Download PDF | Beatrice Forbes Manz - Nomads in the Middle East-Cambridge University Press (2021).
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Nomads in the Middle East
A history of pastoral nomads in the Islamic Middle East, from the rise of Islam, through the middle periods when Mongols and Turks ruled most of the region to the decline of nomadism in the twentieth century. Offering a vivid insight into the impact of nomads on the politics, culture and ideology of the region, Beatrice Forbes Manz examines and challenges existing perceptions of these nomads, including the popular cyclical model of nomad-settled interaction developed by Ibn Khaldun. Looking at both the Arab Bedouin and the nomads from the Eurasian steppe, Manz demonstrates the significance of Bedouin and Turco-Mongolian contributions to cultural production and political ideology in the Middle East, and shows the central role played by pastoral nomads in war, trade and state-building throughout history. Nomads provided horses and soldiers for war, the livestock and guidance which made long-distance trade possible, and animal products to provision the region’s growing cities.
Beatrice Forbes Manz is Professor of History at Tufts University where she teaches the history of the Middle East and Inner Asia, with a particular interest in pastoral nomads. She is the author of Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which was awarded the Houshang Pourshariati Book Award in Iranian Studies, and the best-seller The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge University Press, 1989). She is also the author of numerous articles and chapters in collected words on the history of the Timurids, the Mongol Empire and nomad societies, including in The New Cambridge History of Islam, The Cambridge History of Inner Asia and The Cambridge History of War.
Preface
A number of organizations facilitated the research for this book. A membership in the School of Historical Studies, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2003–4 gave me a year in which to begin this work in the best possible surroundings, and encouragement to explore fields I had not previously dealt with. Funds for the year were provided by a postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and a Faculty Research Semester from Tufts University. Tufts University also provided a Research Semester grant in the spring of 2012. To all these institutions I express my heartfelt gratitude.
This book covers periods well outside my sphere of expertise, and I could not have written it without the assistance of other scholars. A number of generous colleagues have provided indispensable help by reading the chapters of the book as they were written, saving me from many potential errors. I want to thank Thomas Barfield, Tzvi Abusch, Marc van De Mieroop, the late Patricia Crone, Fred McGraw Donner, Louise Marlow, Kurt Franz, David Durand Guédy, Jürgen Paul, the late Thomas Allsen, Patrick Wing, Charles Melville, Rudi Matthee, Linda Darling, Rhoads Murphy, Lois Beck and Hugh Roberts for their generous gift of time and expertise. I am also grateful to Margaret Fearey for reading through the manuscript as an “educated reader.” I owe a particular debt to the Research Technology, TTS team at Tufts University, notably Patrick Florance, Carolyn Talmadge and Yuehui (Aurora) Li, for their painstaking work mapping often obscure locations, under the difficult conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have dedicated this book to the memory of two scholars who died in 2019, both of whom contributed enormously to the history of nomads, and particularly of the Mongol Empire.
The work of Thomas Allsen transformed the field of Mongol history and serves as an inspiration to all writing in this field. David O. Morgan spent a long and productive career promoting the study of both medieval Iran and the Mongol Empire, and also helping to advance the careers of younger scholars I first came in contact with him when he wrote me a very kind letter as a reader for my first book, and from that time on I profited continually from his help and guidance. I am also grateful to him for encouraging me to widen my field by inviting me to write the chapter on the Mongols for the New Cambridge History of Islam.
Note on Usage and Maps
This book is designed for an audience that includes both specialists and non-specialists. I have tried to keep transcription as simple and as consistent as possible. For Arabic and Persian in the pre-modern period, I have used the classical Arabic transcription. Turkic and Mongolian names are transcribed according to systems specific to those languages. For the Ottoman Empire and modern Iran, I have retained the classical transcription for Arabic and Persian terminology, but for well-known figures I have used common modern spelling. For larger cities, likewise, modern spelling is used, while for smaller locations I use the classical transcription. I have omitted most diacriticals in the text but have retained them in the index. In addition to maps showing cities and regions, I have included maps showing land use and pasture locations, based on a combination of modern maps representing primarily nineteenth- and twentieth-century conditions and information about earlier periods taken from historical texts. Since these maps are on a small scale and represent a period of more than a millennium, for any given time they must be viewed as approximations.
Introduction
For almost all people, a comfortable lifestyle requires both animal and vegetable products. While livestock and agriculture are easily combined in subsistence farming, a complex society encourages specialization. In arid and mountainous regions, concentration on livestock breeding led to the development of a separate lifestyle – pastoral nomadism – which has had an enormous impact on the history of the world. The owners of large herds can utilize lands too dry or too high to yield reliable crops by moving from one pasture to another, usually in regular migrations between known seasonal pastures.
Thus they live in tents which can be moved, and their other possessions must also be easily portable. Pastoral nomadism presents a number of paradoxes. Although it is in some ways a limiting lifestyle, which discourages the development of a high civilization and centers its people outside the major cultural centers, it is a specialized economy which developed out of agriculture and involves exchange with sedentary populations. For thousands of years nomads1 and settled agriculturalists have defined themselves against each other, each expressing distrust and disdain for the other lifestyle. Nonetheless both have continued to coexist, to trade, and to influence each other.
Although theoretically nomads could live largely from their herds, in practice many have also practiced some agriculture and have further depended on agricultural populations for many of their needs, from grain and vegetables to metal and ceramic wares. Settled societies are less fully dependent on pastoral goods, but over history nomads have offered much more to the settled than the animal products in which they specialize. Their lifestyle gave nomads several skills of great importance – and of use to their settled neighbors.
The most famous nomad skill was that of war. The need to migrate required organization and survival skills which translated easily into military action, and the protection of livestock and pasture rights required the ability – and willingness – to use arms. As large sedentary states formed and developed armies, they soon sought out nomadic populations as soldiers. Pastoral nomads also have the ability to live in difficult terrain, to move long distances and to mobilize manpower. Thus, they made trade possible through areas of steppe and desert which were difficult for settled populations to access and impossible for them to control. Nomads provided both pack animals and guidance, and likewise some level of security along the routes. For the purpose of this book, I define the Middle East as the region between the Oxus and Nile rivers, stretching in the north through Anatolia. I have omitted North Africa due to constraints of space and time but include the eastern regions of Iran and modern Afghanistan, which have been controlled by nomad dynasties through much of the Islamic period.
The Middle East has had a particularly close relationship with nomadic peoples. First of all, it interacts with large nomad societies on two sides. To the north, the region borders the Eurasian steppe, a vast tract of grassland stretching from Mongolia to Hungary, which was dominated by nomads for three millennia. In the south lie the Arabian and Syrian deserts, inhabited largely by pastoralists. What has been most important in determining the role of nomads in the Middle East, however, is the topography of the region itself.
This is a land fertile but arid, characterized by small areas of productive agricultural land separated by mountain ranges, deserts and plateaus. In the west, great rivers provide two regions of intensive agriculture which were the seats of the first great civilizations of the Middle East – the Nile in Egypt and the TigrisEuphrates system inMesopotamia. Between these areas stretches an expanse of desert and arid steppe extending from southern Arabia to the inland region of northern Syria. The Arabian and Syrian deserts are interspersed with oases and in rainy seasons can provide some pastures, but much can be considered hospitable only by the hardiest of men and animals. The northern Middle East – from Anatolia through Iran and Afghanistan – is a combination of mountain and high plateau.
There are few sand deserts, but also no river systems as rich as those in the southwest. Some areas – particularly in Anatolia and Azerbaijan – can support farming without irrigation; elsewhere water is conducted from mountains and rivers into the plains through canals and underground conduits. The regions supporting intensive agriculture are a small percentage of the total area and much land is best exploited by pastoralists or mountain peoples. In the marshy riverbeds, arid steppes and the foothills of the mountain ranges, nomads can find winter and summer pastures, while the smaller remote mountain valleys remain the seat of mountain peoples living from subsistence farming and livestock. Neither population is easy to control, and both have remained a constant and significant presence from the beginnings of written history to the present.
Nomadic Lifestyles For this book I have adopted a broad definition of pastoral nomads, to include all populations living primarily from livestock breeding and practicing regular migration. Many populations practiced a mixed economy, sometimes living in houses or huts for part of the year and using tents only for the summer months; many also planted crops and harvested them when returning along their migration routes. Sometimes such populations are characterized as semi-nomadic. It was also not uncommon for populations to move back and forth between settled and nomad economies, as weather conditions or political unrest made a change desirable.
However, I have not usually tried to distinguish among different levels of nomadism for a simple reason: the paucity of historical evidence. The sources available to us for most periods covered in this book give us almost no information on the lifestyle or economic strategy of individual groups, and therefore do not allow us to differentiate among populations according to the length of the migration, winter habitation, or degree of dependence on agriculture. While mobility and economic specialization create similarities among all pastoral nomads, very significant variations do exist.2 Two groups have been most visible in the history of the Middle East: the Arabian and Syrian nomads in the southwestern regions, and nomads from the Eurasian steppe in the northern and eastern provinces. The Arab nomads exploit the desert and semi-desert areas of Arabia, Mesopotamia and Syria to raise sheep, goats, horses and most famously camels. In this region the scarce resource is water, and wells are a central necessity. Summer is the season in which groups congregate most closely around water sources, while in winter after the rains they disperse to make full use of seasonal pastures. Most migration takes place between areas where water is available in summer, and those that can be used only during cooler periods of greater precipitation, often at the same level. For this reason, this type of nomadism is often called horizontal nomadism.
The tent used by the nomads of Syria and Arabia is usually made of woven goat hair, which allows the circulation of air in dry weather, but swells when wet and becomes a protection against rain (Fig. 1.1). Because the needs of camels are significantly different from those of sheep and goats, most nomad groups have specialized in one or the other. Groups raising smaller livestock must remain fairly close to the edge of the desert, where sufficient pasture and above all water can be found throughout the year. Camel nomads (a‘rāb or badū) – known in European languages as Bedouin – can retreat more deeply into the desert and travel greater distances in search of pasture, since the camel requires water at most once every four days, and in cool weather with sufficient grazing can go for several weeks without drinking.3 Like sheep and goats, female camels are used for milk, which forms a major component of the Bedouin diet. Their greater mobility gave the Bedouin both freedom from settled control and enhanced military skill. As a result they held greater prestige than the nomads relying on smaller animals.
The northern regions of the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Anatolia, have been inhabited since the eleventh century largely by nomads of Turkic and Mongolian descent, originally from the Eurasian steppe. These populations differ from Arab nomads in a number of important ways.
The livestock raised is usually a mix of sheep, goats and horses, sometimes with Bactrian (two-humped) camels. Sheep and goats form the economic basis of the herd, while horses and camels serve for travel, war and transport. Although horses have somewhat different grazing preferences from sheep and goats their grazing habits are complementary, and the pasture benefits from the mix. Herds can thus be pastured in the same areas and be raised by the same group. While for desert nomads the summer is the time of greatest population concentration, for the steppe and mountain nomads the winter pasture is the more intensive, usually requiring a river valley with water and dried forage. Pasture is less dependent on the vagaries of weather and while migrations may be short or long, a given tribe will migrate spring, summer, fall and winter to the same places. Within Iran and Anatolia, tribes usually migrate vertically, with a winter pasture in a river valley and summer pasture in the mountain highlands which, unlike the lowlands, remain green through the summer.
In general, nomads remain relatively stationary in winter and summer and move more frequently and for longer distances in the fall and spring migrations. This is known as vertical nomadism. In the past, the steppe nomads used tents made of heavy felt attached to a circle formed by wooden lattice work, with a hole for smoke in the center. These were heavier but also far warmer than the goat hair tents of the southwestern nomads (Figs 1.2 and 1.3). Within the Middle East, many Turkic nomads, especially in the warmer regions, have adopted the black goat hair tent.
Among both Arab and Turco-Mongolian nomads, daily tasks are apportioned by gender and women play a major role in production, enjoying a higher position than most settled women. Women set up and take down the tents, and the black goat-hair tents used now by most nomads in the Middle East were until recently woven by them. Herding is usually done by men, but in times of need women can also do this. Among camel nomads milking is done by the men; sheep and goats are usually milked by women, who also process milk products for consumption and sale. Among the Bedouin it is common for extended families to share one tent, which can be separated into public spaces for men and private ones for women, and women are sometimes veiled. Nonetheless they are not segregated and have considerable freedom of movement. Among the nomads of Iranian and Turco-Mongolian descent, the nuclear family is more common, while women are rarely veiled and enjoy both authority and freedom.
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