Arabia is important to many literatures. Through the nineteenth century, however, its spatial divisions faced mainly outwards: the Ḥijāz towards both Egypt and the Ottoman centre; Najd towards Iraq; Oman and Hadramawt towards Indian Ocean worlds. There was little immediate feeling of shared experience. Nor did foreign empires, which elsewhere provoked such feelings, usually show interest in direct control. Hadramawt’s graves and genealogies, meanwhile, were the moral centre of connections reaching India and Java; East African Muslims looked also to Oman. Across much of Eurasia were names from the Ḥijāz and Yemen dating to the age of conquest. As the world came increasingly under Western dominance Arabia seemed the great exception, and by the late nineteenth century printed forms in Mecca allowed pilgrims to take Arabian names that attached them to the cradle of Islam.

The general setting

Yemen, thanks to a few of its specific regions, possessed agriculture sufficient for its needs. Oman had both African and Indian trading spheres. Najd and al-Qaṣīm shunned outsiders, yet the Lamʿ al-shihāb (1817) depicts the men as living decades abroad while the women showed an appetite for imported textiles. The great pilgrim caravans traversed north and central Arabia: rulers taxed these, as they did traders, and the Bedouin robbed them or extorted protection-money, encouraging authors to write as if all Arabia were nomads. In central Arabia, as in Yemen or Oman, most people (including many tribesfolk) were farmers, not mobile pastoralists. But Arabia was poor, and chronicles often mention famine.