7/FOSS, GILLS AND THE 6TH CENTURY AD WORLD SYSTEM CRISIS
I finished my last posting (c3 weeks ago) with the following
words:
Again, I have not managed to finish the series of my messages
today, having spelled out only one of the World System
consequences I wanted to discuss. I have to speak about at
least one other next time (and to finish my series with this).
Though too much time (by network standrads) has passed since
that moment, I still feel obliged to finish my series as I
promised to. Now I shall try to be as brief as possible.
PART 7. SOME WORLD SYSTEM CONSEQUENCES:
TRIBAL STRUCTURES
As has been already mentioned above Arabs elaborated a rather
effective adoptation to the 6th century crisis to a
considerable extent through the massive transformation of their
state and chiefdom structures into the tribal ones. This could
hardly be regarded as a degeneration because the newly
elaborated tribal structures turned out to be able to serve the
functional needs of rather comlex stratified societies.
With the Islamic conquests these tribal structures and
tribal ethos (al-qabaliyyah) appear to have proliferated
through almost all of the territory of the new Islamic state
(which occupied, incidentally, most of the central area of the
World System).
Of course, it should be stressed that there is not so much of
al-qabaliyyah in Islam itself. Yet it seems necessary to take
into account the following moments.
To start with within the Russian Islamic Studies the Islamic
civilization was traditionally designated as the Arab-Moslem
one (which naturally often met strong objections on the part of
our Moslem colleagues from the former Soviet Central Asia).
However, I would stress that this designation is rather helpful
in some respects. The fact is that this civilization
(especially within the territory of the first Islamic Empire)
seems to contain important Arab non-Islamic elements (and
cannot be understood without taking them into account). And al-
qabaliyyah appears to be one of them.
It is important to mention that the Arabs were the dominant
ethnos within the Islamic Empire at least till the Abbasid
revolution in the middle of the 8th century AD; and the Arab
culture as a whole (including its non-Islamic components, like
al-qabaliyyah) acquired a rather high prestige and proliferated
within the borders of the Empire.
The proliferation of the tribal structures and tribal ethos
seems to have had both positive and negative consequenses.
On the one hand, in the areas where most of the population
acquired the tribal organization it often permitted the
existence of complex systems of non-oppressed agriculturalists
(which is very difficult to find otherwise in the preindustrial
world). One of the most evident cases is the North-East Yemen
Highlands of this millennium, where the tribal organization for
most time effectively prevented the exploitation of most
agriculturalists (most plough agriculturalists being armed
honourable tribesmen), at the meantime securing the existence
of an intence network of markets, towns, centres of learning
&c.
Netwithstanding all the attractiveness of such systems some
negative consequences of their proliferation should not be also
overlooked. Looking rather attractive from inside they often
looked entirely unattractive for their non-tribal neighbours,
who often had to deal with rather destructive side-effects of
their functioning. In general, the proliferation of the tribal
structures seem to have played a rather important role in the
inducing of the cyclical Khaldunian processes (for a model of
such processes in addition to Ibn Khalduns al-Muqaddimah
itself see e.g. Gellners Moslem Society [1982]) which
contributed significantly to the Middle Eastern involution in
the 11-18th cent., thus contributing to the loss by the former
central part of the World System of its central role.