Premodern Ethnography : A Cushitic Custom Described and Explained by Mediaeval Arab Observers

The attempt to comprehend a culture temporally and geographically distant from one's own is fraught with difficulties. One will often stand baffled before exotic customs whose purpose and function are seemingly incomprehensible and, as any anthropologist can tell, even a long fieldwork period may not always be sufficient to dissipate the sense of bafflement. It is justified to regard contemporary cultural anthropology as the most consistent and determined attempt so far to make sense of customs and social structures that initially appear to be beyond comprehension. However, attemptsperhaps less sustained and certainly less systematic attemptswere definitely made in premodern cultures as well when travellers, scholars or just ordinary men going abroad confronted a culture that was very dissimilar to their own. The frequently voiced generalisation that mediaeval Muslim intellectuals had little interest in the cultures of non-Muslim peoples, which they perceived as vastly inferior to their own, is definitely not true of quite a number of such authors. Perceive as inferior they certainly did these non-Islamic cultures, but that did not mean a lack of interest, and attempts at comprehending the cultural significance of many exotic customs and phenomena are all too conspicuous in many mediaeval Arabic sources.