5 — His proofs for the totemism of the Arabs

5 — His proofs for the totemism of the Arabs

Whoever reads those proofs in his book will see from their general drift that, when he came to know the conditions of totemism (al-ṭūtamīyah) among the savage tribes as McLennan and others had described them — he being an orientalist who knows the circumstances of the Arabs of the Age of Ignorance (al-Jāhilīyah), their tribes, their genealogies and their objects of worship — he saw that certain tribes or clans were called by animal names. The learned men of that day were enamoured of natural facts on the doctrine of evolution (al-irtiqāʼ) and busied themselves with referring every phenomenon back to it, as we have said above. He saw, too, that the Arab genealogists differed in establishing the pedigrees of certain tribes, and it occurred to him at once that the names of these tribes were survivals of totemism among the Arabs. So he set about searching for its remaining conditions, and saw that some tribes worshipped idols in the shape of certain animals; and that opinion took firm hold of his mind, and he forgot that the condition is not the worship of an idol in animal form, but that what is meant is the hallowing of a species of animal bearing the same name as the tribe. Or perhaps he was alive to this, and thought himself able to produce some incident that admitted of construing, or some indication from which something might be inferred — and the reports of the Arabs are many, and among them are the lean and the fat, the refuting and the refuted, while he is strong in argument and elegant in style. So he contrived proofs that persuade the unreflecting that he has hit the mark with them, whereas he is far from it, as you shall see. Here, then, are his proofs and the demonstration of their unsoundness:

The naming of tribes with animal names (page 188)

Among his proofs for totemism there is nothing that may properly be counted an explicit statement except the names of the tribes — although these names do not by themselves suffice to establish his opinion, for reasons already set out. But he argues that their being called by the names of animals is no idle matter and must have a cause. It falls to us, then, to rebut his argument by showing that these namings are natural and hold nothing strange.

Our author the Professor has cited, of the names of the tribes, every one in which a whiff of the animal can be caught, and the number of those he cites does not exceed thirty names — some of them tribes, some of them major divisions (ʻamāʼir), some of them clans or septs. They are:

Banū Asad — Banū Jaʻdah — Banū Ḍabb — Banū Qahd » Badan — » Juʻal — » Ḍubayʻah — » Kalb » Bakr — » Ḥidāʼ — » ʻAḍal — » Naʻāmah » Bahthah — » Ḥamāmah — » ʻAnz — » Namir » Thaʻlab — » Ḥanash — » Ghurāb — » Wabr » Thawr — » Duʼbul — » Fahd — » Hawzan Banū Jaḥsh — Banū Dubb — Banū Qird — Banū Yarbūʻ » Jarād — » Dhiʼb — » Qunfud —

Were we to count the names of the Arab tribes and their branches — major divisions, clans, houses and septs — they would exceed several hundreds and might approach a thousand; so that if the naming were totemic, the number of totemic tribes would necessarily exceed that of the rest. Then again, some of the names he has cited bear a sense other than the animal one, but he chose the animal sense to add to the grounds of his wager. Bakr, for instance, is glossed as the young of the she-camel; but it also has the sense of “the virgin,” and “the first of anything,” and a cloud, and a vine in its first bearing, and other senses besides. Even were we to prefer its first sense — that is, the young of the she-camel — there would be nothing of totemism in the naming; for if it were admissible that the Arabs should name themselves after an animal and worship it, “the camel (al-jamal)” or “the camel (al-baʻīr)” would have had the better claim, given how they cannot do without it and how old its place is among them — and yet there is no tribe named after it save this Bakr! It is likelier to have been a by-name given to some brisk young man, as though he were a camel-colt. And “al-bahthah” is the wild cow, and also the child of fornication. And “al-jaʻdah” is the female of the young of the sheep, and also the woman with a crimp in her hair — so why should the second sense not be what is meant, had totemism not been uppermost in his mind? And “al-ʻaḍal” is the rat; but vocalised with i after the ʻayn (ʻiḍal) it also denotes the cunning among men, or the ugly among them — so why should one of these two senses not be what is meant? And “al-qahd” is a breed of the sheep of the Ḥijāz, but it also denotes the man white and clear of complexion. And so on — so that the tribes whose naming after animals can be established do not exceed some twenty-odd tribes or branches of tribes.

The occurrence of this small number among hundreds of names cannot rightly be ascribed to totemism; for men have never ceased, from of old, to name themselves after animals or to take by-names from them, after which the name goes and the by-name remains, as we shall show.

Naming

Proper names have a long history in the science of civilisation (ʻilm al-ʻumrān), and they differ in form and in sense with the difference of ages and of nations. Naming in every nation differs from naming in any other, and within a single nation it differs with the successive stages of its civilisation. In every case, however, it is drawn from whatever among created beings, of whatever order, holds a place of regard in the soul; each nation chooses from their names what suits its customs and its beliefs. Thus when it becomes religious it attaches itself to the god or the gods, whether those gods be heavenly bodies or animals or idols or anything else. But before religion, or in the state of rough desert life, men commonly choose for their children the names of those natural bodies they admire or fear, and above all the animals, according to what they discern in the newborn of strength, or courage, or cunning, or gentleness, or timidity. So they choose for him the name of an animal in which such traits are found: they call the brave man a lion, and the man quick to spring a leopard, and they call the graceful girl a gazelle or a dove. Most of the ancient nations, in every quarter of the world, went by this rule, and above all the warlike nations, or the people of the desert and of the raid, who live in the wilds and move from one encampment to another with the animals for their companions — as was the case with the Arabs in the days of their Ignorance. For they lived among the animals until they had studied their natures and had fixed upon each of them a description of its own; so that when a child was born to them it was an easy thing for them to liken him to one of them, in his form or in his temper, and to name him by it.

Nor is this peculiar to the Arabs: it takes in all the people of the desert, or those who go their way, before they became attached to religion. The Jews, in their earliest periods, followed this pattern in naming, and that is why you see among their ancient names many names of animals: as they say Dabūrā (a bee), and Arbah (a lion), and Yūnā (a dove), and Rāḥīl (a ewe), and Shuwāl (a fox), and Kālib (a dog), and Dīsān (a gazelle); or the names of heavenly bodies, such as Ḥūdash (the new moon). And from natural attributes: Ashūr (black), and Abdūm (red), and ʻĪsū (much-haired), and Kūrah (brave). And so with the rest of the ancient nations, especially before they became religious. The ancient English too named themselves after animals; among their old names is Ethelwolf (the noble wolf, or the wolf of the tilth). They also named themselves after natural attributes, such as the white, the brown, the tall and the short. Then they passed by degrees to the crafts: the smith, the carpenter, the engraver, the saddler. What concerns us in this place, however, are the animal names; and there is no nation that has been without naming from them, in degrees varying with the varying degrees of their desert life and their settled civilisation. Among the civilised nations there still remains, even now, a great number of them, or of their counterparts from the names of natural beings such as stones and trees. Here are examples of this:

Of the Greek and Roman names:

Like a lion, or the lion — Leonidas Lion of the forest — Napoleon Rock — Peter Lover of horses — Philip Gazelle — Darcas Lion — Leo

And of the Germanic, Saxon and Teutonic names:

The eagle (nasr), or strong as an eagle — Arnold The noble stone — Athelston The wolf, or strong as a wolf — Bernard The eagle (ʻuqāb), or strong as an eagle — Bertram The wild boar — Everard A ewe — Giles An eagle (ʻuqāb) — Ingram A lion — Leonder Like a lion, or like an eagle (ʻuqāb) — Leonard A lamb — Oven Wolf of the dwellings — Randal The famous wolf — Rodolph The noble serpent — Ethelnid

And of the Old Persian names:

Shīrkūh — lion of the mountain Babr, or Bābar — the lion Jamshīd — face of the sun Ardashīr — the wrathful lion Balāsh — a kind of leopard Sīmurgh — the silver fish Zarasb — the gilded steed Bahrām — Mars al-Ḍaḥḥāk — the serpent

You see from the foregoing that naming with animal names is one of the natural rules observed among all nations; and perhaps the Arabs held to it more firmly than others, as their desert life and its roughness required. For the same reason names bound up with war were numerous among them also, such as Ḥarb, Naṣr, Saʻd, ʻAdwān, ʻAbs, Ashjaʻ, Sahm, Ṣakhr and the like. It was said to Abū al-Duqaysh the bedouin: “Why do you name your sons with the worst of names, such as Kalb and Dhiʼb, and your slaves with the best of them, such as Marzūq and Rabāḥ?” He said: “We name our sons for our enemies and our slaves for ourselves.” (1)

Moreover, those of the Arabs who worshipped the idols named themselves servants to them, as ʻAbd al-ʻUzzá, ʻAbd Manāt, ʻAbd Shams, ʻAbd Saʻd, ʻAbd Taym and others. And when they entered Islam, their names referred to God or to some of His attributes became numerous, as ʻAbd Allāh, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān, ʻAbd al-Raḥīm, ʻAbd al-Aḥad, ʻAbd al-Ṣamad. Such is the way of religious nations in every place and time. The Assyrians named themselves in relation to their gods, as “Taghlātnīn,” the servant of the god Tinīn, and “Mutāghil Nabū,” the worshipper of Nabū. So too the Babylonians, for they annex their names to their god “Bēl” or “Nabū,” saying “Bēl ibnī,” Bēl made me, and “Nabū naṣr,” that is, Nabū helps, and “ʻAbd Nabū,” that is, the servant of the god Nabū, and “Nabū Bālūzūr,” Nabū protects my son (2). So too the Greeks after they became Christians: among their names are “Theodosius,” the gift of God, and “Theodorus,” the servant of God, and others.

The naming by the Arabs of the Age of Ignorance of their men with the names of animals is therefore a natural thing, borne out by the diminutive of those names used in endearment, as when they say Dhuʼayb and Usayd and Kulayb and the like — which admits of no explanation unless those names were by-names of men. The Arabs continued in this in their desert life until they became religious and named themselves with religious names, as has been said. And when they became civilised they named themselves with the names of the crafts, as the coppersmith (al-naḥḥās), the apothecary (al-ṣaydalānī), the oculist (al-kaḥḥāl), the carpenter (al-najjār), the astrolabe-maker (al-asṭurlābī). And when the solidarity of lineage (ʻaṣabīyah) weakened among them they named themselves in relation to the lands, as al-Dimashqī, al-Baghdādī, al-Baṣrī, al-Bukhārī, al-Naysābūrī and others — so that the survival of some twenty-odd of the ancient tribes under the names of animals is nothing strange.

Al-Jāḥiẓ says in the Book of Animals: “The Arabs named their children Kalb and Ḥimār and Ḥajar and Juʻal and Ḥanẓalah and Qird only by way of taking a good omen from it. When a male child was born to a man, he would go out to expose himself to the flight of birds and to the omen; and if he heard a man say ‘a stone,’ or saw a stone, he named his son by it and read in it an omen of hardness, solidity, endurance and patience, and that he would shatter whatever he met. Likewise if he heard a man say ‘wolf,’ or saw a wolf, he construed in it sagacity, guile and gain; and if it was an ass, he construed in it length of life, effrontery, strength and stamina; and if it was a dog, he construed in it watchfulness, vigilance, a voice that carries, and gain. It was for this reason that ʻUbayd Allāh ibn Ziyād had a dog, a ram and a lion figured in his vestibule, saying: a barking dog, a butting ram, a scowling lion — and he took the omen from it, and the omen flew back upon him.”

By-naming

This is on the supposition that they are names by which the fathers of those tribes were called. But many of them were in origin a by-name attached to the original name; then the name went and the by-name remained — which happens constantly, and especially among the Arabs, since they are made by nature for by-naming (talqīb) and for the giving of kunyahs (taknīyah). This becomes clear to you from consulting their lexicons: for you see for the lion hundreds of names, most of them by-names they gave it which then became names; and so for the cock, the raven, the mare, the camel, the wolf, the serpent, the locust and the rest of their animals, besides the names of weapons — to say nothing of the synonyms among the names of the sun, the rain, the sea, the well, milk, honey, wine and fire; and among the by-names, such as tallness, shortness, courage, cowardice, generosity, avarice, folly and the like (1). Each of these has a hundred or hundreds of synonyms, most of them by-names or circumlocutions, which show the Arabs' inclination, from their very nature, to by-naming and to the giving of kunyahs.

They commonly drew their similitudes from the beasts, and scarcely blamed or praised except by that means, because they had set their dwellings among the beasts of prey, the reptiles and the insects, and used them for comparison from their familiarity with their natures — and especially the ʻAdnānī tribes, since they dwelt in the deserts of Najd and the Ḥijāz, their country being rougher and harsher than that of the Qaḥṭānīs. For that reason the names of animals were more numerous in their tribes than in the Qaḥṭānī tribes. They had studied those natures by constant dealing with them, and assigned to each animal a nature they ascribed to it: swerving to the fox, courage to the lion, endurance to the ass, fidelity to the dog, wrath to the leopard, heaviness together with baseness to the elephant, and so forth. And they took to putting the names of those animals in place of the by-names: instead of saying “brave” they say “lion”; and instead of “patient” they say “ass”; and they allude to the shifty man by the fox; and when they wish to say that so-and-so grew angry they say “he turned leopard.”

On the other side, they gave the animals the names of men or their kunyahs: the elephant's kunyah is Abū Ḥajjāj, the lion's Abū al-Ḥārith, the wolf's Abū Jaʻdah, the bear's Abū Rabāḥ, the pig's Abū Qādim — and it is said Abū ʻUqbah — the fox's Abū al-Ḥuṣayn, the dog's Abū Khālid and, with some of them, Abū Nāṣiḥ. The cat is Abū Khirāsh, and it is said Abū Ghazwān; the gazelle Abū al-Ḥusayn; the camel Abū Ṣafwān, and it is said Abū Ayyūb and Abū Muzāḥim; the bull Abū Ḥātim; the ram Abū al-Muṭarrif; the leopard Abū Waththāb; the cheetah Abū Qurrah; the mare Abū Ṭālib; the pack-horse Abū Maḍāʼ; the mule Abū al-Mukhtār; the ass Abū Ziyād. And with them Umm Ḥubayn is the locust, Umm ʻAwf the dove, Umm Mahdī the hen, Umm Ḥafṣ the hoopoe, Abū al-Mayt the dung-beetle, Abū al-Ṣarāt the louse, Umm ʻUqbah the serpent and Umm Yaqẓān the scorpion — and so on.

By-naming was general among the Semitic peoples. Judge of this by what comes in the Torah of Jacob's by-naming of his sons when he gathered them in his last days: he expressed the qualities of some of them by the names of animals, calling Judah a lion's whelp, Issachar an ass, Dan a serpent, Naphtali a hind and Benjamin a wolf. You see the like of this by-naming in many places in the Torah. It shows how widespread by-naming was among the Semites of old; it then grew scarce among the Hebrews and the Syriacs when they settled in the towns and gave themselves up to repose, and remained among the Arabs, since they continued in desert life. Such remained their way down to the first age of Islam and after it, and some of the names of animals are still used for by-naming to this day, their original sense having been forgotten: as al-qarm for the great lord, whose sense in origin is “the stallion”; and likewise “al-riththu” for the valiant man, which is a name for the boar; and “al-aṣyad” for the king, which is the camel. Often, too, they took by-names from the members of the beasts of prey, such as the eye-tooth, the nose and the horn, for these are with them by-names of courage and strength (1). And it is among the customs of the Arabs that when a man's children died and he feared the cutting off of his offspring, he would name his children with the names of the beasts of prey, such as the wolf and the leopard and others; and this custom still holds in Syria to this day.

You see, then, that by-naming from the animals was widespread among the Arabs before Islam; and they went on with it after Islam, so that they called Ḥamzah, the Prophet's uncle, “the Lion of God” or “the Lion of the Messenger of God,” and likewise ʻAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, for the courage of the two of them (2); and they called Marwān ibn Muḥammad “the Ass” for his endurance. By-naming may be for praise, as you have seen, or for blame — as their calling ʻUthmān ibn ʻAffān “Naʻthal,” which is the male of the hyenas; and their calling ʻAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān “Abū Zabbān” for the foulness of his breath, and “the fat of the stone” for his avarice (3); and the by-naming of the Banū ʻAmr ibn ʻAmr “the mouths of dogs” for the foulness of their mouths.

Among the proofs of their appetite for by-naming is that they give a man a by-name from a line of verse he composed, or a word he uttered, or an incident that befell him — a thing that follows no rule. Thus al-Muraqqish the poet: his name in origin was ʻAwf ibn Saʻd, and the name was forgotten and the by-name remained. And al-Mutalammis: his name was Jarīr ibn ʻAbd al-Masīḥ. And al-Nābighah: his name was Ziyād ibn Muʻāwiyah. And so with al-Mukharriq, and Taʼabbaṭa Sharran, and Aʻṣur, and al-Mustawghir, and others whose names went and whose by-names remained — so what should prevent the like of this from happening before recorded history, so that the father of a tribe was given a by-name suiting one of his traits, in praise or in blame, and then the name was forgotten and the by-name remained? In the reports of the Arabs there are many examples of this kind. Qays ʻAylān: his name in origin was Qaqqah, but he became famous by his by-name; and so with Quraysh and others. And the by-naming may have a cause bound up with an incident: ʻAnazah, the father of the well-known tribe, was so called because he killed a man with a short spear (ʻanazah), his name in origin being ʻĀmir. And al-Ḥaẓāʼir was so called because al-Mundhir ibn Imriʼ al-Qays had gathered the captives of Bakr into the pens (ḥaẓāʼir) to burn them, and he spoke to him on their behalf and his intercession was accepted; his name in origin was Kaʻb. And al-Zibriqān was called by this name for his beauty, and was called the Moon as well, both of which are other than his name, and he is known by nothing but them. And Quṣayy: his name in origin was Zayd; and ʻAbd al-Muṭṭalib: his name was ʻĀmir; and both are known by the by-name alone. And the by-name may be the name of an animal or one of its by-names, as Jassās, the name of the well-known man, whose sense in the language is the lion that leaves its mark on the prey with its claws, his name in origin being ʻAmr ibn Murrah al-Bakrī. And judge by this the by-names of the caliphs after Islam, for most of them are known by their by-name, as al-Fārūq, al-Ṣiddīq, al-Manṣūr, al-Rashīd, al-Maʼmūn and others.

If, then, we take into account how widespread naming with the names of animals or by-naming from them was, and the possibility of these remaining while the original names go, together with the Arabs' inclination to it from their very nature, the existence of some twenty-odd animal names among hundreds of tribal names is to be counted nothing strange.

By-naming in the plural form

We have seen, however, that the advocate of the Arabs' totemism attaches the greatest importance to the naming of certain tribes with the plurals of the names of animals, such as al-Anmār, al-Kilāb, al-Arāqim and al-Ḍibāb. In his view the existence of these names in the plural form does not fit our explanation, in respect of the father of the tribe being given a by-name which remains while his original name goes. He holds this form to be a strong proof of totemism, since the sons of the tribe of al-Namir are reckoned leopards and the sons of the tribe of Kalb are reckoned dogs, as the conditions of totemism require.

The answer to this is that by-naming a tribe in the plural form was as widespread among the Arabs as by-naming an individual in the singular form. They would give a tribe a by-name from some general quality shared among them, or prevailing among their members, such as generosity, avarice, forbearance, treachery and the like. And when Islam spread, they assigned to the people of the provinces characterisations by which one was distinguished from another.

Of the characterisations of the tribes in the first age of Islam, there is the example of Muʻāwiyah's asking Daghfal the genealogist: What do you say of the Banū ʻĀmir ibn Ṣaʻṣaʻah? He said: Necks of gazelles and haunches of women. He said: And what do you say of the Banū Asad? He said: Augurs and trackers, eloquent one and all. He said: And what do you say of the Banū Tamīm? He said: A rough stone — if you run against it, it hurts you; and if you leave it, it lets you be. He said: And what do you say of Khuzāʻah? He said: Hunger and chatter. He said: And what do you say of the Yemen? He said: Lords who are dolts. Of this same sort is al-Ḥajjāj's asking Ibn al-Qirriyyah about the tribes of the Arabs, and his characterising each of them by what it was distinguished by — and in his characterisation there is no ribaldry. He said:

Quraysh — the greatest of the tribes in forbearance and the most honourable of them in station Banū ʻĀmir — the longest of them in spears and the most generous of them in the morning Banū Sulaym — the greatest of them in assemblies and the most generous of them in what they withhold Thaqīf — the noblest of them in ancestry and the most numerous of them in delegations Banū Zubayd — the most constant of them to the banners and the most relentless of them in exacting blood-vengeance Quḍāʻah — the greatest of them in consequence, the greatest of them in stock and the farthest-reaching of them in traces

And so on, until he had gone through most of the tribes; he then characterised the provinces, which has no place here.

On this same pattern they would give them by-names from animals in whose natures the trait for which that tribe was famous predominates; and the original name may go and the by-name alone remain, the tribe being known by it — as happened with al-Anmār, which is a tribe of Nizār so nicknamed because its people were famous for the chase, as though they were leopards in springing upon the prey. Al-Nābighah says in his muʻallaqah:

A hunter bore down upon him, running with his hounds — lean of knuckle, one of the huntsmen of Anmār (1)

So too al-Arāqim, a tribe of the Banū Taghlib, who were so nicknamed because their eyes were likened to the eyes of the speckled serpents (arāqim), and they became known by this name (2). And al-ʻAnābis, that is, the lions, were so nicknamed for their courage. One by-name may be applied to more than one man or more than one tribe, each tribe being known by its original name — as with al-Arāqim just mentioned, which is a by-name for Jusham, Mālik, ʻAmr, Thaʻlabah, al-Ḥārith and Muʻāwiyah, the sons of Bakr ibn Ḥabīb of Taghlib (3).

Nor is the by-naming of tribes in this fashion peculiar to the Arabs of the Age of Ignorance; it is common among the Arabs of the present day. The most famous instance of the kind to have passed from tongue to tongue is al-Naqqāsh's by-naming of the people of Lebanon in the middle of the last century, when the Ottoman State sent him to survey Lebanon and take a census of its inhabitants. He was a witty man with a turn for jesting, and whenever he came down into a village or a town he gave its people a by-name from the first comparison that came into his mind as he approached that place — here, then, are the by-names of some of the village people of the districts of the Gharb, most of them names of animals in the plural form. Name of the village — by-name of its people The people of Jabbāʻ — the firs » Nīḥā — the Nawar » Baʻadhrān — the foxes » al-Mukhtārah — the wolves » ʻAyn Qanyā — the firs » ʻAmmā Ṭūr — the strutting cocks » al-Mazraʻah — the cattle » ʻAynbāl — the donkey-foals » Baqlīn — the sheep » Jadīdat al-Shūf — the dogs (1)

Nor is it peculiar to the Arabs; it takes in some of the civilised nations as well. Among the Americans in the United States the people of every state have a by-name of their own, after this fashion:

Name of the state — by-name of its people Illinois — Luchers Missouri — Pibers Oragon — Webfoot Ohio — Buckeye Indiana — Hoosiers New England — States Yankees Albama — Yellow Limnor Wisconsin — Badger

The sum of the matter is that the naming of certain tribes with animal names, in the singular or the plural, has no importance for the question before us, since it is ordinary and natural in generations ancient and modern. And of course no importance remains in what they have mentioned of the worship of animals that was widespread in the Age of Ignorance — which in truth is not of the order of totemic animal-worship at all, but is the worship of idols, the fewer of them in the shape of certain animals and the greater part of them in other shapes. It is therefore of the order of the worship of graven images and is nothing of totemism, since the totem-folk do not worship an idol in the shape of the animal, but worship the animal itself, and hold it sacred, and refrain from harming it, as has been said; and among the Arabs there is nothing of this — yet we shall say a word about the idols of the Arabs which will not be without profit:

The idols of the Arabs

It is well known that the Arabs and the rest of the Semitic nations are, by their very nature, people of the divine unity, and that if they worshipped an idol it is most likely that that idol was an importation among them. This holds of the Arabs in particular, because of their central position among the ancient heathen nations; for in the age of their Ignorance they were encircled by the Pharaohs in Egypt, the Phoenicians in Syria, the Assyrians in ʻIrāq and the Abyssinians in Abyssinia. Their peninsula was the road of the people of India in their trade to Egypt and Syria. And when they went to one of the countries neighbouring them for trade or for raiding and saw the people of that country worshipping an idol in which they believed a power of grace to reside, they would carry it away with them on their return and set it up in the Kaʻbah or in others of their gathering-places. And if an Indian caravan passed by them with an idol they worshipped in the course of their journeys, it might please the Arabs, and they would take it from them or fashion an idol on its model. Of the reports of these idols nothing has reached us but scattered scraps, from which the rest may be inferred.

The most famous of those who carried the idols to Mecca in the age of Ignorance is a man they call ʻAmr ibn Luḥayy. They relate that he gained mastery over Mecca, drove Jurhum out of it and took over its custodianship; and he was a soothsayer, and brought to it the idols from every horizon. He transferred Hubal and Isāf and Nāʼilah from al-Balqāʼ (1), and transferred Wadd and Suwāʻ and Yaghūth and Yaʻūq and Nasr from the coast at Jiddah (2). Each of the famous tribes of that day took one of them for its own, so that Wadd fell to the tribe of Kalb, Suwāʻ to Hamdān, Yaghūth to Madhḥij, Yaʻūq to Murād and Nasr to Ḥimyar. Wadd was in the form of a man, Suwāʻ in the form of a woman, Yaghūth in the form of a lion, Yaʻūq in the form of a mare and Nasr in the form of an eagle. Were one to gather the idols of the Arabs, their number would exceed a hundred idols, of which only a very few are in the forms of animals. And even were they many, they would hardly support an argument, for the reasons we have set out, and because they are an importation, as you have seen — and we do not say this on the authority of the Arabs' own narration alone, since our author the Professor trusts nothing of their reports except what supports his proof; rather we look at these idols with an analytic eye, in the hope of arriving at a result. So we say:

(Hubal) is the greatest of their idols, and they call it the Greatest Idol. They have related that it was made of copper, and it is said of flasks, that is, of glass, in the shape of a huge man; and they used to sacrifice to it and seek its guidance in their journeys, their wars and all their affairs. It appears to us that this idol is one of the gods of the Phoenicians or the Canaanites, and the proofs of that are:

First — the Arabs' own saying that it came to them from Moab in the land of al-Balqāʼ, brought to them by the ʻAmr ibn Luḥayy we have mentioned.

Second — that the word Hubal has no derivation in Arabic answering to its sense, so that it is not derived from any Arabic word. In our view it is Hebrew or Phoenician, its original being “Habaʻl” הבעל, which is the name of the greatest of the idols of the Phoenicians or the Canaanites and of those neighbouring them among the nations of Syria, such as the Moabites, the Midianites, the Babylonians and the Libyans. The Phoenicians had scores of gods, of whom they singled out two, the one male and the other female, calling the male “Habaʻl” and the female “ʻAshrūt.” The sense of “Baʻl” in their tongue is the lord and the god; and the hāʼ in Hebrew is the article of definition, like the Arabic “al-.” By adding this article to Baʻl they mean the greatest god. It appears that when the aforesaid ʻAmr came to Moab, the Moabites' worship of this idol pleased him — for they used to seek rain and seek victory of it — and he carried it to Mecca under its Hebrew name “Habaʻl.” As for the added ʻayn, it is easily slurred over in light pronunciation and then lost in use, and especially in the word “Baʻl,” since the Chaldeans used to pronounce it “Bal,” dropping the ʻayn, this being the name of this god with them. And perhaps the Moabites pronounced it “Hubal,” and ʻAmr ibn Luḥayy transmitted it as he had been hearing it.

Third — that the modes of the Arabs' worship of Hubal resemble the modes of the Moabites' worship of Habaʻl. For the Moabites used to set this idol up on the high hills or on the roofs of the houses, and slaughter to it victims from among animals and men, and burn burnt-offerings to it, and seek its guidance, and prefer it to all their other gods; and so the Arabs did with Hubal. And just as Habaʻl is the greatest of the idols of the Moabites and those who go their way, so Hubal is the greatest of the idols of the Arabs, and they used to set it up above the Kaʻbah.

٭ Isāf and Nāʼilah ٭ They have related that these are two idols, the first in the form of a man and the second in the form of a woman, which ʻAmr ibn Luḥayy likewise carried from al-Balqāʼ and set over the well of Zamzam at the Kaʻbah; then he placed one of them upon al-Ṣafā and the other upon al-Marwah. These two and Hubal may perhaps have made up a heathen triad, for heathen triads were widespread among the idolaters in ancient times. The rule with these triads is that each of them is composed of a man, a woman and a boy. Examples of these triads are many among the ancient Egyptians, the Chaldeans and others.

٭ Yaghūth ٭ It comes in al-Zamakhsharī's commentary that it was in the form of a lion, and that ʻAmr ibn Luḥayy transferred it from Jiddah on the sea-coast to Mecca. If it was brought in from abroad, it most likely came from Abyssinia or Egypt, since Jiddah is the landing-place of the traveller from either of the two to the Ḥijāz. Now we have found among the gods of the Egyptians an idol in the form of a lion or a lioness which they call “Tafnūt”; and the formal likeness between this word and the word Yaghūth is not hidden, if we bear in mind that the Arabs used to write without points, so that when they wrote “yʻwth” it was a matter of doubt to them whether to read Yaghūth or Taghnūt or Taʻūth. This befell them often, even after history had been set down in the heyday of Islamic civilisation: the emperor of the Romans whom Hārūn al-Rashīd made war upon is called by some historians Yaʻfūr, by others Naʻfūr, and by others Naqfūr, which is the correct form, since his Roman name is nicephorus. Is it not conceivable that the like of this confusion should have happened in the age of Ignorance? On this same principle the name Qābīn turned into Qābīl, and Shāʼūl into Ṭālūt, and Jalyāt into Jālūt, and Fūraḥ into Qārūn.

٭ Wadd ٭ This idol was described by Yāqūt in his lexicon, where he says: “It is in the likeness of a man, of the hugest that men can be; two robes have been worked upon it — that is, engraved upon it — girt in one robe and mantled in the other, with a sword upon it; he has slung a bow over his shoulder, and before him is a spear with a pennon on it and a quiver with arrows in it.” How like this description is to the description of one of the kings of the Pharaohs going out to war upon his chariot! And it resembles a Phoenician god named Ashbū (1), or Sīs, an Egyptian god. We cannot be decisive in this; it appears from its description only that it is a foreign god.

And judge by this the rest of the idols, though we do not aspire to trace them all back to their origins, nor that what we say of them should be certain or conclusive; it is rather of the order of the more probable opinion, and this is enough in the present place.

Blood-vengeance, the family and the confederacy

We have seen the advocate of the Arabs' totemism attach the greatest importance to the Arabs' banding together to demand blood-vengeance (thaʼr) in the name of the tribe. In his view this is a survival of totemism, because in old times, when one of the tribe's members was killed, the whole of it joined in demanding his blood, since it was demanding the right of the god who is its supreme ancestor (pages 53 and 56); and that the Arabs have no family, the last term of their genealogies being the clan-group (al-ḥayy) (page 23). We have no need to be long in showing the unsoundness of this construction, now that the unsoundness of the other premises has appeared. For the demand for blood-vengeance in the name of the tribe is natural among the nations of the desert and necessary for the preservation of the bond of lineage, without which that bond would have no meaning. But our author has taken great pains in explaining and in reasoning, so as to reconcile

— Notes —

[33] (1) Al-Damīrī, 242, vol. 2

[33] (2) Rowlinson's Ancient Monaréhies II. 539 & III. 527

[34] (1) Laṭāʼif al-lughah al-ʻArabīyah

[35] (1) Al-Ilyādhah al-ʻArabīyah (the introduction)

[35] (2) The Franks give Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, the by-name of the Lion of the North.

[35] (3) Al-Maʻārif, 131

[37] (1) Jamharat ashʻār al-ʻArab, 54

[37] (2) Al-Kāmil of al-Mubarrad, 127

[37] (3) Al-Maʻārif, 32

[38] (1) Al-Hilāl, page 95, year 13

[39] (1) Ibn Hishām, 27, vol. 1

[39] (2) Yāqūt, 914, vol. 4

[41] (1) Bughyat al-ṭālibīn, 160