Page 92 - Arabian Studies (I)

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78 A rabian Studies I
and refuse to admit to baysan descent. In ‘IbrI a group called the
Shanadld has fairly recently become very rich one ShandudT
owned 117 gardens there — and themselves own[ed 1 slaves: they are
trying to forget their origin but ‘everyone knows they were originally
mawalT of the Hal Bu ‘AIL’
With regard to their origins all the stories reported in Thomas and
Lorimer were confirmed by our sources but the idea that they were
originally captives prevails. Indeed one informant stated that they
were originally called mayasirah (n.b., b to m changes do occasion­
ally occur in Eastern Arabian dialects), people who were enslaved
because they refused to submit to Islam - they were mushrikun and
not nunvahh idlin’ thus, our informant stated, they are found all over
.
the Arab world, even among Quraish, and most Egyptians are
.
baydsirah1 But although this idea that they form an inferior clan by
reason of their refusal to accept Islam is held fairly generally, there is
also a prevalent idea that the baydsirah are a people without asl
(racial origin).
One other account of the baydsirah proves to be of considerable
importance in discussing the evolution of their status. In the Sifat
jazTrat al-'Arab (ed. D. H. Midler, 51—2) Hamdani describes a
struggle for power at the ‘beginning of our era’, between a Malik b.
Fahm clan (the Bani Judaid) and certain Qamr groups of the Mahrah
in Raisut of the Dhofar area, then the most important settlement
between Aden and Oman. In this account he mentions that the
i. original inhabitants of Raisut were the baydsirah. The local traditions
of the area are by no means incompatible with what Hamdani
! reports. Writing of the Qara, Shahara (Sheris) and Botahira (Bata-
hirah) groups in Dhofar, Thomas (Thomas (1937)) recounts that the
Qara, like the Mahrah, were outsiders who gained control of the
area from the original inhabitants, i.e. the Shahara who owned the rich
coastal areas, and the Botahira who lived on the steppe of the
hinterland. The latter were driven eastward into their present
territory but the Shahara were absorbed by the newcomers and
today are little more than slaves of the Qara. All three groups are
considered as inferior by the Arabs.
Now within all these stories there is a number of interwoven
elements which explain not just the origins of the baydsirah but help
reveal the underlying layers in the palimpsest of present traditional
social organization in South East Arabia. At the ‘beginning of our
era’, that is at the dawn of Islam, the peoples of the Gulf were much
more clearly divided into ethnic groups than they are today. Among
these groups were the Arabs but they were by no means the only
important Semitic people living in the desert fringes of Southern and
Eastern Arabia: it was only the call to Islam which gave them

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