NOT FOR SALE

The Meaning of Names in Hadramaut

Mary Ann Walter Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Personal names in Wadi Hadramaut1 differ in several interesting ways from names used elsewhere in the Arab world. For obvious sociohistorical reasons, most of the recorded names are those of male members of the sayyid class, and those names tend to be mainstream Muslim ones. The Hadrami sayyids descend from 80 families that fled Iraq in the 9th century to settle in the wadi, and became an institutionalized religious elite. Personal contact with a wider social spectrum and careful examination of written sources, however, bring to light more names from the native tradition, and their properties. In this study I focus primarily on one aspect of them – that is, given names of girls that reflect and affirm their families’ international ties. But all are worthy of mention, and similarly revealing about the region.

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The area under discussion is located in the (eponymous) governorate in Hadramaut, in the eastern part of the Republic of Yemen. I limit my attention to the section of the wadi between the two cities of Shibam and Tarim, disregarding outliers, the stony plateaus which abut the wadi, and the coastal region of the governorate.

Perhaps the most noticeable is the common appearance of “Ba” in family and tribal names. This prefix is used in much the same way, and with the same meaning, as “Abu” elsewhere, and immediately identifies its bearer as being of Hadrami descent. The Saudi linguist Bakalla and the Yemeni prime minister Bajammal, to mention two possibly familiar names, are from originally-Hadrami families. The Ba cAbbaad family, which hereditarily leads the annual pilgrimage to the tomb of the pre-Islamic prophet Hud in the eastern Wadi, also includes it, as do countless others. A quick check of the index of one recent book on Hadramaut (Freitag & Clarence-Smith 1997) yields thirty such names. A second characteristic of Hadrami names is the preservation of pre-Islamic, preArabic family names, dating from the days of the South Arabian incense kingdoms. One of Yemen’s major newspapers, al-Ayyaam, is published by the prominent Basharahil family, now based in Aden but originally from Hadramaut. This particular name ħ

exemplifies both properties discussed so far. The name šara -iil translates to “God protected” in Old South Arabian, and is well-attested among the victors and ritual givers of the extant inscriptions. A variant of it forms part of the name of Ilšara Ya dub. One ħ

ħ

of the great kings of Saba, this man defeated the great tribes of Hashid and Bakil, conquered the forces of the Ethiopians and of Najran, and captured the king of Kindah – as retribution for offering aid to a certain Imru’ al-Qays.2 Another such Old South Arabian archaism, still found throughout Yemen, is the use of the prefix aamat in names for women much like cabd is used for men elsewhere. Meaning “servant of,” it is typically followed by a religious epithet. Amat al-Aleem al2

It is unclear whether the inscription actually refers to the famed warrior-poet. The name appears more than once in the record, and probably refers to more than one person. The impossibility of accurately dating the inscriptions adds to the uncertainty.

Souswa, Yemen’s first female ambassador, and Princess Amat al-Ghani of the North Yemeni Mutawakkil dynasty, share this name element with the Sabaean woman Amat Ilumquh. Maidservant of a different god, she prayed two millennia ago that he heal her friend of disease. The inscription is of her donation of a bronze statue in thanks. Finally, the relatively frequent attestation of verbal names (such as Yaslam) in the area may also reflect such an origin. As I mentioned above, however, many Hadrami women have given names noteworthy not for the antiquity of their presence in the wadi, but for their very foreignness. Here again, the Basharahil family provides an instructive introduction. In addition to their presence and enterprises in Aden, the family has members and business interests in several Gulf states, including Dubai and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Moreover, a major branch of the family has been resident and active in Singapore for centuries. Their involvement began in the thirteenth century, with the first wave of Hadrami scholars spreading the Shafici school of Islam throughout Southeast Asia. More recently (that is to say, in the last century), they became extremely successful businessmen trading in batik cloth. The family’s flagship store in Singapore is now a major tourist attraction. The Basharahils are by no means alone in Hadramaut with their international ties. As historian Linda Boxberger has written, Hadrami culture “has been shaped by the process of emigration, the return of emigrants, and the maintenance of connections among the emigrant communities and the homeland” (2002:39). The British Empire’s first representative to the region, Harold Ingrams, remarked on his first visit (in 1934) that “emigration is the principal characteristic of the Hadhramis” (1966:162).

While continual, such travel increased enormously with nineteenth-century transportation, communication, and the Pax Britannica. Wadi residents gained economic security from foreign remittances, though political security remained evasive – partly because those same remittances financed more fighting. Hadrami soldiers made up the mercenary armies of Indian princes, particularly in Hyderabad. They there obtained the experience and the fortunes that founded and funded the Hadrami sultanates with which the British treated – both the Qucaytis and the Kathiris, along with innumerable others of lesser note. The expulsion of the Qucaytis from Hyderabad in 1888 threatened the Indian affiliation, and ties weakened yet further with the coming of World War I (Hartwig 1997:50). The Dutch East Indies then became the preferred destination, and Hadramis amassed commercial empires rather than military. Though Arabs were targeted for discrimination by the Dutch authorities, Hadramis prospered until the expropriations conducted by a newly-independent Indonesia after World War II. It was during this period that the expatriate community of the town of Hurayda had double the number of the residents remaining in it3. With independence in the Indies, the loss of it in Hyderabad, and new strictures banning immigration into East Africa, the flow shifted once more. The Gulf states, where the petroleum industry triggered explosive growth, became the new target. Not long afterwards, the advent of a Marxist state (The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen) provided increasing opportunities for travel to places under Soviet control. Its existence also prompted many religious figures to leave, also for the Gulf. A Soviet researcher working in two tributary wadis in the 1980s notes that his interviewees post3

The town numbered 2000, with 4000 residing abroad.

independence “almost invariably headed either for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States or for South and occasionally North Yemeni towns” (Redkin, ctd. in Freitag 1997:319), while official records indicate that 76 % of migrants in 1988 left for Saudi Arabia. A concomitant change in this period was the beginning of women accompanying their husbands on their travels. The previous pattern was for emigrant men to leave in adolescence and not return permanently until retirement. Until then they often maintained two households, making only rare and short visits of a few months to the wife and children waiting in Hadramaut. The dual factors of proximity and a perceived moral environment in the Kingdom and other Gulf states meant that wives are now more welcome in the mahjar. This state of affairs continued until 1990-1991. An eventful period in the history of the region, these months saw both the unification of North and South Yemen and the first Gulf War. Unification spelled the end of the South Yemeni-Soviet relationship, and the opening up of the North-South Yemeni border. The new state’s refusal to join the war coalition4, however, led to the mass expulsion of Yemeni citizens from its neighbors. The enforced influx, along with the cessation of international aid that was another consequence, precipitated an economic crisis that is ongoing, and worsened further by the even stricter immigration policies adopted by many states in recent years as anti-terrorism measures. Hadramaut, therefore, has long depended on emigration, and suffers when it is inhibited. Yet despite its obvious attractions – necessity, even – the Hadrami attitude towards it has never been wholly positive. The feelings of the families left behind about their competition elsewhere can easily be imagined, and no doubt account for some of the 4

It and Sudan were the only Arab states to do so.

hostility to the muwalladiin (those born in a non-Arab country – often, though not necessarily, of mixed parentage). Yet the relationship between Hadramaut and the mahjar is typically framed as one of moral, rather than emotional, opposition. Anthropologist Engseng Ho has discussed the conflicted feelings of Hadramis on this subject in detail. In his summation of the Hadrami viewpoint, “the homeland is poor but pure,” while the mahjar is “where piles of money are made, and morals corrupted in equal measure” (134). This viewpoint informs an entire genre of Hadrami literature, and finds its most well-known expression in a poem by the Hadrami scholar Muhsin al-Saqqaf entitled “al-Qasiida fii dhamm Jaawaa (the poem in blame of Java).5” “al-Sinaawa wa-laa Jaawaa!” it exhorts the men of Hadramaut, the sinawa being a native and extremely labor-intensive kind of hand-drawn well. Enshrined beside a good-sized display about the sinawa in the Seiyun Museum, the slogan is also invariably quoted in conversation when the topic of emigration comes up, as it often does. Even the money made abroad is suspect until related back to the homeland, as expressed in the proverb mal ma huwa fi baladik, la lak wa la li-waladik – money that is not in your homeland, is not yours or your sons’ (Boxberger 2002:41)6. A wholesome education in Hadramaut itself, then, was seen as a necessary corrective for muwalladiin. In at least one notable case involving the fabulously wealthy al-Kaf family of Tarim (and Singapore and Java), inheritances were made contingent upon it (Ho 1997:142). While Hadrami-born adolescent boys left in droves, the muwalladiin arrived for moral grounding.

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Java often being used to refer to the entire Malay/East Indies region. Contrary to these sentiments, however, Dostal reports from a survey conducted in Tarim in the mid-1960s that only 5% of respondents would invest a windfall at home in Hadramaut, rather than save it or use it to fund more travel (qtd. In Lekon 1997:277).

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Yet the tension was not reduced by the ideas that they and returning emigrants brought with them. Differences between the belief systems of home and away surfaced most famously in a bitter feud in the Hadrami community of Java. A question regarding the validity of a marriage between a member of the sayyid class and a non-member embodied the tension between (on the one hand) the rigid caste-like system of the homeland, with its requirement of kafaa’a or equality of rank, and (on the other) the very social mobility that foreign-earned fortunes made possible. To return to the central question of this study at last, how has this tradition of emigration, and the ambivalence felt by Hadramis towards it, influenced naming practices? For one thing, children born in the mahjar are far more likely to bear foreign names. But I focus here on the forsaken women of Hadramaut – the daughters who never see the lands their fathers live in, and the fathers themselves only rarely. During the course of fieldwork conducted in 1999-2000, I had the privilege of meeting many of these women. My interest was piqued when my neighbor Binyar, an elderly woman7 who performed medicinal burnings for the village, told me she was named for a city in “Java” in which her father had worked. I have never been able to locate this city on a map, but I soon heard other geographical names that were more easily identifiable. Another village woman, closer to my own age, introduced herself as Rusia. A few months later into my stay, two new brides arrived in the neighborhood, sisters-in-law. Both in their late teens, one was called Ifrigiya and the other Abha (after a Saudi city near the border of the former North Yemen). Through them I met a friend of a friend from a nearby village who was named Suuriya. Possibly the name that most surprised me was that of a small schoolgirl, Ibb al7

Since official records are almost always lacking, ages are approximate.

Khudraa’ – Ibb the verdant. A medieval, fortified mountain city in northern Yemen, it greatly impressed her father with its lushness. Other names could but don’t necessarily reflect such a localizing intention, such as Hind and Sacuud (the latter is extremely common, as might be expected if there were such an intent). These examples are listed in descending chronological order of age for good reason. It is hopefully clear that the trajectory matches the account given above of the time course of emigration. Only the oldest woman still bears a name from Java. The next group includes women named after places in other Arab countries as well as Soviet, and an “Africa” for good measure. The youngest, younger than unification, has the name of a northern city. Moving from the realm of the actual to the possible, I received several suggestions during my stay for the name of my own (hypothetical) daughter. One was Widyaan, to commemorate my stay in the wadis of Hadramaut itself. Another was Landan (London). This works well enough within the pattern established, though I am not sure whether they knew that. Regardless, it is perhaps not coincidental that rumors were flying at the time about Yemen acceding to the British Commonwealth (on the basis of Aden’s former colonial status). Thus such a name would still reflect a place in which they felt considerable interest and some affiliation. Despite a rather negative attitude toward emigrants and emigration, then, Hadrami families acknowledge their links to other lands in the names chosen for their children. Hadrami women exemplify an attachment to a place that they themselves likely will never see – a place that is often, though not always, a city or region in which their father was employed. Thus their identities, as expressed by their names, depend on their fathers

– just as with their nicknames, diminutives which are based on their fathers’ names rather than their own. By recording such names and establishing a relative age-based chronology, one observes patterns of Hadrami employment overseas, as well as how they changed over time. In this way Hadrami women, usually unable ever to travel themselves, constitute a living record of their own diaspora.