[Webshaykh’s note: Dr. Saad Sowayan, as the post below will explain, has been collecting, analyzing and documenting the oral poetic traditions of the Arabian Peninsula, especially his native Saudi Arabia, since his graduate research. He has now completed two major works, available for reading on the internet, but still in search of an appropriate publisher. I invite readers to look over his impressive documentation and analysis and communicate with Dr. Sowayan any ideas that may help forward his project.]

by Dr. Saad Sowayan, King Saud University

After 10 years of continuous hard work, I managed to finish the two books, which, taking the size and importance of each, I consider to be my lifetime projects.
A) Legends & Oral Historical Narrative from Northern Arabia (1131 pages)
B) The Arabian Desert: Its Poetry & Culture Across the Ages: An Anthropological Approach (820 pages).

The first work, as its title says, is a collection of Bedouin narratives and poems relating to tribal genealogies, camel marks, tribal territories, water wells, sheikhs, warriors, tribal judges, tribal poets, personal histories, as well as narratives relating to raids and counter raids amongst tribes and other events. All of these are told by competent narrators & reciters in the various tribal dialects and all go back to pre and early 20th century. I have been engaged in taping this voluminous material during the span of the 4 years extending from 1982 up to 1985. Since 1995 I have been engaged in archiving, indexing, transcribing and editing this taped material which came to a total of several hundred hours of recorded interviews. Legends & Oral Historical Narratives from Northern Arabia (1131 pages) is the result of this effort very carefully transcribed and edited in Arabic script with full voweling tashkeel. The work comes with a very detailed table of contents and an introduction explaining the nature of the material along with some linguistic remarks and explanation of the transcription method I used. All in all, the work is a primary source on Arabian nomadic tribal culture, oral literature and vernacular language. This work constitutes a compliment to the works of P. Marcel Kurpershoek published in English by Brill in Leiden.

The other work, which contains 21 chapters, in addition to the introduction, table of contents, and bibliography, is theoretical in nature. It breaks all barriers between classical (pre and early Islamic) poetry and later nomadic poetry of Arabia and treats the whole corpus as one continuous oral poetic tradition.

The first few chapters examine this continuity and relationship between the earlier and the later traditions as reflected in their shared aesthetics, topois and language. Then the work moves on to examine this total tradition as a cultural mirror reflecting the desert culture of nomadic Arabia. Utilizing the latest findings in cultural literary criticism, the first chapter examines the nomadic culture as an oral culture and how this orality shapes its outlook, mode of thinking, as well as the production and consumption of literary material. The next three chapters deal with the relationship between classical Arabic and later Arabian nomadic poetry, with special reference to vernacular poetic material provided by Ibn Khaldun in his Muqaddimah. After that, two chapters give description and analysis of poetic dueling as a staged performance and as a genre different from the qasidah. The next chapter that deals with poetic composition from the point of view of the poets themselves. The chapter after that treats oral transmission and oral performance and the social context of poetic delivery. The next chapter is a rather long chapter dealing with the transformation of the historical to the legendary, through the process of oral transmission and reliance on memory as well as the giving of literal meanings to poetic similes and metaphor. It gives ample examples to show how the oral mode leads to mythopoeic thought.

The remaining chapters move on to analyze the cultural patterns and social structure of tribal nomads, mainly through the critical examination of tribal poems and narratives. An attempt is made to define bedouinism, the impact of camel domestication on the formation of tribal organization, and the relationship between bedouins and settlers. A whole chapter is dedicated to examination of the camel and the palm tree as iconic symbols par excellence of badu and hadhar, as reflected in Arabian poetry. Analysis of tribal ethos and tribal structure and nomadic mode of living take three chapters. After that comes the chapter dealing with raids and how they are organized and the rules of engagement governing combat and division of booty. The next chapter is a preliminary attempt to show how culture and nature interact in the desert, how the nomad sees himself and his ability to adapt to desert environment vis a vis the wild beasts, especially the wolf, whose symbolic value for the bedouin comes next only to the camel. The last two long chapters expound on honor codes of the desert and on tribal customary laws. The work is full of citations from primary sources, unpublished manuscript and, especially, poems and narratives in tribal dialects from the above work, Legends & Oral Historical Narrative from Northern Arabia, as well as from P. Marcel Kurpershoek material.

The introduction to each book gives a fuller idea of the nature, content, method and aims of the book. The two books can be viewed on my Website: (www.saadsowayan.com) under the links there for Arabian Desert Poetry & Culture and Legends & Oral Narratives from Northern Arabia. A look at the table of contents provides a quick idea about the size and nature of the two works. From the same website, you can also download my published works in Arabic & in English as well as my CV.

The two books on the website are protected. They can be read but not printed or downloaded. Only the title page, table of contents and introduction can be downloaded. Of course, if things look promising from the publisher’s end, the two works could be dispatched as files in pdf format. The two works are already laid out and proof read. I have a pre-press outfit and I can send them in any format ready to print.

I believe the two works are scientifically valuable and both are executed according to high academic standards. The problem is that both are in Arabic. This usually dampens the enthusiasm of Western publishers and Western institutions. As for local publishers, neither of the two works would pass muster because of strict censorship in the Gulf Region. I am sure you are well aware that in a developing nation, such as Saudi Arabia, on the verge of sociocultural transformation, sensitive issues multiply and many red lines are drawn which limit intellectual maneuvering to a great extent. In its effort to restructure its national identity and rewrite its history so many topics become taboo in a developing nation. In this respect, historical, social and cultural topics turn into volatile issues. None of these two books is written with the express purpose of challenging the status quo or offending any of the dominant ideologies: religious, political, social, or whatever. But this is just how the chips fall when you do true scientific intellectual work. As for other Arab publishers, such as in Egypt or Lebanon, they are not very keen on publishing serious works. They lean more towards commercial-popular books. Furthermore, Egyptian and Levantine intellectuals have their minds made up that Arabia per se does not have much to offer in terms of culture. Most are so urbanized that they are at a total loss when it comes to dealing with Bedouin culture and literature; hence publishers there are not really much interested in the nomadic culture of Arabia Deserta.

The Arabian Peninsula is a fertile and virgin ground when it comes to dialectological, folkloric and anthropological research. It is an expansive area with extremely long history and variegated regions with very interesting local subcultures. All this needs to be documented. The whole area was practically living in the oral stage until just a few decades ago, which means only very negligible records are left of its true sociocultural history and literature. Furthermore, the place was practically closed to foreign researchers until very recently. Unfortunately, many obstacles stand in the way hindering a native scholar from doing serious research in this field. The study of local culture, local folklore, oral literature and dialects is viewed as an Orientalist, colonial conspiracy to undermine the sacred language of the Quran. On the other hand, the political ideologues say that such undertaking undermines Arab unity by concentrating on what divides the Arabs regionally rather than what unites them from the Gulf to the Atlantic as one great nation. Add to this the popular assumption that oral literature and folklore are merely fairy tales, which do not merit real serious scholarship and do not deserve respectable academic status.

This is the predicament of native Arab folklorists. This very fact itself, this resistance by Arabs to the academic study of their native traditional culture and folklore and their ambivalent attitude towards the subject is in itself an interesting topic, which needs to be thoroughly investigated in order to fathom its ideological roots and its sociocultural background. I tried to deal with it in the first chapter of my book Ash-shi’r an-nabati published by Dar as-Saqi (2000).

Of course, there is no lack here of titles of books in Arabic on oral literature, folklore, folk culture and what have you. But such titles are mostly either authored by semi-literates, because the general feeling here is that such a field is the preserve of the illiterates and semi-literates, or they are injected with the proper dose of ideological rhetoric, which reminds one of how things used to be in China and the previous Soviet Union, Also, in order to pass censorship, they have been emasculated to the point of being neither useful nor reliable. Under such intellectual atmosphere, the prospect of finding a respectable local publisher for my work is rather dim and I would truly appreciate any help or suggestion that might come your way.

Although my two projects can not be published locally for reasons of censorship, I am sure once published, readers throughout the Gulf Region will want to buy them and read them, because they address current issues people now are getting interested in and want to know more about. They are written in a style and format that meet the strictest academic standards but, at the same time, the material is well organized, the language is quite facile and the arguments are easy to follow. The very fact that the books are in Arabic will encourage sale among local readers, especially members of the several tribes mentioned in these works, since most of them do not know any other language. The popularity of the topic is amply demonstrated by the mushrooming of local TV channels in the Gulf Region exclusively dedicated to the airing of poetic recitations, camel races and such similar manifestations of bedouin culture and the nomadic past, not to mention the long lists of publications. But people are keenly aware that such publications and media material are not of pure quality, either because they are produced by unqualified people or because they have been doctored and whitewashed through censorship to the point of being either falsified or devoid of real content. People are eager to put their hands on a source that does not shy from telling the story as it really happened and provide them with key intellectual concepts that would help them understand their social history and appreciate its cultural values and oral literary output.

Due to the nature of their subject matter, my two works should provide a relief and a respite from the tirade of books on Wahhabism & terrorism, as if nothing is happening to talk about in Arabia but such ghastly topics. They will also, I think, help introduce and give currency to Kurpershoek’s valuable work amongst Arab readers, since I link with and often quote his volumes. I welcome suggestions from readers of this post about possible venues of publication.