The Eve and Adam celebrated by Muslims, Christians, Jews, and adherents of other faiths are our prototypical Jane and John Doe: critical aspects of their identity, such as the time and place of their births, subsequent residences, race, ethnicity, and language remain unknown and therefore serve as the subjects of longstanding intra- and intercommunal debates. Presently, Jews celebrate the origins of this world and its human population some 5,781 years ago, Christian “Young Earth Creationists” adhere to a slightly longer calendar, most departing from Archbishop James Ussher’s epoch of 4,004 bc, and the Sabians of the lands around the head of the Gulf reckon fully 481,345 years since Adam, a date within the range of 300,000–500,000 years that anthropologists credit for the emergence of anatomically modern humans from their hominid ancestors. If Sabians and Darwinists can therefore find some common ground on the age of our earliest human ancestors, the same is not true for their birthplace.
The search for an “Eden,” or in other words the cradle of humankind, has occasioned the spillage of considerable ink and even blood. Explorers and conquerors have sought it in the ancient Near East, from the aforementioned lands at the head of the Gulf as far north as Armenia, as well as further East to Sri Lanka and beyond, and as far west as Jackson County, Missouri. While the Church of Latter-Day Saints may be unique in continuing to propose a New World Eden, they are by no means the first to do so; this same quest was one of the primary motivations for Christopher Columbus’s voyages of discovery and conquest, with grave consequences for the New World’s inhabitants. Thus the search for a biblical Eden illustrates Berthold Brecht’s dictum that art is a hammer to shape reality rather than merely a mirror to reflect it. Brook Wilensky-Lanford has aptly documented the dramatic history of this quest in her Paradise Lust (Grove, 2011), but for Dr. Abd al-Latif al-Afaliq, the former head of the National Tourism Committee of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the search continues, and he has proposed a new chapter in its history.
Dr. al-Afaliq holds a PhD in Organization Development, an MBA, and an AB in Social Studies. At 771 pages, his latest contribution Roots: A Study on the Unabridged History of Humanity and Civilization (Arabic جذور: دراسة حول التاريخ الكامل للإنسان والحضارة; Tatweer, AH 1441 / AD 2020) is a serious scholarly tome, each page bristling with footnotes and bolstered by a comprehensive 34-page bibliography of English language references. It is by no means a popular work of scholarship, nor is it for the faint of heart, but rather demands a serious commitment from its readers. He has tempered the brute force of his scholarship with considerable organization, including a comprehensive inventory of its contents, the brief summaries which conclude most of its eight primary chapters, a proper conclusion, and a separate concluding resumé of its contents. The hallmark of this organization is bullet points: he organizes his chapter summaries, conclusion, and resumé in the form of bullet points, all of which make his tome eminently more user-friendly.
The setting for his book and his proposed Eden is the basin between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, which is today occupied by a large body of water which Arabic language sources generally describe as the “Arabian Gulf” and which English language sources describe variously as “the Persian Gulf,” “the Arabian Gulf,” or simply “the Gulf.” While this variation across different languages is not the subject of his book (and therefore this review), it underscores the significance of this body of water to the present date. As with many other probable sites for early human occupation (such as the Black Sea basin), this basin was not always occupied by water, but gradually became flooded starting roughly 15,000 years ago due to the global rising of the sea levels that accompanied the Holocene glacial retreat. As a consequence, the history of human habitation in the Gulf basin (and other sites such as the aforementioned Black Sea basin and the region known as “Doggerland” between the UK and continental Europe) remains largely unknown and probably unknowable, but al-Afaliq has reviewed an impressive selection of literature on the subject, using the data available to us from advances in geography, hydrography, and paleontology, among other disciplines, and adeptly summarizes it for the benefit of his readers.
While we cannot as of yet discern what historical and pre-historical treasures may be buried within the deepest reaches of the basin, at least not without further advances in the scientific investigation of these flooded regions, the evidence suggests that the desertified regions surrounding the Gulf, and particularly his own homeland, the oil-rich al-Ahsa governorate of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, were once host to fertile oases and even freshwater lakes and long-ranging water channels, all today buried beneath the sand. The Zagros mountain range to its northeast, the al-Hajar mountain range to its south, and the gentle decline of the Nejd plateau from its west all serve to shepherd flowing streams and rivers into this basin, creating a pure freshwater reservoir which had existed for countless millennia before the sea levels rose and flooded the basin. Dr. al-Afaliq paints a picture for us of a terrestrial paradise, abundantly populated with mammalian life, some of which yet survive in the region, such as the red fox Vulpes vulpes Arabica and the onager Equus hemionus onager, and some of which, like elephant Palaeoloxodon recki, are now extinct. The remnants of these species coincide with the earliest material evidence for human activity, particularly stone tools, indicating that these territories were not merely capable of hosting human as well as animal life, but assuredly did so.
From this evidence, Dr. al-Afaliq concludes that the Gulf basin was the original homeland of humanity qua humanity, distinct from other hominids and prior to its dispersal across the globe. He, therefore, argues against contemporary evolutionary theory, or more properly the Out-of-Africa hypothesis, proposing a new candidate in its stead. This is the strongest of his claims, in the sense that it is specific and debatable, but it is ultimately one that can neither be proven nor falsified with reference to the evidence currently available to us. At the same time, he is not unaware of the scattershot nature of knowledge production within the sciences, citing the old proverb of the elephant (perhaps even a Palaeoloxodon recki) and the blind men, who are unaware of the true nature of what they grasp, variously describing its trunk as a snake, its tusk as a spear, and its body as a wall, and therefore argues forcefully in favor of a more holistic approach unifying the various approaches to the subject of human origins. This is a laudable goal, even if, as he suggests, new evidence can and will force scholars to return to their drawing boards (and one hopes here that Dr. al-Afaliq will continue to revisit his theories of human origins as the discussion continues and new data comes to the fore). Similarly laudable is his call for a new global (pre-)history, focusing upon the unity of humanity, and centering Arabia within this history, although one questions whether this call requires that we necessarily decenter Africa from this same history.
His work is remarkable for his synthesis of traditional Islamic ontologies and those of the post-Enlightenment natural sciences. Thus Roots includes an abstract of “world history” from the year 2,500 BC to the present (pp. 539–686) as well as a discussion of Shem son of Noah and his offspring (pp. 363–374), among other subjects. He is obviously as comfortable navigating contemporary scientific scholarship as any insider, and simultaneously embraces the products of professional anthropologists, geologists, hydrographers, orientalists, hydrographers, and others, while still subtly (and occasionally not so subtly) critiquing it from outside. At times it is not clear whether he is aiming for an Islamic exegesis of the Western scholarly literature on human origins or a rigorously scientific approach to a religious question, but that is perhaps the point. His work is neither solidly one nor the other but something new, in dialogue with scholarship across multiple traditional disciplinary and ethnographic divides.
Dr. al-Afaliq is not unaware of the implications of his scholarship and avers to the sort of censorship, which we might describe as ‘cancel culture’, which occasionally attends those who fail to speak in accordance with what he perceives as a hidebound and pernicious scientific orthodoxy. His work is therefore timely and topical on multiple levels. If anything, the largest impediment to the reception of his ideas is paradoxically linguistic, one important discipline that he neglects in his review of the literature on human origins: his work is exclusively available in Arabic, even if nearly all the literature with which he engages is in English, as his bibliography demonstrates. One therefore sincerely hopes that it will soon be translated into English and other languages, in order to cultivate the sort of readership and vigorous debate that it surely merits.