Maʿadd's world

Next year, Routledge is publishing a collection: Andrew Marsham, The Umayyad World. I hear it was supposed to come out this year but it has been delayed. In it, is / will be a Peter Webb piece: "Ethnicity, Power and Umayyad Society: The Rise and Fall of the People of Maʿadd".

Webb has asked us not to cite this article yet. He has, however, posted it on academia.edu for us to read the article. I interpret this as Webb's call to critique the article, before Marsham and Routledge put it out and make Webb look silly. Honestly, I think Webb has little to fear here; the article is good.

One critique I must raise, is its assumption of the Marwani-era Islamic narrative on the status of Mecca. I don't see Mecca as a pilgrimage site until the Zubayrites insisted upon it during the Fitna, 60s AH /680s AD. I marshalled the relevant arguments in House of War, which I last tweaked 2015, and in the last four years I have found nothing to alter that base calculus. ʿUmar b. Abī Rabīʿa is noted here as the great poet of Mecca, writing love (or lust) songs of the time and place. If my math is right, when the Zubayrites raised the site's profile this ʿUmar would have been in his mid 30s. This is a little old for a man to be messing around, but not too old for poets; witness the late Ric Osacek. I wonder if I am detecting subtle satire. Anyway ʿUmar is here to illustrate where certain factions of Arab didn't talk much of Maʿadd, rendering all this something of a side-show.

Webb finds Maʿadd as an internal ethnonym for West Arabian peoples sharing a culture and language, more-or-less. These peoples overlap with the inscriptions in the Safaitic, Hismaic, and Nabataean languages before them and with the heartland of Quraysh after them. We'd call them "Arabs". The qurrâ, also West Arabian (at least affecting the dialect) never mention Maʿadd although they do preach about the Arabic speech: whether language or poetic-register, opinions have always differed. As the Umayyads spread, some used Maʿadd for pan-Arab propaganda, but this fell by the wayside. One watershed seems to be a paean to Bishr (d. ~75 / 695) which mentions a Maʿadd tribe who hadn't been envisioned before. After that one finds sporadic mention of Maʿadd in poetry and in hadith, but Webb points out it's mainly to discuss the secular virtues of the ideal Arab male - generous and brave. One gets the feeling the use was nostalgic; that nobody was anymore claiming to be Maʿadd by birthright.

In part, I think, the earlier Umayyads "jumped the shark", shoehorning Maʿadd into a genealogical scheme that the term simply couldn't bear. Maʿadd-as-tribe remained, still, secular thus outside the interests of the qurrâ. Where the qurrâ and where their Qurân raised their own rank in the Arab empire's self-image, Maʿadd was redundant.

That left Maʿadd to the nostalgic poets. Where the first literate and self-conscious Muslims became re-acquainted with Maʿadd, they filed the term in their adab literature for righteous conduct among fellow men here on earth.