All Things Arabia pdf download

All Things Arabia

ALL THINGS ARABIA

introduction

Complex Legacies: Materiality, Memory, and Myth in the Arabian Peninsula

Ileana Baird

This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks, And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.

Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712–1714/15)

All around the world national and communal identities are increasingly being defined through new readings of their history, and that history is frequently anchored in things.

Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010)

In a suggestive passage, Wilfred Thesiger, or, as his Arab friends affectionately called him, Mubarak bin London, described his encounter with the people of the Empty Quarter in the following terms:

“The northern Arabs had no traditions of civilization behind them. To arrange three stones as a fireplace on which to set a pot was the only architecture that many of them required. They lived in black tents in the desert, or in bare rooms devoid of furnishings in villages and towns.

 They had no taste nor inclination for refinements. Most of them demanded only the bare necessities of life, enough food and drink to keep them alive, clothes to cover their nakedness, some form of shelter

from the sun and wind, weapons, a few pots, rugs, water-skins, and their saddlery. It was a life which produced much that was noble, nothing that was gracious.”

This blunt description of the material life of the Arabian Peninsula about 1946–1947, the time when Thesiger crossed the Empty Quarter in the company of his Bedouin guides, shows the place as devoid of any “architecture,” “furnishings,” or “refinements”—material references seen here, in a similar way to Ibn Khaldûn’s much earlier’s ac- count in The Muqaddimah, as signs of “civilization.”

The detailed list of objects that fill the life of the desert Arabs—pots, rugs, water-skin, saddlery, weapons, tents—depicts a lifestyle of extreme simplicity, where food, drink, garments, and shelter are all that is needed for physical survival in the harsh desert environment. Albeit reductionist, this description is not inaccurate:

Thesiger experienced the desert firsthand and he recorded his impressions not only in writing but also visually, in the over 38,000 photographs currently held at the Pitt River Museum in Oxford. However, this depiction is strangely at odds with other accounts of Arabia as a place of breathtaking beauty and magic. Here is a recollection of the same place by Richard F. Burton, a nineteenth-century traveller to