Encyclopedia of the Peoples of AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Jamie Stokes, Editor Anthony Gorman and Andrew Newman, Historical Consultants
Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Africa and the Middle East is a two-volume set intended to provide basic information on the numerous historical and present-day peoples who have lived or are living now in these regions of the world. The information in these volumes will be of use to students, nonspecialist researchers, and general readers interested in the cultural and historical backgrounds of Africa and the Middle East.
Contents
List of Entries / iv List of Illustrations and Maps / viii Preface / xii How to Use This Set / xiv Acknowledgments and Contributors / xvi Entries A to Z / 1 Appendix I: List of Individuals Featured in Biographical Sidebars / 763 Appendix II: The Geography of Africa / 764 Appendix III: The Geography of the Middle East / 768 Appendix IV: The Earliest Humans / 770 Appendix V: Chronology of African and Middle Eastern Prehistory and History / 776 Appendix VI: Glossary of Cultural Terms / 799 Bibliography / 821
Preface
Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Africa and the Middle East is a two-volume set intended to provide basic information on the numerous historical and present-day peoples who have lived or are living now in these regions of the world. The information in these volumes will be of use to students, nonspecialist researchers, and general readers interested in the cultural and historical backgrounds of Africa and the Middle East.
There are two critical questions to consider when planning the content of a work such as this: What constitutes a people, and what are the physical limits of the geographical areas under consideration? There are several, sometimes conflicting, definitions of what constitutes “a people” in common use. The aim of this work is to incorporate as broad a range of peoples, variously defined, as possible so as to produce a collection that will be useful to as broad a range of readers as possible.
Perhaps the most inclusive definition of “people” is based on shared language. For example, the Arabs, one of the most numerous and best-known peoples covered in this book, are primarily (although not exclusively) defined by their common language. This definition is particularly useful with reference to the myriad of otherwise culturally distinct peoples of Africa. The central African nation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for example, has more than 200 groups that may be defined as distinct peoples. Since the DRC is just one of Africa’s more than 50 nations, many of which have an equal or greater number of peoples, any attempt to cover all of these groups would quickly overwhelm the scope of this work. In these cases linguistic groupings are a useful way of reducing the potentially overwhelming detail. The peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, may be usefully divided into Bantu-language speakers and Sudanic-speaking groups. Conversely some peoples cannot be usefully defined based on language. Two of the most numerous peoples of the Middle East, the Jews and the Kurds, are among these. In these cases appeals to a shared ethnicity are often made.
Shared ethnicity is the most commonly used factor in defining a people. Defining ethnicity itself, however, is notoriously problematic, and well-established sociologists have suggested that the concept is so vague as to be meaningless. One of the major problems with the concept of ethnicity is that it has been used historically to categorize peoples in a way that those peoples themselves would not necessarily recognize or agree with. In the 19th century, for example, European colonial powers frequently categorized peoples according to then current concepts of race, which were often no more than naked-eye observations of physical characteristics. The generally accepted modern usage of the concept of ethnicity relies on self-definition. In other words, it is necessary and sufficient for a person to be said to have a particular ethnicity if he regards himself as having that ethnicity, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for that attribution to be made by a third party. While this hardly constitutes a rigorous definition, it is a good tool for organizing the world’s population into groups that can usefully be discussed as more-or-less cohesive entities. The Afrikaners are a good example of an ethnic group that makes more sense under this weak definition. Afrikaners generally define themselves as speakers of Afrikaans whose Dutch ancestors arrived in southern Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries c.e. As a matter of historical reality, however, a large number of the early ancestors of the people who refer to themselves as Afrikaners today were Frisians, Germans, Flemings, Walloons, and French Huguenots. Furthermore, in the time since the arrival of these immigrants to Africa, black Africans, Indians, and Malays also became part of their ancestry. It remains true that there is a group of people who can reasonably be called Afrikaners and who recognize each other as such, even though it seems impossible to arrive at a rigorous definition of who they are. It is enough that a large number of individuals believe themselves to be Afrikaners for us to consider them collectively as a people.
Nationality is the other major consideration used in this work for the classification of peoples. Nationality has the great advantage of being easily defined—all persons who are citizens of an internationally recognized nation-state can usefully be considered as a group. There are a few cases where the existence of a nation-state is contested or under negotiation; within the geographical scope of this work the territories under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian National Authority (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) are the most significant. The disadvantage of nationality as a method of classification is that it ignores cases in which peoples with very different ethnic or cultural identities live within the international boundaries of the same country or cases in which ethnic groups live across international boundaries. A good example of the former case is the East African nation of Somalia, which remains an internationally recognized nationstate but which ceased to operate as such in the early 1990s. At the present time the territory of Somalia is divided into a series of de facto self-governing states, some of which claim complete independence, that have not yet been internationally recognized as a consequence of the ongoing conflicts in the region. In this case there is limited utility in attempting to describe the people of such a deeply divided nation as a unified group, although Somalis has been included in this work as a nationality group for the sake of completeness. The second problem with nationality, the fact that it can divide otherwise ethnically unified groups, is most often seen in Africa. The majority of modern nations of Africa have national borders that follow boundaries created by colonial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries. These boundaries owed more to the competing ambitions of the colonial powers than to divisions between peoples with differing ethnicities.
Despite these disadvantages, nationality remains a worthwhile consideration. Identity is subject to constant evolution, and in most cases the peoples who found themselves, willingly or otherwise, grouped together as an administrative unit under foreign domination have since developed new identities as members of independent nations. The strength and uniformity of these national identities vary considerably, often depending on the presence or absence of interethnic conflicts in recent history, but even in the loosest examples peoples of the same nation share a history, in the sense that they have been subject to the same political vagaries, economic or natural catastrophes, and triumphs. It is for this reason that the nationality articles included in this work concentrate on the history of the countries in question rather than attempting to describe the often disparate ways of life of their many ethnically defined peoples. In some cases nationality has formed a social framework that can be said to have prevented or minimized potential interethnic conflicts, particularly in nations with very diverse ethnic conglomerations. Examples might include South Africa in the period after 1991 or Mauritius.
The discussion so far has concerned categorizing the peoples of Africa and the Middle East as they exist in the present epoch. This work is not, however, limited to the present. Historical peoples feature prominently, particularly historical peoples of the Middle East. There are several reasons for including historical peoples in a work that attempts to give a comprehensive overview of the culture of these regions. Often the modern history of present-day peoples cannot be properly understood without reference to the culture and history of the peoples that came before them. This is particularly true in the Middle East, where some of the world’s earliest known human cultures came into being. For example, in order to understand the development of the modern nation of Turkey it is necessary to understand something of the Ottoman Empire, from which it arose, and in order to understand something of the Ottoman Empire it is necessary to understand something of the history of the Turkic Peoples who migrated into the Middle East from central Asia over a period of many centuries. The categorization of historical peoples who no longer exist is more problematic than the categorization of modern ethnic groups, since evidence concerning the groups they self-identified as may be fragmentary or nonexistent. In general these groups are referred to by the name of the kingdoms or empires that they created or belonged to. In some instances there is significant overlap between historical peoples. The Iranians, for example, are treated as a nationality since there is a modern nationstate of Iran, but the same geographical area that constitutes modern Iran has been home to several important historical peoples such as the Medes and the Persians, who have subsequently become subsumed into the modern national identity. In situations such as this the reader will find brief reference to earlier historical peoples in the nationality article and separate in-depth articles on these historical peoples under their historical names.
Fixing the geographical scope of Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Africa and the Middle East was relatively simple with reference to Africa but less so with reference to the Middle East. Africa is essentially a clearly delineated continental mass surrounded on all sides by oceans except for the narrow strip of land known as the Isthmus of Suez, which is itself bisected by the Suez Canal. There are relatively few islands off the west coast of Africa to be taken into consideration. Of these the Cape Verde Islands have been included as the territory of a nation-state predominantly inhabited by ethnic groups from continental Africa, as have the islands of the nation of São Tomé and Príncipe for the same reason. The Madeira Islands and Canary Islands have been excluded as part of the territories of Portugal and Spain respectively. On the east coast the large island of Madagascar has been included, since it is traditionally regarded as part of Africa, as well as the islands of the Union of Comores. The islands of the Republic of Mauritius and of the Republic of Seychelles have also been included.
By contrast, there is no universally accepted definition of the geographical extent of the Middle East. The most commonly accepted template places its boundaries on Israel’s border with Egypt in the southwest, the Sea of Marmara in the northwest, and Iran’s borders in the east. For the purposes of this work, the peoples of Iran and some of the historical peoples of Afghanistan and the Caucasus have been included because of the significant roles they have played in the history of the Middle East.
Encyclopedia of the Peoples of AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Jamie Stokes, Editor
Anthony Gorman and Andrew Newman, Historical Consultants
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact:
Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of the peoples of Africa and the Middle East / Jamie Stokes, editor; Anthony Gorman and Andrew Newman, historical consultants. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8160-7158-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4381-2676-0 (e-book)
1. Ethnology—Africa—Encyclopedias. 2. Ethnology—Middle East—Encyclopedias. 3. Africa—Social life and customs—Encyclopedias. 4. Middle East—Social life and customs—Encyclopedias. I. Stokes, Jamie. GN645.E53 2008
305.800956—dc22 2008041256
Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design by Mary Susan Ryan-Flynn Illustrations by Michal Novak with additional illustrations by Chris Allcott, Darren Bennett, Bob Garwood, Elsa Godfrey, Brian Hewson, Pavel Kostal, Kyri Kyriacou, Janos Marffy, Kathy McDougall, Patrick Mulrey, Rob Shone, Graham Rosewarne, Peter Ross Cover design by Salvatore Luongo Printed in the United States of America
VB JS 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper and contains 30 percent postconsumer recycled content.
