Genealogy: science or practical illusion?
Fawwaz Traboulsi
AFWG Workshop, Cairo, 27-29 March 2009.
I have been working for a number of years on the edition of a voluminous manuscript on the genealogy of families in the Arab East, Al-Akhbar al Mudawwanah wa-l-Marwiyyah `an Tarikh al-Usar al-Sharqiyah (henceforth Tarikh al-Usar al-Sharqiyyah) by the Lebanese historian `Issa Iskandar al-Ma`louf. The first part of the book on the families of Lebanon – came out last December 2008 from Dar Riyad al-Rayess Books in Beirut in seven volumes (and 2626 pages including hundreds of family trees)
Issa Iskandar al-Maalouf (1869-1965) is a teacher and journalist by profession, began his professional life teaching Arabic, Mathematics and English in a number of schools of the Lebanese regions before settling down in Zahleh (capital of the Biqa` plain) where he married the daughter of the local branch of the Ma`loufs. As a journalist, Ma`louf worked for a number of newspapers and journals in the Lebanese territories, and wrote for Syrian and Egyptian nespaepers including Al-Muqtataf, Al–Hilal and Al-Mashriq. Between 1911 and 1914 he issued Al-Athar, one of the first archeological journals in the region.
Hailed by historian Yusuf Ibrahin Yazbek as the last descendant of the Lebanese men of the Nineteenth Century Nahdah, Ma`louf’s encyclopedic writings cover a wide variety of subjects in linguistics, history, geography, archeology, genealogy, education and literature. He was a poet, belle-lettrist and prolific writer on Arab literature. His works include many histories of Lebanon, Syria and Palestine in addition to numerous monographs and books on Arab Medicine, folklore, popular poetry, vernacular Arabic, linguistics, travel, literary history and criticism, etc. Only a dozen of his books have been published, the rest – some sixty works – are still in manuscript form.
`Issa Iskandar al-Ma`louf also bequeathed one of the biggest and richest family libraries of Lebanon. Presently housed in his son Riad’s home in Zahleh, it contains a few thousand books in Arabic, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese and in the more classical ones in Coptic, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, Latin. Ma`louf was particularly interested was collecting material on Muslim esoteric sects (the `Alawis, Isma’ilis, Zaydis and Druze) and on Free Masonry. In addition, his library hosts some four hundred rare manuscripts on different topics, some older ones written on parchment and animal bones.
A lifetime’s work
Ma`louf, who was born into a Greek Orthodox family from the higher Matn (Mount Lebanon) began his intellectual activity in the last decade of the nineteenth century by investigating on the origins of his family. He discovered the Ma`louf’s Arab Ghassanid origins and followed the family’s migration from the Yemen to the Hawran plain in Syria – a major demographic reservoir of Christian Arabs – and their dispersion in a number of localities in the Arab East. These findings were published in 1908 in his book Dawani-l-Qutuf fi Tarikh Bani-l-Ma`louf (Baabda- Lebanon, Al-Matba`ah al-`Uthmaniyyah, 1908). [1]
As Ma`louf’s research into his own family had led him to record the genealogies of a number of related Syrian and Lebanese families, he decided to expand his project and write on the genealogies of the families of Syria and Lebanon. With time, the project was further expanded to include family histories from Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and the tribes of the Arab peninsula (in addition to a few families of Egypt and Morocco).
The final manuscript al-Akhbar al-Mudawwana wa-l-Marwiyyah fi Tarikh al-Usar al-Sharqiyah, a lifetime’s work of some six decades, remained in manuscript form as Ma’louf did not succeed to get his manuscript published in his lifetime. As early as 1924, he issued a brochure advertising his work and asking for early financial subscriptions to help him with the printing costs. He declared to his compatriots of the newly created Greater Lebanon that knowledge about family origins was a patriotic duty, emphasizing the fact that his book covered the genealogies of his the Lebanese irrespective of region, status, social class or religious creed. Quite a few orientalist scholars, among whom Jacques Berque, who visited Ma`louf, promised to find a publisher. In 1946, a decade before his death, Ma`louf, had lost hope in getting his manuscript published. He confessed that his attempts to seek subscriptions had failed as almost all the families addressed asked to see their family histories first before deciding whether to subscribe or not.
Now that positions of the families tell a lot about the function of genealogy and the manner in which families treat their own family origins and destinies. I was intrigued by this condition. So families would only accept what please them and suits them in the relation of their origins and family histories!
I shall come back to this point later.
I took upon myself the task of editing this manuscript initially for a family reason. The author happened to be my maternal grandfather, with whom I lived part of my early life, and owe him a lot in terms of my intellectual interests and development. During the wars of Lebanon (1975-1990) when Zahleh was besieged, I collaborated with his heir, Riad Ma`louf and his family, to photocopy a number of his manuscripts and get them out of the besieged city in order to save them and ultimately find ways to publish them. Prime among them was Tarikh al-Usar, a work which made Ma`louf’s fame, as it had become a tradition for people to visit him inquiring about family lineages and the historian would always oblige. But very few people had seen the manuscript.
My other interest, on the other hand, was of ocurse that of the historian. Ma`louf’s manuscript contains a wealth of material on the history of the peoples and countries of the Arab East. But I was soon to discover the additional material it offered on the demography of the region and its sociology, not to speak on the light it sheds on questions of culture and identity.
It took some twenty years between the time the copy of the manuscript left the Ma`louf library and the publication of the first part of the book. Completing Ma`louf’s work was simply out of the question, so was the task of checking out the family histories it contained. Editing was reduced to re-arranging the thousands of pages into some pattern that will be the reader-friendly. And that was no simple task. Having lost hope in publishing the manuscript, the author simply inserted in the original fourteen volumes of the manuscript, additional pages and notes here and there over the years. Nevertheless, we managed to follow Ma`louf’s original pattern of dividing localities according to administrative units (Qadha’and Muhafazah ) though these has sizeably changed between the time he wrote under the Mutasarrifiyyah and preset-day Lebanon, and describing the history, geography and archeology of each location, before proceeding to noting in detail its family histories in alphabetical order. Needless to say that the bigger problem was to find where was the most convenient way to imbed the families: according to original location? temporary settlement? or final destination? And were we to do in the case of the branches of the family, which is to be considered the principal one and which secondary, etc. Each of these alternatives involved difficult choices and a lot of manipulation of the text. However, the most time consuming part of the printing process was type setting especially the computer setting of family trees, which took us a number of years.
In this contribution, I wish to share with you some information and analysis about this work and the questions it raises as regards families and family histories.
I am not an anthropologist nor am I an ethnologist. I approached this book as a historian. Nevertheless, working on Ma`louf’s genealogy raised a number of questions about genealogy the craft of the genealogist and I found it necessary to follow them. They can be resumed by the following.
To what extent can we consider genealogy as a science?
Why do people wish to know their origins? And when? And what for?
What function does kinship play in social life and in the construction of identities.
What role does memory play when it comes to origins?
Methodology and characteristics
Before proceeding, here are the most salient characteristics of the work and its methodology:
- Ma`louf relied for his monumental work on a multiplicity of sources, namely the following:
i) oral interviews with members of the families themselves, as the author toured villages and towns in the regions of present day Lebanon in quest of material for his book,
ii) oral and written family histories collected during his visits in the Arab region, including extensive periods in Damascus where he served in the translation department of the Arab government of prince Faysal (1918-1920) before contributing to the founding of al-Majma` al-`Ilmi al-`Arabi and in Egypt where he was a member of the Magma` Fu’ad al-Awwal li-l-Lugha al-`Arabiyyah;
iii) the records of an extensive correspondence with clergymen, `ulemas, heads of families, notables and others; who bothered to answer Ma`louf’s queries.
iv) historical documents. - An adept of Ibn Khaldoun who was likewise influenced by modern European historiography, Ma`louf was a ‘transitional’ historian between two traditions. In presenting his methodology, he considers bias and partiality as the main deviations that historians should guard themselves against. In return, he uses the Arab tradition of isnad to buttress his stories by reference to the strength of authority and convincing witnesses. His tools, on the other hand, are calls ‘excavation’ (tanqir and tanquib) ‘investigation’ (tahqiq) and the provision appropriate ‘proofs’ (barahin) in order to ‘ascertain’ his findings (tathbit). Aware that people tend to invent or modify their family stories for a multiplicity of motives, he gave a lot of importance to the reliability of his sources, checking and counter checking the accounts of the informants, comparing between different versions to their minutest details, armed by ‘no other than patience and perseverance’, as was would like to say. When in doubt, he would provide different versions on the same family history. (Dawani al-Qutuf : 4-5, Tarikh al-Usar: 47-8).
- Ma`louf’s major novelty in this genealogy is that he breaks with the tradition of restricting family histories to the elite, the khasah – namely, a`yan, ashraf, sada, `ulema, clergy and the like. He recorded and collected the family histories of the `amma – commoners families- as well, irrespective of status or wealth.
- Ma`louf’s work remains unequalled in its ambition to cover such a wide and arduous subject as the families of the whole Near East. In post war Lebanon, family genealogies, and village, town, city and regional histories abounded. But one contemporary author ventured to write a genealogy that covers the families of Lebanon, he is the late Ahmad Abu Sa`d. None has yet attempted to write a genealogy of the whole region.
Be that as it may, the end result of Ma`louf’s formidable one-man job is necessarily and understandably incomplete and uneven as to sectarian and regional coverage, quite weak on the families of the coastal cities, notably Beirut, and generally, containing less data on Muslim families than on Christian ones. Strangely enough, Ma`louf other works (e.g. his histories of the Biqa` and Zahleh, not to speak of numerous papers and articles) contain valuable additions which were not included in the genealogy. - For the historian, Ma`louf’s work provides rich and abundant data on a number of demographic trends in the regions that constitute present-day Lebanon. Here you can find additional historical and genealogical material emphasizing the Arab origin of the majority of the families of Lebanon, Christian and Muslim. Further proof is given that demographic flow into the Lebanese territories tended to be from West to East, carried by migrant wages from the Arab hinterland rather than from the sea. Inside the Lebanese territories themselves, the main trend of population movement was from North to South as the Christian settlement slowly pushed the Muslim population southwards and eastwards.
- Along the same lines, Ma`louf’s genealogy provides ample material on the frequency of religious and sectarian conversions in Lebanese history, resulting in the change of the religious and sectarian identity of families, villages, towns even whole regions. Those conversions operated both ways between Muslims and Christians and within the sects of each of these two religions. As for the educational motive, prominent among Christians, it mainly refers to the conversion of many Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and even Maronite Christians to the various protestant sects encouraged by missionary schooling.
- Lastly, in drawing the genealogic trees, Ma`louf remained within the tradition of recording the names of male family members only. However, in the accompanying texts, wives and daughters were occasionally mentioned, especially by Christian families.
Contruction of identities
“Genealogy (nasab) is the language of kinship”, writes Ma`louf. A language it is, but also a science also, he adds, one that determines the origins of tribes and their segments according to established known rules.
Meticulous, thorough and scientific as Ma`louf wanted to be, he would soon discover that family histories are not only about knowledge: the language of kinship speaks another language.
When he raises the obvious question- why are people interested in knowing and recording their family history? –
he answers: “in order to bond in solidarity and mutual help [li-l-tanasur fi-l-`asabiyyah] and take pride in their ancestors [al-tafakur b-il-ajdad]”. Thus, this ‘science’, set to produce ‘objective’ and unbiased knowledge on its object, serves also more practical functions. ‘Bonding in solidarity’- is the product of the definition of the ‘nerve’ [`asab] of the agnatic family-which determines the type of lineage endogamy, the rules of exchange of women and the conditions of mobilization for work or battle.
But solidarity and pride are only the fixed factors behind people’s interest in investigating and recording their origins and lineages. Families and groups are not equal in their interest in that quest irrespective of time and place. Ma`louf enumerates natural catastrophes, famines and wars as prime among the factor that drive families, groups and communities to record their lineages as a form of resistance against oblivion and in the hope of the reconstruction and perpetuation of their lineages.
Ma`louf collected most of his material in the post WWI period. In addition to war as a catastrophe in itself two additional calamities befell the Lebanese regions: the famine that hit with particular severity and a new wave of migration. Mount Lebanon alone lost at least a third of its population in the process.
One other factor Ma`louf does not list in his introduction, but is very present in the book itself: social mobility and transformation. We mean by this the socio-economic transformations of post Tanzimat Ottoman times, and its effects on family structure and family relations:
Rapid capitalization leading to the breakup of the muqata`ji Ottoman system (of tax collection and land control);
the collapse of autarcy due to the the rapid development of sericulture and small market production;
the rise of a new predominantly Christian middle class composed of two branches. One consisted of silk reelers, money-lenders, and merchants, including those affluent compradors related to Beirut’s colonial trade. The other comprised the intellectuals related to Beirut’s expanding cultural activities and the budding administration of the Mutasarrifiyah, (the autonomous territory of Mount Lebanon, 1861-1915) both benefiting from a rapid expansion of education, primarily due to missionary schooling,
Ma`louf was not a stranger to these transformations Zahleh, could be seen as a microcosm of this socio-economic mobility, as it was being transformed from a number of estates [hawch] belonging to the Druze muqata`jis to the economic, political and cultural capital of the Biqa` plain: principal market town for the population and the tribes of the plain, it served also as trade link between Mount Lebanon and the Syrian hinterland for a number of vital staples and products. By the second half of the Nineteeth century, Zahleh had achieved its political autonomy from the rule of the previously Druze Billama` Emirs (who had nevertheless converted to Christianity to please their predominantly Christian subjects in their fief in the Matn region), and expelled the last Druze family from its midst. In 1857, the town declared itself an autonomous ‘commune’ led by a council of catholic merchant-military notables who constitute its prestigious ‘seven families’ until now.
It is worth to go back here to the families approached by Ma`louf to subscribe for the publication of his book. Had they accepted, they would have found in their own relation of the family stories and in Ma`louf collection of the genealogies of their families and of similar ones what might have pleased them and satisfied their claim to social ‘honor’. For Ma`louf’s genealogy is full of families belonging to the aforementioned upward mobile Christian middle classes. These newcomers, representing money and cultural capital, would have been quite seduced, in their search for a place in the newly constructed social hierarchy, to read about Ma`louf’s discovery of their Ghassanid Yemeni- Hawrani origin and their tribal descent. Christians, in their majority, they could not ‘bond in solidarity and take pride in their ancestors’ as descendants of Ottoman administrators, or Arab Muslim sadas or ashraf. Their ‘origins’ as Arab Bedouin tribes allowed them to take at least pride in their ancestors as men of war, courage, pride, generosity, hospitality and the like, who fight the strong and defend the weak. Presently, many such families claim such tribal origins and take pride in them without necessarily knowing that Ma`louf was one of the first to excavate their origins.
Constructed identities: trees that walk
However, genealogy is destined to record and explain two contradictory phenomena in the life of families: trace back their their origins to an ultimate time and place. Having done that, it has to explain the reasons why they left that the ultimate place and follow their migrations and dispersion over territories.
The traditional way of presenting a family graphically is by using the graphic template of a ‘tree’. The symbolism speaks for itself. ‘Family trees’ literarily ‘ground’ the family in the earth and spread its branches in space. Thus the roots are deeply furrowed in the ground, and in time, while a strong trunk holds the branches and the leaves. Strangely enough, rarely do family trees show fruits on the branches!
In contradistinction, kinship has to explain why families, split, and depart, migrate and disperse. Departure and dispersion have many causes and factors. Ma`louf lists natural catastrophes, famines, oppression, wars, slavery, over-population, evasion of taxes and of Jizziya. To those he adds the search for work, the love of conquest and settlement, and last but not least, the ‘influence of women’ (Dawani: , Tarikh al-Usar, vol. 1, 48-52).
Strangely enough, though Ma`louf presents the quest for work as the most important factors for family migration, this factor rarely appears in the families’ stories and recollections about the causes of their displacement, as if families are ashamed of avowing their economic necessity and poverty as driving factors for migration.
On a micro-level, emigration and dispersion are also attributed to vendettas and to conflict between families and tribes over water, agricultural land and pastures, and between siblings over inheritance are also an important factor to be mentioned.
By ‘influence of women’, Ma`louf refers to a more dramatic factor related to the family or tribe’s ‘honor’, i.e. to conflicts over the possession of women, the infringement of the ban on exogamy, marriage against parents’ will, such conflicts at times lead to blood feuds and vendettas and the like.
One typical example of a blood feud that includes both family honor and fight against oppression is the trajectory of the Khalaf family in the Biqa`. This is a typical explanation of Ma`louf as in includes philological interpretation when other proofs are lacking. The initial family name of the Khalafs, most probably Greek Catholic Christians as can be inferred from their names, is said to have been Bitar, as their ancestors were mainly blacksmiths. They acquired the denomination of Khalaf (Khallaf in the vernacular is said of a man who begot many) because one of them has many children. Among them was a man who had a girl and six boys. The girl, who left the village of Ras Ba`albak, in the direction of the water spring, was raped by a Harfoush Emir. The brothers immediately killed the Emir and fled with the whole family. They were dispersed along a wide territory ranging from the Nabk in Western Syria, Homs in the North, Jenin in Palestine, to Qumatiyyeh and Kafarshimah near Beirut. Be it said in relation to the question of religious conversions that among the ancestors of the Khalaf is a certain `Abbas who could only be a Muslim! (Tarikh al-Usar: vol. 5, p. 39091)
In all the cases related to reasons for migration and dispersion, Ma`louf makes reference to antique and mythological precedents: Abraham’s expulsion of his son Ismael from the parental home in order to deprive him of his inheritance, during the festivities of the severance of his son Isaac; the destruction of the Ma’rib dam as mythological interpretation for the dispersion of the Arab tribes; the fracticide of Cain and Abel, etc.
Tough the expulsion from the parental home has also been modeled on to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, it can sometimes have a positive effect. For the fracticide of Cain and Abel was the founding murder of civilization. Arab sources on the other hand relate the expulsion of Ismael to the construction of the Ka`bah and the birth of a new generation of Arabs; it is even linked to the birth of the Arabic language itself supplanting Aramaic and Syriac, the languages that Abraham spoke.
But we do not need modern anthropology to remind us that after two or three ancestors, genealogy joins the realm of the uncertain to say the least. Here is the trencahnt formula of Ibn Khaldoun “genealogy is a knowledge/science without much use and an ignorance which brings no harm”.
Let us have a closer look on this. Genealogy has no much use as a source of knowledge when it becomes more and more blurred as we depart from the immediate ancestors. What remains is the function of genealogy. It establishes, emphasizes or even invents womb ties (silat rahm in Arabic) of family origins and family alliances that are supposed to create or strengthen a `asabiyah that welds the community/group by common rules, traditions, and [subjects it] to one leadership and consequently [leads it to] a common destiny. Without this function, the genealogy is but illusion (wahm) and incongruous dreams as Ibn Khaldoun tells us in the Muqaddimah:
“… the utility of kinship/genealogy resides in that fusion that imposes womb ties in order that mutual help [munassarah] and pride and glory [nu`rah] may occur. What is beyond that is superfluous, as genealogy is but an illusion which has no reality to it and its utility only resides in these bonding and welding [effects]” (al–Muqaddimah: 129 – my translation).
The author of the Muqaddimah goes on to add:
“…when kinship/genealogy becomes blurred and [still] seeks to be considered a science among sciences, the utility of illusion will depart from the mind and lost will be the [pride and glory] nu`rah that endows it with solidarity/`asabiyyah; it [kinship] then becomes useless.” (al–Muqaddimah: 129 – my translation).
The notion of nu`rah is important here. Defined by its synonyms of kubar and khuyala’, which evokes dignity, honor, hubris and even vanity, poses a problem in translation whereas na`rah seems more appropriate as it refers to bonding and conglamorating. But Ibn Khaldoun insists on using nu`rah which I will venture to translate as social honor in the Weberian sense.
We can say that, in more modern terms, the utility of kinship resides in its ideological function not in the knowledge it produces. It is constructed social honor that is recorded and searched for in genealogies, more than real origins, migrations and destinies.
Going on more step further, Ibn Khaldoun now deals with the political function of nu`rah as he affirms, a few pages later, that dominance in leadership [ri’asah] is the product of solidarity/`asabiyyah not the product of kinship (al–Muqaddimah: 132). No wonder, then, if we find those who dominate inventing sacred or prestigious lineages for themselves as additional justification for their domination. One case in point is Saddam Hussein’s invented family tree to ‘prove’ that the Sunni President was a descendant of Imam `Ali, a barely veiled attempt to rally Iraq’s Shi`as, in the name of common descent, to the Sunni President’s war against Shi`i Iran.
In brief conclusion, I have tried to show the relativity of genealogy as a science, and the extent to which what seems as the most solid foundation of identity- family origins and lineages- can be constructed frequently, if not always, to serve some purpose in the presentand that these purposes have much to do with practical utility more than the production of knowledge. Saddam Hussein’s invention of his sacred genealogy is just the exaggerated form of a practice of inventing common origins and shared ancestors in order to strengthen group solidarity, confirm family, tribal, religious and political alliances in the present and provide them with spacial ‘depth’ and historical continuity.
Trees do not move, reminds us another Ma`louf. I am talking about Amin Ma`louf in one of his latest novels about his family, where he ackowledges `Issa Ma`louf’s Dawani-l-Qutuf (Amin Ma`louf, Origines, Paris, Grasset, 2004, p. 484) and relates that in his own nuclear family, Isaa Ma`louf’s genealogy is referred to as the ‘Tree’. A critic of identity fixations, and identity politics Amin Ma`louf is warning against singular identities, especially family or religious ones. But he is also reminding us that origins do not explain much. At best they might explain a beginning. They cannot explain a common trajectory as they cannot explain a common ‘essence’. It is noteworthy that Amin insisted that the Arabic translation of his book Origines should bear title Bidayat [Beginnings] rather than Usul[Origins]. Here the younger Ma`louf meets Amartya Sen in his remarkable book Identity and Violence whose subtitle tells all about its message: common destinies, based on assumed common origins and identities, are but illusions.
[1] The book was published in an English translation in the United States as Maloof, The Ghassani Legacy, the translator/editor Hanna Maalouf assuming the title of its author.