The discovery at Mada in Salih: myth or artifact?

• Author: Kennedy, Philip F.

Few books in islamic studies or Arabic literature are like this compact and engaging volume. Its great merit is its singularity - the identification and informed presentation of an undeniably arresting and rich subject. For it "reconstructs" an Arabian myth (the story of the destruction of Thamud and the episode of the SheCamel of Salih); suggests its probably composite historical provenance (e.g., the detectable imprint of biblical material as just one layer of a chronologically stratified and allusive narrative); and discusses, more essentially, an episode in the life of Muhammad that is enigmatic in the extreme, namely, the exhumation at al-Hijr of Abu Righal (the last survivor of the Thamud) together with the golden hough (the ghusnun min dhahabin) with which he had been mysteriously interred.

All the while the author takes his cue from a wealth of material, and gives one a real sense of how Islamic civilization built upon the scant narratives through which the Koran articulates its cumulative rhetoric. In its compositeness, and by means of discursive hints and allusive excursuses, the volume suggests - in the end perhaps too tacitly - a significant figural foreshadowing of Muhammad's situation in the Thamud story. This was topical - retrospectively at least - during the tense and problematic campaign against Tabuk.

It is this figural aspect that is exhumed to the same degree as the golden bough of Abu Righal and constitutes the most striking achievement of the book. The golden bough itself, whose physicality one must not lose sight of even if the episode is only the faint trace of an historical incident, is more problematic; in the end the author leads us to a mystery (and one is grateful for the role he has played), even if that mystery is far from solved. For the cross-cultural links with pre-dating tales (Gilgamesh, Homer, and Virgil) are too tendentiously pursued to constitute a solving of the enigma unearthed. (And to some extent this book is too much the narrative of its own intellectual endeavors, diluting the strength of its textual and hermeneutical arguments; i.e., it is at times a touch solipsistic, allowing one access too grudgingly to a focused argument.)

The introduction (pp. 1-12) gives a brief overview of the prejudices of the earliest Arabic literary culture and the canon that emerged from them. Absent from consideration in the literary/textual panoply dominated by poetry were/are myth and symbol. This section, notably, discusses the chief terms characterizing the ethics of Arabian society before and after Islam. In the author's view, changing perceptions - a hiatus to some extent - can explain the diminishing contours of ancient narratives. Their subsequent exiguous restructuring/reemergence in certain "parsimonious" narratives (e.g., the golden bough episode) is characterized thus by an absence - one paralleled, for example, by the shift in the essential semantics of jahiliyya. From being the emphatic condemnation of an attitude (one of untempered passion leading to folly and errant practice), jahiliyya acquired a temporal implication that came to dominate its semiotics. That is, jahiliyya as a term came to be understood principally as a time - an era - more than an attitude; or an attitude by virtue of a time, ignoring the fact that its antonym, hilm, had been one of the cardinal virtues of pre-Islamic Arabian muruwwa (virtus). This, briefly, is how I have understood Stetkevych's discussion (his own words express this temporal aspect as "an absolute breakdown of ideated time" [p. 3]), and one applauds this renewed contribution (there have been others [e.g., Bravmann's and Izutsu's (not referred to by the author)]) to an understanding of the ethics of the nascent Islamic community.

The relevance of this discussion is more problematic: with jarl relegated, by some collective conceptual and doctrinal misapprehension of the early Muslim community, to pre-Islamic Arabia there comes another assertion: "We must, therefore, entertain the strong notion that its denial by the new Arabia that emerged with Islam also meant Arabia's denial of myth, its cultural, autochthony defining ingredient" (p. 6). Then comes a generic qualification that presumes a working knowledge of the taxonomy of myth (and epic) never in fact discussed elsewhere: "For myth, all myth - the epics it engenders and those from which it nourishes itself - not just Arabian myth, is hardly conceivable without the presence of jarl somewhere near its very core." That is, the understanding of an essential temporal and semantic confusion over jarl - the hiatus that came about in the early Islamic perception of things - provides this book, in effect, with a conceptual point of departure.

The "co-optation" of key-terms (hilm, jahl, etc.) somehow inhibited the more natural evolution of myth. This allows, for example, the residual fragments of a mythic narrative to be reworked into the emerging figural aspect of Salih as reflected in Muhammad's activities at al-Hijr. All this, of course, denies scantiness of detail the ability to characterize a narrative in its own right; not all narratives must be filled out with detail and their own internal exegetical apparatus. And details may be forgotten without those details necessarily having had any symbolic or doctrinal significance. But this is just a...