Myth of C11th AD Arab Invasion

“… both the facts and the information provided by Ibn Khaldun are often in complete contradiction with the “Arab invasion” thesis”. Yves Lacoste Yves Lacoste wrote (in 2017): https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/3293-ibn-khaldun-and-the-myth-of-arab-invasion Ibn Khaldun and The Myth of "Arab Invasion" In this excerpt from Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World, Yves Lacoste shows how Ibn Khaldun's work refutes the myth of the "Arab invasions [of the Maghreb] of the eleventh century," despite the uses to which it has been put by the authors of the myth. First published in 1966 and translated by David Macey for a 1984 Verso edition, Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World — by French geographer Yves Lacoste — analyzes the life and work of the 14th-century North African historian and polymath. "The most famous of Arab historians," Ibn Khaldun was still little known in Europe at the time of Lacoste's writing, outside the circle of specialists working on the history of the Maghreb. Among them, Lacoste shows, his writings were most typically decontextualized and distorted in the service of colonialist ideology. "For my part," Lacoste writes, "I believe that, if Ibn Khaldun's thought is to become more widely known and if it is to be integrated into contemporary thought, we have to do more than simply restore him to his rightful status as one of the founders of History... Provided that they are analysed with care, the most important and original features of Ibn Khaldun's work can now be seen as a major contribution to the study of the underlying causes of underdevelopment. It must, however, be stressed that the relationship between the work of the Maghrebian historian and underdevelopment is far from straightforward. It would be not merely simplistic but quite wrong to think that in the fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun described the characteristics of an objectively underdeveloped country. He was studying medieval structures which slowed down or blocked social, political, and economic development It was only several hundred years later that these structures combined with outside influences to facilitate colonization, and colonization determined the appearance of the phenomenon of underdevelopment. In the excerpt below, Lacoste shows how Ibn Khaldun's work refutes the myth of the "Arab invasions [of the Maghreb] of the eleventh century," despite the uses to which it has been put by the authors of the myth. …. Many contemporary historians and specialists in North African history give the impression that the major interest of Ibn Khaldun's work is that it provides us with a complete explanation of the crisis that put an end to the social and economic development of the Maghreb. They argue that the crisis was the result of the gradual invasion of North Africa by nomadic Arab tribes from the east, first the Beni Hilal and then the Beni Solayn. According to C.A. Julien, the most famous specialist in North African history, the Hilalian invasion was “the most important event of the entire medieval period in the Maghreb.”1 It was, he writes, “an invading torrent of nomadic peoples who destroyed the beginnings of Berber organization — which might very well have developed in its own way and put nothing whatever in its place.”2 It must be stressed at the outset that The Muqaddimah does not provide a systematic account of this crisis, the effects of which were still visible in the fourteenth century. Ibn Khaldun gives no methodical account of the underlying causes of this destructive phenomenon. The Histoire des Berbères describes a series of upheavals and crises, and several unsuccessful attempts to establish a centralized monarchy. But the problem of a Crisis with a capital 'C' is never raised. The Hilalian invasion is not the main theme of the The Muqaddimah. Ibn Khaldun refers to it simply as one of the causes of the turmoil. The encyclopedic Muqaddimah contains a section on methodology, an analysis of political and social structures, and a general synthesis, but basically it does not describe the spectacular collapse which modern historians claim to have discovered. Ibn Khaldun was not studying a major localized event such as an invasion and its aftermath; he makes no systematic distinction between the character of the Maghreb before and after the crisis. But he does make a methodical analysis of the permanent political and social structures that characterized North Africa. And, according to Ibn Khaldun, the arrival of the Hilalian tribes did not alter those structures to any great extent. No space is given to a detailed study of the Hilalian invasion in the systematic and analytic framework of The Muqaddimah or in the Histoire des Berbères, each chapter of which deals with a different dynasty. The lengthy modern accounts of the Hilalian invasion do not, therefore, derive directly from Ibn Khaldun. It is, of course, quite legitimate to formulate a thesis by collating scattered data. But the theory that the “Arab invasion” was the determining factor in the crisis of medieval North Africa is less than legitimate, as it takes into account only part of the data provided by Ibn Khaldun. The modern historians who established this theory left aside all the facts that did not support it. Yet both the facts and the information provided by Ibn Khaldun are often in complete contradiction with the “Arab invasion” thesis. Ibn Khaldun does of course mention the arrival of the nomadic Arabs and the destruction they wreaked on several occasions: “However, at the present time — that is, at the end of the eighth century 3 — the situation in the Maghreb, as we can observe, has taken a turn and changed entirely. The Berbers, the original population of the Maghreb, have been replaced by the influx of Arabs that began in the fifth century.4 The Arabs outnumbered and overpowered the Berbers, stripped them of most of their lands, and also obtained a share of those that remained in their possession.”5 Taken out of context, this much-quoted passage does appear to provide a sound basis for the “Arab invasion” thesis. But what are we to make of the following statement from the same author? “The Berbers on the African shore constitute the native inhabitants of the region. Their language is the language of the country, except in the cities. The Arab language there is entirely submerged in the non-Arab native idiom of the Berbers.”6 If the Arabs from the east were really conquerors who drove out the Berbers, how could the Arab language be “submerged”? The Muqaddimah does contain certain famous and much-quoted passages condemning the behaviour of the Arabs. Thus, Ibn Khaldun writes that “Places that succumb to the Arabs are quickly ruined,”7 and that “It is noteworthy how civilization always collapsed in places the Arabs took over and conquered, and how such settlements were depopulated and the very earth there turned into something that was no longer earth.”8 But in other related passages Ibn Khaldun praises the moral qualities and political virtues of the Arabs, claiming that they are “closer to being good than a sedentary people.” There is no way we can evade this apparent contradiction. Ibn Khaldun is too good a historian to forget that the Arabs founded great and stable empires in both the east and the west. In a number of important passages he demonstrates that all the kingdoms and viable political organizations founded in North Africa were established by “nomadic” or “Arab” peoples or by tribes with very similar socio-political characteristics. The Almoravids, for instance, were true Saharan nomads; the Fatimids were originally peasants from Kabylia; the Almohads were a mountain tribe from the Moroccan High Atlas. As we shall see, Ibn Khaldun is quite right to classify them together. We are not, then, dealing with “nomads,” “Bedouins,” or “Arabs” but rather with groups having similar political and social structures though very different “ways of life.” Ibn Khaldun does make a methodological distinction between two major groups which are usually referred to as “Arabs” or “Bedouins” and “sedentary groups” respectively. But the truly radical distinction is between the rural population, the people of the bled — a category which includes both nomads and sedentary farmers — and the townspeople and farmers who live near the towns. Ibn Khaldun does criticize the destructive Arabs who were robbers and incapable of founding a state, but he does so in order to contrast them with the “good” Arabs who did found empires. For reasons that remain unclear, the terminology used by Ibn Khaldun is not very precise. The confusion is not simply a matter of translation problems. His work is often used as a source of quotations rather than being studied in detail. It is extremely complex and often seems to be contradictory. We have to grasp the true meaning of passages which form part of the same argument but which are obviously contradictory if taken out of context. In his classification of human groups, Ibn Khaldun stresses the differences between them and ignores similarities or dissimilarities between their “ways of life” and we have therefore to try to grasp the real criteria he uses. Despite the obvious complexity of the issues involved, the vast majority of historians of North Africa still subscribe to the thesis that the “Arab invasions of the eleventh century” destroyed the achievements of the sedentary population. They make a systematic distinction between the foreign nomadic invaders (usually and wrongly described as “Arabs”) and the sedentary Berber population, the native victims of the invasion. The thesis of the Nomadic-Sedentary, Arab-Berber antagonism appears with the colonization of Algeria. According to J. Berque “The Arab-Berber antithesis became a cliché by 1845.”9 Carette's Recherches sur les origines des migrations des principales tribus de l'Afrique septentrionale launched the theme of the “Arab invasions of the eleventh century” in 1853. The French translation of The Muqaddimah published in 1863 was invoked to provide definitive corroboration of what was by then almost an official thesis. One of the greatest Arab thinkers confirmed (or seemed to confirm) the views of the historians of the colonial period. The Arab invasions may not, as has so often been claimed, be the “decisive event” in the history of the Barbary states, but they certainly became the main theme of North African historiography from the nineteenth century onwards. According to G. Marçais, “The entire life of North Africa was deeply and permanently marked by this catastrophe.”10 For Julien, the arrival of a destructive nomadic people was the most important event of the entire medieval period in the Maghreb.11 In the writings of E.F. Gautier, the nomadic-sedentary opposition becomes even more important, takes on still greater resonances. The invasion assumes “the proportions of an apocalypse,” an “immense catastrophe,” “the end of a world.”12 The struggle between the two groups becomes an eternal, cosmic battle. According to Gautier, the entire history of North Africa from classical antiquity onwards is a duel between “two biological species which always behave in totally opposite ways.” “Throughout the two millenia separating classical antiquity from our own day, the Maghreb has always been divided into two irreconcilable halves: nomads and sedentary groups. The nomad's instincts are quite different (from those of the sedentary farmer). His way of life means that he is a communist. The harshness of his life means that, when led by his prince, he is a disciplined soldier, at least for the duration of the battle. But it also means that he is permanently dissatisfied and always eager for new conquests. Politically, he is an anarchist, a nihilist. He has a great predilection for disorder and for the opportunities it affords him. He is destructive and negative. Even his victories accomplish nothing as he destroys their fruits in an unaccustomed orgy of extravagance.”13 Despite their official nature, the thesis of the nomad's historical guilt and the theory of the eternal opposition between nomadic and sedentary groups are in contradiction with a number of elementary points of geography. There is no basis in reality for any such total, metaphysical opposition between nomadic and sedentary groups, even though novelists have found it a fertile source of inspiration. From ancient times until the beginning of the nineteenth century, one of the major features of the areas was the importance of semi-nomadic groups who practised both stockbreeding and farming, their activities at any given moment depending upon the seasons and upon where they were. There were, of course, completely sedentary arboriculturalists and pure nomads, but such groups were extreme cases and rarely came into direct contact with one another (except in Tunisia, for example). The vast majority of the population came in between these extremes. The interests of farmers and herdsmen were interconnected. Although some passages in Ibn Khaldun do suggest that nomadic and sedentary groups were irreconcilable, others could easily be used to support the more convincing argument that farmers and herdsmen coexisted in harmony. The simplistic opposition between nomadic Arabs and sedentary Berbers is equally fallacious, as any geographer or anthropologist would recognize. But the fact remains that this worn-out argument is still used. It is therefore worth pointing out that not all nomads were “Arabs” and that not all Berbers were sedentary by any means. The number of authentically “Arab” groups who came from Arabia and settled in the Maghreb was very small. The people known as “Arabs” in the Maghreb were in fact Arabic-speaking Berbers who retained many of their original characteristics. Although some of the Berber-speaking population were truly sedentary (in Kabylia, the western Rif and the western High Atlas), others were nomadic or semi-nomadic (as for instance in the mountains of the Central Atlas and the western High Atlas). In an attempt to get around this fact, which completely invalidates the equations between Arab and nomadic and Berber and sedentary, E.F. Gautier tries to divide the Berbers along linguistic lines.14 Even if we do accept the existence of some sedentary-nomadic opposition, it does not correspond to any major ethnic or linguistic divisions. Moreover, herdsmen and villagers were capable of coexisting within small but highly unified political and social formations. Brunschwig has shown that during the Middle Ages there were tribes in Ifriqiyah made up of complementary but equal sedentary and nomadic fractions.15 The political distinction between nomadic and sedentary groups is equally artificial. There are no known examples of conflict between purely sedentary and purely nomadic groups. On the contrary, all recorded conflicts appear to have been between singularly disparate groups. “Nomadic factions and sedentary groups entered into alliances against other nomads who were allied with other sedentary groups. Bedouin sheikhs and rulers of cities formed alliances against other Bedouins and their urban allies. The mutually hostile blocs formed in this way had nothing to do with notions of origins or ways of life. Contradictory as their respective mentalities and aims may have been, the nomads no more tried to undermine sedentary institutions in any systematic way than the sedentary groups tried to wipe out nomadism.” Such is Brunschwig's view of Ifriqiyah, the country which suffered most at the hands of certain nomadic groups. Even if we restrict the argument to the extreme examples of arboriculturalists and long-distance camel nomads, the conflict between their interests is much less serious than has sometimes been suggested. On the contrary, there are many cases in which their interests coincided: the nomads guarded and guided the caravans and were responsible for most transport in North Africa. They supplied the towns with food and contributed to the existence of some trade-based rural economies. They provided a skilled labour force that was much appreciated and greatly sought after at harvest time. Marçais cites specific examples of nomads and villagers entering mutual contractual agreements to farm land in the Constantine area. All too often compared to plagues of locusts, the Beni Hilal “were taking an active part in the life of the country barely a century after their arrival and were contributing to the wealth of those they had once reduced to poverty.”16 Brunschwig cites other similar cases. Stock breeding was far from being simply a cause of conflict or from being detrimental to the interests of the sedentary population. These brief remarks are enough to show that the nomadic-sedentary distinction has to be regarded with a certain scepticism. North Africa did, undoubtedly, go through a prolonged period of turmoil. But was that turmoil basically the result of the “nomadic invasion”? And was there in fact an “invasion”? ….