Marsh Arabs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Marsh Arabs معدان , Ma'dan |
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500,000[1] |
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| Arabic | |||||||||
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| Shia Islam | |||||||||
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| Iranian Arabs |
The Marsh Arabs (Arabic: عرب الأهوار, Arabs of Al-ahwar), also known as the Ma'dan (Arabic: معدان) are inhabitants of the Tigris-Euphrates marshlands in the south and east of Iraq and along the Iranian border.
Comprising members of many different tribes and tribal confederations, such as the Al bu Muhammad, Feraigat, Shaghanba and Bani Lam, the Ma'dan had developed a unique culture centred around the marshes' natural resources. Many of the marshes' inhabitants were displaced, and the wetlands themselves destroyed, during and after the 1991 uprisings in Iraq.
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[edit] Culture
The word Ma'dan means "dweller in the Plain (Adan)", and was used disparagingly by desert tribes to refer to those inhabiting the Iraqi river basins, and by those who farmed in the river basins to refer to the population of the marshes.[3] There was a considerable historic prejudice against the Ma'dan, partly as they were considered to have Persian or other 'mixed' origin and partly due to their practice of temporary marriage.[4]
The Ma'dan speak a local dialect of Arabic and traditionally wore a variant of normal Arab dress: for males, a long shirt or thawb (occasionally with a Western-style jacket over the top, in more recent times) and a keffiyeh headcloth worn twisted around the head in a turban, as few could afford an agal.
[edit] Agriculture
The society of the Marsh Arabs was divided into two main groups by occupation. The group known as the al hwar Arabs bred and raised buffalo, while others cultivated crops such as rice, barley, wheat and pearl millet; they also kept some sheep and cattle. Rice cultivation was especially important; it was carried out in small plots cleared in April and sown in mid-May: cultivation seasons were marked by the rising and setting of certain stars, such as the Pleiades and Sirius.[5]
Some branches of the Ma'dan were nomadic pastoralists, erecting temporary dwellings and moving buffalo around the marshes according to the season. Some fishing, especially of species of barbel (Barbus sp., notably the binni or bunni, Barbus sharpeyi) was practised using spears and datura poison, but large-scale fishing using nets was until recent times regarded as a dishonourable profession by the Ma'dan, and was mostly carried out by a separate low-status tribe known as the Berbera.[6] By the early 1990s, however, up to 60% of the total amount of fish caught in Iraq's inland waters came from the marshes.[7]
In the later twentieth century a third main occupation entered Marsh Arab life; the weaving of reed mats on a commercial scale. Though they often earned far more than workers in agriculture, weavers were looked down upon by both Ma'dan and farmers alike: however, financial concerns meant that it gradually gained acceptance as a respectable profession.
[edit] Religion
The majority of Marsh Arabs are Shia Muslims, though in the marshes small communities of Mandeans (often working as boat builders and craftsmen) lived alongside them.[8] The inhabitants' long association with tribes within Persia may have influenced the spread of the Shia denomination within the marshes. Wilfred Thesiger commented that while he met few Marsh Arabs who had performed the Hajj, many of them had made the pilgrimage to Meshed (thereby earning the title of Zair);[9] a number of families also claimed descent from the Islamic prophet Muhammad, adopting the title of Sayyid and dyeing their keffiyeh headcloths green.
[edit] Society
As with most tribes of southern Iraq, the main authority was the tribal sheik. To this day the sheik of a Marsh Arab group will collect a tribute from his tribesmen in order to maintain the mudhif, the tribal guesthouse which acts as the political, social, judicial and religious centre of Marsh Arabic life. The mudhif is used as a place to settle disputes, to carry out diplomacy with other tribes and as a gathering point for religious celebrations and prayer. It is also the place where visitors are offered hospitality. Although the tribal sheik was the principal figure, each Ma'dan village (which may have contained members of several different tribes) also had a hereditary qalit or headman.
Blood feuds were a feature of Marsh Arab life, in common with that of the Arab bedouin, and many of the Marsh Arabs' codes of behaviour were similar to those of the desert tribes.
Most Marsh Arabs lived in arched reed houses considerably smaller than a mudhif. The typical dwelling was usually a little more than 2 meters wide, about 6 meters long, and a little less than three meters high, and was often constructed on an artificial island of earth and reeds called a dibin.[10] There were entrances on both sides with a screen in the middle; one side was used as a dwelling and the other side was used to shelter animals in bad weather. A raba was a higher-status dwelling which also served as a guesthouse where there was no mudhif.[11] Traditional boats (the mashoof and tarada) were used as transport: the Ma'dan would drive buffaloes through the reedbeds during the season of low water to create channels for the boats, which would then be kept open by constant use.[12]
The marsh environment meant that certain diseases, such as bilharzia and malaria, were endemic;[13] the Ma'dan's agriculture and homes were also vulnerable to periodic droughts and flooding.
[edit] 1991 - 2003
The marshes had for some time been considered a refuge for elements persecuted by the government of Saddam Hussein, as in past centuries they had been a refuge for escaped slaves and serfs, such as during the Zanj Rebellion. By the mid 1980s, a low-level insurgency against Ba'athist drainage and resettlement projects had developed in the area, led by Sheik Abdul Kerim Mahud al-Muhammadawi of the Al bu Muhammad under the nom de guerre Abu Hatim.[14]
During the 1970s, the expansion of irrigation projects had begun to disrupt the flow of water to the marshes. However, after the First Gulf War (1991) the Iraqi government aggressively revived a program to divert the flow of the Tigris River and the Euphrates River away from the marshes in retribution for a failed Shia uprising. This was done primarily to eliminate the food source(s) of the Marsh Arabs and to prevent any remaining militiamen from taking refuge in the marshes, the Badr Brigades and other militias having used them as cover. The plan, which was accompanied by a series of propaganda articles by the Iraqi regime directed against the Ma'dan,[15] systematically converted the wetlands into a desert, forcing the residents out of their settlements in the region. Villages in the marshes were attacked and burnt down and there were reports of the water being deliberately poisoned.[16]
The majority of the Ma'dan were displaced to other areas of Iraq or to Iranian refugee camps, while others abandoned their traditional lifestyle in favour of conventional agriculture. Only 1,600 of them were estimated to still be living on traditional dibins by 2003.[17] The western Hammar Marshes and the Qurnah or Central Marshes had become completely dessicated, while the eastern Huwaizah Marshes had dramatically shrunk.
[edit] Since 2003
With the ending of a four year drought in 2003, and the breaching of dykes by local communities subsequent to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the process has been reversed and the marshes have experienced a substantial rate of recovery. The permanent wetlands now cover more than 50% of 1970s levels, with a remarkable regrowth of the Hammar and Huwaizah Marshes and some recovery of the Central Marshes.[18]
Efforts to restore the marshes have led to signs of their gradual revivification as water is restored to the former desert, but the whole ecosystem may take far longer to restore than it took to destroy. Only a few thousand of the nearly half million Marsh Arabs remain in the area. Most of the rest that can be accounted for are refugees living in other Shia areas in Iraq, or have emigrated to Iran, and many do not wish to return to their former home and lifestyle, which despite its independence was characterised by extreme poverty and hardship. A USAID report noted that while some Ma'dan had chosen to return to their traditional activities in the marshes, especially the Huwaizah Marsh, within a short time of reflooding, they were without clean drinking water, sanitation, health care or education facilities.[19] In addition, it is still uncertain if the marshes will completely recover, given increased levels of water abstraction from the Tigris and Euphrates.
Many of the resettled Marsh Arabs have gained representation through the Iraqi Hizbullah organisation; others have become followers of Moqtada al-Sadr's movement, through which they gained political control of Maysan Governorate.[20] Political instability and local feuds, aggravated by the poverty of the dispossessed Marsh Arab population, remain a serious problem.[21]
[edit] Literature
The way of life of the Marsh Arabs was chronicled by Sir Wilfred Thesiger in his classic book The Marsh Arabs (1964). Thesiger lived with the Marsh Arabs for months at a time over a seven-year period (1951-1958), building excellent relationships with virtually all he met, and recording the details of day-to-day life in various regions of the marshes. Many of the areas that he visited have since been drained.
Gavin Maxwell, the Scottish naturalist, travelled with Thesiger through the marshes in 1956 and published an account of their travels in his 1957 book A Reed Shaken by the Wind.
There are relatively few other accounts of the Ma'dan; one was jointly published in 1927 by a British colonial administrator, Stuart Edwin Hedgecock, and his wife.[22] Gertrude Bell also visited the area.[23] T. E. Lawrence passed through in 1916, stopping at Basra and Ezra's Tomb (Al-Azair), and recorded that the Marsh Arabs were "wonderfully hard [...] but merry, and full of talk. They are in the water all their lives, and seem hardly to notice it."[24]
[edit] Link to Sumerians and Babylonians
The origins of the Marsh Arabs are still a matter of some dispute. British colonial ethnographers found it difficult to classify some of the Ma'dan's social customs and speculated that they might have originated in India,[25] while it was rumoured amongst neighbouring tribes that they had Persian origins.
Some scholars have theorized about possible historical (and even genetic) links between the Marsh Arabs and the ancient Sumerians, based on shared agricultural practices and methods of house building. There is, however, no written record of the marsh tribes until the ninth century. [26]
Others have noted that much of the culture of the Ma'dan is in fact shared with the desert bedouin who came to the area after the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate, and that it is therefore likely that they are descended from this source, at least in part.[27]
[edit] References
- ^ USAID, iraqmarshes.org
- ^ USAID, iraqmarshes.org
- ^ Wilfred Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs, Penguin, 1967, p.92
- ^ Yitzak Nakash, The Shiis of Iraq, Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 47
- ^ Thesiger, p.174
- ^ Thesiger, p.92
- ^ USAID Iraq Marshlands Restoration Program Final Report, Chapter 9
- ^ Thesiger, p.127
- ^ Thesiger, p.55
- ^ Thesiger, p.75
- ^ Thiesiger, p.71
- ^ Thesiger, p.70
- ^ Thesiger, p.85, 108
- ^ Juan Cole, Marsh Arab Rebellion, University of Indiana, 2005, p.12
- ^ Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation, Harper, London 2005, p.844
- ^ ,The Mesopotamian Marshlands: Demise of an Ecosystem UNEP, p. 44
- ^ Cole, p.13
- ^ Iraqi Marshlands: Steady Progress to Recovery (UNEP)
- ^ USAID Iraq Marshlands Restoration Program Final Report, Chapter 1
- ^ Cole, p.14
- ^ See Cole, pp.24-33
- ^ Fulanain (S. E. and M. G. Hedgecock) Haji Rikkan: Marsh Arab, Chatto & Windus, London, 1927
- ^ See Letters at The Gertrude Bell Project, Newcastle University.
- ^ Thomas Edward Lawrence, [http://telawrence.net/telawrencenet/letters/1916/160518_family.htm Letter of 18/05/1916, telawrence.net
- ^ Cole, p.10
- ^ Edmund Ghareeb, Historical Dictionary of Iraq, 2004, p.156
- ^ Thesiger, pp.100-01
[edit] See also
- Tigris-Euphrates alluvial salt marsh
- Edward Bawden
- Iranian Arabs, for related groups in Khuzestan Province
- Muntafiq, a large tribal confederation of southern Iraq
[edit] External links
- Images from Iraq's Marsh Arabs in the Garden of Eden, University of Pennsylvania
- Wilfred Thesiger's photographs of Marsh Arab life, Pitt Rivers Museum
- An article on the ancient and recent history of the Marsh Arabs at Laputan Logic (Part II)
- Life on the Edge of the Marshes: A twenty year long ethnographic study conducted by Edward Ochsenschlager. As well as documenting the traditional way of life of the Marsh Arabs, it also made comparisons with ancient Sumerian cultural practices.
- AMAR International Charitable Foundation ("Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees")
