The State of Agriculture in Late 13th Century Rasulid Yemen: Part 1

Agriculture, Conferences and Talks, Rasulids, Yemen

By Daniel Martin Varisco

[In 2003 I attended a conference in Rome and gave a paper which was eventually published in Convegno Storia e Cultura dello Yemen in età  Islamica, con particolare riferimento al periodo Rasûlide (Roma 30-31 ottobre 2003 (Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Fondazione Leone Caetani, 27, pp. 161-174, 2006). As this publication is virtually inaccessible, I am reprinting the paper here (with page numbers to the original indicted in brackets).] The original post on Tabsir was here.

INTRODUCTION AND SOURCES

[p. 161] About seven and a half centuries ago the second Rasulid sultan, al-Malik al-Mu?affar Y?suf ibn ‘Umar, was thrust into power in his youth after his father’s murder, just about the time the Genoan Marco Polo was born. The overlap between the Italian merchant mercenary and mercenary descendant sultan is fraught with irony. Al-Mu?affar, the untested state builder came to power just a decade before the overthrow of the Abbasid caliphate, which had blessed Rasulid rule as a buffer against the Zaydi imams of Yemen’s northern highlands, while the future Italian diplomat set out on his trek only a decade or so after the Mongols had destroyed Baghdad. Polo was destined to serve an aging Kublai Khan, returning to Italy in 1295, the very year that the seventy-year-old-plus Rasulid ruler died. When Polo referred to the immense wealth of the sultan of Aden, “arising from the imposts he lays” in the Indian Ocean trade, he meant al-Mu?affar. Marco Polo and al-Malik al-Mu?affar never met, except in print, but the world that they both embraced was centered on an important trade network linking the Mediterranean and Africa with Persia, India and ultimately the lands of the great Khan.

Fortunately for the Rasulids, the merciless Mongol warriors never reached Yemen, apart from a few individuals who later assisted a Yemeni sultan in compiling a King’s Dictionary also known as the “Rasulid Hexaglot.” (1) [p. 162] Yemen also escaped the incursions of crusading medieval knights, although the legacy of Saladin played a major role in defining its political fortunes until the arrival of the Ottoman garrisons and Portuguese galleons in the sixteenth century. My focus is on the zenith of the Rasulid era near the end of the long reign of al-Mu?affar, the preeminent state-builder of the dynasty. By 1252 he consolidated his hold over the coastal zone (Tih?ma), southern highlands and Aden, as well as achieving periodic control over ?an?’, thus driving the Zaydi imams back to their firm base in ?a‘da. The sultan’s forces in the late 1270s took control, by land and by sea, of the important southern harbors at al-Shi?r and Dhofar, two important sailing venues along the trade route to the Persian Gulf and India. In 682/1283, despite the Zaydi loyalties of many of the tribes, al-Mu?affar was able to briefly take hold of ?a‘da, even striking coins there. Military success led to increased diplomatic recognition for the Rasulids; later delegations are described in the chronicles as arriving from Persia, Oman, India and China. Fortunately, al-Mu?affar was an avid patron of architecture and learning, so that the material and written records of Rasulid activities are quite extensive. (2)

My paper is on the state of Yemeni agriculture near the end of al-Mu?affar’s reign, when his son al-Malik al-Ashraf ‘Umar wrote a major agricultural treatise entitled Mil? al-mal??a and included a detailed agricultural almanac in his astronomical compendium, al-Tab?ira f? ‘ilm al-nuj?m. (3) Perhaps the most valuable resource for the history of Yemen’s internal production and external trade at the close of the 7th/13th century is a compilation made for the court archives of al-Mu?affar. This is probably best styled, in English, a register, a daftar which documents customs, taxes, duties, state finances and production data for the areas under Rasulid control, most notably the commerce through the port of Aden. In this sense, it is a Rasulid “Doomsday Book,” a record of mundane matters that provides a far better insight on the economics and administration of Yemen at the time than any of the surviving historical chronicles. Internal dates indicate most of the information is based on field reports from 1292-96. Yemeni historian Mu?ammad ‘Abd al-Ra??m J?zim has recently edited and annotated this [p. 163] important text for the Centre français d’Archaeologie et de Sciences Sociales de Sanaa.(4)

FOOTNOTES:
(1) This is a unique Rasulid hexaglot, compiled in the 1370s and published in P. GOLDEN 2000. The Mongol dialect entries are mostly from the Il-khânid era.
(2) A fuller account of the achievements of al-Mu?affar is provided in VARISCO 1993a, pp. 14-23.
(3) For a detailed analysis of al-Ashraf’s agricultural almanac, see VARISCO 1994. See also VARISCO 2002, pp. 323-351.
(4) J?ZIM 2003.

to be continued …

The references for the whole paper are indicated below:

REFERENCES

Al-Akwa‘, Mu?ammad
1971 al-Yaman al-kha?r?’ mahd al-?a??ra. Cairo: Ma?ba‘at al-Sa‘?da.

Gingrich, Andre and J. Heiss. 1986. Beiträge zur Ethnographie der Provinz Sa‘dah. (Nordjemen). Sitz. Akad. d. Wiss. Phil-hist. Kl, vol. 462, Vienna.

Golden, Peter
2000 The King’s Dictionary: The Ras?lid Hexaglot: Fourteenth Century Vocabularies in Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Armenian and Mongol. Leiden: Brill.

Ibn Ba????a
1980. Ri?lat Ibn Ba????a. Beirut: D?r Bayr?t li-al-?ib?‘a wa-al-Nashr.

Ibn al-Muj?wir, Jam?l al-D?n Y?suf (died 690/1291)
1954 ?ifat bil?d al-Yaman wa-Makka wa-ba‘? al-Hij?z al-musamm?t ta’r?kh al-mustab?ir. 2 vols. Edited by Oscar Löfgren. Leiden: Brill.

Ibn S?da, ?asan
1965 al-Mukha??a?. 17 volumes. Beirut.

Ibn Wa?shiyya
1993-95 Kit?b al-Fil??a al-Naba?iyya. Edited by T. Fahd. Damascus: Institut Français de Damas.

al-Khazraj?, Ab? al-?asan ‘Al? (died 812/1410)
1906-18 The Pearl Strings: A History of the Resuliyy Dynasty of Yemen. Edited by J. Redhouse. 5 volumes. London: Luzac and Company.

Varisco, Daniel Martin
1993a The Agricultural Marker Stars in Yemeni Folklore. Asian Folklore Studies 52:120-142.
1993b Texts and Pretexts: The Unity of the Rasulid State under al-Malik al-Mu?affar. Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée 67 (1993):14-23.
1994 Medieval Agriculture and Islamic Science: The Almanac of a Yemeni Sultan. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
2002 Agriculture in Rasulid Zab?d. In J. F. Healey and V. Porter, editors, Studies on Arabia in Honour of Professor G. Rex Smith, 323-351. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wahhabis in the Dustbin?

"Arab Spring", Development, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism Issue, Wahhabi

This is a fascinating analysis by Hassan Hassan of the Saudi royal family trying to rewrite its past. It is available on the New/Lines website.

Here is the conclusion:

“Whatever Wahhabism is morphing into, though, it will not lead to a new lease on life. In Saudi Arabia and beyond, Wahhabism has been losing ground for too many years. The factors that once helped it grow no longer exist. Politically, the state no longer needs the ideology, which would not have flourished without the state. Even if the Saudi state decided to change its view about the utility of Wahhabism, it would not be able to reverse the trend. Wahhabism ran out of gas ideologically before it did politically. The ideology, sometimes seen as a distinct sect even from the Sunni tradition it emerged from, had long projected power disproportionate to its actual appeal and strength because it had the backing of a powerful and wealthy kingdom and a vast network of rich and generous donors. That bubble has now burst, and Wahhabism is reduced to its right size of being a minor player in the Muslim landscape, progressively including in Saudi Arabia.“

Bulldozing Islamic Jeddah

Archaeology and Antiquities, Architecture, Development, Ethics, Saudi Arabia, Wahhabi
mid-19th century view of Jeddah from Richard Burton’s travelogue

The current de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, MBS, has promoted a major development scheme entitled Vision 2030. This time, instead of sending henchmen with cleavers, he is authorizing imported Western bulldozers to basically turn the older parts of the historic port of Jeddah into a wannabe Dubai. As noted in a recent article on Qantara:

“Currently, the areas most affected by the destruction are those to the south and east of the old city, the Balad, parts of which have been designated UNESCO World Heritage sites. Prior to evacuation, between 10,000 and 50,000 people lived in each of these neighbourhoods. That means tens of thousands are likely to lose their homes. Estimates circulated by dissidents and demolition critics range from hundreds of thousands to one million."

The port of Jeddah has been the main stopping point for Muslim pilgrims on their way to Mecca for almost fifteen hundred years. It is described by early geographers in detail, given the amount of travelers who passed through. For the modern kingdom, however, history means nothing and can be erased by the whims of the super rich. This continues the destructive Wahhabi impulse that sacked Kerbala in 1802, as described below by ‘Uthman b. Abd Allah b. Bishr (d. 1872) in his Unwan al-Majd fi Tarikh Najd (Mecca, 1930):

“In the year 1802, Ibn Sa’ud made for Karbala with his victorious army, famous pedigree horses, all the settled people and Bedouin of Najd, the people of Janub, Hijaz, Tihama and others…The Muslims [i.e. the Wahhabis] surrounded Karbala and took it by storm. They killed most of the people in the houses and the markets. They destroyed the dome above al-Husayn’s grave. They took away everything they saw in the shrine and near it, including the coverlet decorated with emeralds, sapphires and pearls which covered the grave. They took away everything they found in the town—possessions, arms, clothes, fabric, gold, silver, and precious books. One cannot even enumerate the spoils! They stayed there for just one morning and left after midday, taking away all the possessions. Nearly 2000 people were killed in Karbala.”

When the well-primed news media talk about reform in Saudi Arabia, it is worth noting that reform has a long way to go, given the roots of its blood-soaked Wahhabi past. It will take more than letting women drive at the same time that women who protest are jailed, basic human rights in the kingdom are ignored, and heads are still chopped off in public. Even the chopping up of a journalist who dared to call out the corruption is now ignored, because of the profit for a family which defies the morality of the country’s own Prophet. As long as the Saudi regime buys Western military supplies, they are given free rein to use them, resulting in the world’s worst humanitarian disaster in Yemen, with thousands dead and more dying every day, and fueling the sectarian divide between the Saudis and Iran.

There is a saying that blood is thicker than water, but it seems that for the Saudi elite it is oil which is thicker than either blood or water. They have plenty of oil, have shed lots of blood and are desperate for water. All this leads to an economic domino effect: the world craves oil, oil revenues fuel a family wealth fund which spreads an intolerant interpretation of Islam worldwide, and then much of the oil revenues come back to oil-hungry countries who sell weapons to the Saudis.

Imagine if Greece leveled the Parthenon for a shopping mall and Italy replaced the Colloseum with a football field. In a sense that has already happened to Mecca and Medina. Welcome to Saudi Arabia in 2030…