Page 93 - Arabian Studies (I)

Bayasirah and BayadTr 79

dominant status. Initially many non-Arabs resisted Islam and were
either enslaved or placed in a client status to the Arab tribes;
however this did not last long. The whole social picture soon began
to change as the people of the Arabian Peninsula came to accept
Islam and as the old socio-ethnic groupings broke down and the
‘racial’ purity of the Arabs weakened. The ‘racial’ distinctions
between the Semitic peoples of the steppes were amongst the first to
disappear, and groups like the Mahrah were deliberately incorporated
into a wider Arab nation symbolised by a spurious genealogy. In the
littoral fringe of the Gulf, where the Arabs had already started to
integrate with the local populations in pre-Islamic times, the process
of assimilation accelerated and gave rise to new groupings like the
Huwalah (of reputedly mixed Persian Arab descent). On the other
hand these processes of assimilation did not necessarily break down
certain racial or class barriers that had been clearly established in
pre-Islamic times in the way described by HamdanI and Thomas in
their accounts of the peopling of Dhofar. Although it may have been
true that all peoples who resisted Islam were provisionally reduced
nominally to a common status, to invoke such a cause for explaining
the present condition of the bayasirah is pure local rationalisation:
the real reason why they were rejected by the Arabs and others was
that they had no known racial origins and this is indicated by their
very name, which in early Islamic times designated impure breed.2
The bayasirah were therefore spurned by those who had asl, Arabs,
Persians and the like: between the latter, on the other hand, a certain
amount of intermarriage attenuated their original mutual exclusive­
ness.
However, the fact that the bayasirah formed a rejected group by
no means implies that they were themselves a single people. HamdanI
is just as correct when he says that the original inhabitants of Raisut
were bayasirah as are the LTsan al-‘Arab and the Taj al-'arus (art.
bayasirah) when they say that the bayasirah are a people (jil) of Sind
from whom the nawkhudhas (ships’ captains) recruited mercenary
fighting sailors: this too is why there are differences amongst the
various bay sari groups in Oman today. In the view of the writer the
bayasirah are the vestigial souche of peoples who lived in the general
area of the Gulf before the arrival of the Semitic and Indo-Aryan
groups who came to dominate them. Perhaps they are to be
identified with the Ichthyophagi who, from reports in Pliny, Strabo,
Ptolemy and the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, formed one of the
three major ethnic groupings of southern and eastern Arabia. Such a
tripartite division also appears in the traditional and written records of
the area where the Arabs, the proto-Arabs (that is the Semites of the
desert borderlands who were subsequently incorporated into Arab