LITMIR.BIZ

      From Speechlessness to Civilization: The Evolution of the Umma

      What are nations? Why is humankind divided into them, and what are the consequences, cultural, religious, and political, of this division? These are basic questions that ought to inform any comprehensive discussion of the topic. Yet Alfarabi does not frequently engage in such a discussion. Although the term Umma appears in almost all Alfarabi’s political works, it is often unaccompanied by any obvious explanation of its meaning. Such is the case in the Book of Religion and the Attainment of Happiness, which will be discussed in Chapters 4 through 6. Only two works, the Book of Letters and the Political Regime, give a thematic account of the Umma, its causes, and its character. They therefore constitute the focal point of Alfarabi’s treatment of the Umma. Any attempt to determine the significance of the concept, and apply it to Alfarabi’s oeuvre as a whole, must begin with these two works. In this chapter, I will analyze Alfarabi’s thematic definition of the Umma and contrast it with the presentation of the same theme by some of his most illustrious contemporaries.

      The Natural Causes of the Umma, and Its Conventional Character

      The starting point of Alfarabi’s account of the Umma is nature. The emphasis on nature is strongest in the Political Regime, where Alfarabi states that “One Umma is distinguished from another by two natural things: natural temperaments and natural states of character” (PR 61.65, Ar. 70.5–6).¹ Alfarabi proceeds to elaborate in some detail the natural causes that give rise to the differences among the Ummas. His emphasis on these differences is so acute that he employs the verb “to differ” (ikhtalaf) and its cognates over thirty times in less than two pages. The different climates produced by the uneven motions of the heavenly bodies and their varying positions vis-à-vis the earth’s surface affect the air, earth, and water in each region, which in turn allow different kinds of animals and plants to thrive in each region. The plants and animals become the nutriments of each Umma, and their effects on the bodies of the people nourished by them are consolidated through breeding and procreation. The result is a habitable world divided into Ummas, each of which occupies a particular spot on the earth’s surface and possesses a fixed and inalienable character (61.65–62.67, Ar. 70.5–71.7).

      As Joshua Parens has already detected (Parens 2006a, 88–90), Alfarabi’s rather naive description of the Umma in the Political Regime is not entirely revealing. It suffers from some noteworthy omissions. While the largely physical meaning of “natural temperaments” is clear enough from the emphasis on nutrition and procreation, the meaning of “natural states of character” remains mysterious. Does it point beyond the body toward the soul? Alfarabi also admits that he has not mentioned all the ways in which the heavenly bodies and air influence the character of humans, without elaborating further (PR 62.66, Ar. 71.5–7). This puzzling statement might hint at the passage’s plainly inadequate account of language. Alfarabi mentions language as a distinguishing mark of each Umma: “a third, conventional, thing having some basis in natural things, namely, the tongue—I mean, the language through which expression comes about” (61.65, Ar. 70.6–7).² Yet this single, terse sentence constitutes the sum total of Alfarabi’s treatment of language in the Political Regime. In the Book of Letters, by contrast, Alfarabi’s thorough account of language and its evolution covers many pages.

      Conversely, the account of the evolution of the Umma in the Book of Letters is prefaced by a remark that seems to compress the entire discussion of the Umma in the Political Regime into a single sentence. Alfarabi describes the first humans, who have not yet undergone any linguistic development and therefore cannot even speak, as follows: “They are in a specific dwelling place and country, and endowed by nature with a form and constitution in their specific bodies, and their bodies will have specific qualities and mixtures” (BL 134.20–135.1, #114).³ The causes of this condition, such as the heavenly bodies, climate, and nutrition, are not explicitly mentioned here but seem to be presupposed. The Book of Letters thus confirms the assumption of the Political Regime concerning humankind’s primordial dispersal over the surface of the earth. The varied natural features on the surface of the earth create marked bodily differences among humans in different regions even before language begins to evolve within their souls.

      In the next clause Alfarabi introduces the soul and its inclination toward knowledge (BL 135.1–2, #114), a theme that was noticeably absent from the comparable discussion in the Political Regime, thus opening the way for a full-blown treatment of language. Language gradually establishes itself in the soul and emerges as the driving force behind the growth and particularity of the Umma in ways largely unaccounted for by the limited scope of the discussion in the Political Regime. In the Book of Letters, language replaces climate as the primary cause of the difference (ikhtilāf) between Ummas (BL 137.1, #118). While language extends beyond physical causes, it also remains rooted in them, as Alfarabi observes in the Political Regime (PR 61.65, Ar. 70.6–7). Yet Alfarabi does not explain the relation between language and physical causes in that work, whose description of the effects of external physical causes on the human body remains so general that it does not mention specific bodily organs. In the Book of Letters, Alfarabi leaves no doubt that the most important of these organs is the tongue. The tongue represents the crucial link between physical nature and language. It is remarkable for the variety of movements and sounds of which it is capable by means of its diverse interactions with adjoining organs, which are described by Alfarabi in unusual detail (BL 136.5–13, #117).⁴ Alfarabi suggests that the movements and sounds first adopted by each Umma are likely to be determined by the natural temperament of the tongues and surrounding organs of its members, who will adopt whichever articulations happen to be easiest for them to make. These articulations vary from one dwelling place to another. As a result, the first consonants of each language differ. This is the “first cause of the difference between the languages of the Ummas” (136.13–137.2, #118).

      Alfarabi’s account of the beginnings of Ummas and languages stands in contrast with the view of the Qur’ān, which declares, “What was humankind but one Umma, that later came to differ” (Qur’ān 10.19).⁵ Alfarabi says absolutely nothing about the time of human unity that is supposed to have preceded the subsequent human dispersion. He does not look back beyond what can be posited through our knowledge of our present dispersion and observation of palpable, natural causes. For similar reasons, Alfarabi can ignore the Qur’ānic passage in which God teaches Adam the “the names of all things” (2.31). To the Islamic traditions that speculate freely about Adam’s linguistic skills, one of which attributes seven hundred languages to him (Pedersen 1, 78), Alfarabi might have replied that the first humans in each and every Umma were speechless.⁶

      The purely natural causes emphasized in the Political Regime are sufficient to ensure that the primary sounds of the languages, and by extension the languages themselves, will differ from Umma to Umma. But it is the conventional aspect of language that determines the subsequent course of the Umma’s development.⁷ In the Book of Letters, Alfarabi distinguishes between nature and custom by ascribing the actions performed by our original instincts to the former, and the actions established through

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