Category Archives: Islamic Sects

Yemen Military in the early 19th century

The Library of Congress has an online print of an engraving by Andrea Bernieri. It does not appear to be based on an actual observation by the artist. Below is the description on the website:

This hand-colored engraving of a work by Andrea Bernieri (flourished 1826–42) depicts Yemeni horsemen with lances exercising in the courtyard of a fort. The horsemen are watched by a soldier holding a musket, and civilians are looking on in the foreground. Bernieri was one of the Italian artists who contributed works to a 15-volume set by Giulio Ferrario (1767-1847) entitled Il costume antico e moderno, o, storia del governo, della milizia, della religione, delle arti, scienze ed usanze di tutti i popoli antichi e moderni (Customs old and new, or the history of government, militia, religion, arts, sciences, and the ways of all nations, ancient and modern) published in Italy in 1823–38. Ferrario was a Milan publisher, printer and librarian whose monumental work contained more than 1,500 hand-colored plates depicting clothing from the classical period through the early 1800s, as well as many architectural drawings and engravings. The engraving appeared as plate 29 in Asia, volume 5 of Ferrario’s work. It is from the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection at the Brown University Library.

Bernieri, Andrea, flourished 1826-1842.

I have not been able to find the exact match of the volume with the image above, although an edition from 1833 includes two engravings of Arabs of the Peninsula in a chapter that is primarily about Mecca. These come across as rather fanciful, especially the females with no veils. These images are attached below.

As pointed out by Noha Sadek, the military image above is a copy of an earlier image in an edition of Niebuhr’s travel account. Below is the earlier image it is based on from the 1774 French edition:

Far Horizons, Arduous Journeys, and The Conference of the Birds

“The Concourse of the Birds” (ca. 1600), Metropolitan Museum of Art

by Jon W. Anderson

Amid the blizzard of punditry and spin-doctoring – especially spin-doctoring from perpetrators and advocates of prescriptions for Afghanistan who turned from the Bush administration’s original goal of smashing al-Qaida and denying it sanctuaries in Afghanistan from which the 9/11 attacks were hatched to destroying Iraq and “nation-building” in Afghanistan – it is worth pausing to take account of how the startling swift advance of the Taliban there from a border post to a provincial capital then to all other provincial capitals in less than a week and Kabul on the weekend looks from Afghan and perhaps even Taliban perspectives. So far, those have been limited to interviews with media-savvy Afghan modernists, on the one hand, and a Taliban press conference on the other. Or, all the news that fits the script(s).

What is new among facts closer to the ground is the much derided and in recent months ignored Doha “process,” if we might borrow that term. Doha is the proximal point of departure for everything that has happened in Afghanistan since the former Trump administration negotiated, signed, and exchanged copies of an agreement with the Taliban last year. From the outside, to external observers, this all looked very diplomatic, including accepting the Taliban as a de facto international player. Very diverting, and pundits were diverted into deconstructing it as variously hasty, overdue, giving up on Afghanistan, or a typical Trump deal, all show but bankrupt at its core. But that wasn’t the Doha Process from Afghan perspectives.

By setting a date for withdrawal of US troops on the ground in Afghanistan in return for Taliban agreeing not to molest that withdrawal, that Trump agreement with Taliban negotiator-representatives reset the game in two ways. First, it concluded armed hostilities in a classic Afghan form of conflict-management where one side concludes it cannot win, stops fighting, and effectively changes sides (while on the surface hiding that) by withdrawing from the field, with the other side accepting that instead of destroying its foe. Second, it provided a sort of non-aggression pact, or informal, more private than public, assurance that the withdrawing party would not be molested in return for effectively laying down arms. This underlying structure of the Doha Agreement from an Afghan perspective, on which foreign observers focused as leaving the Afghan government to make its own agreement, has a denser significance in customary Afghan approaches to conflict management. In those terms, the high-level Doha agreement provided a model subsequently applied “down the line,” as it were at all the points of actual armed conflict in myriad local discussions, agreements, and private assurances by Taliban that they would not molest or revenge themselves on soldiers who laid down (and especially surrendered) their arms nor civilians who didn’t oppose them. They may or may not have had a strategy to preserve and take over existing apparatus of government, as well as discarded military equipment much paraded before the cameras. But this much is basic: they managed a negotiated cessation of fighting and freedom of movement for themselves.

I don’t have direct evidence of myriad local negotiations and private assurances of this sort; but the alternative favored by external pundits – that thousands of soldiers and police, all of them, spontaneously and simultaneously deserted a government too corrupt, distant, and indifferent to their own welfare – is inherently implausible. It is implausible, first, that all would do this at the same time, as if Afghans were of one mind like a flock of pigeons and, second, that the occasional holdouts might not have been taken by Taliban as betrayal of the deal justifying their return to fighting. By all accounts so far, there was little of that and a lot of quietly stopping and simply stepping out of their way.

The structural condition for this outcome was set by the final US strategy of driving Taliban into the mountains and hinterlands while securing urban centers where most of the population lived. To old hands, this might resemble an old Vietnam strategy and defiance of the Maoist alternative, though it probably follows a more contemporary counter-insurgency doctrine of pushing insurgents to the margins so the centers can develop and develop constituencies for development. Again, I do not know if this was the rationale, but the effect of pushing Taliban out of sight was to push them out of mind and so to fail to register localizations of the Doha Deal for what they were, a deal and not just threats to kill any who opposed them.

Second, subsequent Afghan behavior supports the hypothesis of quiet assurances not just in Doha and not just in myriad local settings but all up and down the spectrum from local to national forces and government. The sudden night-time flight of President Ghani, a day after a final – recorded – broadcast in which he proposed to plan a meeting to mediate a national council to negotiate differences, followed the next day by not-so-former grandees who still represented important constituencies, some armed, stepping forward to announce that they stood ready to organize and host such a meeting with the Taliban, suggests the fix was in, notwithstanding his professions of sudden decision and sudden departures. Former President Hamid Karzai, current co-President Abdallah Abdallah, and surviving Mujahadin leader Gulgbeddin Hikmatyar interposed themselves with not-so-subtle reminders of other constituencies in Afghanistan, including armed ones, that Taliban would have to take into account.

While Taliban do not have such a reputation from their previous takeover and time in power, their performative defiance of the rest of the world in that period has so far (not this week but since the Doha Agreement) taken a back seat or at least been supplemented by professions of wanting international recognition following performances of such at Doha and in – of all things – a press conference in Kabul two days after Taliban fighters entered the capital. Whether a Conference of the Big Birds will occur, and whether it might include the volunteer grandees, the gesture and the roles claimed by persons making it are wholly Afghan. Call it speculation in settlement, jockeying for position, attempts to take the game ahead now that the game behind is up. This is the normal next phase in customary Afghan conflict-management: it is not de-escalation, not compromise or cutting the difference, but realignment that recognizes and accepts interests and a politics of alliance-making that begins with collusion. Even former President Ghani’s statements from his new not-yet-exile in the UAE are such a bid to, in journalist terms, “relevance.” In this regard, it may have been wiser than the pundits realized for US President Biden to blame the Afghan army for its debacle, since that cast him, an outsider, and not them as the betrayed party.

Where does this leave journalists and other observer-interpreters? For the most part, they have been outside the local versions of the Doha Process in Afghanistan; within Afghanistan they have been close to modernist constituencies that hitched their stars after the first Taliban period to the two domains that Taliban then forbade, especially to women – namely, education and media broadly interpreted to extend from fashion to broadcasting, publicity, and centering on expressive professions. These are most accessible to foreign observers, first, because they want to be – those are their reference groups – and second because foreign observers already have categories for them that provide a kind of pre-understanding that is at best thin when it comes to Taliban but also when it comes to the other demographic most threatened by them in the past, the Shia Hazara.

The coming test not just for the New Taliban but for the old grandees is who will take an interest in those Afghans in whom foreigners take an interest. This is not just the media world of commentators and interpreters focused by modernists, and particularly by urban women who have grasped the opportunities in education and media to measure the distance they have come from the last time Taliban were in power; it also must include the Shia Hazara whose marja (religious leader/exemplars) in neighboring Iran have deep networks among co-religionists in Afghanistan. This time, Iran is not a bystander and, for those who worry about such things, has two decades of experience recruiting and deploying third-party volunteers/mercenaries in its own regional adventures. Whether or not it could mobilize them, at the least, Iran would take an interest in direct threats to the welfare of Shia in Afghanistan. Arguably, the stability of Afghanistan going forward will depend on such negotiations and alliances formed that Taliban neglected (or rejected) last time but whose public spokesmen now profess to want to engage.

My only prediction is that the process will drive outsiders crazy, and lacking local points of reference will test abilities to tell their own. Among those local perspectives…

In The Conference of the Birds, the Persian Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar of Nishapur (1142-1220) described a meeting of all the birds to decide who would be their sovereign. Each bird represented some human fault, and after some discussion the wisest urged that they seek out the Simorg. To do that, they had to pass through seven valleys, one where they abandon dogmas, one where they abandon reason for love, one where they abandon worldly knowledge, another where they abandon desires and lusts.  In the Valley of Unity they realize that everything is connected, in the Valley of Wonderment that they have never understood anything, and in the final valley of Poverty that the ego is nothingness.  The birds experience agonies and pain.  Many die of fright even at the prospect of the journey, but some do set out, and a final 30 reach the abode of the Simorg (=30 birds in Farsi), which they realize is like the reality of a mirror in which one sees oneself reflected.

Jon W. Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the Catholic University of America. He conducted ethnographic research in Afghanistan in the 1970s.

The Ghost of Amanullah: Afghanistan Redux

The Khyber Pass in 1923

Historians generally assume that “modernity” jump-started in Afghanistan in 1919 with the crowning of Ghazi Amanullah Khan as emir and later as king in 1926. Succeeding his father, Habibullah Khan, who had been assassinated while on a hunting trip, Amanullah launched a campaign similar to Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran to create a “European” style modernity with the moderated trappings of Islam. All three Islamic countries were being reborn after the disaster of World War I, even though only Ottoman Turkey had been directly involved. In 1919 Afghanistan was one of the least “modern” countries in the region, long buffeted by foreign invasions from its neighbors but never fully controlled by an outside power.

When history repeats itself, it does so with a vengeance. In 1842 Great Britain suffered one of its major defeats when in a retreat from Kabul some 16,000 British troops and civilians were annihilated. In 1989, after losing more than 15,000 troops, the Soviet Union pulled out of its decade-long attempt to make Afghanistan a Marxist ally. Today NATO, led by the United States, is ending its attempt to democratize the Afghans against terrorism after two decades and a loss of over 2,300 American servicemen and another thousand from NATO member troops.

Lowell Thomas in Afghanistan in 1923

The case of Amanullah is well worth revisiting. The flamboyant American journalist, Lowell Thomas, who made his claim to fame by glorifying Lawrence of Arabia, was able to cross the Khyber Pass in a Buick at the invitation of Emir Amanullah. He describes his visit in Beyond Khyber Pass (1925). Well aware of the dangerous and uncharted territory he was entering, he quoted lines from the British Raj poet Rudyard Kipling:


“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”

Driving up to Jalalabad and Kabul in his motocar, a sight to behold at the time, Thomas paints a time-machine Orientalist picture of a land filled with brigands and fanatics, sprinkled with an occasional positive note. On women in this Islamic realm, he writes:

But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is what Thomas shows of the typical Afghan woman:

Like his adoration of Lawrence during World War I, Amanullah becomes a local icon resurrecting a backward society into a Westernized future. Thomas writes:

One of those “good things in life” was tennis, which Amanullah loved, just as he did the new American silent cinema. And just as he loved his wife Soraya, who threw off the veil (which Amanullah considered not essential to Islam) and wore stylish Western clothing of the time.

Amanullah and Soraya

In 1929, after a decade that benefited elites, the masses of Afghanistan had little to show. It seems that Amanullah though that all the country needed was modern dress. He even convened a loya jirga of tribal leaders who were forced to dress in suits. After a rebellion, not unlike the Taliban started in the early 1990s, Amanullah abdicated and spent the rest of his life in luxury in Europe, dying in Italy in 1960.

Thomas was hopeful about a new nation of Afghans, but was aware that it would not be easy.

In an assessment of the fall of Amanullah, the writer Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah in 1932 summed up what doomed the king:

The blame game for the messy withdrawal of American troops and the host of Afghan supporters is now in full swing. If two decades of outside support was not enough to transform Afghanistan into what the neocon architects dreamed of for it and Iraq, it is hard to see what staying any longer would have accomplished. The swift takeover by the raggle-tag Taliban apparently took the Pentagon intelligence by surprise, but it also shows that little would be accomplished by maintaining any military presence. Whether Biden made the right decision or not (and history, rather than partisan congressional committees, will be the best judge), it is obvious that the majority of Afghans have chosen the Taliban rather than the puppet government paved with good intentions but as corrupt as all the previous ones.

It is too early to tell how the Taliban will govern. As an opposition they were demonized, but taking on the responsibility of running a country with a population of some 38 million divided into numerous ethnic and tribal enclaves will be a full-time job. Spending the winters in neighboring Pakistan is over with. The “buck”, as they say, now stops with a group that has a dubious record with the potential for continuing human rights abuses. Either the Taliban will be reborn with a slight nod to moderation, not as much as Amanullah of course, or will themselves fail so miserably to bring peace and economic prosperity, that they too will be toppled.

As Thomas noted almost a century ago:

“The swaggering Afghan has good reason to swagger. The independence of his wild mountainous country, placed squarely between two jealous rivals, the Bear to the north and the Lion to the south, has remained intact… Yet the freedom-loving mountaineers —hiding in ravine and cave- later waged incessant guerilla warfare on all who passed their way.”

Afghanistan redux.

Geocolonialism and the War in Yemen

harb
In April Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the situation in Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. After more than three years of a lopsided war between a Western-supported Saudi/Emirati coalition and a rebel group in control of the capital Sanaa and most of the estimated 28 million Yemenis, the crisis is only getting worse.

Now coalition forces are attempting to wrest control of the vital port of Hodeidah from the Huthi forces, thinking that such a loss would force the Huthis to accept their terms for a total submission. Since this port supplies most of the food and aid entering Yemen, loss of the port would likely trigger a siege to literally starve the Huthi areas into submission. The Huthis know this and are not likely to give up the port without a bloodbath. Meanwhile several hundred thousand residents fear for their lives and many have already fled to areas with no resources whatsoever. The UN fears a renewed outbreak of cholera, which has already affected more than one million Yemenis. Negotiations continue by the UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths to stop the impending violence.

But in the midst of all this turmoil, one recent pundit argues that the eastern province of Marib, firmly in control of the Saudi/Emirati alliance, shows how one province succeeds in the midst of Yemen’s war. Not only is this sparsely populated and oil-rich area considered a success, it is said to be “thriving.” A football stadium with German turf and according to FIFA standards is being constructed and there is a new university for 5,000 students. The biblical land of the Queen of Sheba and famous Marib dam mentioned in the Quran (which was bombed at one point by the Saudis) is said to be “regaining a slice of its historical importance.”

So what is the lesson for Yemen’s future from this miracle in the desert? For journalist Adam Baron “Marib’s experience holds wider lessons for Yemen’s future: embracing decentralisation, empowering local actors, and focusing on ground-up stabilisation are all strands of the story that international and local players interested in bringing peace and stability to Yemen should note.” The main local actor here is a tribal sheikh named Sultan Arada, drawing on support of the conservative Islah movement. With outside money pouring in, he has morphed into the sultan of a fiefdom. The current “stability” is grounded not on local concerns but from the top-down flow of money from the neighboring international players, Saudis and Emiratis.

Yemen’s future is not in Marib, nor in building state-of-the-art FIFA stadiums in a country with a ravaged infrastructure, ongoing water crisis and sectarian violence fueled by the grueling three years of war. Marib is currently a colony of the Saudis, just as the Emiratis would like to take control of the island of Socotra and the port of Aden. The two wealthiest states of the now moribund GCC are carving out their zones of influence on the backs of people in the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula. Without the billions of dollars worth of weapons and strategic intelligence from the West, this war dividend could never have been realized.

Welcome to the latest, post-Cold War twist in the land once thought to be Holy. It is no longer direct Western intervention but a shared geocolonialism, in which the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran is applauded and abetted by Western leaders. Muhammad bin Salman’s recent trip to the U.S. sold his snake-oil reform in exchange for buying more weapons and all that he assumes oil-drenched money can buy. Meanwhile the Saudi abysmal track record on human rights and the war crimes of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen are ignored. If Marib is the model for Yemen’s future, then the only democracy, for its flaws, in the Arabian Peninsula will be geocolonized into yet another make-believe kingdom or emirate.

al-Juwayni on Islamic Law

juwayni

David R. Vishanoff has recently published online A Critical Edition, English Translation, and New Commentary on Imām al‑Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī’s Leaflet on the Sources of Law
(Kitāb al‑Waraqāt fī uṣūl al‑fiqh).

“For an English-speaking student who wishes to understand the theory behind Islamic law, the first step is to read an introductory legal theory text such as Muslim students traditionally read and memorize in the Arab world. The Kitāb al-Waraqāt fÄ« uṣūl al-fiqh, or Leaflet on the Sources of Law, attributed to the KhurāsānÄ« ShāfiÊ¿Ä« AshÊ¿arÄ« scholar Imām al-Ḥaramayn AbÅ« al-MaʿālÄ« Ê¿Abd al-Malik ibn AbÄ« Muḥammad al-JuwaynÄ« (d. 1085), is a good choice, for two reasons.

First, it is brief, yet covers all the main concepts, terms, and principles of the classical Islamic discipline of legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh), which explains the scriptural “roots” or “sources” (uṣūl) from which the detailed rules of Islamic law (fiqh) derive their authority, and the interpretive process that connects each rule to its sources. It defines what law and legal theory are, then explains how to analyze the language of Muslim scriptures (how to translate commands into laws, and various ways to resolve contradictions between texts), and then goes on to describe several other tools that one can use when scripture does not provide a clear rule (e.g. textual criticism and reasoning by analogy). It concludes with a description of who is qualified to use legal theory, and how certain they can be about the conclusions they reach.

Second, it is representative of mainstream SunnÄ« views that dominated legal thought in al-Juwaynī’s day and that are still widely accepted today…”

click here to go to the website.