The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

tribalism

Islam was born in a tribal environment, and tribes have played a large role in Islamic history. Except, however, in the work of the great historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), tribalism—the values and attitudes that are characteristic of tribes—has not been an important topic in Islamic political theory. Nor is it likely to become so, for even in places where the tribes were once dominant, they are mostly no longer important actors. Yet tribalism, at least in some regions, continues to influence the way that people think about politics and indeed about other topics.

Although the word “tribe” has never been defined in a satisfactory fashion, scholars who write about the Middle East and North Africa agree, broadly speaking, as to which groups should be called tribal. In this usage, which will be followed here, virtually all nomads are tribal, but not all tribes are nomadic.

This entry focuses on the Middle East and North Africa, with particular attention to the Arabic- and Berber-speaking parts of the region.

Tribalism and Islam

Islam is hostile to tribalism, and this hostility goes back to the time of Muhammad. He wanted to convert not only his fellow townspeople but also the Bedouin tribes of Arabia. The new religion offered a view of the world that centered on the supernatural—God, the afterlife, and the Day of Judgment—and that demanded revolutionary changes in people’s behavior and beliefs. The Bedouin, however, were down-to-earth people, with little interest in things they could not perceive and a deep attachment to their ancestral way of life. The Prophet did not have an easy time with them.

Eventually all the Bedouin converted to Islam, although those who remained nomads retained many of their traditional values and practices. Some medieval Arab historians, writing centuries after the nominal conversion, used the term muslimūn (Muslims) to refer to the settled population as opposed to the ‘arab (Bedouin). Islamic religious literature generally shows them in a poor light, and Islamic law either prohibits many of their customs (e.g., blood revenge carried out on someone other than the perpetrator) or else makes no allowance for them. For example, virtually every Bedouin tribe has its own particular territory, but Islamic law does not recognize tribes as corporate entities and therefore cannot entertain any territorial claim that a tribe might make.

Until well into the 20th century there were still Bedouin whose way of life was un-Islamic, even though they mostly felt a deep loyalty to their faith. Many pious Muslims have been of the opinion that nomads cannot not be good Muslims. When the Saudis, for instance, reestablished their kingdom at the beginning of the 20th century and encouraged the spread of Wahhabi doctrines among the tribes of Arabia, they attempted at the same time to settle the nomads. But old customs are tenacious, and the authorities in Saudi Arabia, a state that more than any other in the Arab world attempts to follow Islamic law, still find it necessary to recognize tribal territories. Discrimination between individuals according to their tribal (or other) origin, something that has generally been condemned by Islam, remains a significant feature of Saudi life.

The only region where there were nomads who followed the prescriptions of Islamic law as strictly as possible was the Western Sahara, where the Zawaya tribes maintained high standards of piety, and indeed religious scholarship, for centuries. The Western Sahara was also inhabited by other Arabic-speaking nomads, notably those referred to as the warrior tribes. The Zawaya looked on them as little better than infidels.

The History of Tribes in the Islamic Middle East and North Africa

Until the 20th century there had, throughout the Islamic period, been a flow of tribespeople from the Arabian Peninsula into the Fertile Crescent. This flow began well before the appearance of the Prophet Muhammad, but up to the time of his death it was on a modest scale. The conquests that followed the demise of the Prophet were accompanied by a massive outpouring as the Muslims destroyed the Sasanian Empire (Iran and the eastern part of the Fertile Crescent) and took over much of the territory of the Byzantine Empire (the western part of the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and some coastal regions of North Africa).

The population of the new Muslim empire was made up predominantly of townspeople and peasants (i.e., nontribal agriculturalists). The Arab tribes, which soon fell to fighting among themselves, remained a significant force for many decades after the conquest, but the cities and villages of the new Muslim empire did not generally suffer lasting damage. Arabic became the dominant language in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt but not further east. Apart from the Arabs, the main tribal elements in the previously Sasanian and Byzantine domains of Asia were the speakers of various Iranian languages, notably the Kurds, the Lurs, and the Baluch. They do not seem to have been particularly numerous or influential in the early Islamic period, but during the era of extreme political fragmentation in the late 10th and early 11th centuries a number of short-lived Kurdish principalities appeared in eastern Anatolia and western Iran.

A second tribal flood burst out of Arabia in the 10th century, when the Bedouin again flowed north, especially into Iraq. Certain Isma‘ili groups (the Qarmatians) made their influence felt on the Bedouin during these years, but the degree to which this influence can be linked to the migration is uncertain. At the same time the Arab tribes of northern Syria grew stronger, and some of them may have moved east across the Euphrates. In the late 10th and early 11th centuries these Bedouin groups founded a number of small states in the Fertile Crescent. This was accompanied by considerable destruction and population decline, as is shown, among other things, by the archeological evidence. At least in the western part of the Fertile Crescent there was a revival of urban life some 200 years later, though it has been suggested that there was further substantial Bedouin immigration from Arabia around the year 1200.

The third, and last, great Bedouin emigration began in the late 17th century and continued until early in the 19th century. It occurred at a time when the Ottoman Empire was weak, and in its later stages it was linked to the Wahhabi movement. This wave, which brought the Shammar and ‘Anize tribes into the Syrian steppes, determined the tribal composition of the region as it remains to this day. All indications are that it was accompanied both by a decline in the overall population and by an increase in the proportion of nomads in that population.

Bedouin tribes reached Egypt at the time of the Islamic conquests and were reinforced in the centuries that followed. Some of the tribespeople lost their tribal identity, but others, especially those in Upper Egypt, did not. At least from the 14th century onward, the tribes were powerful, and sometimes dominant, in Upper Egypt, and they remained so until early in the 19th century.

It was from Egypt that the Muslims conquered the Maghrib. Here, in contrast to the East, they found a rural population that was itself largely tribal. These rural people—nomads and sedentaries—mostly spoke, and continued to speak, Berber languages. Only in the middle of the 11th century did Arab tribespeople begin to appear in large numbers in the Maghrib. The first wave consisted of tribes that had long been resident in Egypt, and their advance, which was accompanied by considerable destruction, is known to history as the invasion of the Banu Hilal. The Bedouin gradually moved westward, reaching Morocco at the end of the 12th century and entering the Western Sahara in the 15th century. There they eventually extended about as far east as Timbuktu. Before the arrival of the tribes, the Arabic language in North Africa had been confined largely to the cities; now Arabic spread to the countryside, and there came into being the pattern that exists to this day, in which, very broadly speaking, Arabic is spoken in the plains and Berber in the mountains.

Arab tribes also flowed into the northern parts of the present-day states of Sudan and Chad, a region referred to here as eastern Sudan. They began to enter this part of Africa in large numbers in the 14th century, mostly traveling up the Nile from Egypt. Once south of the Sahara they spread westward, eventually reaching as far as Lake Chad.

Wherever they went, the Arabs mixed sooner or later with the local population, which in Africa was either Berber or black. The term “Arab tribe” is used here simply to refer to a tribe whose native language is Arabic; in many cases it is clear that the ancestors of what is now an Arab tribe were mostly non-Arabs. These Arab tribes often show cultural traits that are characteristic of the local people rather than of the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula. In the case of Africa one might mention, for instance, the prevalence of monogamy in the Western Sahara and the use of drums as tribal symbols in eastern Sudan.

The second great reservoir of tribes, after Arabia, was Central Asia. Turkic nomads began moving westward across Iran into Azerbaijan and Anatolia from about the year 1000, and in the last decades of the century they entered Anatolia in large numbers. Anatolia had suffered greatly during the preceding centuries, but though the population was thin, it apparently did not include, at the time of the Turkic invasions, a high proportion of tribal people. After the first wave of Turkic tribes in the 11th century, there was a second one in the 13th century, the result of Mongol pressure from the East. In contrast to what happened in North Africa, the arrival of the nomads in Anatolia was not accompanied by lasting demographic or economic decline. Some of them, indeed, turned back to the East: between the 14th and 16th centuries there were three waves of Turkic nomads, associated respectively with the Qara Quyunlu, the Aq Quyunlu, and the Safavids, that moved from Anatolia to Iran. Of the tribespeople who remained in Anatolia, many became sedentary. Those who continued as nomads generally spent the winter on the Mediterranean coast or on the northern fringes of the Fertile Crescent and then moved into the mountains and spent the summer with their flocks on the interior plateau. The Ottoman authorities made some use of the nomads as soldiers but also invested considerable effort in attempts to settle them, beginning in the 17th century.

Incomparably the most destructive of the tribal invaders were the Mongols, who swept over Iran and the eastern half of the Fertile Crescent in the 13th century. The Mongols, unlike the Turks and the Arabs, left no lasting linguistic heritage in the region. At least from this time on, both Iraq and Iran were thinly settled countries with large tribal populations; the population levels of the early Islamic centuries were not to return before modern times.

The Tribal Population in 1800

The preceding section gives only a schematic view of events; at the local level there were innumerable ups and downs over these many centuries. It is likely, however, that in relation to earlier periods of Islamic history, the populations of the Arab world and Iran reached a new low, and the proportion of tribespeople a new high, some time in the decades around 1800. These are significant years, for they mark the time when Western influence on the Middle East begins to have revolutionary effects.

The population of all the Arab lands, from Morocco to Iraq, and including the Berbers, may have been about 15 million in 1800; a more miserly estimate gives a similar figure for all the Arab lands plus Anatolia, and even the most generous would not set the Arab and Berber population above 20 million. The area covered by present-day Turkey contained at most about 10 million people, while the population of Iran was perhaps five or six million. To put these figures in proportion, it is worth noting that the population of India was at this time perhaps 200 million (with a wide margin for error), while the population of China, for which the evidence is much better, is generally agreed to have been not less than 300 million.

The people of the territory covered by present-day Iran, Turkey, Israel, and the Arab states were divided, in the first place, between town and country. Here we are confronted not only by factual problems but also by conceptual ones, since there is no wholly satisfactory way of drawing the line between urban and rural settlements. But by almost any measure, at least 80 percent of the population was rural in 1800.

Next, there is the delicate question as to what proportion of the rural population was tribal. Many nomadic Turkomans still inhabited Anatolia in the 18th century, and eastern Anatolia also contained many Kurdish tribespeople. Quantitative estimates, however, are few, and the rural population of early 19th century Anatolia, though it appeared sparse to European observers, was evidently denser than that of any area of similar size in the Arab lands or Iran. It is only in parts of central and eastern Anatolia that the nomads were dominant.

For Iran, an estimate from the beginning of the 19th century that about half the population was nomadic seems to be generally viewed as plausible, as does another that about a quarter of the population remained nomadic at the beginning of the 20th century. Even without allowing for the possibility of sedentary people who were tribally organized, this implies that more than half the rural population of Iran was tribal in 1800.

In the Arab world there were extensive regions where almost the whole rural population was tribal in 1800. It goes practically without saying that this was true of the Western Sahara, eastern Sudan, and Libya. In Morocco and Algeria there was a large, and in some places quite dense, Berber population in the mountains, most of it sedentary, some of it more or less nomadic, and all of it tribal. The plains of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were largely occupied by Arab tribes, and even those whose main occupation was agriculture were not fully sedentary. Each agricultural tribe had a territory, only part of which was cultivated in a given year; the people lived in lightly built huts that they would move from time to time. One of the main reasons for moving was to allow one area of the territory to lie fallow while another was cultivated. The most urbanized area of the Maghrib was Tunisia, the only part of the region where there was a significant number of Arab villages in the plains that probably had roots in the pre-Hilalian population. Yet even in Tunisia it is believed that in the 19th century nomads constituted a majority of the population.

Turning now to the east, it is clear that the great majority of the population of the Arabian Peninsula was tribal in 1800. Perhaps half of that population lived in the Yemen, mostly in stable, long-established mountain villages, but here too tribal organization was predominant. The situation in Iraq was, broadly speaking, similar to that in Algeria and Morocco, with the Kurds taking the place of the Berbers. In the territories controlled by the present-day states of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel (Greater Syria), the tribes were somewhat less prominent, at least in those regions that lie not more than a hundred miles or so from the Mediterranean. The cities were particularly strong in this region, and here, as in most places in the Middle East, there were peasants in the immediate vicinity of each city. Beyond the immediate environs of the cities, however, the flatlands were everywhere dominated, or at least menaced, by the Bedouin. What distinguishes Greater Syria is that peasants were also to be found in at least some of the mountain regions, the Maronites of Mount Lebanon being the best known group of this kind.

‘Ali al-Wardi (1913–95), an eminent Iraqi sociologist who proposed ideas similar to those expressed here, viewed Egypt, and especially Lower Egypt, as the only Arab country in which sedentary influences clearly outweighed nomadic ones. There is much to be said for this view. Upper Egypt is to this day a region with marked tribal traits, but Lower Egypt, even in 1800, retained a large peasant population.

Tribal Influences

During the long centuries when they dominated much of the countryside, the Bedouin had a marked influence on the nontribal population. Peasants adopted many elements of Bedouin culture. So, for instance, the traditional kinship structures and laws of the Palestinian villagers are merely variants of the corresponding institutions among the nomads, and there can be little doubt about who influenced whom. The age-old hostility between the desert and the sown land was no barrier. Mark Sykes, an English traveler, wrote of the Syrian peasants, “Their manners and customs are borrowed from the Bedawin, whom they dread as their hereditary foes, and against whom until lately they have had to defend themselves” (Dar ul-Islam, 1904). Like so many other Islamic peoples, these peasants were often proud to proclaim themselves descendants of the old Arab tribes.

Even towns and cities were not always immune to tribal influence. One of the most striking examples comes from Iraq: the Muslims of Baghdad ceased at some point to speak their ancient urban Arabic and instead adopted a Bedouin dialect. A similar process took place in a number of cities in North Africa, where almost all the rural dialects of Arabic are of Bedouin origin. Bedouin forms of social organization sometimes penetrated the towns. Agreements relating to the payment of blood money that are clearly based on Bedouin models are recorded for Nazareth in the 19th century and for Najaf early in the 20th century.

In some places, certain institutions of tribal society still retain their vigor in the early 21st century, above all where governments are weak. This is amply illustrated by recent events in the Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, and Palestine, where tribes or clans have often appeared as political forces. Even in a firmly governed country like Egypt, a large amount of dispute settlement, especially in the south, takes place according to the ḥaqq al-‘arab, the villagers’ version of Bedouin law.

It is not, however, institutions that constitute the most important part of the tribal heritage of the Arab (and Berber) world but rather values and attitudes. This is an idea that has often been adumbrated, though it has been developed at length only in the work of Wardi. It would be desirable to specify these values and attitudes with precision, to offer good evidence that they are widely held in the relevant population, and then to prove that they originated among the tribes. In practice, unfortunately, none of these things can be done, but many of the suggestions that have been raised in this context are nevertheless worthy of attention.

One common observation is that those who cultivate the soil in the Arab lands, unlike their fellows in other parts of the world, show little interest in, or little respect for, agriculture as an activity. There are clear exceptions to this, notably in the mountainous areas and in parts (at least) of Egypt, but there is no doubt that the attitude is widespread. It can plausibly be ascribed to nomadic influence.

Two other frequently made observations are that “extreme individualism” is prevalent among the Iranians and Arabs and that these same people “develop intense loyalty to certain small units, such as the family, the clan, the tribe, or the religious sect,” but not to large ones, notably the state (Charles Issawi, “Economic and Social Foundations of Democracy in the Middle East,” International Affairs 32, 1956). Issawi does not discuss the question of just how these qualities can coexist, but perhaps what those who have made these observations have in mind can best be captured by substituting the word “assertiveness” for “individualism” and by remembering that it is not uncommon for someone who is assertive in one relationship to be just the opposite in another. Assertiveness is not a trait that one would expect among peasants, but it is characteristic of many Middle Eastern tribes, which stress respect for the autonomy of the individual man. This respect is perhaps linked to the facts that where the tribes flourish, there is no effective central authority, and that a nomad and his family form a mobile and fairly independent economic unit. The absence of an authority that maintains the peace also helps explain the loyalty to a small group, which often consists of agnates: a man depends on such a group to defend his vital interests, not least his physical integrity and that of his dependents.

Wardi viewed the central feature of Bedouin culture as taghālub, by which he meant something like competitive striving for domination, and he argued, mainly with respect to Iraq, that this had been inherited or adopted by the sedentary population, though often in a debased form. The Bedouin, writes Wardi, whether as an individual or as a member of his tribe, “wants to be the despoiler and not the despoiled, the transgressor and not the victim of transgression, the giver and not the receiver, the one whom others seek out and not the one who seeks out others, the one who makes demands and not the one of whom demands are made, the one who helps others and not the one who seeks help, the protector and not the one who seeks protection” (Dirasa fi Tabi‘at al-Mujtama’ al-’Iraqi [A treatise on the nature of Iraqi society]).

The tribal environment was one in which it was necessary always to broadcast the message nemo me impune lacessit (no one attacks me with impunity). Every man was armed, and the absence of security meant that a man always had to be ready to use his arms. Disgrace would follow a failure to resort to violence when—in the local view—it was demanded. The emphasis on individual rights and the continual fear of their being infringed meant that disputes were frequent and protracted and the spirit of cooperation limited in scope. These features have also often been observed in the peasant societies of the Middle East. Thomas Russell, a British police officer with decades of experience, wrote of the Egyptian peasant that “brought up from childhood to stories of violence . . . he almost welcomes an affront so as to demonstrate to the world his manliness in avenging it” (Egyptian Service, 1949). Cathie Witty, an American anthropologist who studied disputes in a village in the Biqa Valley of Lebanon, wrote of the women that “they are quick to anger, as are men, and they engage in conflict with a vitality and tenacity that usually astounds Westerners” (Mediation and Society, 1980).

Much of South and East Asia entered the modern era with a relatively dense population that consisted largely of peasants. The Arab world and Iran started with a thin population that consisted largely of tribespeople. In the Arab world, moreover, even many of the peasants were suffused with tribal values. These are not the values characteristic of peasants in, say, India or China, and it may be that some of the difficulties that the Arabs and Iranians have faced in adapting themselves to the changes of the last two hundred years are a result of having started with a society in which the broad masses of the population were heirs to values and attitudes that have their roots in a tribal, rather than a peasant or urban, society.