Text

E-book All Things Arabia : Arabian Identity and Material Culture

---

Penilaian

---

n 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 civiliza-tion behind them. To arrange three stones as a fireplace on which to set a pot was the only archi-tecture 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.”1This 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 “civiliza-tion.”2 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 shel-ter are all that is needed for physical survival in the harsh desert environment. Albeit reductionist, this description is not inaccurate: Thesiger experi-enced the desert firsthand and he recorded his im-pressions 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, nineteenth-century traveler to the Arabian Peninsula and remarkable translator of The Arabian Nights:“[T]he Jinn bore me at once to the land of my predi-lection, Arabia, a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some bygone metempsychic life in the distant Past. Again I stood under the diaphanous skies, in air glorious as ether, whose every breath raises men’s spirits like sparkling wine. Once more I saw the evening star hanging like a solitaire from the pure front of the western firmament; and the after-glow transfigur-ing and transforming, as by magic, the homely and rugged features of the scene into a fairy-land lit with a light which never shines on other soils or seas. Then would appear the woolen tents, low and black, of the true Badawin, mere dots in the bound-less waste of lion-tawny clays and gazelle-brown gravels, and the camp-fire dotting like a glow-worm in the village center. Presently, sweetened by dis-tance, would be heard ... the measured chant of the spearmen gravely stalking behind their charge, the camels ... and—most musical of music—the palm-trees answered the whispers of the nigh-breeze with the softest tones of falling water.”3Through a subtle process of “transfiguring and transforming,” the viewer’s perspective changes from the “homely and rugged” details of everyday life to a “fairy-land scene” of domestic harmony. Tents, clays, gravels, camels, and palm trees are suddenly ensouled through the magical alchemy of light, scent, and sound. No longer just “bare ne-cessities of life,” the things that fill this nostalgic landscape gain agency and a story-like quality through emotion and synesthesia, conjuring in the reader’s mind Arabia of the soul.When reading about Arabia, such sharply con-trasting descriptions are the norm. The same ob-jects that prove in some accounts the lack of “civi-lization” and “traditions” of a people whose energies are focused mainly on survival are ren-dered in other accounts as breathing an un-matched beauty and a profound spirituality. Trav-elers like Lodovico Varthema in the sixteenth century, Joseph Pitts and Carsten Niebuhr in the eighteenth century, Ali Bey, Johann Ludwig Burck-hardt, Richard Burton, Georg Wallin, Carlo Guar-mani, Charles M. Doughty, William Gifford Pal-grave, and Lady Anne Blunt in the nineteenth century, Wilfred Thesiger, Harold Ingrams, Ber-tram Thomas, and Harry St. John Philby in the twentieth century, and Marcel Kurpershoek in the twenty-first century4 provided detailed depictions of the desert environment, the Bedouin life, or Arabia’s holy places through tropes of pilgrimage, hardship, and discovery. On the other hand, Muslim travelers to the Arabian Peninsula, from Naser-e Khosraw, Ibn Jubayr, Ibn Battuta, and Ev-liya Çelebi to Nawab Sikandar Begum, Mirzâ Mo-hammed Hosayn Farâhâni, and Jal?l ?l-e Ahmad,5focused mainly on pilgrims’ travels to Mecca, the spiritual and religious endpoint of the Hajj. Al-though obviously reflecting the sensibility of their authors, these narratives provide unique insights into the material culture of the place, ranging from accounts of the desolate bareness of the environ-ment to Orientalized evocations of a magical and alluring locale. Within this wide variety of impres-sions, and within the changing waves of history, Arabia’s distinctiveness is still to be asserted.

---

Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

-

No. Panggil

939.4 BAI a

Penerbit

: BRILL., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

286 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9789004435926

Klasifikasi

939.4

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

History of Ancient Middle East to 640

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

Komentar

---

Anda harus masuk sebelum memberikan komentar