Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

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