Download PDF | Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration, By Kristina Richardson, I.B. Tauris, 2021.
257 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Inspiration for this book came in late 2014, while I was a fellow at the Institut für Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft at the University of Münster. I held that post from 2012 to 2014, where I worked with Professor Thomas Bauer, who warmly welcomed me into his weekly Arabic seminar. There, I had the honor of reading and learning alongside the most capable and kind Arabists I have ever met: Syrinx van Hees, Hakan Özkan, Anke Osigus, Andreas Herdt, Nefeli Papoutsakis, and Rana Siblini. Many of them were engaged with an edition of the poetry collection of Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, a fascinating Mamluk author who figures centrally in Chapter 3.
I never would have learned so much about him were it not for the work of Thomas, Hakan, and Anke. From 2014 to 2015 the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg at the University of Bonn provided another intellectual home. Under the guidance of Stephan Conermann and Bethany Walker, I began to understand the vast scope of my project. Grateful for our weekly seminars, intellectual discussion, and brilliant workshops, I was able to shape this project as I have. During my 2017–18 sabbatical, I spent the fall semester at the University of Munich, where I had the pleasure to earn the moral and scholarly support of Helga Rebhan, Andreas Kaplony and Teresa Bernheimer.
While living in Munich near the Benedictine monastery St. Boniface’s Abbey, I became aware that the community had Christian Arabic manuscripts. A librarian at St. Boniface’s directed me to their affiliated monastery in Andechs, a site of pilgrimage since the twelfth century. One intrepid morning, Boris Liebrenz met me and my daughter Cecilia in Munich, and the three of us ventured to Andechs on a manuscript pilgrimage. We were refused entry into the library, to my daughter’s relief, but the visit was not a total wash.
The experience helped me appreciate the autonomy and isolation of monastic communities and the reverence that approaching the cloister on foot could inspire. That day’s excursion led to some of the book’s main arguments about the medieval transfer of print technologies. Warmest gratitude goes to Boris, who has offered endless support (along with welcome challenges) to my theories and project; I am so grateful for his friendship, patience, intelligent commentary, and hospitality over the years. Back in New York City, my home institution of Queens College has consistently supported my work with approvals of fellowship leaves and an internal Mellon Foundation award.
The CUNY Graduate Center Committee on Globalization and Social Change helped hone my discussions on the stakes of this research. I owe gratitude to Gary Wilder, Joan Wallach Scott, Mandana Limbert, Susan BuckMorss, Duncan Faherty, and Barbara Naddeo, whose comments helped shape the Introduction. Two grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities—a2019 summer stipend and a 2020 award—permitted the time and space to complete this manuscript. I am equally grateful for the informal conversations over coffees and beers with the Leipzig-based anthropologists Bernhard Streck and Olaf Günther. The book also benefited greatly from conversations with Beth Baron, Susan Boynton, Gottfried Hagen, Rob Haug, Stefan Heidemann, Daniel Kaufman, Lulu Reinhardt, Karl Schaefer, Martin Schwartz, the late Satadru Sen, Jens Ulff-Møller, and Torsten Wollina. Students in my history seminars on “History of the Roma” and “Printing Before Gutenberg” heard these arguments develop over time, and I really appreciated their engagement with and even resistance to so many new ideas. A version of the Introduction appeared as “Invisible Strangers, or Romani History Reconsidered,” History of the Present 10.2 (2020): 187–207, and a version of Chapter 2 was published as “Tracing a Gypsy Dialect through Medieval Arabic and Persian Literature,” Der Islam 94.1 (April 2017): 115–57. I would also like to thank the board of the Early and Medieval Islamic World series, my patient editors Rory Gormley and Yasmin Garcha, and the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript, whose comments helpfully sharpened my arguments. This book is dedicated to my family and my teachers.
INTRODUCTION
HOW THE GHURABĀ’ FELL OUT OF HISTORY
In the late sixteenth century a Muslim silk weaver named Kamāl al-Dīn regularly recorded anecdotes and observations about his life and work in Ottoman Aleppo. A lengthy fragment of this notebook survives today and makes for an unusual witness to this time and place, representing the perspective not of members of the religious, military, or scholarly elite but that of an ordinary craftworker.1 Kamāl al-Dīn lived in the northeasternmost quarter beyond the city walls, not in the city center where the old, elite families resided.
The external border of his neighborhood fronted wilderness and absorbed a critical branch of the Silk Roads that extended eastward through Central Asia and into China. New migrants from Central and East Asia tended to settle there, and this cultural mix may have nurtured his sensitivity to people and their languages. In his notebook Kamāl al-Dīn recorded an Arabic sign alphabet that he had learned, composed entries in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, and discussed a Hebrew wall inscription with a Jewish friend. Perhaps most astonishingly, in early 1589 Kamāl al-Dīn noticed an unusual occurrence on the streets of Aleppo.
I saw an easterner singing in seven languages with his tambourine in his hand. First, he sang in Arabic, then in Turkish, then in Persian, then in Kurdish, then in Gorani, then in the language of the strangers [bi-lisān al-ghurabā’], then in Hindi. In other years I have seen Indians with a dancing boy. They were playing a long-necked stringed instrument (ṭanbūr), a tambourine, and a vertical flute. Two copper bowls were in the hand of the boy.
They wander from one musical act to another, just as the warbler (dukhkhal) does. Of their singing one can know the metre, but not understand its meaning, unless you are from among them. Praise to the great Creator.2 When first reading this list of seven languages, “the language of the Strangers” struck me as an uncharacteristically opaque phrase from an author who, in other passages, had taken pains to explain obscure terms. Judging by the syntax and grammar, it is clear that “the language of the Strangers” was not synonymous with “an unspecified foreign language” and also that “the Strangers” were a known group, but who were they? A tribal confederation known as Banū Sāsān renamed themselves ghurabā’ (“Strangers”) by the late thirteenth century, and this new label—the classical Arabic term for so-called Gypsies—has endured into the present.
The ghurabā’ also spoke a Semitic language that they called Sīn and that outsiders called “the language of the Strangers.” Today, Sīn, which some of its speakers now refer to as Sīm, survives as a spoken language among entertainers in Alexandria and Cairo, and among the peripatetic Ḥalab community that lives along the Nile basin in Egypt and the Sudan. The umbrella terms “Gypsies” and “Strangers” are similarly vague, in that they encompass the Armenian Lom and the Levantine Dom, who speak Indo-European languages closely related to Romani, as well as the English Travellers and the Central European Yenish (German, Jenische; French, Yéniche), who speak wholly unrelated languages.
This broad conception of affiliation and identity sharply contrasts with researchers’ tendency to treat the Roma as an isolated diasporic Indian community, obscuring their historical relationships with culturally similar, but linguistically distinct groups. Neglecting their elective ties with European and Ottoman Jews, as well as certain traveling groups in Central Europe, distorts Romani history, by propping up racist framing of the Roma as representative of a “pure,” “uncorrupted” culture. Modern Romani studies are premised on a linguistic view of kinship. “Only if isolation [of the field of Romani Gypsy studies] is shattered and a fundamental debate about the premises of Gypsy studies takes place in prestigious periodicals and is addressed to a broad academic public can we expect, perhaps, to arrive at a deeper understanding of the history of Gypsies.”3 In fact, the key premise upholding the isolation of Romani studies from other “Gypsy” studies is the construction of Roma ethnicity on the basis of linguistic models of kinship.
In the first half of this introduction, I will show how the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and North American philologists, medievalists, and ethnographers delegitimized the Strangers’ language and the culture that this language expressed. In the latter half of the introduction, I will show that Nazi German racial classifications were adopted and, indeed, strengthened by the Romani diaspora, in part because it appealed to their own Romani ethnocentrism but also to make themselves sympathetic to a legal regime that only recognized them as a distinct racial group. These related developments reveal how the Strangers became lost as an object of historical inquiry. The task now is to recover their medieval past and integrate into global medieval studies and as a vital corrective to centuries of academic and popular misconceptions about so-called Gypsies.
culture was largely invisible in historical treatments of the town and the Rhine Valley. The modern-day Yenish and Ḥalab Sīn-speakers have much in common. Both communities have concentrated settlements along the banks of the Rhine and the Nile, two northward-flowing rivers. They are both identified with begging and itinerancy, and they speak mixed languages.
The Yenish language has a German grammatical base, and its vocabulary derives mainly from German, Hebrew, and Romani.5 That the Yenish maintained close contact with Jewish and Roma communities is evidenced in the significant lexical absorptions but is also substantiated through historical documentation. After the First World War, many traditionally Roma habits like begging, fortune-telling, and itinerancy were restricted in Germany, and the Roma were made to live in housing for the poor outside large urban areas.
Though the Roma and Yenish plied similar trades, often occupied the same camps, and intermarried and absorbed each other’s vocabularies, their histories are rarely told together.6 Both groups were targeted by Nazi laws: Roma classified as “Gypsy” and the Yenish as “asocial.” Between 1935 and 1945, many Yenish were interned in camps and deported from Germany and the Netherlands, and as many as 500,000 Roma and an undetermined number of Yenish were exterminated in concentration and labor camps. On its face the historiographical separation between the Yenish and the Roma is clearly arbitrary, akin to deeming the Ojibwa nation as other than Indigenous because their language group is distinct from that of the Cherokee nation. Rather, anthropologists eschew essentializing groups based on “predetermined, global criteria.”
Current discussions privilege defining indigeneity “in local and relational terms” that depend on context and relationships with their environment. As such, they construct ties through settlement in the Americas, shared belief systems, and lifestyles.7 So how did Strangers understand themselves and their relationship to broader society? The term “Stranger” suggests a specific outward stance. In 1908 the German Jewish sociologist Georg Simmel published an essay about those members of a given society who complicate the binary of exclusion and assimilation. They constitute “an element of the group itself . . . an element whose membership within the group involves being both outside it and confronting it.”8
It is precisely this ceaseless negotiation of belonging to non-Stranger communities and subsequent adaptations to shifting those communities’ needs that define the Strangers’ worldview. For Simmel community bonds are forged and solidified through economic relationships, like the division of labor and land ownership. Therefore, the archetypal Strangers were tradespeople who furnished products and services that the local population could not provide themselves, as well as European Jews who “were no owner of land—land not only in the physical sense but also metaphorically as a vital substance which is fixed, if not in space, then at least in an ideal position within the social environment.”9 Simmel’s reading, in its privileging of labor categories and property as key determinants of social class, has a distinctly Marxist cast, but the medieval Strangers organized themselves into professional tribes and did not claim specific territorial origins.10
It is precisely this definition of strangerhood that researchers Aparna Rao and Joseph Berland argued was the distinctly unifying principle—over and above ethnicity, religion, language, or nationality—of peripatetic populations in Asia and Africa.11 This shared identity as Strangers is reproduced in the names of contemporary Muslim Gypsy communities in the Balkans, Africa, and Asia, many of which are some form of the name ghurabā’. This apparent naming continuity underscores the foundational importance of the medieval Strangers as well as the deliberate cultivation of social status outside of the mainstream. The term gurbet entered the Ottoman Turkish lexicon sometime after the 1550s, designating the same groups as the Arabic ghurabā’. 12 The Kurbat of Syria speak Domari; the Afghan and Iranian Ghorbat are Shi‘ite peripatetics who speak Ghorbati; and in Egypt and the Sudan “the most common description of Gypsy groups along the Nile is ghurabā’, which means Strangers.”13 In the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, where Muslims are grouped according to perceived origins, there were three main Muslim communities: the Gharīb, the Lhasa Khache, and the Wabaling.
The Gharīb were distinguished by their non-Tibetan name and their low-status work as beggars and street cleaners. In 1961 and 1962, the Gharīb migrated to India.14 Additionally, many European Roma communities today also bear this name, rendered as Gurbet, and their dialects are called Gurbet Romani. Communities of Rom Gurbets settled in the Balkan states of Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia.15 In Serbia the Gurbéti clan is Muslim. In Cyprus the Gurbet clan speak Gurbetçi, and in Crimea the Gurbét clan also call themselves Truchmén, which may be a corruption of Turkmen.
In North America the Roma call the Travellers gurbet. 16 The Stranger label has deep historical roots and enduring continuity, and the Strangers’ self-fashioning as an alienated people emerges in premodern writings and also in modern memoirs and ethnographies of Roma and similar groups. Jan Yoors, a Belgian Flemish non-Roma who left his family in 1934 at the age of twelve to live with a Roma traveling unit, related an illuminating exchange with Pulika, a Roma elder. When Yoors referred to the Kalderash Rom as Russian Gypsies, “Pulika wearily told me how misleading it was to single out Gypsies by a national identity, in view of their constant, wide-flung traveling. He said I at least should know they were ‘a race of strangers.’”17 Pulika rejected the homogenizing, territory-based national identities in favor of a “racial” identity not rooted in blood, territory, or language, but in solidarity with fellow land-rejecting people who were estranged from the status quo.
Pulika upends Yoors’s assumed naturalness of identifying with national categories. As the historian Joan W. Scott has written, “categories of identity we take for granted as rooted in our physical bodies (gender and race) or our cultural (ethnic, religious) heritages are, in fact, retrospectively linked to those roots; they don’t follow predictably or naturally from them.”18 While the category of Strangers is also inadequate for capturing the multiplicity of people’s lives, its ambiguity allows for a multiplicity of affiliations. Scott continues, “There’s an illusory sameness established by referring to a category of person (women, workers, African Americans, homosexuals) as if it never changed, as if not the category, but only its historical circumstances varied over time.”19 But in this next section, I will examine how the modern European state ruptured Stranger solidarities, dividing the Stranger community to reflect identities accepted by modern nations.
This shift fundamentally changed the ways in which scholars wrote about and imagined Strangers. Nevertheless, Strangerhood has proven to be a persistent principle uncompromised by centuries of exposure to the culture or language or history of these Strangers. Even when they have shared information about their professions and habits, as they did periodically in the Middle Ages and to nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century ethnographers, Strangers became no less strange to observers.20 As Carlo Ginzburg demonstrated in his microhistory The Cheese and the Worms, learning more about the heterodox cosmology of the miller Menocchio did not make him more relatable to his contemporaries. He remained strange until the very end.
Genetic Purity and Languages
In 1808 the philologist Friedrich Schlegel advanced the hypothesis that Sanskrit was the ancestral language of the Indo-European language family, and Arthur de Gobineau developed this idea further in his On the Inequality of the Human Races (1861), by proposing the existence of a superior parent Aryan race in his 1861 book. This problematic linkage of language with race enjoyed wide acceptance in late nineteenth-century scientific communities, and the familial/genetic model of relations influenced the vocabulary of both fields of study.
Languages belong to “families” with genetic lineages such that we can speak uncontroversially of “ancestral” and “parent” languages. “Sister” languages, like Arabic and Hebrew, share a common “ancestor.” A so-called “bastardized language”—such as American English from the perspective of a speaker of British English—referred to what is now known as a dialect. The “bastardization” conveys the judgment of linguistic illegitimacy and tainted transformations. Even if the concept of bastardization has fallen into disuse among linguists, the idea of linguistic purity still has academic and popular currency. In 1886 the Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein (German Language Association) was founded with the express mission of isolating “pure” German language from the “foreign” vocabulary that had invaded it. While this association has been disbanded, several European states still host similar institutions.
The Académie Française, for one, actively combats the corrupting “competition” and “real threat” of English in modern French.21 In short, the taxonomy of language families does not capture the full spectrum of language development. Language isolates, such as the Ainu language of Japan, have no apparent genetic relation to any known language. Following the logic of kinship, each language isolate constitutes a single language family, and by one recent estimate they make up 32 percent of all language families.22 Many other languages, like Jamaican Patois, developed through cultural contact, not as genetic offshoots of parent languages. Language contact produces specific varieties of linguistic change, and current linguistic modeling ascribes subsidiary status to those pidgins, creoles, and multilingual mixed languages that do not slot into genetic models. Rather than a vertical genetic development, these types of languages result horizontally, from everyday exposure and exchange. A contact language can only fit into a family tree as the ancestor of a language family. Even though it possesses no single “parent,” it can have descendants.23 Pidgins, such as Namibian Black German, develop when two or more groups share no common language, and rather than learning each other’s languages, they typically mix the grammars and draw vocabulary from one of the languages to create a pidgin. So, pidgins do not initially serve as anyone’s native language, though nativized pidgins would then be considered a creole.
A creole like Gullah, on the other hand, is the native language of a speech community. In the case of mixed languages, the grammatical base derives from one language, and the lexicon from one or another different language, most famously exemplified by Jewish languages other than Hebrew. Yiddish (JudeoGerman), for instance, has a German grammatical base interspersed with Hebrew vocabulary; Judezmo/Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Shuadit (Judeo-Occitan), Yevanic (Judeo-Greek), and Italkian (Judeo-Italian) have traditionally been considered “multi-genetic languages,” though more recent research rejects the kinship terminology, reframing Jewish languages in terms of “fusion” or “divergence and convergence.”24
This more flexible approach circumvents the rigid genetic model of linguistics that has sustained particular cultural hierarchies. The dynamism of contact better captures the lived experiences of language speakers and paths of linguistic development of mobile populations. While language families have some scientific validity, reliance on this model alone to explain all linguistic phenomena simplifies complex historical developments. The anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot remarked that Western observers created subalterns by weaponizing language against foreign populations. Because these observers did not find grammar books or dictionaries among the so-called savages, because they could not understand or apply the grammatical rules that governed these languages, they promptly concluded that such rules did not exist. . . . [T]he field was uneven from the start; the objects contrasted were eminently incomparable.25
Many observers—from the ninth century to the present day—have resolved the incommensurability of Sīn grammar with those of recognized languages by demoting Sīn to a casual jargon used within a community of thieves, tricksters, and beggars. In spite of today’s interdisciplinary consensus that Sīn-speakers are disreputable people who share a degraded form of speech, medievalists and social scientists have been largely unaware of each other’s scholarship on the subject. Most medievalists do not know that the language of the Banū Sāsān is a living language, and, conversely, most anthropologists and sociologists are unaware of Sīn’s medieval history. How did these separate epistemological traditions result in the same problematic conclusion?
Orientalist Discourses on Sīn-Speakers
Alfred von Kremer, who served as the Austrian consul to Egypt from 1859 to 1862, published his observations on the country in two massive volumes entitled Aegypten (1863). The section on the Ḥalab and similar groups, which was translated into English and published the following year, opens with a comparison of the Jewish and Stranger diasporas. “Excepting the Jews there is no people so scattered over the earth as the gipsies. Homeless and yet everywhere at home, they have preserved their physiognomy, manners, and language.”26 Von Kremer evokes the exceptionality and strangeness of their perpetual deracination, a condition that feels intensified among the Strangers, because unlike the Jews, they claim no ancestral homeland. For von Kremer and for generations of scholars after him, their language—like their lineage—is condemned because it is unclassifiable and untraceable. “All these subdivisions of the Egyptian gipsies speak the same thievish slang language, which they call Sīm. Nothing certain is known concerning the origin of this word.”27
Following this statement, von Kremer includes 106 Sīm words that he learned from a snake-catcher in Cairo and from other native speakers in Upper Egypt. On the basis of this slender evidence he reaffirms his earlier impression of the language: “There can be no doubt we have here to do with a thievish slang dialect, made use of by the gipsies in order not to be understood by strangers. The circumstance that amongst themselves they speak Arabic, and Sīm only in the presence of strangers, is decisive on this point.”28 Von Kremer registers his exclusion from conversation as a sign of Sīn-speakers’ hostile intent, though all he seems to describe is a community that is, at minimum, bilingual. In spite of its obvious limitations, von Kremer’s branding has regrettably structured, as we shall see, much subsequent research on speakers of Sīm/Sīn. During her fieldwork with Egyptian Sīm-speakers, the sociologist Alexandra Parrs learned—through her Arabic-English translator—the Sīm words for “cell phone,” “thief,” “woman,” and “police” from a field informant.
On the basis of this meager list, she heavy-handedly reaffirmed that “[t]he term ‘thievish language’ used by von Kremer does, in this case, express a literal meaning. Sim has become a language or a code for theft and has reduced [its speakers] to that very identity.”29 A language implies historical and cultural depth on the part of its speakers, whereas a code suggests artificially or spontaneously formed speech, falling outside of genetic linguistic development. Von Kremer’s pronouncements have cast a long shadow over subsequent scholarship, superseding findings that directly counter his analysis. For instance, in the late 1990s the anthropologist Karin van Nieuwkerk interviewed female entertainers in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt, who spoke Sīm. “How to understand the use of a secret language by a group which apparently has no marginal and excluded social status? Why do they have a secret code if they have nothing to hide and are more or less accepted?”30 The assumption that Sīm-speakers must be dishonorable becomes difficult to reconcile with the direct observation that ordinary Egyptians also speak this language.
The medievalist encounter with the Banū Sāsān and their language, though limited to texts and images, has yielded similar research outcomes. Part of the difficulty stems from how languages have been traditionally taught. Acknowledgment of language contact in the premodern Middle East has been mostly limited to Jewish languages like Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Syriac.31 The Andalusian historian and geographer al-Bakrī (d. 1046 CE) transcribed samples of an Arabic pidgin spoken among Black residents of the town of Mārīdī in southern Sudan.32 The most extensive and most influential historical treatment of the Banū Sāsān remains Clifford Bosworth’s two-volume study, based on two lengthy didactic poems—one from tenth-century Iraq and the other from fourteenth-century Syria—that aimed to inform an Arab audience about the tribe’s language and culture. Abū Dulaf al-Khazrajī, the author of the earlier poem, identified as a member of the Banū Sāsān, and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī, the author of the second one, claimed that a patron had commissioned him to embed himself among the Banū Sāsān and write about their language. Bosworth ultimately concluded that the vocabulary presented in the poems formed part of a jargon or a criminal argot.33 Because of Bosworth’s outsize influence on this topic, the jargon paradigm enjoys wide acceptance and even imaginative elaboration. One medievalist concluded that “[t]he Banū Sāsān argot seems to have been a highly developed code. Its basic appeal to beggars and enterprising travelers hardly disappeared with the Banū Sāsān themselves—coding one’s speech for an illicit trade, of course, seems transhistorical.”34 He continued by comparing sīn to graffiti in North American train yards. Bosworth acknowledged that certain features of the Sāsāni language challenged his classification and his assumptions about slang formation. He remarked that “[o]ne would not expect to find jargon words for prepositions or conjunctions,” like “upon,” “by,” “until,” and “up to.”35 Occasionally, Bosworth came across evidence of a Sāsāni word’s relationship to ancient Middle Eastern languages. In one of Abū Dulaf ’s verses, a Sāsāni man clandestinely defecates beneath a mosque carpet, then cleans himself by wiping his buttocks against the wall of the prayer niche.36 The Sāsāni term used for prayer niche is midhqān, and in ancient South Arabian inscriptions, mdqnt and mdqn means “a place of prayer within a temple.”37 Bosworth dutifully acknowledges these occurrences as curiosities, while resisting further analysis. To complicate the jargon paradigm, some of the premodern Sīn terms also appear in languages of modern peripatetics, so how to account for a jargon that persists for nearly 1,000 years? These categories imply unseriousness, social instability, and antisocial behavior and also capture none of Sīn’s linguistic complexity, disincentivizing researchers from treating it as a worthy subject of investigation. As I wrestled with this question during my research, it became ever clearer that the jargon framework was too narrow and should be discarded in favor of something more encompassing—namely, a language. Languages spoken by itinerant groups with nonconforming grammars are frequently described by scholarly and lay observers as “secret languages” that function primarily to conceal speakers’ conniving activities from presumably upright outsiders.38 Even the most well-meaning researchers do not examine these languages as minority dialects, rather centering their own experiences of incomprehension when confronted with this novelty. Furthermore, if they cannot understand these minority dialects, then even ordinary features of these languages are interpreted as extraordinary. Similarly, an anthropologist who studies the Mugat Gypsies in northern Afghanistan, has documented important Mugati vocabulary as evidence of their so-called argot. After presenting a list of Mugati terms for such household items as rice, plate, and bread, he wondered why a “secret language” would extend into the vocabulary of everyday life.39 Of course, as Trouillot reminds us, “grammar functions in all languages.”40 Exempting nonWesterners from the natural order of things removes them from ordinary historical processes and ultimately prevents researchers from objective engagement with these subjects and their languages. This wrongly perceived absence of linguistic order was interpreted as evidence of either the freedom of noble savages or of their unredeemed primitiveness.
Unthinkability
What historical possibilities have been obscured, if not foreclosed, by internalizing particular narratives? In Middle Eastern historiography one can cite the inviolability of the Qur’an as a concept long unquestioned by historians. David S. Powers has written frankly about his own struggles with this taboo. “The idea that the early Muslim community might have revised the consonantal skeleton of the Qur’ān is unthinkable not only for Muslims but also for many Islamicists—including, until recently, myself. This unthinkable proposition is one of the central concerns of the present monograph.”41 Only when Powers was willing to break with this tradition did he examine some of the earliest Qur’an manuscripts for evidence of revision and tampering, ultimately identifying significant changes to the core Qur’anic text. Similarly, the status of blue and green eyes as despised in medieval Islamdom has only recently been entertained. The physiognomy of whiteness has been so widely assumed to convey neutral, if not positive, associations that medievalists have rather assumed scribal error than entertain the possibility that medieval authors intended to express dislike of pale eyes.42 Unthinkability in the context of Romani history functions similarly and extends into two key realms. First, there is a pervasive assumption that the Roma, as unlettered nomads, left no recorded history, so the field of premodern Romani history barely exists. The earliest written records about the Roma appear in fifteenth-century Europe, penned by non-Roma observers. Historical knowledge about pre-fifteenth-century Roma is inferred through analysis of their Romani language. Its classification as an Indo-Aryan language indicates historical roots in western India. Kurdish, Persian, Greek, and Turkish loanwords in modern Romani point to migrations and long stays through these territories. Related Indo-Aryan languages and dialects, such as Lomavren, a mixed language spoken by the Lom of Armenia, and Domari, spoken by the Dom of West Asia, became markers of a distinct racial category. Second, after the Second World War, the Roma reinforced racial pseudoscience to represent themselves before European publics as a racialized nation in exactly those homogenizing terms set forth by Oriental philologists and in Nazi discriminatory laws. Historians have not challenged this framing.
Constructing a Roma Racial Subject in Modern Europe As discussed earlier, central to a racialized myth of language was the notion that one could eradicate “intruders” and isolate pure language. Linguistic hierarchies arose with “less pure” nongenetic languages like creoles, pidgins, and mixed languages occupying an uncertain classification and scientific validation. The pseudoscientific genetic model has not been abandoned but rather strengthened by parallel racial pseudoscience. Racial families can be “bastardized” by racemixing, diluting the assumed purity of genetic racial groups. Although the Roma endured nearly 400 years of slavery, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in Wallachia and Moldavia, they are more commonly associated with a later period of European mass violence, the Nazi German campaign of racial genocide.43 The Nuremberg Laws, passed in September 1935, defined citizenship as something only those with German “racial” heritage could claim. A follow-up decree issued on November 14 that same year defined degrees of Jewishness, and on November 26, a parallel law defining Gypsies (Zigeuner). The distorted racial logic outlined here still persists, as shall be seen, in contemporary understandings of the Roma community. 1. Z pure Gypsy (Vollzigeuner or stammechter Zigeuner) 2. ZM+ Zigeunermischling with predominantly Gypsy blood 3. ZM Zigeunermischling with equal parts German and Gypsy blood a. a ZM degree I is a person who has one German and one pure Gypsy parent b. a ZM degree II is a person who has one German and one ZM degree I parent 4. ZM- Zigeunermischling with predominantly German blood 5. NZ Nichtzigeuner encompasses all remaining cases of non-Gypsies.44 The construction of the first concentration camp for Roma began months after this declaration. Between 1935 and 1945, as many as 500,000 Roma were exterminated in concentration and labor camps alongside an unknown number of itinerants, such as the Yenish. When Nazi Germany fell, Allied forces pursued policies of denazification and reparations. In 1953 the West German government passed legislation to compensate survivors of the Holocaust who had been targeted on “grounds of political opposition to National Socialism or for reasons of race, religion or ideology.” Under this formulation Jewish survivors of the Holocaust received reparations, but Romani citizens of Germany who made these same claims upon the state were denied them. According to West German officials, the Roma had only been targeted by the Nazi regime as asocials and criminals, making them ineligible for compensation.45 Ironically, this denial of reparations forced the Roma to beg West Germany and nongovernmental organizations for charity, although it was their public begging that had initially inspired Nazi condemnation. The only possible responses were to either question the restrictive definition of genocide or to adjust their petitions to the demands of the law. Choosing the latter, Romani activists adopted wholesale the racial criteria of the Nazi regime and began redefining themselves as a nonterritorial nation, unified by the Romani language.46 (The Yenish do not speak Romani, so they have not been included in the Roma’s reparations claims.) In 1971, a number of Roma groups convened for the first World Romani Congress in England, where members voted to adopt a Romani flag and anthem and to repudiate the exonym “Gypsy” in favor of “Rom,” the Romani term for “man.”47 In a deliberate parallel with the Hebrew Shoah (“destruction”), in the year 2000, Ian Hancock, a linguist of Romani origin, began using the term Porrajmos—a Romani word that means “devouring”—to refer to the Roma Holocaust.48 The term has not gained wide currency, as it is “used by only a handful of activists, many of them non-Roma, and it is unknown to most Roma, including relatives of victims and survivors,”49 but the move is part of a broader political strategy. As the sociologists Andrew Woolford and Stefan Wolejszo have noted, “much depends on the ability of victim groups to articulate and gain public and political acceptance for the trauma narratives they use to describe their suffering and to communicate the necessity of reparative action.”50 Related efforts have focused on influencing European language policies and making Roma rights a human rights issue. Linguists worked to standardize the Romani language in Latin script, and activists petitioned nations to sign the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages to recognize Romani as a minority language within their border. When Spain became a signatory to the charter in 2001, it agreed to recognize Catalan and Basque as minority languages but not Romani. Other efforts include encouraging the teaching of Romani in European universities by publishing language-learning materials.51 In April 1996 Roma activists founded the European Roma Rights Centre to centralize the struggle against anti-Roma legislation and incidents, like police brutality, forced sterilization of women, and segregated schooling.52 These developments have had varying influences within European Romani communities. More successful has been the official German response to Roma suffering. A memorial to Roma and Sinti survivors of the Holocaust was dedicated in 2012 in Berlin. Of all of the activists’ adopted proposals, the name change from “Gypsy” to “Roma” has had the greatest influence on scholarly discourse about traveling communities. Replacing usages of “Gypsy” with “Roma” flattens differences in this cultural landscape, and the nomenclature presents certain challenges for specialists. (I myself have not escaped this problem. This book’s very title is a capitulation to the erasure of ghurabā’ from historical literature. The Arabic word is unfamiliar to Arabists; Gypsy is culturally offensive; and Roma is the most recognizable term for contemporary readers.) The erasures from this new convention are handily illustrated from a recent New Yorker article about the effects of the Syrian civil war in the northern town of Saraqib: “Many of Saraqib’s thirty thousand inhabitants trace their roots to Ottoman times, though in recent decades a community of Roma has settled on the south side, cornering the market in dentistry.”53 As far as I know, there is no community of Roma in Saraqib, though there is a documented Dom community that specializes in dentistry. I presume that the New Yorker journalist was informed that “Gypsies” lived in the city, then substituted this problematic term with the preferred, though imprecise, “Roma.”54 These distinctions have import, because Dom and Rom inhabit West Asia. In fact, a Romani community lives in the city of Zargar, near the Iranian capital of Tehran.55 Conclusion The creation of a sealed and bounded Rom identity serves the aims of Romani nationalism, a movement that arose from the post–Second World War erasure of Romani suffering and denial of European citizenship, but it has a distorting effect on any studies of Romani history. After fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Hungary, Michael Stewart concluded that “the Rom do not have an ethnic identity. For them, identity is constructed and constantly remade in the present in relations with significant others, not something inherited from the past.”56 Historians can appreciate the political aims of Romani nationalism while not wholly accepting its premise of homogeneity. The Strangers have historically eschewed discrete identities, in favor of more expansive associations. Acknowledging these broader associations would pave the way for, say, Romani-Yenish-Jewish histories of early modern Europe or histories of medieval Middle Eastern Strangers, in which mixed languages like Yiddish and Yenish are studied anthropologically, and begging is not ascribed to social or racial deviance. Mixed languages bear witness to long and complex cultural interactions, and professional beggars participated in informal economies with varying degrees of competence, creativity, and financial success. Perceptions of beggars as criminals who speak in coded language to defraud naïve publics have been strongly influenced by state laws that criminalize and pathologize public begging, obscuring the possible appeal of subsisting on charitable donations.57 For one, the earnings of the women, men, and children who begged were not subject to state taxation or oversight. In fact, one tenthcentury Sāsāni poet suggested that their begging was a form of public taxation that exceeded even a state’s financial authority: “We [the Banū Sāsān] exact a tax from all mankind, from China to Egypt, and to Tangier.”58 Secondly, there is no major initial financial investment or business overhead, such as a craftsperson would need to purchase raw materials, apply for vendor permits, or rent a market stall. Without any operating expenses, all the money collected is clean profit. Thirdly, the money had not been borrowed, so there existed no obligation of repayment— with or without interest. It had also not been stolen, so earners assumed no adverse legal consequences. In short, beggars possessed their earnings free and clear of bureaucracies and institutions. As the preacher ʿAjīb counseled his fellow ghurabā in a thirteenth-century shadow play, “Let your finest robe be of rags, and your greatest concern to collect money. If you follow these two pieces of advice, you will be safe from bankruptcy and debt.”59 From the perspective of the ghurabā’, begging could serve as a theater of aspiration, just as any other profession. While this type of financial autonomy also brought financial insecurity and social isolation, it crucially freed people to construct a society alongside but very distinct from the majority one. They maintained their languages over centuries, cultivated craft expertise, and developed a rich literary heritage. What began as an attempt to identify a casual reference in a weaver’s notebook has developed into the reconstruction of an archaic language and the history of its speakers. It is nothing short of a radical reimagining of the Islamicate Middle Period. The guiding question of this Introduction has been “how did the ghurabā’ grouping disappear from collective historical consciousness?” The following chapters highlight the interpretive choices that displaced the ghurabā’ as historical subjects and the resulting silences that shape our understanding of these groups. In post–Second World War historiography the history of eastern ghurabā’ has been isolated from those of the European Roma, the Sīn language reduced to a deviant slang or a secret language, their labor as beggars or other street workers denigrated as dishonorable, and their opaque heritage interpreted as hostile dissimulation. Chapter 1 opens with a reconstruction of the early Islamic history of the Zuṭṭ, a medieval Romani tribe that formed part of a larger Banū Sāsān tribal confederation. The Banū Sāsān renamed themselves ghurabā’ by the late thirteenth century. Though not all tribal members of the Banū Sāsān were linked by belief systems or ethnicity, they did share common lifestyles and the Sīn language. Chapter 2 details the history and the linguistic characteristics of Sīn. In Chapter 3, I read Ibn Dāniyāl’s (d. 710/1311) shadow play Wondrous and Strange as an ethnographic map of the underground economy of thirteenthcentury Cairo. This singular text offers insights into the interdependence of underground and above ground economies. The professional specializations of Sīn speakers testify to their adaptability in quickly shifting landscapes. They developed niches as unlicensed medical workers (eye doctor, circumciser of girls), acrobats, animal trainers, astrologers, beggars, and laborers (torchbearing night watchmen and camel drivers). In this section, I also focus on the personal letters and verse of Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār (d. 749/1348–9), a vernacular poet who explicitly identified as a gharīb, lived in the gharīb quarter of medieval Cairo, and integrated Sīn terminology into his work. His poetry mostly concerns themes that, for his particular historical moment, were particularly voluptuous: beer, hashish, wine, men who could not satisfy their female lovers, penises, and unrestrained sexuality. The implications of gharīb-authored literature for medieval Arabic letters are tremendous, because such a minority voice has not previously been acknowledged. Al-Miʿmār’s own references to his living situation, to Sīn, and to the ghurabā’ have been misunderstood so that one modern biographer concluded that “we can be certain of the poet’s membership in the urban middle class.”60 It is necessary to place al-Miʿmār and his particular innovations within the proper cultural context. Chapter 4 unsettles presumptions about Romani and gharīb nomadism, by pinpointing the locations of the urban settlements of Banū Sāsān/ghurabā’ in Iberia, West Asia, and northern Africa, with close attention paid to the communal homes, as well as the neighborhoods, streets, and cemeteries bearing their names. The final three chapters turn to the innovative manuscript and print cultures pioneered by ghurabā’ astrologers. Chapter 5 explores the illustrated astrological books that emerged by the thirteenth century and were known by their Sīn name, bulhān. These large-scale works inspired similar astrological book genres in the Ottoman Turkish, Safavid Iranian, and Mughal (Gūrkānī) Indian empires and in the Quṭb Shāhī Sultanate of southern India. In Chapters 6 and 7 the focus turns to blockprinted amulets produced by the ghurabā’ (and pilgrimage certificates also probably printed by them) in West Asia, northern Africa, and Iberia from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. This print phase was remarkable for its early adoption, centuries-long duration, and multilingualism, but historians of European and Arabic print have consistently downplayed its historical significance. I intervene in this debate to analyze not only gharīb techniques of production but to also establish plausible timing and routes of transmission of blockprinting technology through Hungary into the Holy Roman Empire in the first decades of the fifteenth century. The production of single-page devotional woodcuts in Bohemia and Bavaria in the 1410s coincided with the arrival of “Egyptian” bands to the region, and I argue that these phenomena were likely linked. The Epilogue considers how this book has laid the foundation for a transhistorical, transregional Ghurabā’ studies. This book does not exhaustively cover every facet of medieval gharīb existence but offers readers a sensitive treatment of their daily lives and the literature and crafts through which they uniquely and enduringly expressed their culture.
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