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Our ancestors need to hear from us. Vivienne Jake, Kaibab Paiute elder
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 fathers 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, alud, I begin to hear my familys stories and perhaps, some of yours as well
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.
that is true, then how could it be that any Lebanese are pureblooded 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. Thats 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.
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 Bashshr 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.
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 Yemens 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.
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 Kab 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 mothers ancestry. Unfortunately, al-Nadirs 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-Nadirs jokes, for the Prophet ordered his newlyconverted followers to assassinate al-Nadir. To this day, a debate rages among both Moslems and Jews regarding Mohammeds insistence that this non-believer should be assassinated. Was it because Kab 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 loosetongued, politically-inappropriate poet into the world!
He cut off the hands and ears, and scooped out the eyeballs of nobles, inflicted unheard-of outrages upon the inhabitants, destroyed watercourses, burnt the books, and utterly destroyed the country. At last, Mohammed ibn Nurs tyranny was met with the wrath of an infuriated people, whose tribes disposed of his deputies, but then kept quarreling among themselves. This power vacuum persisted into the middle of twelfth century; then, as White suggests, a Nabhan tribe acquired ascendancy and ruled until the reestablishment of the Imamate in A.D. 1429 He was able to trace the stabilizing influences of this tribe in the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula well into the 1620s, suggesting that our Nabhan ancestors had at last found a new home in which some of them developed an enduring sense of place. As Hourani noted, they had found a place in Oman, not dissimilar to Yemen in the southeast.
of palms to harvest dates for spread out on pruned fronds to mature and dry. Potters are firing up their dome-shaped kilns with other palm fronds as fuel. Nearby, dyers are soaking goathair cloaks in vats of indigo, blue as the mountains above them. And in the souks, vendors are marketing many of the same varieties of dates, spices and vegetables that their ancestors have nurtured for centuries. Because of its living traditions as much as for what Lynn Simarski calls one of the most majestic monuments in all of Oman, Bahla is now recognized as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations,. UNESCO is assisting in the restoration of this monumental legacy of the Bani Nabhan tribe. Bahla is the very place where the tribe established their first capitol of the collective Nabhanid kingdom and it perhaps the place with which the Nabhans have the longest continuous association. Historian Hasan al-Naboodah has suggested that this kingdom was collective in the sense that numerous Nabhan sheikhs formed a confederation to guard their shared territory from intruders, without having much of a hierarchy among themselves. It appears that some members of the tribe had a stronger inclination for trade than for farming and crafts, for they shaped a second capitol at a breach on the precipitous mountain coast, at Suhar, a city which continues to be an important international seaport. Later, when Portuguese seafarer Alfonso de Alburqueque first encountered the second Nabhanid castle in Suhar in 1507, he found that it was a fortress square in shape, with six towers around it, having over its gate another two very large towers. It was large enough to comfortably hold a thousand men and all their provisions.
From 1150 AD when the collective Nabhanid kingdom first brought peace to the region, these two castles were used by a long chain of Banu Nabhan rulers that maintained a functioning confederacy for longer than the present U.S. government has persisted in North America. The dynasty developed around 1150, in a period of disunity within the Moslem world. Abu Muhammed al-Fallah may have been the first Banu Nabhan of the conferderacy, emerging as a leader to be reckoned with by 1151, solidifying his power base by 1154, and prevailing until 1176. Nearly two dozen Banu Nabhan presided over the secular, economic and military affairs of the mountainous coastal region of Oman for the next three to five centuries. Until recently, they were largely ignored or despised by more conservative Omani Moslem historians, one of whom dismissed their era with a single sentence: None of the Nabhani rulers was a just ruler [and] most of them were known for their injustice and infidelity. However, recent historians suggest that the Nabhans collectively offered a leadership that far and away eclipsed the influence more orthodox Imams who were charged with offering their spiritual authority to the region. These Imams are regularly praised today by more fundamentalist Moslem historians, and the more hedonistic Nabhans used as scapegoats. The truth may be that although Islam had been introduced to Oman around 630 AD, Omans pivotal location in intercontinental commerce meant that the elected theocracy of the Imamate did not preside over all of its affairs. More secular affairs, such as trade across the seas and along the Frankincense Road, could benefit the Arabs only if there were leaders who
maintained good diplomatic relations with surrounding nations, and quelled the bickering between the nomadic tribes whose grazing lands the spice caravans passed through.
are terribly unhealthy, harmful to those sailing by and absolutely fatal to those working there, who, moreover, die off easily because of the lack of nourishment. By discouraging anyone to get near to the desert valleys where the same ancient frankincense trees were tapped for the aromatic amber in late summer year after year, and by obscuring the whereabouts of the route to the interior later known as the Frankincense Road, the Nabhans were undoubtedly among the coastal Arabs who cornered the market on this valuable commodity.
Then, in a story said to occur on the 625th Arabian night, another Nabhan is shown to be lavishly wealthy but just as unsuitable for another Baghdad beauty named Mahdiyah: When Al-Haml, lord of the Banu Nabhan, heard of her charmshe took horse with five hundred of his men to demand her hand. His offer of marriage was also spurned, so he kidnapped Mahdiyah and her slave girls, only to have Baghdads own Gharib the Stranger drive a lance through Al-Hamls heart, and cut off his head. Gharib was so proud of his success in routing a southerner from the Arabian Peninsula, that he composed this couplet on the spot: I am he who is known on the day of the fight, & the Jinn of the Earth at my shadow take flight! Fortunately, not all of the Nabhan and Tayy tribal members faired so poorly when they visited the north. In fact, some of the Tayy subtribe moved to Baghdad, and later, further northeastward to assist with bringing Arab-speaking merchants what they wanted from the Silk Road caravans. After a while, all Arab-speaking traders in Fari-dominated dialect areas were called Tayys for short, and later, Tajiks. Some scholars claim that this is the origin of the name Tajikistan, signifying that it was a place of exchange along the Silk Road for Arab-, Farsi- and Mongolian-speaking traders. Apparently the lessons learned in managing trade along the Frankincense Road had also had some value on the Silk Road, the other route that linked the caravans of the East with those of the West.
position in the Arab spice trade between the Far East and Europe as well as Africa. Perhaps it could not have lasted much longer anyway: the Banu Nabhan had been holding pivotal positions linking spice trade between Asia, Africa and Europe for centuries. Now that Portuguese and Spanish seafarers had found ways to reach India and the East Indies on their own, the land routes taken by camel caravans would inevitably be usurped. But the Portuguese not only had disrupted the Arab connections with the Malabar Coast by sea; they then took over the castle in the port of Suhar as well.
for the Ottomans came in from the north and incorporated the regions economy into their vast empire. The tribe was no longer at the pinnacle of its political power on the Arabian Peninsula, but does that mean that all Nabhans emigrated from the region, losing their centuries-old sense of place? There are indeed families-- including artists still in vicinity of Suhar and Bahla--with whom we share our surname. They can still trace their descent back through some twenty-two generations of affiliated tribes now called the Bani Riyam, which formerly received strong leadership from the Nabahina sheikhs. Nonetheless, we can be sure that some Nabhans did begin to wander beyond their homelands of the eastern Arabian Peninsula from this time onward.
emigrants could more easily take refuge there without infringing upon the more productive territories of neighboring tribes. Perhaps they could escape religious persecution there, or easily trade in the wild anise seed that naturally sprouts and grows in years with adequate rainfall. But in the end, Mount Hauran was perhaps more of a waystation or stopover for the tribe than a home with long-term potential.
They certainly do. For starters, while it appears that the Abou Rjeillys were steadfast Christians, but it is not so clear that the Nabhans had been as tenacious in adhering to just none religion. It is known that one branch of the family that arrived in Lebanon were Sunni Moslems. The word Sunni comes from the term ahl al-sunnuh wa-l-jamaah, meaning people of custom and community who humbly attempt to mirror the Prophets most admirable and devout behaviors in their own actions. Although ancestors of the Nabhans may have been Christian prior to the emergence of Islam late in the sixth century, nearly every community on the Arabian peninsula converted to Islam within a century and a half after the Prophet Muhammeds death. Of course, some Nabhans may have held out as Christians, as the Abou Rjeilys did near Mount Hauran in Syria. But a return to Christianity for some Sunni Nabhans is just as likely, and probably occurred within the last three centuries, after they had moved to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon from the south and east of the Arabian Peninsula.
What relatives have recalled to me, however, is that Ras el-Metn is a place of heavenly summers. During the era in which the Nabhan family still lived around the mountain in any number, it was thick with mulberry trees whose leaves were harvested for feeding to silkworms. At the time I heard these stories, I had no idea that silkworms had ever been translocated to the Mediterranean, but later learned that silk production had become a major cottage industry in the mountains of Crete as well. I warmed to the idea that Ras el-Metn had been a memorable place in family history until the Nabhans moved on for one last migration across the Middle East.
hidden off from the road between Zahle and Aanjar. He agreed to do so if Elias and the other Abou Rjeilly militia men could come as well. Down in the valley, Eliass family decided to go by the name of Bourjailly.
found themselves landing in Vera Cruz, Mexico, or Brazilian ports instead. As World War I began, much of the Bekaa Valley was depopulated. By the time Lawrence of Arabia and his Arab allies freed Damascus of the Turks, the valleys population was perhaps only one twentieth of what it had been a quarter century before. The French and English then set up their separate protectorates for Lebanon and Syria respectively, leading to a far greater influence of French culture among most Nabhans. According to Ellis Island records, 26 year old Petros Nabhan was the first of the family to emigrate to the United States in 1893. Immigration of Nabhans from the Old Country to America peaked between 1906 and 1912. This included one eighteen year old, Amin Najm Nabhan, who, in 1909, listed his previous residences as both Beirut and Syria. At that time, the Bekaa Valley was still part of Syria, hence the confusion among American-born Nabhans when their grandparents called themselves Syrian, even though most remaining relatives live in what is now known as Lebanon. The Bekaa Valley is at the southern cusp of the Fertile Crescentone of the first cradles of agriculture in the Old World. But it has also been ancestral grounds for a number of my fellow Lebanese-American writers and activists, from Ralph and Laura Nader to Vance Bourjailly and Greg Orfalea. We all grew hearing stories of the Old Country, and in most cases, the anciently-inhabited landscape that are grandparents, aunts and uncles were referring to is none other than the Bekaa. In spring, it is a splendor of wildflowers; in fall, it is burgeoning with fruits of all shapes and sizes. Not fruits from nursery-raised trees or
hybrid seed packets, but biladi varieties, ones that have been passed from hand to hand, sower to sower, for centuries. For those of us with the surname of Nabhan, the Old Country could just as well mean Yemen, Oman, Mount Houran or Ras el-Metn. But the stories of those ancestral grounds have, until recently, been obscured. Our family has migrated, but so has the desert itself. The past does not stand still. It continues to shift in a way that will make much of this sound absurd or obsolete to the next generation of the Nabhan tribe that comes along. They will have to tell their own versions of our family history, in order to restore our sense of family. The lands themselves will find ways to be restored, to regenerate new wealth after the scars have healed. Some future generation will record in these landscapes something that we cannot even imagine seeing there today. The land and the stories will go on. References
Al-Naboodah, Hasan M. 197. Banu Nabhan in the Omani sources. In G. Rex Smith, J.R. Smart, and B.R. Pridham, New Arabic Studies, Volume Four. University of Exeter Press, Devon. Ashtiany, Julia. 1990. Abbasid Belles-Lettres: Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. Volume II. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, This volume includes the Bashar ibn Burd poem, first technically translated into English by A.H.L. Beeston, p. 280, freely translated here.
Brown, John Permain. 1969. The Lebanon and Phoenicia: Ancient Texts Illustrating Their Physical Geography and Native Industries. Volume I. American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon. Casson, L., trans. 1989. The Periplus of the Erythraen Sea. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Dalby, Andrew. 200. Dangerous Tastes: the Story of Spices. University of California Press, Berkeley. Gil, Moshe. 1992. A History of Palestine, 634 to 1099. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hourani, Albert. 1991. A History of the Arab Peoples. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kennedy, Hugh. 2004.The Court of the Caliphs. When Baghdad Ruled the Moslem World.Phoenix/Orion Books, London.
Menon, Bala. 1999, The magic of Bahla. www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/3763/Bahla.htm?20064 Orfalea, Gregory. 1988. Before the Flames: a quest for the History of Arab Americans. University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas. Recently revised and released as Orfalea, Gregory. 2005. The Arab-Americans; A History.
Simarski, Lynn Teo. 1991. Fortified Oman. Aramco World , Volume 42, Number 0ne, January-February. www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue 1991.fortified.omam.ht Suhar, Arabia, Regnal Chronologies. www.hostkingdom.net/arabia.html. Turner, Jack. 2004. Spice: The History of a Temptation.Vintage Books, New York. www.1902-encyclopedia.com/A/ARA/arabia-25.htm Wilson, Arnold Talbot 1928. The Persian Gulf. George Allen and Unwin, London.