Lenguaje oral

Within Marx’s oeuvre is a kernel that is the logical premise and temporal beginning of his theory of capitalism as world history. This core idea is the notion of a primordial state in which the working subject is owner, producer, and consumer. It is a condition prior to exchange and before their historic separation, in which raw materials, tools, and products jointly exist in the material form of land:

In the best case he relates not only as worker to the land and soil, but also as pro-prietor of the land and soil to himself as working subject. Ownership of land and soil potentially also includes ownership of the raw material, as well as of the primordial instrument, the earth itself, and of its spontaneous fruits. Posited in the most original form, it means relating to the earth as proprietor, and finding raw material and instrument on hand, as well as the necessaries of life created not by labour but by the earth itself. . . . This is historic state No. 1 . . . (Marx 1978: 264)

In German Ideology and Grundrisse (the source of the above quotation) Marx traces history as the separation of these elements out of their orig-inal commingling. As private property, the means of production become divorced from labor, the division of labor progresses with specialization and a wider exchange of goods in trade, and money arises as a means and measure of value, facilitating expanded commerce. This history is re-presented in the opening chapters of his Capital, as the logical

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mation of the commodity form into money and capital. Beginning his exposition with a Janus-like commodity that is exchanged for a sensu-ously diªerent commodity, use value for use value, Marx correlates the expanding circulation of commodities with the increasing development and domination of the second aspect of the commodity, its exchange value. From the last third of the seventeenth century on, precious met-als like gold and silver became specialized commodities, prized for their exchange value. Their natural properties of rarity, portability, divisibil-ity, and durability rendered them suitable to stand as universal equiva-lents of value quantities, and their use and exchange values merged into one attractive body that was both physical and symbolic: “although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver”

(Marx 1967 [1867]: 89).

Commodities were originally the ends, to be used in the satisfaction of human needs. Money was originally a means for exchanging com-modities. As means, money was subsidiary to the ends, comcom-modities.

Somewhere along the line, these two elements traded places, with money emerging as the ends, usurping the place of commodities. Means and ends became reversed.

These developments result in the production of goods by human be-ings, not to satisfy human needs but to increase capital, so that money can beget money. In the form of capital, commodities produced by the worker exert an objective power over him; this dynamic is the alienation of labor, which separates labor’s living form from its dead, congealed form, which then becomes dominant. The dominance also extends into space, with mar-kets becoming worldwide, and labor’s advent in this form gives rise to foreign competition for workers, capitalists, and whole countries alike.

A near-contemporary of Marx, Aâmad al-Junayd, whom we met above, also noted the phenomenon of foreign competition. Because of his con-cern for the weavers of his native Tarim, Aâmad al-Junayd mothballed the luxurious garments his brother sent him from Singapore and contin-ued to use the simpler local product. With access to neither Hegel nor the British Library, his actions were not grounded in a complex theory of alienation. Nevertheless, the power of capital-based production to swamp the local artisanry was patent to him; he saw it as a problem of alien nations instead. Against the blandishments of foreign finery, he posited a moral end in local cloth: the product was virtuous because God-mindedness was woven into the very warp and woof of its fabric. More correctly, as it appears in his biography, the action of this spiritual incor-poration is denoted by the Arabic verbal noun gh-z-l, which vowelized as

ghazlmeans the spinning of yarn; as ghazal, the word evokes the love po-etry of Sufi mystics sung in praise of the divine (A. Q. al-Junayd 1994:

122).¹¹

Al-Junayd’s preference for the local is shared by Aristotle. For Aristo-tle, the ground of the local was not divinity but the household (oikos), the basic unit of his theory of Greek sociability.

It was out of the association formed by men with these two, women and slaves, that the first household was formed; and the poet Hesiod was right when he wrote,

“Get first a house and a wife and an ox to draw the plough.” (The ox is the poor man’s slave.) This association of persons, established according to the law of na-ture and continuing day after day, is the household, the members of which Charon-das calls “bread-fellows.” (Aristotle 1962: 27)

In Aristotle’s ontology, each thing has a nature and a teleology, the final cause or end toward which it is directed and provided for “according to the law of nature.” The end of the household is its independent mainte-nance, or reproduction, under the administration of the master. This end may be called “household management.”

As a thing of nature, the household is already provided for. No need exists “for this kind of money-making (for which) the end provides no limit, because wealth and getting money are themselves the end” (Aris-totle 1962: 44). Enough resources lie close at hand to provide for the oikos—in nomadism, farming, piracy, fishing, and hunting:

Getting a living in this self-supporting way is clearly given by nature herself to all her creatures . . . plants exist for the sake of animals . . . all other animals exist for the sake of man . . . If then we are right in believing that nature makes nothing without some end in view, nothing to no purpose, it must be that nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man. This means that it is part of nature’s plan that the art of war, of which hunting is a part, should be a way of acquiring property. (Aristotle 1962: 39–40)

Moneymaking to provide for the household is a part of its administra-tion, as is warfare. But both are only means for household ends. Money-making for itself or warfare for itself deviates from the task of household management, which is providing for the oikos.

Exchange begins originally because of relative shortages and surpluses

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11. Messick (1987) oªers a suggestive perspective on how weaving may constitute a whole discursive arena that is silent or subordinate and that interlaces meaning and thread simul-taneously in a semiotics of resemblance rather than representation.

in diªerent areas. Thus, it occurs socially and spatially beyond the house-hold. In Aristotle’s rustic naturalism, restricted exchange merely restores natural equilibria. The imbalances that motivate exchange are a result of naturally occurring diªerences in resource endowment within the realm, not of socially generated causes. The problem of generalized exchange arises when exchanges cross national boundaries, whereupon media of exchange appear. First, traders use precious metals; then, fiat money. The notion emerges that wealth is a pile of coins, and the pursuit of money for its own sake begins. This idea is easily debunked by Aristotle’s natu-ralism, for fiat money is arbitrary and easily debased when political au-thority falters, and “it will often happen that a man with plenty of money will not have enough to eat” (Aristotle 1962: 43).

Here, we are far from the original purpose of providing for household consumption. The prudent go home to the restricted economy of autarky, pursuing domestic production for domestic consumption. Self-su‹ciency (which includes slavery and piracy) is a virtue in this economy and is an end grounded in the static “law of household nature,” or oikonomos, “eco-nomics.” For Marx, in contrast, no possibility exists of going home to the primordial, as the circuits of exchange and mediation carry an inner necessity. Laws of motion drive the system forward and ever outward:

congealed alienated labor and the cumulative social power of generations.

This excursus helps us understand why Marx’s near-contemporary Aâ-mad al-Junayd might have more a‹nity with Aristotle than with Marx.

While all three partake in a nostalgia for true ends in a world increasingly dominated by means, their responses diverge. For Marx, extensive, large-scale sociability, including foreign trade, is coterminous with large, mul-tiple circuits of exchange that create their own necessary dynamic and ends. Rejecting them in toto is out of the question; they are the limits of the known social world. They represent the living cumulative social power of dead generations. The issue is how to restore human needs as the ends of the system, directing rather than rejecting its power.

For Aristotle and Aâmad, respectively, such social power is unnatural and ungodly; power from large, multiple circuits of exchange is inher-ently destructive. Engagement with these means of exchange is a choice, not a necessity. Such choices deviate from the true ends, of maintaining the oikos or of maintaining God-minded livelihoods such as weaving. They transgress the law of nature or of God. Aristotle and Aâmad both val-orize self-su‹ciency as moral virtue. In economic terms, they promote the return to autarky: consuming at the site of production, “historic state No. 1”—in anthropological terms, the apotheosis of the domestic group,

defined by kinship or religion. In this perspective, the ends reside at home, where they are attainable. Aristotle’s solution is a relatively trouble-free return to the equilibrium state of the household. Aâmad’s is a resolute valorization of an end conjoined with communal intimacy—donning the blessed cloth of the Tarim weavers—on the one hand, and a containment of the intrusive, destructive foreign, on the other—putting a lid on the luxurious foreign cloth.

The three thinkers’ diªerences directly confront each other in their views on weaving. Aâmad’s view we already know. As for Aristotle:

So any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling a man to live. . . . sup-pose that every tool we had could perform its function, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, like the statues made by Daedalus or the wheeled tripods of Hephaestus, of which the poet says that “self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods”—and suppose that shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plucker play on a lyre all self-moved, then manufacturers would have no need of work-ers nor mastwork-ers of slaves. (Aristotle 1962: 31)

Dispensing with workers, precisely Aâmad’s point; dispensing with slaves, against the natural constitution of the Greek oikos, in Aristotle’s view.

In contrast, Marx observed that:

That labour which from the first presupposed a machine even of the crudest sort, soon showed itself the most capable of development. Weaving, earlier carried on in the country by the peasants as a secondary occupation to procure their cloth-ing, was the first labour to receive an impetus and a further development through the extension of commerce. Weaving was the first and remained the principal man-ufacture. The rising demand for clothing materials, consequent on the growth of population, the growing accumulation and mobilisation of natural capital through accelerated circulation, the demand for luxuries called forth by the latter and favoured generally by the gradual extension of commerce, gave weaving a quan-titative and qualitative stimulus, which wrenched it out of the form of produc-tion hitherto existing. Alongside the peasants weaving for their own use, who con-tinued, and still continue, with this sort of work, there emerged a new class of weavers in the towns, whose fabrics were destined for the home market and usu-ally for foreign markets too. (Marx 1978: 180–81)

Aâmad al-Junayd’s reasons for putting in a box the luxurious cloth he re-ceived from Singapore have ample support from Aristotle and Marx. Yet his principled stance is not without its historical ironies. The ascent of the great sayyid families within Hadramawt—the founding of sanctuary set-tlements (âawìa) there under their authority (in “mansabates”) and their rise to regional fame, as represented by the saint Abñ Bakr al-ªAydarñs of

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Aden in the sixteenth century—correlates with their contemporary promi-nence in Gujarat, the textile-producing center of the Indian Ocean (Chaudhuri 1990), whose natural market stretched from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. When the industrial production of batiks and sarongs took oª in Java in the late nineteenth century, not long after al-Junayd’s principled rebuª of the luxurious Singapore textiles, Hadramis were among the leaders of the powerful marriage of capital and industrial tech-nique. In the middle of the twentieth century, an al-Junayd was one of the largest manufacturers, as well as president of the Federation of In-donesian Batik Manufacturers (Vuldy 1987: 175–77, 226).¹²Desirable In-donesian sarongs today bear trademarks named for well-known Hadrami lineages, such as al-Jufrô, al-Junayd, al-ªAììás, Bá Hashwán, bin Sumayì, and bin Sunkar.

Aâmad al-Junayd’s distrust and rejection of the foreign was not only because of principles. His experiences confirmed his convictions. These experiences are recounted in his biography by his descendant. The author’s sources are stories passed down orally within the family, private docu-ments such as personal correspondence, and published histories. In the oral telling and retelling of these stories, and their inevitable accommo-dation to the authority of written histories, the accounts take on a recog-nizably paradigmatic character. Hagiography is one of the dominant forms of history writing in Hadramawt, and it exerts a standardizing influence on lesser biographies.¹³ Biographies, in turn, which are regularly and widely compiled from oral accounts after a person dies, are the primary source material for Hadrami historians. In consequence, we should not be surprised to find in Aâmad al-Junayd’s biography elements and themes that resonate with those in the history books. The connection is not co-incidental. As he explained to me, Aâmad al-Junayd’s biographer ªAbd al-Qádir al-Junayd was motivated to write because Aâmad had partici-pated in political reform in the general interest. While the activities of his associates had been recorded in the histories, Aâmad’s role had not.¹⁴The biographer wanted to show that Aâmad was a figure in line with the clas-sic Hadrami sayyid saint personalities, who combined scholarship and

ac-12. I am grateful to Michael Gilsenan for the reference.

13. The well-known Lebanese historian Shakôb Arslán was quite taken with a rhyming line that often opens Hadrami biographical accounts: “He was born in Tarim, and memo-rized the Qurºan, the Karôm” (al-Mashhñr 1984: 54; al-Shillô 1982: 7).

14. The events in question concern sayyid figures such as Imam T¥áhir b. Husayn bin T¥áhir, Hasan S¥áliâ al-Baâr, and the “Seven ªAbd Alláhs,” who campaigned with the local tribal Kathôrô sultans to repel the foreign Yáfiªô interlopers (al-Hámid 1968; bin Háshim

tion.¹⁵Writing Aâmad’s biography made the example of this predeces-sor didactically available for mimesis by his succespredeces-sors; Aâmad himself composed such history lessons, as we will see in chapter 7.¹⁶Aâmad’s son and one of his students had begun writing notes on his biography, but they died before bringing it to completion.¹⁷ªAbd al-Qádir inherited these notes from his teacher when the latter died and took them with him when he migrated to Africa, finally to complete the task.

The books of biography and history echo ways in which similar ele-ments and themes occur today in the telling of events and the interpre-tation of their meanings. While in Hadramawt, I spent a significant amount of time reading history and biography with friends. We read bi-ographies of their friends’ ancestors, family histories, and more general histories of Hadramawt. My friends were always quick to locate mem-bers of their families and ready to point out analogies between the con-tent of the texts and the current situation. These lessons were constant demonstrations to me of the high degree of interpenetration of oral and written media in Hadrami social life, to the extent that these media merge into a single discourse to one who works with these sources over time.

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1948; al-Kindô 1991). They are represented in the genealogical table and discussion in chap-ter 7. The chap-term Seven ªAbd Alláhs (ªAbádilláh Sabªa) derives from the writings of Ibn al-ªArabô. Its use in Hadramawt demonstrates familiarity with his doctrines, in this case the specific idea of saints as the inheritors of prophets (Chodkiewicz 1993).

15. This combination is represented by the pairs ªilm wa-ªamal, dôn wa-dunyá (knowledge and works, religion and mundane world). A tradition of social engagement is part of the sayyids’ self-image of their brand of Sufism. The interrelation of knowledge and action means that hagiography and historiography are intimately related in Hadrami literature. One can trace this combination of “theory and practice” in an Islamic idiom to the early lights of Hadrami Sufism. Abñ Madyan Shuªayb emphasized the complementarity of knowledge and action, ªilm and ªamal (Cornell 1998: 135), while Ibn al-ªArabô’s concept of the “perfect hu-man being” (al-insán al-kámil) was elaborated upon by ªAbd al-Karôm al-Jôlô, a disciple in Yemen, to show how the prophet Muâammad could be a living reality “made manifest in a Sufi saint” (Cornell 1998: 208; for more on al-Jôlô in Yemen, see Knysh 1999b). Cornell’s work reexamines the troubled relation between model and history in writings on Islamic saints. Diªerences between mystics and orthodox legal scholars have been exaggerated by generations of Orientalists. Often, legists were Sufis. The Prophet’s âadôth are both sources of law and models for spiritual imitation. Hadrami luminaries lay claim to both labels of legist and saint.

16. Dresch (1990) has noted the active role that learned historiography with a unified narrative plays in constituting states, even from fragments, in his study of the Zaydi imam-ate in North Yemen.

17. Ahmad’s student was ªAbd al-Raâmán al-Mashhñr, the nineteenth-century author of the sayyid “total genealogy” and abridger of Aâmad’s graveyard manual (discussed in chap-ter 7).

Such at least was my experience. On that basis, I will explore further the ways in which foreign and local forces interact within Aâmad al-Junayd’s biography. In its telling are themes that recur in subsequent chap-ters of this study.