Soqotra: South Arabia's strategic gateway and symbolic playground

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 131-160

  Elie, Serge ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GEOGRAPHICAL THEORY; HEGEMONY; THRESHOLD;

ASIA; EURASIA; INDIAN OCEAN; MIDDLE EAST; RED SEA [INDIAN OCEAN]; SOCOTRA; SOUTH YEMEN; YEMEN;

EID: 33847253053     PISSN: 13530194     EISSN: 14693542     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13530190600953278     Document Type: Article

References (105)

1. 'Preface', in Bailey Balfour (ed.) Botany of Socotra (Edinburgh: Robert Grant & Sons, 1888), p. xviii.
2. C. F. Beckingham, 'Some Notes on the History of Socotra', in Robin Bidwell and Rex Smith (eds) Arabian & Islamic Studies (London: Longman, 1983), p. 172.
3. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, & Modern, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
4. One famous example of this fabulous fauna from Soqotra is the mythical bird Phoenix, which arose from the ashes of aromatic resins. See a brief account in Herodotus, The Histories (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 112. Its progeny in Soqotra today is called the Egyptian vulture, known as Soido in Soqotri, and it is a scavenger.
5. Maxime Rodinson, 'L'Arabie du Sud Chez les Auteurs Classiques', in Joseph Chelhod (ed.) L'Arabie du Sud: Histoire et Civilisation, vol. I (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 1984), p. 58.
6. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 13.
7. See discussion of Edenic discourse in Grove, Ibid., pp. 21-22. For the broader history see Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
8. For the broader history see Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
9. J. S. King, 'The Aborigines of Sokotra: An Ethnological, Religious, and Philological Review', The Indian Antiquary (July 1890), pp. 189-215.
10. In Oriens Christianus 85 (2001), pp. 139-161. I am grateful to Miranda Morris for this reference.
11. William H. McNeill, A World History, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 151.
12. Ahmed Ubaydli, 'The Population of Suqutra in the early Arabic Sources', Seminar for Arabian Studies, 1989, 19, p. 150.
13. On the basis of this story, the late Robert B. Serjeant added, without trying to promote, his own pet theory about the origin of the island's name: 'It is a curious coincidence that, though it is agreed that the name Socotra is derived from Sanskrit [...], the radical letters of Aristotle's birthplace Stagirus/Astaghara, S T GH R, allowing for a simple metathesis and the very common interchange of the letters gh/q in Arabic, are the same as those of Socotra/Suqutra'. See his 'The Coastal Population of Socotra', in B. Doe, Socotra: The Island of Tranquility (London: Immel, 1992), p. 137.
14. By the sixth century AD the Greeks or their descendants were still there, according to Cosmas Idicopleustes, a Greek merchant later turned Christian monk in Alexandria, who recounted that, 'I sailed along the coast of this island, but did not land upon it. I met, however, with some of its Greek speaking people who had come over to Ethiopia.' See J. W. McCrindle, ed. The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk (London: Hakluyt Society, 1897), p. 119.
15. See the comments and examples by J. S. King, 'The Aborigines of Sokotra', p. 189, on the propensity of the Greeks and Portuguese to corrupt Oriental words with which they came in contact.
16. As one of its many editors and translators explains, it was a guide for merchants and not seaman, thus was concerned with advancing the pecuniary interest of its intended audience. Accordingly, its 'emphasis is overwhelmingly on trading information, the products that could be bought and sold in each port' (Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 8)
17. See Rodinson, 'L'Arabie du Sud', pp. 67-68, for a discussion of the divergent views on this text.
18. The spelling adopted in this paper is based on this version. It is not universally used, as can be seen in the use of 'Socotra' by the authors quoted here.
19. Theodore and Mabel Bent, 'The Mahri Island of Sokotra', in Southern Arabia (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1900), p. 391.
20. See Serge Elie, 'Hadiboh: From Peripheral Village to Emerging City', Chroniques Yemenites, 12 (2004) (available at: www.univ-aix.fr/cefas).
21. Casson, The Periplus, p. 69.
22. This absence is explained by the fact, as Casson observes, that 'the raison d'être for [t]his handbook, is the trade in luxury goods for the Mediterranean world that was carried by on by the merchants of Roman Egypt', Ibid., p. 15.
23. C. F. Beckingham, 'North and North-East Africa and the Near & Middle East', in L. E. Pennington (ed.) The Purchas Handbook, vol.1 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1997), p. 225.
24. See Antoine Lonnet, 'The Soqotri Language: Past, Present and Future', in Henri Dumont (ed.) Soqotra (New York: UN Publications, 1998), pp. 297-308.
25. See discussion of chronological framework for ancient South Arabia in K. A. Kitchen, Documentation for Ancient Arabia, part I (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994).
26. The information contained in this paragraph is a collage from all of the sources cited in this paper, in addition to Walter Dostal, 'Mahra and Arabs in South Arabia: A Study of Inter-Ethnical Relations', in Arabian Studies in Honour of Mahmoud Ghul (Jordan: Yarmouk University Symposium, 1984), pp. 27-36.
27. W. H. Schoff, Peryplus of the Erythrean Sea (New York: Longmans, 1912), p. 129.
28. Casson, op. cit., p. 69. Description of Soqotra (Dioscorides) is contained in paragraphs 30 and 31 of the Periplus (pp. 68-69).
29. Casson, Ibid., p. 67. One need not accept Casson's (Ibid., p. 166) suggestion that this statement may be mere propaganda being repeated by the author of the Periplus that was put out by Arab traders to discourage competition.
30. Casson L. The Periplus. The suggestion that Roman traders from Egypt might have leased the island is rejected by Ibid. 169
31. Schoff W.H. Peryplus of the Erythrean Sea 1912 (New York: Longmans)
32. Brian Doe, Socotra: Island of Tranquility (London: Immel, 1992). See further discussion of archaeological research in section III below.
33. See George Hourani, 'Did Roman Commercial Competition Ruin South Arabia?', Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 11:4 (1952), pp. 291-295.
34. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 (New York: Norton, 1989), pp. 96-112.
35. By the 1970s a significant proportion of the population was still dwelling in caves.
36. Henry Yule (trans.) The Book of Ser Marco Polo, vol. II (London: John Murray, 1875). All the quotes are taken from chapter 32, 'The Island of Socotra', pp. 398-403
37. Beckingham, 'Some Notes', p. 172.
38. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 236
39. Robert B. Serjeant, The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 2.
40. Beckingham, 'Some Notes', p. 173.
41. Serjeant, The Portuguese, p. 4.
42. Jaqueline Pirenne, A la Découverte de L'Arabie (Paris: Le Livre Contemporain, 1958), p.19.
43. Afonso Albuquerque, Soqotra's Portuguese conqueror, seemed to have entertained some grandiose plans of his own. One of his many hagiographers, Diogo Machado, explains them as follows: 'There were two actions suggested by the magnanimity of his heart which he was determined to perform. One was to divert the channel of the Nile to the Red Sea, thereby to render the lands of the Grand Turk sterile
44. the other to carry away from Mecca the bones of the abominable Mafoma [Prophet Muhammed], that, these being reduced publicly to ashes, the votaries of so foul a sect might be confounded.' Walter De Gray Birch (trans.) The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalbuquerque, vol. I (London: Hakluyt Society, 1875), p. xli.
45. Saint Thomas is the apostle who is reported to have converted the Soqotrans while on his way to India around 50 AD. The discussion that follows relies on Birch, The Commentaries, vol. I. The book is a four-volume chronicle of the Captain's voyages and exploits on behalf of the expansion of Portuguese rule in the Indian Ocean, and published in two editions, 1576 and 1774. It was written by Braz Dalbuquerque, Afonso's son, based on the latter's letters, 'collected from the actual originals written... in the midst of his adventures to the King D. Manuel', p. li.
46. During his tour of duty in the region, he was to effectuate many visits to Soqotra and her sister island Abd Al Kuri.
47. Birch, The Commentaries, p. 39.
48. Birch, The Commentaries, 45
49. The description of the battle is spread over eight pages of The Commentaries (pp. 45-52).
50. It is not made clear how the Christians were differentiated from the non-Christians.
51. So-called because they are presumed to come from Ras Fartak, a promontory, situated in Mahra.
52. Birch, The Commentaries, p. 54, emphasis added. This phrase betrays the fact that what the Portuguese were looking at was a form of religious syncretism that had only an imagined resemblance with Christianity. More interesting is that the account seems to confirm that Soqotra had remained a multifaith community that was a tributary of Mahra, and was politically managed by a pact between the Muslims as political masters and non- Muslims as protected minorities. The presence of the fort and the troops were to enforce the payment of the Jizya, and to protect against invaders, and not to prevent visitors such as Christian missionaries. This arrangement seemed a continuation of the sulh (agreement) initiated in the eighth century AD, when Soqotra was colonized by Oman under the first Ibadi Imam Julanda ibn Mas'ud (751 AD). For an interesting discussion of this political arrangement
53. see J. C. Wilkinson, 'Oman and East Africa: New Light on Early Kilwan History from the Omani Sources', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 14:2 (1981), pp. 272-305 (especially pp. 275-281).
54. Birch, op.cit., pp. 53-54.
55. Albuquerque acknowledged the crucial contribution made by a Mahri pilot: 'this Moor was a great pilot for that coast, and gave him a chart of all those parts of the Kingdom of Ormuz'. Birch, Ibid., p. 52.
56. A yearly payment of 'six hundred head of sheep, and twenty cows, and forty bags of dates', Ibid., p. 204.
57. Serjeant, The Portuguese, p. 46.
58. This was a widely share propensity, and very much in evidence in Albuquerque's English translator, for whom he was the 'Caesar of Portugal... whose deeds of martial valour, whose intrepid spirit, whose kingly aptitude for supreme power... [and] his especial genius for widely spread conquest' commended him to his readers (Ibid., pp. ii, xviii, xxi).
59. E. Prestage, The Portuguese Pioneers (London: A&C Black, 1933), p. 298.
60. Yule, Marco Polo, p. 402. Subsequent travelers were to encounter only the artifactual remains, but not living practitioners, of this religion.
61. See Balfour's (1888, op. cit., p. xxv) speculative appreciation of the Portuguese legacy on Soqotra.
62. Bent, 'The Mahri Island of Sokotra', pp. 343-398.
63. Bent, Ibid., p. 380,
64. Georg Schweinfurth, 'Recollections of a Voyage to Socotra. 1881', in Doreen and Leila Ingrams (eds) Records of Yemen, vol. 4 (London: Archives Edition, 1993), pp. 187-204.
65. Grove, Green Imperialism, p. 3.
66. Charles L. Geddes, 'An Account of Socotra in the early 17th Century', University of Colorado Studies in History, 3 (1964) p. 70. An interesting incident occurred there, which seemed to have led the British to establish a trading post in 1618 in Mokha on the Red Sea coast of Yemen, in order to participate in the coffee trade. Aboard the ship there was a merchant named William Finch, who remained on Soqotra for over three months, prior to continuing to India. According to Geddes, (Ibid., p. 72). 'His description is not only the earliest made by an Englishman but is also the most complete for the entire century.' In his journal Finch described the peculiar coffee drinking habit of Soqotrans. It was 'the first mention of it [coffee] in the records of the East India Company'. The British East India Company appears to have discovered the existence of coffee through the 'ethological' account of Soqotrans drinking the brew.
67. He was the first Royal ambassador selected by King James at the request of the East India Company to negotiate a trade agreement with the Great Mughal of India in an attempt to break the monopoly of the Portuguese.
68. William Foster, (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India 1615-19 (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 24.
69. Stafford B. Haines, 'Memoir of the South and East Coasts of Arabia', Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 15 (1845) p. 107. Kishin was the main village of Mahra, which had jurisdiction over Soqotra.
70. For all the correspondences regarding this incident see Doreen and Leila Ingrams (eds) Records of Yemen, vol. 4 (London: Archives Edition, 1993), pp. 160-185.
71. Bent, 'The Mahri Island', p. 394.
72. S. B. Haines, J. R. Wellsted and C. Cruttenden, 'Surveys of the Island of Socotra - 1834-35', in D. and L. Ingrams (eds) Records of Yemen, vol. 1 (London: Archives Edition, 1993), pp. 617-704.
73. James R. Wellsted, 'Memoir on the Island of Socotra', Journal of Royal Geographic Society, 5, (1835) p. 132.
74. There is a remarkable similarity in terms of professional interest and provenance between Dr I. B. Balfour (1853-1922) to his precursor, if not relative, Dr Edward Green Balfour (1813-84), who was a leading advocate of a radical environmentalism in India. This similarity confirms the portrait of the early environmentalists from the United Kingdom painted by Grove (Green Imperialism, p. 11) as follows: They were 'Scottish scientists employed by the East India Company... mainly medical surgeons trained in the rigorous French-derived Enlightenment traditions of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen universities. They were especially receptive to a mode of thinking which related the multiple factors of deforestation, water supply, famine, climate and disease in a clear and connected fashion.' Incidentally, I. B. Balfour botanical expedition to Soqotra led to a dissertation on the phanerogamic vegetation of the island for the MD degree in 1883.
75. Lucile H. Brockway, 'Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens', American Ethnologist, 6:3 (1979), pp. 449-465.
76. For an interesting account of this aspect of Linnaeus's life, see Lisbet Koerner, 'Linnaeus' Floral Transplants', Representations, 47 (1994), pp. 144-169.
77. It was an opportunity for which Linnaeus was extremely grateful and seems to have contributed to his scientific epanouissement, and thus to the furthering of botany as a science. See the exuberant acknowledgement by Linnaeus in Grove, Green Imperialism, p. 312, n. 8.
78. Grove, Ibid., p. 312.
79. For the case of the French, see Michael Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994).
80. Gwynne M.D. Soqotra: A Bibliography 1999 See (Edinburgh: Royal Botanical Garden)
81. Wellsted seems to have been partly guilty of intellectual opportunism. It turns out that he did not collect the list of words for which he has earned the eternal gratitude of the Orientalist-philologists. Lieutenant Haines, Wellsted's superior officer during the Soqotra mission, peeved by the inadequate acknowledgement of his status and of his presumed crucial contribution, was to remark later: 'He published my vocabulary and meteorological register, and stated other matters so as to make it appear that he was the principal throughout. [...] He was much indebted for information never acknowledged.' See Haines, op. cit. (1845), p. 110.
82. For a brief account of this mission by some of its members, and an historical overview and portrait of the participants, see D. Muller, O. Simony and F. Kossmat, 'The Austrian Expedition to South Arabia and Sokotra', Geographical Journal, 13:1 (1899) 638-640;
83. E. Macro, 'The Austrian Imperial Academy's Expedition to South Arabia 1897-99', Arabian Studies, I (1993) pp. 54-82.
84. King, 'The Aborigines of Sokotra'. Lord Rennell was chairing the meeting during which Douglas Botting presented a paper on his 1956 Oxford University expedition to Soqotra. See Douglas Botting, 'The Oxford University Expedition', Geographical Journal, 12:4 (1958), p. 209.
85. P. L. Shinnie, 'Socotra', Antiquity, 34 (1960), pp. 100-110.
86. Brian Doe, Socotra: Island of Tranquility (London: Immel, 1992).
87. All archaeological excavations have failed to uncover evidence of Greek settlements. The one exception being a team of Russian archaeologists, which conducted excavations in the 1980s, and found shards of pottery in the settlement of Hajriya in the suburb of Hadiboh that 'were probably made in the Mediterranean region in the early centuries of this millennium.' Vitaly Naumkin, Island of the Phoenix: An Ethnographic Study of the People of Socotra (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1993), p. 120. For an overview of archaeological research in Soqotra see Lloyd Weeks, Miranda Morris, Bernadette McCall and Khalil Al-Zubairy, 'A Recent Archaeological Survey on Soqotra', Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 13 (2002), pp. 95-125.
88. Brian Doe, Socotra: Island of Tranquility (London: Immel, 1992).
89. England's colonial interest in the island seemed to have been merely for its use as a flagpole; except during the Second World War when it served as a base for anti-submarine patrols. Aden became England's prized possession and served as a coaling depot. On various occasions Soqotra came up as a 'satellite Jewish settlement' if Palestine could not absorb the Jews, and the idea of separating the island from Aden's jurisdiction in order to maintain it as a British dependency after South Yemen's independence; both ideas were momentarily entertained but abandoned. In effect, Soqotra was a colony with an absentee colonial master. The British presence prior to, and since, the period of 1939-1945 when a garrison of allied soldiers was maintained was through its resident officers in Aden, who visited the island irregularly as escort of scientific missions and to formulate experimental development project proposals (e.g. agriculture and fisheries) that were never implemented. (D. and L. Ingrams, Records of Yemen, vol. 9 contain a series of government correspondences dating from 1943 on the subject of Soqotra as a Jewish settlement and reports on development projects on pp. 737-782)
90. Ernest Gellner, State and Society in Soviet Thought (London: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 2-3.
91. Teodor Shanin, "Ethnicity in the Soviet Union: Analytical Perceptions and Political Strategies", Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31:3 (1989), p. 409.
92. Julian Bromley and Viktor Kozlov, 'The Theory of Ethnos and Ethnic Processes in Soviet Social Sciences', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31:3 (1989), pp. 425-438. This article seems to be the refined restatement of the authors' first discussion of the subject in the 1970s. See Tamara Dragadze, 'The Place of 'Ethnos' in Soviet Anthropology', in E. Gellner (ed.) Soviet and Western Ethnography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 161-170.
93. Naumkin, Island of the Phoenix, pp. 363-364.
94. See E. Gellner, 'The Nomadism Debate', in op. cit. (1988), p. 92.
95. Gellner, 'Modern Ethnicity', in op. cit. (1988), p. 121.
96. Naumkin has since recanted the approach adopted in his ethnography. See Serge Elie, 'Vitaly Naumkin: Portrait of Soqotra's First Ethnographer', Yemen Times, 13:622 (2003), p. 5.
97. Naumkin, op. cit. (1993), p. 364.
98. Commission of the European Communities, Socotra Archipelago Master Plan (Sana'a: MoPD, May 2000).
99. Formulated as part of a project funded by a 1997 grant from the Global Environment Facility.
100. Yemen's Environmental Protection Council and the Ministry of Planning and Development commissioned the Plan, which was financed by the European Union, and prepared in May 2000 by a British environmental consultancy firm WS Atkins International at the cost of one million dollars.
101. Commission of the European Communities, SAMP, p. 6-5.
102. W. H. Ingrams, 'Socotra: The Isle of the Blest', Port of Aden Annual (1955-56), pp. 61-64.
103. See Serge Elie, The Waning of a Pastoralist Community: An Ethnographic Exploration of Soqotra as a Transitional Social Formation, D.Phil. dissertation. Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, 2006.
104. This attitude is not peculiar to Soqotra, as it is found in any society where identity is defined on religious ground. However, in Soqotra it is relatively recent and has a local dimension, as it is linked partly to the mutated understanding of an historical incident that took place around the ninth century AD, which involved a civil strife between Christians and Muslims. This occasioned a poetic epistle written by a certain Zahra Soqotriya, calling upon the Sultan of Oman to come to the rescue of Muslims, in a graphic description of the barbarity of the Christians, especially toward the women. This seems to be the first act of writing-or more aptly, discursive insurrection attributed to a Soqotran, and as such it is the source of pride among Soqotrans. However, as this poem became part of popular 'historiology' that peculiar combination of orality and literacy, resulting into a synthesis of fact and fiction the incident was believed to have taken place during the time of the Portuguese, and through a process of osmosis (as literacy remains a problem) has permeated the culture and shaped collective memory. See brief accounts and some background information in R. Serjeant, 'The Coastal', pp. 136-140, and J. C. Wilkinson, The Imamate Tradition of Oman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 332, 344. Ahmed Said Al-Imbali, a Soqotran, has published a commentary on the poem in Arabic, which was partly responsible for making Soqotrans aware of it.
105. One glaring evidence of this is the total absence of a discernable impact on reversing the languishing state of the local vernacular, in spite of the labour of a number of linguists working on the Soqotri language. Beyond the scores of publications of strictly academic value, in the narrowest sense of the term, there have been a few desultory warnings about the language's imminent extinction, but devoid of any concrete policy proposal to prevent that from happening. See A. Lonet, 'The Soqotri Language: Past, Present and Future', in H. Dumont (ed.) Soqotra (New York: UN Publications, 1998), pp. 297-308; and M.-C. Simeone-Senelle, 'Une Richesse Méconnue et Menacée: La Langue Soqotri', Chroniques Yemenites, 9 (2001).