In this book I have seriously considered five possible explanations for the use of biological terms as names for Bedouin kinship groups: the “predatory animals” hypothesis; the “ancestor eponymy” hypothesis; the “nickname eponymy” hypothesis; the “naturalistic” or “Bedouin appropriation of the desert landscape” hypothesis; and the “obscuring internal cleavages” hypothesis. As I worked to see how well they accounted for the empirical data, it became clear that there were two standards for evaluating them. One standard was quantitative: how many of the attested cases does a particular hypothesis explain? The other standard was qualitative: does one hypothesis account for a greater variety of cases than the others?
As I have shown, the “ancestor eponymy” hypothesis accounts for the highest percentage – 69.15% – of the attested cases. In comparison, the “predatory animals” hypothesis accounts for only 38.89% of the data. It was not possible to offer a quantitative evaluation of the “nickname eponymy” hypothesis because, in the absence of the necessary documentation, I could not determine exactly how many cases were covered by this hypothesis.
The “naturalistic” or “Bedouin appropriation of the desert landscape” hypothesis has the potential to account for all of the biologically-based group names. In theory, and from a quantitative perspective, it could be the winner. However, I argued in Chapter 6 that the motivation for the Bedouin to “culturally appropriate the desert landscape” primarily operates in the context of competition for social status between Bedouin and non-Bedouin. It is not at all clear that this kind of competition is constantly present. In a context where a Bedouin group is competing primarily with other Bedouin groups, this motivation would not be present. Furthermore, by explaining every name indiscriminately, this hypothesis fails to account for the selectivity of the naming process. When the Arabs apply biological terms as names for their kinship groups, they utilize only 530 of the over 2,600 primary terms for living things in the Arabic lexicon. The “naturalistic” hypothesis does not explain why comparatively few biological terms are chosen as names.
From a qualitative perspective, the “nickname eponymy” and the “obscuring internal cleavages” hypotheses explain the greatest variety of names. Since a person’s nickname can refer to anything that his society associates with him, metaphorically (ex. al-ʿAnqāʾ, “the man who is like a griffin or phoenix”) or metonymically (ex. al-Ǧawāmīs, “the man with many water buffaloes”), it covers references to every possible thing, both organic and inorganic. Thus, it even explains names for Bedouin tribes that refer to manufactured objects (such as Kinānah, “quiver”). The “obscuring internal cleavages” hypothesis covers about the same range of references. It accounts for all of the non-human names for Bedouin kinship groups, since it suggests what the motivation for choosing them might be. The varieties of names accounted for by the other explanations are fewer. The “ancestor eponymy” hypothesis deals only with the terms (such as ḥafṣ, “male lion cub”) that are both individual personal names and group names, while the “predatory animals” hypothesis covers an even more restricted set: names derived only from terms for predators.
My new explanation, the “obscuring internal cleavages” hypothesis, can be applied to any and all kinds of names because it completely ignores referential meanings. It also disregards whatever connections these names might have with the environments that the Bedouin inhabit. Instead, it treats the names as empty ciphers. Its focus is on the ways in which Bedouin groups use the names tactically to preserve the organization of their tribes and prevent competitors or enemies from discovering hidden internal cleavages.
As I noted, both of the tests of the “obscuring internal cleavages” hypothesis were positive but the measures associated with these tests were small in magnitude.
1 The Goals of the Analysis
The point of evaluating the five hypotheses is to measure their general explanatory power, not to decide how well they might apply to a . It goes without saying that the applicability of any one of these five hypotheses to a particular case does not depend on how many of the entire set of cases that it explains. The “predatory animals” hypothesis, for instance, applies to only 38.89% of the group names in my data set. Even though it covers only a small portion of the total number of cases, this does not necessarily diminish its explanatory power for one particular case.
To illustrate the logical independence of each hypothesis’ general explanatory power from its applicability to a , let us consider the al-Ṣaqr tribe, which resided in the northern Jordan Valley and the area around the city of Baysān in the nineteenth century (von Oppenheim 1943: 35–37). Since the name of the al-Ṣaqr means “the Saker falcon,” it clearly referred to one of the creatures that occupy center stage in the “predatory animals” hypothesis. At the same time, the tribe’s name could also be explained as an instance of “ancestor eponymy,” since the phrase al-Ṣaqr could have been the name of its founding ancestor. What is more, Ṣaqr is attested in the Onomasticon Arabicum as a nickname; a man named ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān ibn Muʿāwiyah ibn Hišām ibn ʿAbd-al-Malik was given the nickname Ṣaqr Qurayš, “the falcon of Qurayš,” in the eighth century AD (see Onomasticon Arabicum record number 43338). Hence, it is conceivable that Ṣaqr was the nickname of this tribe’s founder, not his personal name (although more research would be needed to prove this). This means that the third hypothesis, “nickname eponymy,” could also apply here. The “naturalistic” hypothesis is also relevant, given that the Saker falcon is part of the Bedouins’ natural environment. Finally, the “obscuring internal cleavages” hypothesis also fits this case. The al-Ṣaqr tribe was extremely heterogeneous; it was a blend of 35 separate kinship groups that attached themselves to the tribal core. Consequently, it is possible to argue that the al-Ṣaqr tribe adopted its non-human name as part of its strategy for concealing its many internal divisions. This one case could exemplify all five of the hypotheses evaluated in this project.
Some other individual cases are more difficult to explain. The groups called al-Ḫašabāt (“the pieces of wood”) and Āl Zaʿtar (“the family of wild thyme”) (al-Wāʾilī 2002: 481, 724) do not appear to have been named after ancestors, since neither ḫašabah nor zaʿtar are personal names. It also seems unlikely that these words could have been bestowed on their ancestors as nicknames, although of course this cannot be ruled out since almost any word or phrase can be turned into a nickname. Certainly the “predatory animals” hypothesis cannot explain these two names, since they are derived from terms for plants or plant products, not predators. As for the “Bedouin appropriation of the landscape” hypothesis, it applies only weakly to the name al-Ḫašabāt (since pieces of wood are not unambiguously natural objects and could, in fact, be manufactured things). One could regard the name Zaʿtar as a reference to a natural thing if it were not more strongly associated with a human activity: cooking. Thus, for these two kinship group names, only one of the five hypotheses considered in this book really fits: the “obscuring internal cleavages” hypothesis. This last hypothesis seems to be the best explanation because it does not depend on the meanings of these names. If this hypothesis is correct, the names are merely empty ciphers that take the place of human names and that are used to conceal the foreign origins of the two groups.
In order to formulate the “obscuring internal cleavages” hypothesis, I had to ignore the referential meanings of the avian, mammalian, and botanical terms and treat them as empty ciphers. This does not mean that the people who belong to the groups who use these terms as names think of them as meaningless. Far from it; many members of these kinship groups know exactly what their tribal names mean. Others may not be sure – as I argued for the name of the Ruwālah tribe in Chapter 2. I have done my best to recover the meanings of many tribal names that refer to natural species. Those who are not completely familiar with the many Arabic terms for plants, for example, may not have realized that many tribal names are colloquial plurals of plant terms. The people whose families and tribes bear such names may not agree with my explanations of why the names are used but they certainly agree that the names are important and interesting.
My argument for the “obscuring internal cleavages” hypothesis is not based on an assertion that such kinship group names are meaningless. I merely argue that their meanings do not determine how these names have been used. The terms from which the kinship group names are derived certainly refer to the natural world and evoke many psychologically powerful associations, recalling similarities between human beings and living species (see Al Issawi 2021). But these associations do not help us explain why some Arab kinship groups are named after human beings while others are not.
2 The Goals of This Book
One of the primary goals of this book was to push aside Robertson Smith’s theory of pre-Islamic “totemism” and other variants of this idea – such as those that appear in Freud’s Totem and Taboo. My main objection to the “totemism” that these writers endorsed is that it has almost no basis in empirical evidence. Other objections to “totemism” can also be made: it divides the human species into “primitives” and “civilized races” and assumes that the history of human thought consists of a grand advance from “primitive” to “civilized” stages. Most modern scholarship in paleontology, human genetics, and archaeology casts doubt on this simplistic vision of the past. I have accepted the one version of “totemism” in this book that does not depend on these assumptions: Claude Lévi-Strauss’ notion of a “totemic operator.” In contrast to previous writers, Lévi-Strauss collected evidence for the existence of a “totemic operator” from hundreds of empirical cases and firmly rejected the evolutionist idea that there is an essential difference between “primitive” and “civilized” thought. Lévi-Strauss’ writings, however, were part of his effort to use ethnographic data to discover some of the universal characteristics of the human mind. His main concern was not to explain the differences between specific cases but rather to highlight the common elements that they share. Consequently, although I gratefully acknowledge the debt that I owe to Lévi-Strauss, I have not been able to use his work to explain the particulars of the Arab case.
While writing this book, I have been faced with several unexpected difficulties. Simply to translate the group names or, at least, provide glosses for them that reveal their likely meanings, I have had to consider a host of lexicographical, linguistic, and even philosophical problems. I also have tried to demonstrate that the question of what Arab kinship group names mean is intellectually and theoretically significant for scholars of history and society. I leave it to my readers to decide whether my solutions for these problems are adequate or convincing. Even if they do not accept my methods and my arguments, I hope they agree that exploring the meanings of these names is essential for understanding the construction of individual and group identities in Arab societies. The names are central components of the mundane social worlds in which ordinary action takes place.
Whatever the merits of this effort, it does at least focus scholarly attention on a vast corpus of words that has long been and continues to be an important and highly-valued element of Arab cultural traditions. The casual references to tribal names that pepper the academic literature about the Middle East reveal a long-standing curiosity about them. Even after Robertson Smith’s theory of Arab “totemism” was discredited, scholars writing about the region persisted in describing the names as “totemic,” without serious reflection about what this adjective might actually mean. I believe that, by linking speculation about these names to research into Arab social organization, I have transformed the names into data that should be subjected to theoretical scrutiny. The time is long past for us to move beyond Robertson Smith’s “totemism” and to reconsider this Arab tradition in light of comparative onomastics, translation theory, and social theory in general.
3 Topics for Future Research
3.1 An Additional Test of the “Obscuring Internal Cleavages” Hypothesis
One of the flaws in my second test of the “obscuring internal cleavages” hypothesis – in which I showed that non-Bedouin kinship groups tend to have fewer animal names than Bedouin kinship groups – is that the test depends on data about the villages of northern Jordan. The residents of these villages certainly do not earn their living from nomadic pastoralism and so are not “Bedouin” in any economic sense. However, some of them claim to be descended from Bedouin groups who migrated to northern Jordan from points further south. This means that some of them could have inherited their kinship group names from Bedouin groups who settled in their villages. In other words, the data base of “non-Bedouin” descent group names possibly may include some names of former Bedouin descent groups.
To remedy this, the names of sedentary kinship groups from another population that is largely composed of non-Bedouin could be collected. With such a new data base of sedentary names, a second test of the “obscuring internal cleavages” hypothesis could be carried out.
One possible source of information about a different sedentary population is the lengthy Dictionary of Palestinian Tribes (Muʿǧam al-ʿAšāʾir al-Filasṭīniyyah) by Muḥammad Ḥasan Šarrāb (2012). This massive collection of kinship group names and place names could provide an even larger sample than Muhaydāt’s book on Jordanian tribes. It is more difficult to use, however, because it does not clearly distinguish between independent cases and cases that are historically related or that have the same origin. For example, Šarrāb lists 67 families with the name Ṣāliḥ or al-Ṣāliḥ or Abū-Ṣāliḥ and also lists the more than 50 locations in pre-Mandate Palestine where these families lived (Šarrāb 2012: 448–450). Since the personal name Ṣāliḥ is very common, it could be that all 67 of these families took their names from different people and thus might represent 67 independent cases. However, it is also likely that some of these families are branches of a larger kinship group with the name Ṣāliḥ that was represented in more than one location. Such branches would not be independent cases. Without some historical and genealogical information about each family, the reader is not in the position to decide whether it is an independent case or not. For the moment, then, Šarrāb’s work is only a potential data base. It can only be used for testing my hypothesis after the additional historical and genealogical data are brought to bear.
Another option would be to conduct new field research in some area where no families of Bedouin origin have settled. In my opinion, one good candidate for data collection would be the population of al-Minūfiyyah Governorate (muḥāfaẓat al-minūfiyyah) in Egypt’s Nile Delta. To my knowledge, this area has not witnessed significant settlement by Bedouin groups, although it was sometimes placed under the administration of Bedouin shaykhs in the previous centuries. Winter (2014: 90–91, 96) reports that al-Minūfiyyah was governed during early Ottoman times by the shaykhs of the Banī Baġdād Bedouin. However, in light of the complaints lodged by the residents of the province against these shaykhs, it seems that the Bedouin were alien administrators rather than settlers. In more recent times, al-Minūfiyyah Governorate was the locus of Jean Berque’s (1957) ethnography of the town of Sirs al-Layān. Berque makes no mention of Bedouin settlement. If it is true that this region is overwhelmingly inhabited by non-Bedouin, it could be the source of valuable new data for testing my hypothesis.
3.2 Changing Frequencies of Kinship Group Names over Time
Another topic for future research would be the issue of name frequency over time. How many of the oldest kinship group names based on terms for natural species are only rarely used now? How have these frequencies changed over time?
The fact that 38 kinship groups in my data base are named after ṣaqr, “falcon,” while only two are named after nasr, “vulture,” surely has some significance. Although both of these terms must be included in the set “terms for natural species that are acceptable as kinship group names,” the first term seems much more firmly established in this set than the second.
One suspects that the difference between the frequencies of these two terms might be due to changes over time of their acceptability as group names. Perhaps nasr has only recently come into fashion as a kinship group name, while ṣaqr has been a kinship group name for a longer time period. Ṣaqr is certainly attested as a group name in many widely-spread locations: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, southern Egypt, and northwestern Egypt (al-Wāʾilī 2002: 1060–65). This leads me to think that it has diffused to these locations from Arabia over many centuries. Although I do not have any data that supports this particular speculation, there is certainly evidence that, in general, the popularity of names varies from one historical period to another and from one place to another.
We know, for example, that the name ʿIkrimah (“female dove/pigeon”; cf. al-Bustānī 1983: 623; al-Ǧurr 1973: 846) was relatively popular during the first four Islamic centuries. The Syrian historian Ibn ʿAsākir (499 AH to 571 AH) refers to four of the prominent men of Damascus who bore this name: ʿIkrimah ibn Abī-Ǧahl ʿAmr ibn Hišām ibn al-Muġīrah Abū-ʿUṯmān al-Maḫzūmī (died 15 AH/634 AD), ʿIkrimah Abū-ʿAbdallah (died 104 AH), ʿIkrimah al-Dimašqī, and ʿIkrimah ibn Rabʿī ibn ʿUmayr al-Taymī al-Fayyāḍ (Dar el-Mechreq 2002: 377; Ibn ʿAsākir 1995: 50, 51, 72, 126; identification numbers 10046 and 10464 at https://onomasticon.irht.cnrs.fr). The Onomasticon Arabicum identifies two more: ʿIkrimah Abū-Ṯawr (died between 393 AH to 403 AH) and ʿIkrimah ʿAmmār al-Yamāmī (died 159 AH; cf. identification numbers 10834 and 42043 at https://onomasticon.irht.cnrs.fr). The term was also used as a kinship group name in pre-Islamic times, as can be seen from the names of the ʿIkrimah ibn Ḫaṣafah branch of the pre-Islamic Qays ʿAylān tribe and the ʿIkrimah branch of the Bakr ibn Wāʾil tribe (al-Wāʾilī 2002: 1407).
In modern times, however, the term ʿIkrimah is almost never used as a name. A recent survey of personal names in the Ẓufār region of the Sultanate of Oman does not even list it. Of the 163 men’s names used by 827 men who were registered in the telephone directory for this region in 1980, only two – Fahd (“panther”) and al-Fīl (“the elephant”) – are animal names. Four men are named after natural objects – Maṭar (“rain”), Almās (“diamonds”), al-Baḥr (“the sea”), and Badr (“full moon”) – and one other is named after a manufactured object: Sayf (“sword”) (Oman 1980: 183–184, 190–194). Avian names such as ʿIkrimah are completely absent in Ẓufār. Why?
To address the question of variation over time more broadly, it would be useful to track the changing frequencies of personal and group names derived from terms for natural species in even earlier historical periods, that is, during the long span of time between the tenth century BC and the fourth century AD, when Arabic gradually emerged from the Central branch of the Semitic languages as a distinct variety (see al-Jallad 2018: 318). Hoyland estimates that there are some 20,000 texts written in “Safaitic” script alone, along with many thousands of other texts in “Nabatean,” “Thamudic,” “Taymanitic,” and “Hismaic” scripts (Hoyland 2009: 348; see also al-Jallad 2018: 320–22; Macdonald 1999: 255–56, 262–63). Most of these texts contain personal names and many of them include references to kinship groups. Thus, there are huge data sets that could be employed for testing the “predatory animals,” “ancestor eponymy,” and “nickname eponymy” hypotheses.
As for the “obscuring internal cleavages” hypothesis that has been proposed in this book, testing it against this “proto-Arabic” evidence might prove more difficult. This last hypothesis depends on detailed knowledge of the dynamics of Arab kinship groups in historical times. Comparable knowledge from prehistoric Arabia is currently very scarce. However, as more epigraphic evidence about the social organization of pre-Islamic Arabia is published, progress in testing this hypothesis may become feasible. One recently-published work, for example, utilizes epigraphic data to reconstruct the religious and ritual life of the nomadic pastoralists of early Arabia (al-Jallad 2022). Efforts to reconstruct the social life of early Arabia are underway (see Macdonald 2020).
3.3 Comparison with Ancient Kinship Groups among Speakers of Old Arabic
Epigraphic evidence shows that many of the terms for mammals – such as “camel” (gamal/ǧamal) “juvenile male camel” (bakr), and “juvenile female camel” (bakrah) – are of great antiquity. They are frequently attested in the Ancient North Arabian inscriptions that were scratched onto stones by nomads in the Ḥismā desert of southern Jordan and parts of north-west Saudi Arabia. These inscriptions were written in what is called the Hismaic script and consist of strings of characters (sigla) that represent only consonants and some long vowels. They are not firmly dated but appear to be contemporary with, or later than, the occupation of southern Jordan by the Nabataeans, speakers of related Semitic languages who wrote their own inscriptions using a modified Aramaic script (Diez et al. 2017: vii). Since the latest texts in the Nabataean script date to the fourth century AD (Graf 2004: 148), the latest Hismaic inscriptions may also date to that century; they may also be several centuries older than that. At any rate, the last of them were written some two hundred years before the emergence of Islam.
The words in the Hismaic inscriptions that are of interest for this book are the terms for animals and the names for people and kinship groups. The records of the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA) (Diez et al. 2017; Diez and Macdonald 2017) show that the siglum /bkr/ – that is, bakr, “juvenile male camel” – appears four times as a term for an animal and six times (record nos. TIJ 058, TIJ 215, TIJ 237, TIJ 268, TIJ 419, TIJ 453) as the name of a man in Hismaic inscriptions. The siglum /bkrt/ – that is, bakrah, “juvenile female camel” – appears 25 times and is often inscribed immediately adjacent to drawings of camels, which make its meaning unmistakable. In only one inscription (record no. KJC 539), it appears to mean “maiden.” This is the reading that makes sense in context, given that the other parts of the inscription refer to women and young girls. The siglum /gml/ – that is, gamal or ǧamal, “camel” – appears seven times in connection with drawings of camels and seven times (record nos. KJA 92, KJB 58.1, KJB 149, KJC 173, KJC 511, TIJ 033, TIJ 287) as the name of a man (Diez et al. 2017: 650, 675, 705, 757, 893, 1081, 1092, 1149, 1157, 1168, 1174, 1120, 1232).
The same terms and names are present in inscriptions recorded in many other scripts – including Greek, Dumaitic, Hasaitic, and Safaitic – in the northwestern and northeastern parts of the Arabian Peninsula (Diez and Macdonald 2017). Some of the terms and names found in this corpus appear in Table 9.1. I should note that a few of the glosses in this table are my own and were not provided by the editors of the corpus. It appears that when an animal term in this corpus is clearly being used as a man’s name – as indicated in context by the following word /bn/, “son of” – the editors of the corpus have left it untranslated, as if it were only a proper noun that refers only to people. But, of course, the point of my book is to document exactly how such proper nouns are derived from terms for living things. So, I believe that my research goals justify my insertion of these glosses.
Evidence in the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA) of terms for living things and personal and group names derived from these terms
The pattern that emerges from the epigraphic record for the first four centuries AD – that is, the use of terms for natural species as names for both individuals and descent groups – is very reminiscent of the pattern found among the Bedouin later, in both early Islamic and modern times. It suggests a high degree of historical continuity.
The practice of using terms for natural species as names for individuals may be even older. We find the name of an Arab monarch in an Assyrian inscription of 853 BC, written on what is known as the Kurkh monolith. A certain “Gindibu of an Arab land” is listed by Shalmaneser III as one of the people he defeated at the Battle of Qarqar (Grayson 1996: 23, lines 90b–96a). This personal name seems to be an early form of later classical Arabic ǧundub, “locust” (Hava 1970: 100).1 If so, then it is conceivable that the same biological term could have been used as the name of an early Arab kinship group. However, it may not be possible to demonstrate this using Assyrian inscriptions, since Assyrian contacts with the Arabs during the eighth century BC seem to have been limited (Byrne 2003: 12–14, 16, 18).
3.4 Comparison with Ancient Kinship Group Names among Speakers of Other Semitic Languages
To place the Arab names for persons and kinship groups in an even broader perspective, it is possible to compare them with names attested for the Northwest Semitic branch of the Central Semitic languages, that is, in Aramaic, Canaanite, Hebrew, and Ugaritic (see al-Jallad 2018: 318). For example, considerable research has already been done into the personal and family names recorded in Palmyrene Aramaic between the first and third centuries AD (Smith 2013). A social history of kin groups and family names during an even earlier time – the Neo-Babylonian period (747 to 626 BC) – has been written, based on archaeological materials (Nielsen 2010). These developments show that comparison of my book with works about kinship group names among other speakers of Semitic languages in many historical periods is feasible.
3.5 Comparative Onomastics
All of the above questions are central to an important field of study: onomastics. The earliest onomastic research on Arabic names focused on the Arabian Peninsula (see Hess 1912; Littmann 1921) but more recent work has been done on Egyptian (see Littmann 1956), Jordanian (see Aljbour et al. 2019), and Palestinian (Borg and Kressel 2001) names and on the place of Arabic names in the context of Semitic onomastics (cf. Dirbas 2017, 2019). One of the main tasks of onomastics is to rigorously establish what the facts are: the variety of names used by any given society, the uses to which these names are put (as elements of individual and family identity; as heraldry for noble households; as dynastic symbols; as elements of myth; as tokens of religious beliefs; as trademarks; and so on), and the ways in which names change from one era to the next. Thus, onomastics has provided the data needed by the many disciplines (linguistics, lexicography, cultural anthropology, sociology, epigraphy, and history) that have made the systematic study of the Middle East possible. The task of these disciplines, in turn, has been to explain why and how names have been invented, selected, transmitted, transformed, used, and preserved by Middle Eastern societies. If, after suggesting their hypotheses, these disciplines must go back to specialists in onomastics to ask for their help in testing their explanations against new data, this is only to be expected; empirical research requires this dialectic between careful documentation of findings and efforts to explain these findings. Hopefully, the present study will make a contribution to these efforts.
My approach can certainly be extended to cases outside of the Arab world. If we turn to the Russian case, for example, we might discover some relationship between the use of animal terms as household names and the particular feudal order that arose among Russian speakers under Mongol domination. If the emergence of this Russian naming practice can be dated and if its florescence turns out to be correlated chronologically with the development of particular feudal estates in Russia, then we may ourselves on the threshold of an explanation.
I am indebted to Clive Holes for pointing out this possibility to me.