4 — Totemism among the Arabs

And when? These are all weighty questions that cannot be answered, and the partisans of the doctrine of mother-right (al-umūmah) themselves confess their inability to answer them — so how well we may dispense with going over to it. Whoever surveys the history of marriage from the earliest conditions of civilisation (al-ʻumrān) down to the present sees in it nothing but what overturns mother-right.

4 — Totemism among the Arabs

Once the thesis of mother-right among the Arabs is overturned, the thesis of totemism (al-ṭūtamīyah) among them is overturned with it, since mother-right is its foundation and the first of its conditions. Even so, we shall examine our author's proofs on the side of totemism separately: we shall set out the conditions of the totem as he himself has expounded them, and then consider how they apply to the circumstances of the Arabs.

Totemism requires “that the people of a single tribe agree upon an animal, or a plant, or some other being which they believe to be their supreme ancestor, that they call themselves by its name, and that they worship it or hold it sacred.” Does this fit the circumstances of the Arabs of the Age of Ignorance (al-Jāhilīyah), wholly or in part? So that the subject may be cleared up and the demonstration made plain, we resolve the question into its constituent parts — and accordingly totemism requires: —

First: that the people of the tribe agree upon an animal or a plant which they believe to be their supreme ancestor.

Second: that they call themselves by its name or trace their descent to it.

Third: that they worship it or hold it sacred.

Totemism is not established unless these three premises are met together among the Arabs. Yet if you search their reports, ancient and modern, the fabulous and the factual, the well attested and the unattested; and what non-Arabs have related of their ancient condition in the books of the Greeks and the Romans, to say nothing of the Torah; and what has been read of their history on the monuments of Ashur, the monuments of Thamūd and the monuments of the Yemen and Ḥaḍramawt — you will not succeed in finding anything that points to its existence. And if you study the condition of the Arabs today, in the deserts and the towns, the valleys and the mountains, you will not find among them a tribe, nor a clan, nor a single man who believes himself descended from a lion, a bull, a fox, a sycamore or a rose. However hard you tax yourself with digging, collating and construing, you will find no trace whatever of this belief, not even by way of fable, nor in the course of a denial or a taunt — so the first premise has fallen.

As for the second, part of it is true: that is, that some tribes are called by the names of animals, such as the Banū Asad, the Banū al-Namir and the Banū Kalb and the like. But they do not believe that those ancestors were animals; rather they reckon them men whose genealogies run back to the first fathers.

The third premise is sound on the surface and corrupt underneath. For some tribes of the Arabs did worship gods in the shape of animals, just as the rest of the ancient heathen nations worshipped — in Egypt, Ashur and Phoenicia — peoples who worshipped idols by which they figured the powers above; not that a tribe worshipped some particular animal, held it sacred, refrained from harming it and believed it to be its ancestor, as the totem-folk do. The Banū Asad, for instance, call themselves by the name of the lion, but they do not believe it to be their ancestor, nor do they hold the lion sacred or worship it; and if a lion crosses their path they kill it. Their object of worship may indeed be one of the animals, in the shape of an eagle or a mare or some other of the animal idols. But the condition of totemism is precisely that the Banū Asad believe the lion to be their ancestor, and that they hold every lion sacred or worship it — that is, do it no harm. And the Banū Thawr must believe that the bull is their ancestor, and worship bulls or hold them sacred, and neither slaughter them nor harm them. And the Banū Jarād ought to believe themselves descended from the locust, hold it sacred and not eat it, as you have seen above among the conditions of totemism holding today among the savage nations. It is not enough that a tribe be named after the bull, say, and hold the locust sacred, or be named after the lion and hold the mare sacred. And even supposing it fell out that a tribe were named after an animal and held it sacred or worshipped it, this would still be nothing of totemism, since the first condition is that it believe itself descended from it. These three conditions have never been found together in a tribe of the Arabs, nor in a clan of theirs, nor in a sept, nor in a single individual among them, not even by way of fable or fabrication. Even the meeting of the last two conditions is not to be had, for there is not among the tribes of the Arabs a tribe named after an animal which worships it; and it is not enough that it worship an idol in the shape of that animal — the condition is that it hold the species of this animal sacred and refrain from harming it, as the Egyptians held the cat or the scarab sacred. And the Arabs hold no animal sacred save rarely and in particular circumstances. Moreover, for all the pains our author has taken and all the latitude of construction and interpretation he has given his proof, he has not managed to produce a single piece of evidence that one of the tribes called by animal names worshipped an idol in the shape of the animal it is named after — and even had he succeeded in that, it would avail him nothing, since what is required is that the tribe named after an animal hold the species of that animal sacred, not an idol in its shape.

The doctrine of totemism among the Arabs therefore falls with the fall of mother-right; and then it falls again, because the circumstances of the Arabs are so remote from the conditions of totemism, as you have seen — and yet we ought not to shut our eyes to the proofs on which the advocate of the Arabs' totemism relied in establishing this opinion, nor to the reason he adopted it, strange as it is. So we say: