Adam's Mirror: The Frontier in the Imperial Imagination

Abstract

To the centre of any empire, the frontier is a site of anxiety, of potential harm, of barbarians who could be marching towards the gate. The imperial imaginations of the medieval Arab dynasties, the colonial British, and now the United States have been dominated by this anxiety. We have to plant our historiographical feet in the frontier space of present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and north India to see the concerns which emerge from within a regional imagination, in a regionally specific conversation and in regional stories. Situating ourselves in the frontier reveals varied perspectives that are invisible to the imperial eye. To pay attention to the localised production of history and memory is to decontextualise the only context that appears relevant – the imperial one. This shift in perspective reveals that the oft-designated “frontier” has a centrality all of its own. Prologue In az-Zubayr’s Kitāb al-Hadāyā wa al-Tuhaf (Book of Gifts and Precious Items), a catalogue, created in the 11th century, of tributes collected by Muslim kings over the centuries, is a report about a fragment of a mirror, which was received as tribute by the Umayyad caliph Mu‘āwiya b Abi Sufiyān (d 680) from the king of al-Qiqān near al-Sind.1 Since 660 CE (Common Era), the Arab armies were engaged in extending tributaries in the Thughr al-Hind w’al Sind (frontier of al-Hind and al-Sind), slowly making their way east of Khurusān, Kirmān, Sāstān, and Makrān (present cities such as Kandahar in Afghanistan, Lahore, the regions of Waziristan, Baluchistan, and the port city of Sindh in Pakistan). It was Adam, az-Zubayr reports, who received this mirror from god, upon his descent from heaven, so that “he could see whatever he wished on earth”, no matter in conditions good or bad. Mu‘āwiya used the mirror to examine for himself the conditions at the frontier of his dominion, to know and check on his appointed governors and commanders in the distant battlegrounds of alHind w’al Sind. This mirror, now a fragment of governance, remained in Mu‘āwiya’s personal possession until the ‘Abbasid times (mid-8th century onwards), after which it was reportedly lost. A metaphorical reading of the 11th century re-imagination of the Umayyad frontier policy needs to retain both the mystery and the danger of that frontier. It ought to capture the anxiety that the frontier continuously produces in the seat of putative power – what is going on so far away?2 It is an anxiety that paradoxically internalises a peculiar fascination with the frontier even as it pushes away more robust understandings – it simultaneously keeps the frontier a known object and an unknowable terrain. The fragment of the mirror acts as an apt metaphor for this tension – a mirror that reflects not the viewer but the distant other, and not just any other but a specific other that denotes potential danger. The frontier itself is a site of anxiety, of potential harm, of barbarians who could be marching towards the gate.3 It is this anxiety, this particular reading of the frontier that tends to dominate the imperial imagination – it clouds over the historical contingencies, the particularities or the specificities, and those instated there; in its place is a caricature of the exotic, the unknown. This anxiety of the empire embeds itself in the frontier itself, waiting to be recalled, remembered and reproduced. On 29 January 2009, at the Senate confirmation hearing for US Secretary of State nominee Hillary R Clinton, Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, made the following remarks: