4/FOSS, GILLS AND THE 6TH CENTURY AD WORLD SYSTEM CRISIS
Dear Colleagues,
I finished my last posting with the following words:
A few words should be added with respect to the very
interesting adaptation of the Arabs to the 6th century AD socio-
ecological crisis which had very important consequences for the
evolution of the World System as a whole. I hope to do this in
my next posting.
So, I shall try do this now.
PART 4. THE ARAB ADAPTATION TO THE 6TH CENTURY AD WORLD SYSTEM
CRISIS
Actually, what was described at the end of my previous message
may well be described as an important component of this rather
effective adaptation. This was simply that most socio-political
systems of the Arabs (or, for the extreme methodological
individualists, the Arabs themselves - anyhow, it could be well
described in both ways) reacted rather adequately to the socio-
ecological crisis by getting rid of the rigid supra-tribal
political structures (i.e. all those kings, chiefs and their
retainers) which started posing a real threat to their very
survival. Indeed, it is rather difficult to imagine anything
more nasty than the royal messangers coming to you in a lean
year (which may well have been preceeded by one or two similar
years) and demanding from you to pay royal taxes when you
yourself have nothing to eat and to feed your children.
However, the Arabs did not only destroyed most of those rigid
political supra-communal structures allienating the tribal
sovereignty, but also developed their alternatives - soft
structures not posing any threat to the sovereignty of tribes.
Most noticeable of them seems to be the development of the
system of sacred enclaves, regular pilgrimages to them and
accompaning this regular pilgrim fairs (mawa:sim).
The result was the development of rather effective
intersocietal networks, of which the best known is the Western
Arabian religious-political area (the functioning and evolution
of which, incidentally, left a noticeable trace on the history
of the World System as a whole).
It seems to have been formed as a result of the
expansion of the zones of influence of the respective
sanctuaries, their interweaving into one more or less
integrated religious-political area.
This of course was primarily a religious area, yet it
had evident political dimensions too. It was in the
pilgrimage-fairs (mawa:sim) at the above
mentioned
sanctuaries "that traditional tribal society established
its manifold contacts, the exchange of the religious and
use-value. Furthermore, the various legal problems
(armistice, debts, benefits, payment of blood-money,
bailing out of prisoners, finding of clients, looking for
disappeared persons, questions of heritage, etc.) of the
participants were also settled there. This exchange of
and cults common to several tribes, that is, regular social
contact in general, played no negligible role in the
extension of particular tribal consciousness" (Simon 1989,
90; also see especially Wellhausen 1927, 88-91).
As a result we can observe the formation of a certain political
area more or less correlating with the religious one, an area
where certain norms of not only religious, but also political
culture were shared, where the people would avoid killing
travellers in ashhur h*urum, the holy months (and would
consider the same parts of the year as the holy months),
where the
representatives of various tribes would go to the same places
to settle their conflicts, and would observe the same rules of
political mediation &c. The most remarkable fact is the almost
complete absence of significant intertribal warfare in "the
area of the four sanctuaries" between the time of its final
formation (i.e. h*arb al-Fija:r in the last decade of the6-
th century AD) and the start of the clashes with the
Muslims. Actually at this time we can observe in the "Area
of Four Sanctuaries" (In the early 7th century
AD it covered not only Western
Arabia, but also considerable parts of the other Arabian
regions)cultural-political entity, which in the absence of
any significant political centralization secured the
existence of a huge cultural network within which a very
intensive (and very productive) exchange of information, energy
and matter took place.
(Being polycentric the Western Arabian area seems to have
had a considerably heterogenous structure including a few
interweaving subsystems centred on the respective sanctuaries.
The best known is the hums amphyctiony centred on the Meccan
sanctuary.)
[Incidentally, this type of cultural-political entities
seems to be ignored (without any reasonable justification) by
practically all the "classical" theories of social evolution
(e.g. Claessen, Skalnik 1978; Claessen et al. 1985; Fried 1967;
Hallpike 1986; Lenski 1987; Parsons 1977; Sanderson 1990;
Service 1971 [1962]) and does not seem to fit in all these
essentially unilineal evolutionist schemes, especially in their
most popular "band - tribe - chiefdom - state" version (with
all its modifications). Indeed, all the Western Arabian
polities of the early 7th century appear to have had a rather
"primitive" socio-political structures (which seems to be valid
even with respect to the Meccan community [see e.g. Dostal
1991]) and, according, to such schemes could be only classified
as "autonomous communities", "tribes", at most as "chiefdoms"
(though most Arabian "chiefdoms" seem to have disintegrated in
the second half of the 6th century AD). However, they were
parts of a much wider cultural-political entity whose overall
level of social complexity may well be compared with the one of
an average "early state"; though lacking the political
centralization this entity fails to find its place in the above
mentioned schemes (this appears to be true with respect to any
processes of socio-cultural growth which are not accompanied by
the growing political centralization, or especially going in
hand with the political decentralization).].
In general, the Arabs appear to have developed a rather
effective adaptation to the 6th century World System crisis.
The soft intersocietal networks they created even permitted
them to assume the role of the guardians of the important WS
links in the WS Southern area, a role which the Great Powers of
the late 6th - early 7th century were already unable to perform
(the point which Foss and I discussed on the WSN this summer).
In Re: 2/FOSS, GILLS AND THE 6TH CENTURY AD WORLD SYSTEM CR of
Tue, 1 Oct 1996 14:49:31 Barry Gills asks me:
>I presume you are saying that
>the general world economic crisis "levelled" the states and
>chiefdoms
>of the Arabian peninsula in its wake- setting back state
>forms to
>less complex formations?
There is something in this statement that I cannot say and
accept. The states and chiefdoms of the Central Arabia were not
levelled to less complex formations in the course of the 6th
century crisis but rather developed into a more complex, subtle
and effective stateless system. I would definitely avoid describing these
processes as anything like decline, degeneration or
regress.
I have strated this message (and finished the previous one)
with:
A few words should be added with respect to the very
interesting adaptation of the Arabs to the 6th century AD socio-
ecological crisis which had very important consequences for the
evolution of the World System as a whole. I hope to do this in
my next posting.
Actually, I have not discussed these consequences yet, so I
shall try to do this in my next message.
Yours,
(Dr) Andrey Korotayev, Senior Research Fellow
Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of
Sciences
(Sector of Theoretical Problems of Oriental
History)
12 Rozhdesrvenka, Moscow 103753, RUSSIA
Fax: (7) (095) 975 2396; E-MAIL: andrei@rsuh.ru