Desert is a Homeland that Has Migrated

Copyright 2006 by Gary Paul Nabhan

“Our ancestors need to hear from us.” Vivienne Jake, Kaibab Paiute elder

It is well after midnight, and I have found myself in the backseat of a rented Lexus with a driver named Ahmed who is speeding 150 kilometers per hour along the shores of the Arabian Gulf. There is desert here right up to the sea, but both dry ground and ocean water are hard to make out. There are floodlights beaming down on the eight lane super highway between Abu Dhabi and Dubai that obscure nearly everything on either side of the pavement.

I spot an exit for a camel race track, but we do not take it. I catch fleeting glimpses of Burger Kings, Subways, and Las Vegas-style shopping malls not far off the freeway, but we pass them by. The modernity and globalized glitz of the United Arab Emirates should be overwhelming my spirit, but my soul has already wriggled loose of their influence.

My soul has been roaming through the desert, to an era when the Nabhan tribe of ahl-Hadr Arabs reigned over the 500 kilometer stretch of coastlands between here and where the present-day Shuhar, Oman is located. Back then, Bahla and Suhar were capitols of a kingdom called Nabhanid , one that sent precious frankincense from the Boswellia trees of Oman out to Ethiopia, Syria, Egypt and Al-andalus. Its port towns south of the Straits of Hormuz traded for saffron, pepper, nutmeg and cinnamon coming in from the Malabar coast of India, the East Indies, and China.

Aroused by the potent chemicals in those spices, my imagination has been racing back through the last two millennia, wondering when, among those many centuries, the Nabhan tribe had land to call their own, land in which they felt deeply rooted. I have also been wondering why, after living for centuries in Yemen before a great flood damaged their lands, they roamed as rootless as tumbleweeds blown clear across the howling sands. I will be seeking clues in places such Musqat, Mecca, Bahla, Bagdad, Damascus, Byblos and the Bekaa. Like Dubai, many of these places have been radically transformed since Nabhans last inhabited them. Dubai itself has been transformed into highly-contrived stretch of oil refineries, instant modern cities, and million dollar race tracks where camels once roamed, unimpeded on their own. Such lands prompt me to recall an ancient aphorism frequently repeated among nomads of the Sahara: a desert is a homeland that has migrated.

Which has shifted more over the centuries? My father's clan, its values and dreams, or these sandy lands themselves, tortured by misuse, exhausted of their former fertility, blown away, or paved over and obscured? “You can never go home anymore” may seem to be a peculiarly American take on the world, but is it, in a world where one out of every three people is from a family that has included political or economic refugees over the last century and a half? What is left out of this bald statistic is the probability that many more of us are ecological refugees, forced to be weaned from some mother land because it has been ravaged by drought, locusts, fire, or by our own taxing practices of poor soil and water management.

I mull over these possibilities not merely for those whose surname is the same as my own, but for Every Person and for Every Habitat that is on the face of this earth. We have certainly never been as rooted as plants are in their habitats, but neither are we inexorably destined, like an HIV virus, to fully destroy our living habitat, our host. Can we find our ancestral home ground as Arthur Haley and many others have done, or has that ground already been swept out from under us?

Being somewhere between an ancient cactus and a deadly microbe in our lifestyles, however, gives us plenty room to accumulate soil around our base, or to blow it all away. And so imagination is once again racing back through history, trying to fathom just exactly where my ancestors gravitated to between these two poles.

Just where they gravitated can be judged by the stories which they themselves have told, and which others have told about them. As I close my eyes on the outskirts of modern Dubai, I strain my eyes to hear those stories, as Ahmed turns up the radio and oud music floods the car. But somewhere accompanying that ancient twelve stringed instrument, al'ud , I begin to hear my family's stories and perhaps, some of yours as well…

Once, when visiting a Lebanese cousin who was showing me through the souks of Byblos, I heard him speak with pride of our cultural heritage by claiming that we were direct descendants of the Phoenicians. As we looked out over the ancient Phoenician harbor there, its picturesque fish markets, antiquities shops, and sidewalk cafes, this claim seemed not only plausible but appealing. That is, my cousin asserted that his Nabhan contemporaries all share bloodlines with the very Phoenician seafarers who set sail from Byblos, Batroun and Tripoli to every known port in the Mediterranean world more than fourteen hundred years ago.

In doing so, my cousin was like the father in the movie, Big Fat Greek Wedding, who made the Greeks responsible for almost all of the great achievements of Western civilization. In fact, the Phoenicians did make the key innovations for our alphabet –named for alif and baa, the first two letters in most Semitic languages; for much of our basic arithmetic; and for many advances in astronomy and the related science of navigation. But putting that aside, I wondered, can my Nabhan family or any other Lebanese family verify that they have descended from those ancient seafarers?

It is an ironic claim, for what we know of the Phoenicians is that they were indeed the proverbial sailors in every harbor. Even if they occasionally returned to Byblos or other ports in present-day Lebanon, they had sown their seeds widely, from Granada and Carthage to Alexandria and Athens. While they may have kept a cohesive cultural identity over many centuries, more likely than not, they became pan-Mediterranean genetically.

How many families are not in this very same boat? They carry a name that implies they are from ethnicity or dynasty, but over the centuries, their clan picks up genes from many other ethnicities, moieties, clans or kinships. We pretend that the paternal surname is the predominant thread that links us to our ancestors, but many other bloodlines are woven into the tapestry as well.

What we do know about the relationship of Phoenicians to their mother land is that they deforested much of the coastal range above their harbors during their boat-building frenzy. By 3000 BC, they had already begun to strip away the most massive cedars of Lebanon to build rot-resistant ships in their satellite boat-works in the harbors of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Even after centuries of depleting one forest after another in the Lebanon Mountains, they failed to heed the plea for sustainable harvesting of the cedars that came from none other than the great Greek philosopher of science, Theophrastus (372-287 BC):

“It appears that if one protects such species of trees, each in its proper habitat, and does not cut them, they become remarkable both in height and thickness.” In Biblical Times, the Phoenicians acquiesced to as many as 10,000 loggers per month going onto Mount Libanos to cut timber! The durable wood from the lands above the Phoenician ports literally fueled the consolidation of the Mediterranean into one rather cohesive trade economy. And yet, it came with a cost.

Nevertheless, even if some of Phoenicians stayed close to home, attempting to protect the watersheds above Byblos, Beyrouth and Batroun, is there any greater chance that thesde home-bodies left pure-bred descendants?

Consider this. Over the last twelve centuries, some fourteen different conquering forces have rampaged what are now called Lebanon and Syria. They raped, pillaged and plundered as they passed through, and occasionally took wives (or husbands) from the local populace by legitimate means. If that is true, then how could it be that any Lebanese are pure-blooded Phoenicians at this late date? For better or worse, most Lebanese are mutts. The fifty million folks of Lebanese descent living beyond the Levant are no more mutts than their five million kin living inside the Old Country. That's what one gets for having ancestors who have had a predilection for living around cultural crossroads and harbors. Miscegenation has been the norm, not the exception. This truth is not exclusive to the Lebanese; it likely describes the ancestry of many of you reading this who identify with other ethnicities as well.

As many cultures--- from Gypsies to Cherokees--- have demonstrated, genetics may be one issue, but cultural identity is an altogether different one. In the Middle East, you can be a member of a clan or tribe by simply claiming (even by marriage) allegiance to a known common “ancestor.” That allegiance has been historically demonstrated through a kindred or corporate spirit known as ‘asabiyya. Genes don't matter as much as allegiances do.

The clan of our father's side of the family was historically known as the Nabahina or Banu Nabhan tribe, with the terms Nabahina (collective plural) and Nabhan (singular) originally meaning “outstanding” and “noble.” They were one of the ahl Hadr tribes of Yemen, at the southernmost reaches of the Arabian peninsula, not of the Mediterranean coast of the Levant. To be distinguished as one of the ahl Hadr tribes in such an early era meant that they were already “dwellers of fixed abodes,” unlike the ahl Bedu , or nomadic Bedouin.

Itinerant Bedu sheepherders still coexist with our kin in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon today. They currently rent my cousins' mountain pastures and bring them zaatar- flavored yoghurt and cheese derived from their ewes grazing on wild thyme in the summer. Nabhans may live in close proximity to camel-caravanning Bedouins, but we are not Bedu. In fact, my family has many of the agrarian biases against the nomadic life of the Bedouins that are expressed in this eighth century poem fragment from Bashshãr ibn Burd:

“(My father) never had to sing a camel song

while trailing along behind such a scab-ridden beast,

nor did he ever resort to piercing tiny colocynths--

the wild watermelons-- to quench his hunger & thirst,

neither did he have to knock down with a stick

the pods of native legume trees--mimosa, carob, acacia--

nor did we need to roast on meager coals

a skink while its tail still flailed & quivered

nor did I ever have to devour a desert lizard

that I dug with my own hands out of the stony ground.”

There may be very good historical reasons why Nabhans have exhibited a sense of place less like that of Bedouin sheepherders and Phoenician seafarers, and more akin to farmers of the Persian uplands, the floodplains of the Fertile Crescent, and the valleys draining out to Indian Ocean along the coast of Yemen. Along with the Hinawis, Aus, Khazras and kindred Tayy or Atik, the Banu Nabhan tribe were among the original Arab populations of Yemen that later dispersed to many parts of the Arabian Peninsula, Fertile Crescent, and beyond.

Their original dwelling place, according to the great historian of Arab peoples, Albert Hourani, was “Yemen in south-western Arabia, a land of fertile mountain valleys and a point for long-distance trade….The mountains of Yemen lie at the extreme point of an area touched by the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean, and this is where regular cultivation of fruits and grains had long been carried on.”

Sometime around the fifth century AD-- between the times when Yuhannis the Dipper and Yeshua of Nazareth were baptizing people in the River Jordan and when the Prophet Mohammed was sparking the fervor among newly-converted Moslems--- these original Arab tribes suffered losses during a dramatic flood, then departed from Yemen to seek green pastures elsewhere. It appears that invasions by the Ethiopians and depletion of Yemen's agricultural productivity aggravated this dispersal. Although these Arab peoples had traveled north in earlier centuries and were known as far north as present-day Baghdad as early as the sixth century BC, they were now looking to permanently settle, not merely to pass through these more arid lands of the north.

We know from a rather infamous incident that while most of the Nabhan-Tayy tribal members went northeast toward the Straits of Hormuz, others did not pass in the same direction, marry among the same people, nor keep the same religion as before. Early in the Christian era, some of the Tayys and Banu Nabhans were certainly part of the mass migration out of Yemen into the western reaches of Arabian Peninsula; in fact, the Tayys may have continued on to the Silk Road inTajikistan.

It was also likely that many were Christianized Arabs by this time, but continued to have close social and economic ties with Jews. In the multicultural communities of this era, it was there not unusual that a Banu Nabhan man fell in love with a Jewish girl from the Hebrew-speaking Banu al-Nadir tribe. During this era, most well-traveled people were polyglots, and they likely spoke Aramaic as a lingua franca as well as the dialects of their ancestors. In any case, this multi-lingual couple spawned a child named K'ab b Ashraf who loved to play with words. He became a well-known poet and because he was raised as a devout Jew, he was nicknamed al-Nadir to draw attention to his mother's ancestry.

Unfortunately, al-Nadir's playfulness with words, particularly his capacity for parody and satire, did not sit well with everyone. When, in a public performance, his poems poked fun at a certain Mohammed, who was claiming to be the recipient of a new prophesy. Mohammed was apparently not amused by al-Nadir's jokes, for the Prophet ordered his newly-converted followers to assassinate al-Nadir.

To this day, a debate rages among both Moslems and Jews regarding Mohammed's insistence that this non-believer should be assassinated. Was it because K'ab b Ashraf al-Nadir ibn Banu Nabhan was merely loose with his words, or was it because of adherence to Jewish thought and custom? There are those who maintain that after some frustrating experiences while running spice trade caravans to Jerusalem for his first wife, Mohammed was never comfortable with Jews. They read into the assassination order a hatred for all Jews, not just for one satirist who was both Jewish and Arab by descent.

This landmark conflict may have led to the ambivalence that some Nabhans have had regarding fervent religious devotion. It may have also made some Moslems wary of engaging with any quick-witted character with the surname of Nabhan, and may have even discouraged further pairings of Nabhans with Jews, for fear of producing another loose-tongued, politically-inappropriate poet into the world!

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