Megan Brown
Staff Writer
In Allen Fromherz’s book The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present, he guides readers through the ports on the Persian Gulf, from Dilmun to Dubai. And at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, Fromherz will bring Chautauquans on that journey with him.
Opening Chautauqua Lecture Series’ Week Eight theme “The Middle East: The Gulf States’ Emerging Influence,” Fromherz will cover the history of the ports along the Persian Gulf, bringing audiences from ancient history to modern day.
Fromherz currently serves as a professor of Middle East, Gulf and Mediterranean history at Georgia State University. Along with directing the Middle East Studies Center at GSU, he is one of the founding series editors of the Edinburgh Studies on the Maghrib, a series focusing on the people, politics and history of Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Mauritania, the Sahara and Western Sahara.
While Fromherz developed an affinity for history in high school, he began to focus on the Middle East while attending Dartmouth College for his undergraduate degree. With professors like Gene Garthwaite and Dale Eickelman, he studied the history and language of the region, ultimately penning his senior thesis on Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century historian from Tunis.
“I wrote my thesis about his idea of history, which is a very novel approach to the past, which was not to just write down what happened but to try to interpret it and try to see patterns in the past,” Fromherz said.
His research and experience brought Fromherz to Qatar University, where he worked as an assistant professor of Middle East history.
“All of my students were Qatari,” Fromherz said. “I had segregated classrooms — one class for the men, one class for the women — and my students were really my teachers. They revealed to me all these amazing stories and connections and insights about the region, and I realized how much the history of this place hadn’t really been written down, especially of Qatar.”
One of the aspects of their culture that stood out to him was how connected they were to their family and heritage.
“Their primary source of identification was their extended family or their tribe,” Fromherz said. “That was really revealing to me, this idea that the qabila, or the extended family, the larger group, was for my students what they most identified with.”
With the encouragement of his publisher, Fromherz penned Qatar: A Modern History, one of the first scholarly history books about Qatar since the 1980s. With his most recent book The Center of the World, Fromherz wanted to focus on the ports and show that international groups populating the Persian Gulf is not a modern phenomenon.
Because people along the Gulf relied more on trade than on agricultural practices, a diversity of people developed in the area.
“The Gulf was, in some ways, much more globalized before globalization even happened,” Fromherz said.
Ocean voyages allowed for a specific type of connection — one that is now lost, as people travel on airplanes for shorter periods of time.
“Imagine if you were on a ship with the same people that are on those transatlantic flights today,” Fromherz said. “You would have a completely different interaction and understanding of those people if you had to be in close quarters with them for six months at a time. What I say about the water is that it creates this … forced interesting microcosm and interaction and understanding of the other.”
While this hardly created a monoculture, it created an opportunity to respect others’ beliefs, as those beliefs could be to the other person’s benefit.
“Perhaps somebody’s prayer to God will be more effective than yours, and then the ship won’t crash on the rocks,” he said. “Or maybe it’s an issue of profit. If you are flexible and don’t serve beef at the banquet, then maybe you get to have the opportunity of working with more Hindu merchants, so that’s the kind of accommodation that you see happening a lot.”
In contrast to the sea, people then return to their “homeland” where they can reaffirm their current culture and beliefs, Fromherz said.
“You can be cosmopolitan without necessarily losing your distinctive identity,” he said. “You can hold both of those at once, and this has been happening in the Gulf and in the Gulf social history and cultural history for thousands of years.”
