguish him from the son of the other mother — and he may become famous by his relation to his mother rather than to his father. Examples of this are many, before Islam and after it. ʻAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib had more than one wife, and there were born to him of them several children, among them three each of whom was named Muḥammad; so one of them, Muḥammad the Elder, was traced to his mother Khawlah bint Jaʻfar of the Banū Ḥanīfah, and he called him Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥanafīyah. Had this man lived in the Jāhilīyah, his posterity would have been known as the Banū al-Ḥanafīyah, a sub-tribe of Hāshim or of Quraysh — as the Banū al-ʻAdawīyah are known, by relation to their mother of the tribe of ʻAdī.

A man may become famous by the name of his mother even when he has no namesake among his brothers, this coming about only through the fame of his mother. Muḥammad al-Amīn ibn Hārūn al-Rashīd became famous as Ibn Zubaydah, because of his mother's excellence above the rest of the mothers of the caliphs and because of her fame; and judge the rest by this. Is it then allowable that these incidents be taken as proofs of mother-right? Add to this that the Arab tribes which are traced to a woman go back in the end to descent through the father, which is the general and comprehensive rule. The Banū Ẓāʻinah, for example, were traced to their mother Ẓāʻinah, and they are traced also to their father, so that they are called the Banū Thaʻlabah ibn Murād ibn Udd. The Banū Khindif are likewise the Banū Ilyās ibn Muḍar, and were traced to their mother, the wife of Ilyās, whose name was Khindif. The Banū Ṭuhayyah were traced to their mother, and they are the Banū Sawd ibn Mālik — and judge the rest by this (1)

2 — The making of the names of the tribes feminine (page 28)

That is, that the Arabs say jāʼat Muḍar and saṭat Qays, with the feminine verb, and do not say jāʼa Muḍar and saṭā Qays. We do not know the connection between a name's being feminine and mother-right; and the feminine and the masculine in Arabic follow no analogy. Had mother-right been sound, it would not have harmed it that the names of the tribes should be masculine, just as their being feminine does not establish the existence of mother-right. Moreover the feminine gender of the tribes has a cause built upon a rule among the rules of the language, namely the implying of the word «tribe» (qabīlah, a feminine word) before every name: our saying «Muḍar» means «the tribe of Muḍar», and our saying «Qays» means «the tribe of Qays», so that the feminine belongs to the elided word 'tribe'. The wisdom in this is the warding off of confusion between the agent's being a man named Qays or Muḍar and its being the tribe; for when the verb is feminine the mind turns to the tribe. Upon this principle they make the names of the cities feminine even when their form is not feminine, so that we say 'Baghdād was conquered' and 'Miṣr was peopled' or 'al-Shām', implying the word «city». And today we say 'al-Muqaṭṭam related' and 'al-Muʼayyad mentioned' and 'al-Hilāl said' with the feminine verb, making the verb feminine while the agent is masculine in word and in sense — we only imply before it the word 'newspaper' or 'journal'.

3 — The expressing of kinship by the belly (page 28)

He alleges that the naming of the tribe by the belly (baṭn) supports the Arabs' reliance upon kinship through the mother. The fact is that the baṭn is a branch among the branches of the tribe, by way of ramification like a tree; and they only made its names resemble the names of the parts of the body with regard to the relation of these one to another, or the branching of some of them out of others. The largest aggregate with them is «the ḥayy», a figure for the whole man, by which is meant the company who encamp together in one quarter. It divides into «the shuʻūb», that is, the branches — and the two shuʻbs are the two halves, as though they intended the division of the body into two equal parts, right and left. Next after these are «the qabāʼil», which are the pieces of the skull-bone branching one out of another. Then «the ʻimārah», a figure for the chest; then «the baṭn», the belly; after it «the fakhdh», the thigh; and last «the faṣāʼil». You see, then, that the use of the belly for the tribe or for some of its branches has no connection with mother-right, but is a branch among the branches of descent, according to what corresponds to it among the members of the body. And were we to turn aside from this account and take every name as independent, and accept the account that leapt into his honour's mind, it would follow that they should signify by the belly the family that is of one belly; whereas by it they mean the section made up of families.

4 — The derivation of the word ummah (nation) from umm (mother)

This is with him a proof that the foundation in descent is the mother, and especially because umm in Hebrew denotes the tribe or the company (page 28). But this expression is only of the nature of figurative usage, as is not hidden from one acquainted with the manners of the Arabic language — as in their saying umm al-qurá (the mother of the towns), umm al-madāʼin (the mother of the cities), and al-ummahāt for the elements. With them the umm is the origin, so that the umm of everything is its origin and its support, and everything to which other things are joined is an umm to them. The origin of these senses is the children's following of their mother, because it is she who is charged with rearing them in their infancy, so that they follow her and are led by her command — not because she is the origin of descent. For this reason they said umm al-kitāb for its original, umm al-qurá for Makkah, and umm al-dunyā for Egypt because of the multitude of its people. As for the derivation of ummah from umm, it is accounted for in this same manner, by the borrowing of motherhood for headship, or from generation, since this appears in women rather than in men, because it is the woman who brings forth the offspring and she who undertakes the nursing and the rearing. So when we mention birth, the mother comes first to our minds; and for this reason the expressing of kinship by the organ of generation in women has prevailed, as by the belly or the womb — and not because the mother is the origin of kinship. Were you to follow out the senses of what corresponds to the word ummah in the rest of the languages, you would see it bearing this very sense: the word Nation in the Frankish languages means ummah, and is derived from a verb in Latin meaning «to be born». The English say Motherland, meaning by it the homeland of both parents, although the word requires that it be the homeland of the mother alone. So upon our author's account this word would be a proof of the prevalence of mother-right among the English today!

5 — The khāl, the ʻamm and the kinnah

The matter is that by the word «khāl» in Arabic the mother's brother is not meant in particular, but it is applied to every man of her people; and likewise the word «ʻamm»; and that the original sense of this word is «the people», which is its purport in Hebrew to this day. Accordingly there would be among the Arabs no family of their own (page 258), but the child would be the son of the company or of the tribe, as mother-right or totemism requires. This is a strange saying: if reliance upon it were sound, our judgements upon the genealogies of the English and the French and others would be thrown into confusion, for you see among them this very extension, or sharing. The word Cousin in their tongues denotes every agnatic kinship more distant than brotherhood: it is the son of the paternal uncle and the daughter of the paternal uncle, the son of the paternal aunt and the daughter of the paternal aunt, the son of the maternal uncle and the daughter of the maternal uncle, the son of the maternal aunt and the daughter of the maternal aunt, the son of the son of the paternal uncle, the son of the son of the maternal uncle, and so on — for which there is no counterpart in Arabic. Its origin is the son of the maternal aunt, for it is pared down from Consobrinus in Latin, that is, the son of the mother's sister. Does its application to all the kindred then inform us that the origin in kinship is the mother? Judge by this the word Uncle in English and what corresponds to it in the other Frankish languages, for it denotes the paternal uncle or the maternal uncle, and its origin is Avunculus in Latin, whose sense is the maternal uncle, and which was afterwards applied to the paternal uncle. The truth is that there is no weight in this divergence as regards mother-right, for the languages differ in their ways of signifying by what follows no analogy, and especially as regards the degrees of kinship. In some languages there is a word denoting a kinship which cannot be expressed in another language save by several words: ṣihr in Arabic cannot be expressed in the English language save by three words, Brother-in-law; and so too ḥamw, which with them is Father-in-law; and the grandfather is expressed in the English language by two words, Grand father, and likewise the grandson, Grand son. Conversely the word Nephew in English cannot be expressed in Arabic save by two words, ibn al-akh or ibn al-ukht, and likewise Niece, bint al-akh or bint al-ukht — and the denoting by each of these two words of the children of the brother and of the sister together might be taken by the holders of the view of mother-right among the proofs of it!

And by the word «kinnah» in Arabic there is meant, in the Semitic languages, the son's wife and the wife alike; so our author has drawn from this the inference that the man used to marry his kinnah (that is, his son's wife or his brother's wife), and that there was no bond of marriage between a man and his wife (page 136). The answer to this falls under what has been set forth above of the difference of the senses of words by extension and figure. Like it is the word «ṣihr», by which is meant the husband of a man's daughter and the husband of his sister; and by ṣihr is also meant kinship in general, and the aṣhār are the people of the woman's house. Some of them make the ṣihr take in the ḥamws and the khatans together. Is it then sound to lean upon such an extension in establishing a principle or a view?

6 — Temporary marriage (mutʻah)

This is the marriage for a term — that is, that the man concludes upon a woman a contract of marriage for a named term, so that when the term expires the marriage is void. Our author holds that this marriage was prevalent at the appearance of Islam, and reckons that it supports his view of mother-right; but mother-right requires that the women of the tribe be free to the people of the tribe without ⟨...⟩ and without condition, while the mutʻah does not come about without a contract, so that it contradicts what he wished to establish. The mutʻah is one kind among the kinds of marriage that were prevalent in the Jāhilīyah, and all of them negate mother-right, because in them the man is the possessor of lordship and the possessor of the marriage-bond.

7 — The burying alive of daughters (waʼd)

The author of the totemism of the Arabs holds that the prevalence of the burying alive of daughters in the Jāhilīyah made the daughters few, so that they were forced to share the women, several men sharing in one woman, begetting children of her, and descent being traced to her (page 30). Some investigators have gone to excess in the question of waʼd and have imagined it a usage prevalent in all the lands of the Arabs, whereas the critic sees that it was confined to a particular place and a particular time under particular circumstances; otherwise it is not reasonable that men should set about burying their daughters and then be forced to share their wives, when it lay within their power to be quit of that strait. Some of them have held that the Arabs used to bury their daughters for fear of poverty, though they had release from this poverty had they kept them alive, given the fewness of daughters and the eagerness of husbands towards them with bride-price and gifts. Others have said that they used to bury them for fear of disgrace; and if mother-right were sound, there would be no disgrace there for the fathers to fear. Their fear of disgrace for their daughters is an indication of jealousy, and jealousy cannot exist in communal marriage. In either case his proof from waʼd falls.

8 — The marriage-bond in the woman's hand

The possession by some of the women of the Jāhilīyah of their own marriage-bond in marriage and divorce has been taken as a proof of the sovereignty of mother-right and that the woman is the head of the family — how strange is this conclusion, and how defective this induction! The woman in the Jāhilīyah did not have her marriage-bond in her own hand save in particular conditions and rare incidents: shall we then make the anomalous a rule to build upon, and the rare an analogy to reason by? The rule in their marriage is that the bond be in the man's hand. And grant that it is in the woman's hand: it is so only by a contract bound with conditions and laws, and not by way of licence and sharing, as they intend by mother-right. Judge by this the rest of his proofs for establishing mother-right, for they go back to the interpreting of words or to reliance upon defective induction — as his saying (page 118) that ab (father) means the rearer; and his deriving ḥayy (the living) from Ḥawwāʼ (Eve) (page 177); and his mention of kinship by suckling or by eating together (page 148); and the interpreting of the word Āḥāb as akh ab (brother-father), and the like, whose refutation is to be measured by what we have set forth.

Summary

The assertion of the prevalence of mother-right among the Arabs of the Jāhilīyah cannot be established by weak indications, for certainty is not removed by doubt — unless it be allowable to lean upon the anomalous and the rare and to leave aside the general rules. You have seen among the conditions of mother-right that marriage be from outside, by raiding or by capture, because the daughters of the tribe, as they allege, grow few through waʼd or otherwise; and that the woman be a wife to several men together, her children being traced to her. We have not understood how marriage should be by raiding, nor how descent within a single tribe can be referred back to the mother, nor why the daughters should grow few until the tribe is forced to raid others to obtain women. The natural rule in the history of man in his earliest ages is that the women should be more than the men, since the latter are exposed to slaying and the like in raiding and assault; and the fitter thing is that the women should be many, so that a man marries several of them. Moreover the obtaining of women by raiding prompts a return to descent through the father, because the fathers remain in the tribe. This resembles what came about through the multitude of captive women and slave-girls in the first age of Islam: they multiplied until a man had ten or scores of them to himself, and descent remained in the men — nor is anything else possible, as appears to whoever considers it. And were it supposed that the women made war upon the tribes to obtain husbands by capture, that would be nearer to the preserving of descent in them, that is, to the tracing of descent to them or to their tribe.

The assertion of the dominance of mother-right in general, then, stands in need of establishment or of amendment, because its existence in this manner is not reasonable and does not agree with the rules of the social order — or at the least does not agree with them among the Arabs; for the rule in marriage with them and with the rest of the Semites is that it be within the tribe, and if one of them inclines to the outside it is for some passing cause. This is their state in the most ancient of what we know of their reports in the Torah and elsewhere; and the Arab calls his wife the daughter of his paternal uncle even when she is not so, because the prevailing thing in marriage with them is that it be between the children of the paternal uncle, with varying degrees of that uncleship. The Jews are of all nations the most careful of their genealogies, and they forbid marriage outside their tribes and punish whoever departs from this with a severe punishment; and if an Israelite marries a woman not of Israel his marriage is fornication, and they call the child born of that marriage a «naghl» (bastard), as the Arabs call him a «hajīn» (hybrid), that is, base-born. How then, along with this, shall we allege that the ancient Arabs used to marry from outside by raiding? And if we suppose that they were so, then when did marriage pass to the inside, and how did mother-right pass over into father-right or into husband-right?

— Notes —

[18] (1) Zeitsch. der Deutch. Morg. Gesl. Bd. XVII. 707

[19] (1) Al-Hilāl, year 13

[20] (1) Strabon, Trad. A. Tardien, Livre XVI. 25

[22] (1) Al-Maʻārif of Ibn Qutaybah 25