Once God showed me, in the way in which a dreamer sees, that I was circumambulating the Kaªbah with a group of
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14. The small number of names itself is not unusual. In England around 1700, for ex-ample, eight Christian first names reportedly accounted for 90 percent of the male popu-lation (J. C. Scott et al. 2002: 8). The unusual aspect of the Hadrami sayyid names is the amount of symbolic work they had to do.
people whose faces I did not recognize. They were reciting two lines of poetry, one line of which I remember and the other of which I have forgotten. The one which I remember is this: For years we have turned, as you have turned, / around this House, all together, each of us. . . .
One of them spoke to me, calling himself by a name that I did not recognize. He said, “I am one of your ancestors.”
I said to him, “How long ago did you die?”
He replied, “Forty thousand and some years.”
I said to him, “But Adam himself did not live that long ago.”
He said, “Which Adam do you speak about? Are you speaking about the closest one to you, or about another?”
Then I recalled a âadôth in which the Prophet says, “God created one hundred thousand Adams.” That ancestor to which I go back could have been one of those.
Muâyô al-Dôn Ibn al-ªArabô (Quoted in Chittick 1994: 90)
One hundred thousand Adams, forty thousand some years, one ances-tor. Names establish figural connections in dreams, across years, between imaginal and historical realms. Yet the power of figural interpretation in creating similarities comes at the cost of imprecision in defining dif-ferences. This problem was not an issue in The Travelling Light Unveiled because its dominant narrative structure was annalistic and geographical rather than figural. The author undertook the task of identifying the ge-nealogical figures in situ, within already diªerentiated space and time. He assumed that readers had preexisting knowledge of the persons, places, and times he invoked. In an oxymoronic sense, his book was a local chron-icle of a diasporic society written for readers native to that society. Pre-cisely because of its fidelity to the spatiotemporal lineaments of that society, it reproduced a locality—albeit a large one—to which it became confined. For readers in other places and times, its figural genealogies re-mained obscure because the primary genealogies themselves were con-fusing. To the imaginations of readers beyond its own society, The Trav-elling Light Unveiled of ªAbd al-Qádir al-ªAydarñs in fact could not travel.
Some of the untouched readers who were born later and elsewhere, in a transformed diaspora in which most of the landmarks had changed, in-cluded persons whose own ancestors figure in the chronicle, like poor Ibn al-ªArabô in his dream, a waif lost in the mirrors of figural genealogy—
son of the unknown Adam.
Nominal multiplication breeds anonymity. The irony is not lost on Ibn al-ªArabô, who, in his monism, speculated on the potential of God’s
ninety-nine names for actualization in each human being. While float-ing signifiers that are detached from referents may be celebrated by undisciplined anthropologists these days, this approach makes for in-tractable history and genealogy. Al-Shillô was to compose a text that or-ganized the names in a systematic fashion, The Irrigating Fount: On the Virtuous Biographies of the Noble Sayyids, Descendants of the Patriarch ªAlawô (1901, 1982). He was familiar with ªAbd al-Qádir al-ªAydarñs’s text and had written an appendix to it (al-Shillô n.d.), while also trying his hand at a similar chronicle for the following century (al-Shillô 2003). He knew the names in ªAbd al-Qádir al-ªAydarñs’s history; their families had been connected in Hadramawt and India by kinship and pedagogical links for generations.15In a customarily standard, self-eªacing gesture, al-Shillô avers in his book that he is merely borrowing from his predeces-sors in content and form; he then allows that he added knowledge gained from his travels, as well as âadôth. He had sojourned four years in India away from Tarim, then settled in Mecca for a quarter century.
While he was familiar with the people and places of al-ªAydarñs’s chron-icle, al-Shillô did not assume similar familiarity on the part of his read-ers. His intellectual world was a larger and more cosmopolitan one than ªAbd al-Qádir al-ªAydarñs’s, sitting as he did in Mecca composing his text. Although he had been inspired by al-ªAydarñs’s chronicle, he sought to improve upon it by employing a diªerent structure of pres-entation. This form made it accessible to a wider audience that included both non-Hadrami contemporaries and Hadramis born in later times.
The Irrigating Fountbecame one of the best-known Hadrami compo-sitions throughout the diaspora and was published in book form in 1901 (al-Shillô 1901). In manuscript or in print, the book was eminently portable. Among the sayyids, it became something of a foundational, canonical text. Indeed, it locates itself at the end of a line of eminent predecessors (al-ªAydarñs 1985; al-Khaìôb n.d.; al-Sakrán 1928; Kharid 1985; al-Shillô 1982: 13–14).
The book has two main parts and an introduction. In the interests of continuity, we will begin with the second half. It addresses the problem of anonymity, paradoxically created by an abundance of names in figural genealogy.
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15. ªAbd al-Qádir b. Shaykh (II) al-ªAydarñs’s father, Shaykh (II) b. ªAbd Alláh al-ªAydarñs, had been a student of al-Shillô’s brother, Aâmad b. Abô Bakr al-Shillô. ªAbd al-Qádir’s grand-father, ªAbd Alláh b. Shaykh (I) al-ªAydarñs, had been a student of al-Shillô’s grand-father, Abñ Bakr b. Aâmad al-Shillô.