How environment and kinship shape groups

This lesson asks you to explain how factors such as the physical environment and geographic location, and social structures such as family and kin, shape individual and group behaviour. The museum serves one account only, one contemporary author's picture of tribe and kinship in Arabia before Islam; the class brings the methods of sociology, the physical environment and other societies. ¹

Read the source and mark what it describes and what it judges. Then ask what evidence it gave, and which other factor a sociologist would have asked about.

Read one paragraph and mark what it describes and what it judges. In the record of the social condition of the Arabs before Islam, the book al-Rahiq al-Makhtum says that the bond of a man with his brother and his cousins and his clan was firm and strong ². They lived and died for tribal solidarity, and the basis of the social order was solidarity by descent and kinship ². They followed the proverb "help your brother, whether he is an oppressor or oppressed," in its literal sense, without the qualification that Islam introduced, that helping the oppressor means restraining him from oppression ². Yet rivalry for honour and lordship often led to wars among tribes that shared one father, as between al-Aws and al-Khazraj, 'Abs and Dhubyan, and Bakr and Taghlib ². The first sentences describe a custom; the clause about the qualification that Islam introduced is the author's own comparison. Ask where the description ends and the judgement begins.

A list of customs can be misread as a list of what everyone did. The record says that the author describes various circles whose conditions differ from one another ³. Of a man's relation with his children he lists several kinds, some of them harsh, and then does not count these among the widespread prevailing morals, since the Arabs were the people most in need of sons to protect them against the enemy ². A student who quotes one of the customs as if it were the rule of the whole society would be going beyond what the author himself says.

The record is the picture of one contemporary Sunni author, and it says plainly that the picture combines description and judgement. It adds that the views of modern studies of Arab society before Islam and of the status of women in it have not yet been added, and that the subject is one of dispute. The same book describes women among the nobles as honoured and protected, with the greater share of freedom of will and force of speech ³, and, in its final word, says that women were bought and sold and sometimes treated like objects ². Which of the two sentences is a description, which a judgement, and which circles does each cover?

The book says that the tribe was a miniature government resting on the unity of solidarity and on mutual interests in protecting the land and repelling aggression, and that the tribes in the deserts inside the Peninsula were entirely free, while those near al-Hira owed a subjection that was nominal ⁴. Does kinship or the land explain more of how these tribes behaved, and what evidence beyond this one author would you need before you could say so?

• The social condition of the Arabs before Islam: the author's circles, his description and his final judgement, kept apart.
• The political condition of the Arabs before Islam: the same book on the tribe as a miniature government, and on how rule differed by place.
• Asabiyya: the bond of kinship, with the record's note on what the book does not say of it.

Read the record on the social condition of the Arabs before Islam. Make two lists, what it describes and what it judges, then name one other factor you would ask about.