L’auteur

Elève précoce, William Robertson Smith entra à l’Université de Aberdeen à l’âge de quinze ans, avant de passer au New College à Edinbourg pour se former à la prêtrise en 1866. Après avoir obtenu son diplôme, il pris une chaire en hébreu à l’Église libre Aberdeen College en 1870. En 1875, il a écrit un nombre important d’articles sur des sujets religieux dans la neuvième édition de l’Encyclopaedia Britannica. Il est devenu connu en raison de son procès pour hérésie dans les années 1870, à la suite de la publication d’un article dans l’Encyclopædia Britannica. En 1881, il est lecteur d’arabe à l’Université de Cambridge. En 1887, Smith est devenu le rédacteur en chef de l’Encyclopædia Britannica. En 1889, il a écrivit ses travaux les plus importants sur la religion des Sémites, ouvrages majeurs dans l’analyse du phénomène religieux.

Préface

The object of the present volume is to collect and discuss the available evidence as to the genesis of th e system of male kinship, with the corresponding laws of marriage and tribal organisation, which prevailed in Arabia at the time of Mohammed ; the general result is that male kinship had been preceded by kinship through women only, and that all that can still be gathered as to the steps of the social evolution in which the change of kinship la^jF is the central feature corre- sponds in the most striking manner with the general theory propounded, mainly on the basis of a study of modern rude societies, in the late J. F. McLennan’s book on Primitive Marriage. The correspondence of the Arabian facts with this general theory is indeed so close that all the evidence might easily have been disposed under heads borrowed from his exposition ; and for those who are engaged in the comparative study of early institutions this would probably have been the most convenient arrangement. But the views of my lamented friend are not so widely known as they deserve to be, and several of the Essays in which they are expressed are not very accessible. Moreover I wished to speak not only to general students of early society but to all who are interested in old Arabia ; for if my results are sound they have a very important bearing on the most fundamental problems of Arabian history and on the genesis of Islam itself. I have therefore thought it best to attempt to build a self-contained argument on the Arabian facts alone, following a retrogressive order from the known to the unknown past, and not calling in the aid of hypotheses derived from the comparative method until, in working backwards on the Arabian evi- dence, I came to a point where the facts could not be interpreted without the aid of analogies drawn from other rude societies. This mode of exposition has its disadvan- tages, the most serious of these being that the changes in the tribal system which went hand in hand with the change in the rule of kinship do not come into view at all till near the close of the argument. In the earlier chapters therefore I am forced to argue on the supposition that a local group was also a stock-group, as it was in the time of the prophet ; while in the two last chapters it appears that this cannot always have been the case. But I trust that the reader, if he looks back upon the earlier chapters after reaching the end of the book, will see that this result has been tacitly kept in view throughout, and that the sub- stance of the argument involves nothing inconsistent with it.

The first chapters of the book do not, I think, borrow any principle from the com- parative method which cannot be completely verified by Arabian evidence. These chapters are rewritten and expanded from a course of public University lectures delivered in the Easter Term of the current year, and my ori- ginal idea was to confine the present volume to the ground which they cover. I found however that to break off the argument at this point would be very unsatisfac- tory both to the author and to the reader, and that, to round off my results even in a provisional way, it was absolutely necessary to say something as to the ultimate origin of the tribal system. And here it is not possible to erect a complete argument on the Arabian evidence alone. But it is, I think, possible to shew that the Arabs once had the system which McLennan has expounded under the name of totemism (chap, vii.), and if, as among other early nations, totemism and female kinship were combined with a law of exogamy, it is also possible to con- struct, on the lines laid down in Primitive Marriage, a hypothetical picture of the deve- lopment of the social system, consistent with all the Arabian facts, and involving only verae causae, i.e., only the action of such forces as can be shewn to have operated in other rude societies in the very way which the hypothesis requires (chap. viii.). I have thought it right to limit myself, in this part of the subject, to the briefest possible outline. The general principles of the hypo- thesis, as laid down by J. F. McLennan, are not, I believe, likely to be shaken, but it is premature to attempt more than the most provisional sketch of the way in which they operated under the special historical con- ditions existing in the Arabian peninsula.

The collection of the evidence on which my arguments rest has occupied me at intervals since the autumn of 1879, when I put together a certain number of facts about female kinship and totemism in a paper on " Animal worship and animal tribes among the Arabs and in the Old Testament," which was published in the Journal of Philology, vol. ix. At that time I had access to no good library of Arabic texts, so that I could only pick up what lay on the surface of the unsearched field ; but the results of this pro- visional exploration appeared so promising that it seemed desirable to publish them and to invite the cooperation of scholars better versed in the early literature of Arabia. Several orientalists of mark responded to this invitation ; in particular Prof. Th. Noldeke sent me some valuable observations, which have since been incorporated in his review of Prof. G. A. Wilken’s book, Het Matriarchaat bij de oude Arabieren (Oester. Monatschrift f. d. Orient, 1884), and Prof. Ignaz Goldziher contributed a list of important references to the hadith and other sources in a letter to the Academy, July 10, 1880. The hadith (traditions of the prophet) was not used at all in my paper, but I had begun to search through it in the winter of 1879—80, when a visit to Cairo enabled me also to procure extracts from Tabari’s Coran commentary, of which some specimens are given in the notes to the present volume. The next contribu- tion to the subject was Prof. Wilken’s book, already cited, which appeared at Amsterdam in 1884. Most of the facts on which Prof. Wilken builds are simply copied from my paper and Dr Goldziher’s letter, but he adds a very useful collection of the traditional evidence about mot’a marriage, for which he had the assistance of Dr Snouck Hurgronje. On this topic I had briefly touched in a note to my Prophets of Israel (1882), p. 408 ; but Prof. Wilken was the first to bring it into connection with the rule of female kinship.

Another new point to which Prof. Wilken devotes considerable attention is the importance attached in ancient and modern Arabia to the relationship of maternal uncle and nephew ; and what he has said on this head plays a chief part in the controversy between him and Dr Redhouse, which has produced the two latest publications on the subject of female kinship in Arabia (J. W. Redhouse, Notes on Prof. E. B. Tylors " Arabian Matriarchate" [1885] ; G. A. Wilken, Eenige Opmerhingen naar anleiding eener critiekvan mijn " Matriarchaat bij de oude Arabieren" The Hague 1885). Some points in both these papers are touched on in the following pages, but I have not found occasion to go into the controversy in detail, as my interpretation of the whole evidence differs fundamentally from that of the Dutch scholar. It will be seen from this survey that by much the larger part of the evidence which I have used had to be collected without assistance from any predecessor, and I have not been able to extend my search over more than a moderate part of the vast field of early Arabic literature. On the other hand, while I have tried to give specimens of all the types of evidence that have come under my observation, I could easily have multiplied examples of many of these types.

The notes appended to the volume contain a variety of illustrative matter, and in some cases take the shape of excursuses on topics of interest which could not have been brought into the text without breaking the flow of the argument.

In conclusion I desire to express my thanks to my friend and colleague Prof. W. Wright for valuable help in all parts of the book, and to my friend Mr D. McLennan for many important criticisms and suggestions on the first six chapters.

W. ROBERTSON SMITH.

Cheist’s College, Cambridge. Oct. 26, 1885.

Table des matières

CHAPTER I.

The Theory of the Genealogists as to the Origin of Arabic

Tribal Groups 1

CHAPTER II.

The Kindred Group and its Dependents or Allies . . 35

CHAPTER III.

The Homogeneity of the Kindred Group in relation to

the Law of Marriage and Descent …. 59

CHAPTER IV. Paternity 107

CHAPTER V.

Paternity, Polyandry with Male Kinship, and with Kin- ship through Women 131

CHAPTER VI.

Female Kinship and bars to Marriage . . . .162

CHAPTER VII. Totemism 186

CHAPTER VIII. Conclusion 217

Notes and Illustrations 246

Index 317