Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
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192 t CHAPTER EIGHT<br />
<strong>Jews</strong>, <strong>and</strong> others who declined to embrace <strong>Islam</strong> were in the end<br />
content to speak its language.<br />
The new converts’ assimilation to Arab tribal society was considerably<br />
more difficult. Differences between peoples had always<br />
existed, of course, save in that pre-Babel world when all humankind<br />
was one (Quran 2:213; 10:19), but conversion had a particular<br />
significance in an essentially tribal society where identity <strong>and</strong> its<br />
consequent social <strong>and</strong> political protections were claimed on the<br />
basis of birth. There are ways of associating with tribal societies<br />
even if one is not born into them, but one of the most common,<br />
fictive adoption <strong>and</strong> its resultant patron-client relationship, provides<br />
the cliens with status of a decidedly inferior quality. What the<br />
cliens was to vestigial Roman tribalism, the mawla was to pre-<br />
<strong>Islam</strong>ic Arab tribal societies: a freed slave, protected but dependent.<br />
It was a kind of juridical adoption whereby the newcomer<br />
became a client of the tribe, with limited membership privileges<br />
<strong>and</strong> a considerable menu of obligations.<br />
The Arabs too were organized tribally be<strong>for</strong>e the coming of <strong>Islam</strong>,<br />
<strong>and</strong> though the Quran attempted to create a new type umma<br />
where spiritual merit replaced the old blood ties—“the noblest<br />
among you in God’s sight is he who is most righteous,” Quran<br />
49:13 announces in a bold reversal of tribal values—the Muslim<br />
society that emerged after the Prophet’s death continued to display<br />
much of the same tribal organization <strong>and</strong> many of the status<br />
markers that had prevailed in pre-<strong>Islam</strong>ic days. Thus new Arab<br />
converts could be assimilated into the rapidly exp<strong>and</strong>ing umma<br />
without difficulty, but non-Arabs who submitted were accessioned<br />
only through the pre-<strong>Islam</strong>ic institution of clientage known as<br />
wala. Thus the new Persian Muslim, <strong>for</strong> example, was attached to<br />
some Arab tribal lineage as a mawla, or client, who depended on<br />
his patron (wali) <strong>for</strong> protection <strong>and</strong>, in some larger sense, from<br />
whom he took his identification as a Muslim. This condition of<br />
clientage, a tribal hangover in a religious society that in theory<br />
recognized no tribal distinctions, though it created serious social<br />
problems in the eighth <strong>and</strong> ninth centuries, <strong>and</strong> even later in Spain,<br />
eventually passed out of <strong>Islam</strong>.