Placed Nomads

Document Type : Viewpoint/ Editorial

Author

Associate Professor, Faculty of Architecture, College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Village and city are the only official categories in the classification of human social life. This division includes the period when early humans stopped wandering and living in caves and settled down. The name of this period has been given as the agricultural revolution, which is based on settling and living in a fixed place. Since then, the stability of the place of residence has been recognized as the essence of human and societal growth, and its product has been named civilization. Civilization means the achievements of the Madinah, referring to the array of manners that the urban man adopted by dividing work and having more spare time to foster his culture and relationships. Given that compared to villages, customs were higher in the cities, the term civilization was selected to reflect supposedly the product of his urbanization. Comparatively, the village connoted a kind of backwardness and lack of development, which was documented by his place of residence. In naming, any manners originating from the city are superior to rural manners and customs because they reflect a higher level of knowledge and mastery over nature. Neither the divider nor the essence of division in this naming can be said to echo integrity but is the locus of occurrence. As the application of civilization to every movement of urban dwellers is against common sense and general human understanding, its accuracy makes it clear how important "place" is in the classification of human understanding of perfection and transcendence. So instead of providing a single spiritual criterion to explain perfection, he used an index that leads to a material criterion (city or village). In this approach, every act arising from urban life is a sign of superiority and a manifestation of civilization, even if it is not in line with rational and moral standards. In contrast to this naming, the Qur'an's approach is to separate the village and the Medina, which, instead of depending on the population or the type of production, has defined the characteristics of integrity as a criterion for the separation. "In the Qur'an, the word Medina has been used 14 times and village 60 times... In the Qur'anic terminology, all settlements on earth have been identified with the sign of a village, unless they are compatible with special criteria... The criteria of the Qur'an in identifying a city include the cultural competence of individuals and the presence and residence of a prophet from God's prophets" (Rehbari, 2008).
In the logic of the Qur'an, a place is addressed with the two titles of village and Medina at two different times. When the event violates human development and integrity standards, the name of the village is used, and when there is a perfect event in that mentioned place, the name of Medina is used. Therefore, the Qur'anic division in the classification of the place of human life is not based on the location or the size of the place, which is based on its moral status. This implicit conclusion can be arrived that two different addresses to the same place for two different actions prove that the "place" is spiritual and, in today's interpretation, is a "place." The way today's knowledge recognizes the place and landscape as a living, soulful phenomenon that carries the meaning that the observer gains from the simultaneous interpretation and perception of "outside". So far, two opposing logics have been proposed to describe the terms city and village: first, the size and type of economy, and second, the action of the community living in. Although this discussion is per se attractive and important, limiting the place of human social life to the village and the city means neglecting an important and common group in Iran and many other lands. The result of this mistake is adopting plans and taking actions that are against the natural, human, and national rights of its inhabitants. Moreover, in the contemporary period of Iran and from the time of Reza Khan onwards, such a mistake has been repeated under the name Takht Qapu, or nomad settlement.
Nomadic life is the third type of human social life, which, unlike the city and the village, is not only dependent on living together, but the condition for its realization is the fluidity of the "place" of the life of this society. Nomads have based their way of living and production on the dairy production economy rather than agriculture, which is dependent on land and its forced results requiring settlement and production dependent on a fixed place. They have set up their social system based on migration, benefitted from wide and dynamic pastures in the territory, and made a living by producing dairy, meat, textiles, and handicrafts. They have organized their social relations by defining the tribal and clan systems as described in various studies, and they have built a great civilization based on two specific social and livelihood systems, whose immaterial manifestations outweigh their material aspects. The traits of chivalry, freedom, chivalry, naturalism, patriotism, and many other social and moral traits are present in nomadic society. With this description, due to the occurrence of such mistakes in the classification of human habitations into cities and villages and the neglect of nomadic places, a large group of Iranian society has been eliminated. The calamities that have been imposed on this society under the title of development but caused by power-oriented motives or ignorance have caused great human and natural losses. The increasing unemployment and poverty in the nomadic areas of the country, which has led to the appearance of a strange figure of 20 thousand people awaiting death sentences for drug trafficking in Delfan city (Ebrahimi, 2023), is the result of these policies. For a nation that has established a nomadic civilization for thousands of years and lives in a positive interaction with its natural and human environment, the burden of monotony and customs that it does not know has no meaning other than the destruction of its existence and civilization. The way to improve the lives of nomads is to recognize their civilization and address their needs with regard to their living conditions. The nomads are the people of the place who have experienced and know the place to its vast extent, and unlike the nomads, they have a deeper understanding of the land and the place. What is the desire of man today?

Keywords


Rahbari, H. (2008). Cities and Villages in the Culture of the Qur'an. Qur'anic Researches, 14(54 & 55), 320-341.
Ebrahimi, Y. (2023). Namayande-ye majles: bara-ye 1000 ta 2000 nafar dar shahrestan-e Delfan-e ostan-e Lorestan be ellat-e forosh-e mavad-e mokhader hokm-e edam sader shod east [Member of Parliament: 1000 to 2000 people have been sentenced to death for selling drugs in Delfan Lorestan]. Retrieved December 20, 2023 form: https://www.didbaniran.ir/fa/tiny/news-173136.