Conclusion

the demand for blood-vengeance (thaʼr) among the Arabs and the demand made by the totem-folk for the right of their supreme ancestor. Far be it from him to bring that off, unless totemism (al-ṭūtamīyah) among the Arabs were first established — in which case blood-vengeance might be explained as he explains it, instead of its being itself one of the proofs of that totemism, called in aid to establish it.

As for the absence of the family among the Arabs, the assertion is a strange one; to deny the family among the Arabs comes close to denying self-evident truths, or rather it is to deny the light of the sun at high noon. Stranger still is his inferring the totemism of the Arabs from the mutual binding and mutual aid that arise among them by way of confederacy (ḥilf) and the like. Confederation is a political principle still in force today among the most advanced of the civilised nations; it differs from the confederacy of the Arab tribes only as the desert life of the one differs from the settled civilisation of the other.

Conclusion

We close the essay with a word on totemism itself, and say that it is not among the things scientifically established, even for the savage tribes of the present day; for many of the philosophers of civilisation (al-ʻumrān) deny it, and more than one of them has written in criticism of it — above all Spencer, the celebrated philosopher, who is the most trustworthy of authorities in the science of human society. There occurs in his book Principles of Civilisation what amounts to this: “It appears to me that the origin of the doctrine of totemism is an error in the interpretation of by-names and kunyahs — that is, that the savages used to call themselves by the names of certain animals or other natural beings by way of by-naming; then these names became confused for their sons, who supposed those animals to be their fathers in truth, and so worshipped them or held them sacred.”

Moreover, the doctrine of totemism runs counter to many of the established principles of civilisation which induction and observation confirm — such as the accepted account of the origin of the worship of ancestors and the worship of the heavenly bodies, and of the stages by which man advanced in each of them. To say nothing of the repugnance of totemism to the judgement of reason: how should it occur to a man to believe himself descended from a serpent, a beetle, an onion or the like? Totemism, then, is one of those weak scientific opinions built upon a defective induction, and it stands in need of sifting and criticism.

If, then, you take account of the collapse of the proofs for mother-right (al-umūmah) among the Arabs, the doctrine of totemism among them collapses too; and totemism itself has in any case been shown to collapse in their case quite apart from mother-right, in view of the unsoundness, set out above, of the opinions of those who assert it. How much the more, when it has become plain to us that totemism in and of itself is one of those recent scientific opinions which stand in need of criticism and sifting?

( The end )