‘ARGUING WITH THE PAST’

In Youssef Chahine's 1997 film, Al-maṣīr (Destiny), the occasionally violent conflict between the secularists and religious fundamentalists in Egypt today is portrayed as a clash between the ideology of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the well-known Andalusian Muslim philosopher, and that of the followers of al-Ghazzālī, religious fanatics who would impose their own world view at all costs. The irreconcilable difference lies in the position of both with regard to human reason, the will of the individual and life, symbolised by worldly pleasures, such as love, music and dancing. Whereas Ibn Rushd is portrayed as a champion of all, al-Ghazzālī is made the symbol of uncompromising, community-oriented traditionalism that leaves room for none; in fact, his followers – portrayed as members of a cult-like Sufi ṭarīqa – would resort to assassination of those who do not conform or convert to their way of life. Chahine's indictment of al-Ghazzālī, albeit exaggerated, is not unfounded in some of the current assessments of al-Ghazzālī's contribution to Islam as, let me borrow the words of W. Montgomery Watt, an ‘outstanding theologian, jurist, original thinker, mystic and religious reformer’; in fact, it parodies current Islamic discourses.

Al-Ghazzālī's ‘religious reform’ is on hindsight considered by many conservative Muslim thinkers pivotal in the establishment of what scholars of Islam would call Sunni orthodoxy. His attacks on theology, Shi⃓ism and particularly philosophy, as he is deemed to have summarised in Al-munqidh, set the trend for the way subsequent ‘orthodox’ Sunni Muslims thought about Islam as exclusive of these areas of knowledge.

Lowenthal is here speaking of what he calls ‘Heritage Crusades’, or a variety of practices that seek to revere, even sanctify, traces, remnants and objects belonging to the past that points to a plurality of our possible links with the past, including history, tradition, memory and myth today. To be Possessed by the Past (1996) is responsive to contemporary alienation from the past, when The Past is a Foreign Country (1985).

NARRATIVISED PAST

I find Davenport's pronouncement on the relationship between geography and history tantalisingly appropriate for my exploration of the Arabic novel, for it elegantly sums up a key theoretical principle underpinning any discussion of Arabic narrative and storytelling at the juncture of the transformation from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern’ in the recent history of Arab culture and literature. Davenport not only places the stake of geography and history in each other, but also opens up the imagination to the forces of geography and history. He allows the imagination to be mapped by our notions of space and time and, more importantly, sees the workings of the mind in spatial and temporal dimensions. The idea is not new. What Davenport says of ‘imagination’ – that even though it is ‘metaphoric’, ‘like all things in time’, it ‘is also rooted in a ground, a geography’ – has been a familiar, if not dominant ‘motif’ or ‘trope’ in an array of ‘histories’, of science, thought, critical thought, art, literature and culture.

EPIC OF THE COMMON FOLK

Ḥarāfīsh provoked no controversy and generated less criticism. It seems universally liked by Mahfouz's critics. It has been variably called a utopian fantasy, ḥulm al-madīna al-fāḍila, Al-madīna al-fāḍila being al-Fārābī's description of ideal community; an epic of death and rebirth; an allegory of the search for metaphysical Truth and social justice; a national myth structured around an epic hero, recognised from the signs of his extraordinary birth, being orphaned very early in life, and his all-human traits; and even a magic-realist epic of man's search for social justice. It is all these and more. I have no intention of exhausting the other possible interpretations of this novel. I want to narrowly focus on its historical impulse, and look at it as a history of the nation-state, this time told from the perspective of the common folk, whom Mahfouz calls the ḥarāfīsh, after the name he gave to his close circle of friends which he borrowed from the Mumluk and a later designation of the rabble of Cairo's urban poor found in historical sources. Whatever group of the urban poor this term points to in Mahfouz's epic, whether an organised group of mendicants schooled in martial arts in the earlier sources or the general ruffians of the later material, this novel is primarily a family saga focused on the urban poor, particularly the unskilled class, and details its rise to prominence in society.

Setting the Stage

Our understanding of diachronic change in the landscape of Central China is structured by two underlying topographies: (1) the environmental context within which societies developed in the region and (2) the topography of archaeological historiography – the history and development of archaeological research in a region. These two topographies have changed over time – the former contemporaneously with the time periods on which this book focuses and the latter throughout the course of archaeological research in the region. In these two chapters, we examine these topographies and their trajectories of change.

Environmental topographies, discussed in Chapter 2, are defined by the physiographic conditions within which human societies were established and developed. The environmental conditions include the physical geography and the climatic conditions that influenced the means by which communities interacted, the natural resources to which people had access, and the extrasocial factors that sometimes played a major role in shaping human society. Physical geography helped define routes of communication and barriers to movement. Climate, hydrology, and other dynamic aspects of the environment all contributed to a varied landscape of risks and rewards that affected human behavior. Our understanding of these dynamic factors is imperfect, of course, because it depends on data that are as fragmentary as the archaeological record. Nevertheless, we are able to outline the environmental changes that would have affected communities in Central China during the period of focus in this book, and we are able to identify those aspects of the physical environment that would have made certain locations hospitable to settlement (such as availability of water and other natural resources) and those factors that would have made other locations less desirable (including swamplands, propensity for flooding, and difficulty in acquiring resources).

Preliminaries

We begin with a caveat. For many, “Central China” will appear to be misapplied to the region on which we focus in this book. The term may evoke the so-called Central Plains of the Yellow River valley in northern China, which are central to most discussions of Chinese civilization and central to the primary narratives of China's origins. The area discussed here, comprising the modern provinces of Hubei and Hunan, the Sichuan Basin, and the municipality of Chongqing, is peripheral to these stories and often referred to as “Southwest China.” But the southwest of the modern People's Republic of China (PRC) in fact includes the Tibet Autonomous Region, Yunnan, Guizhou, and the western mountainous parts of Sichuan not focused on here. Because archaeology speaks to the processes that set the foundations for modern nation-states, and because these nation-states play a considerable role in determining how archaeological and historical data are collected and considered, it is appropriate to use the PRC to identify our broader area of interest, and the Sichuan Basin, Chongqing, Hubei, and Hunan are actually just south of its geographical center. As this book makes clear, notions of centrality and peripherality need to be interrogated in our investigation of the ancient world, and our provocative use of Central China is intended to draw attention to this issue.

Over the course of this book, we have seen that areas that were peripheral to political topographies in Central China, such as the Three Gorges region, could nevertheless be important nodes in production and trade and were central locations in the process by which cultural identities were formed. In particular, the production and distribution of salt were responsible for bringing the people of the Three Gorges into increasing communication with communities farther away. The people who produced and traded salt in this area interacted with people in the Shu region to varying degrees and, as the burial data show, were part of a network of communities that was gradually penetrated by members of a Chu diaspora. By examining this region through the lens of multiple conceptual topographies, we gain a perspective that is lost when political peripheries are marginalized. This realization emerges through the process of bringing the political periphery of Central China to the fore.

As has been noted for other regions of the world, “peripheries situated between cores were far from helpless in dictating the terms of exchange” (Kohl 1987b: 20) or the nature of other forms of interaction with distant regions. This understanding has caused a shift in recent scholarship toward trying to understand the roles that political peripheries played in political change. Lyons and Papadopoulos (2002a: 7), for example, have noted that “scholars [have] turned from examining centers to peripheries, the marginal spaces where difference is negotiated and where actions and expectations take on new senses. The periphery, of course, is not an external geographical point but represents those borderland settings in which meanings are displaced and reinvented.” A focus on so-called far peripheries is, therefore, an essential part of any attempt to understand social change and regional relationships (see Hall 2000: 237).

Historical Accounts of Yong and Ba

In the last two chapters, we outlined the culture-history and archaeological data from the Chengdu Plain and the Middle Yangzi to provide a sketch of the political and cultural topographies of these regions from the Late Neolithic through the Bronze Age. Here we turn our attention to that in between – the Three Gorges – and adjacent regions along the Yangzi River and its tributaries.

Similar to the Sichuan Basin, the Three Gorges region is not well attested in historical documents for the time period under consideration here. Several ethnonyms appear in scattered historical texts and may refer to groups in the region. These terms may, to an extent, have been imposed on heterogeneous local cultures from the outside as part of a “schematic account of the past” (Bagley 1999: 230) that served to support a particular perspective on political order through the “geographical violence” that can be brought about by naming (Said 1994: 225). Colonizers have often considered differences among indigenous groups to be irrelevant (Dominguez 2002: 69). By using a single term or a small number of terms to refer to all the “others,” indigenous identities are eliminated (Lightfoot and Martinez 1995). We should be particularly cautious, therefore, when dealing with external textual sources that characterize ethnic groups in the past.