In both historical and contemporary times tribes have played important roles in the Islamic world. The English term “tribe” is one that specialists and others have used confusingly to depict what they perceive as actual groups of people, political entities, forms of social organization, structural types, modes of behavior, cultural systems, and ideologies. It is often a translation, not always accurate, of indigenous terms whose use and meaning can vary according to context. Although many scholars and others equate tribalism with nomadism and pastoralism, not all nomads and pastoralists are tribal, and more tribal peoples have been settled than nomadic.
Tribal people, governmental officials, and social scientists hold different ideas concerning what is represented by the term “tribe” and its local equivalents. The analytical constructs of outsiders do not duplicate indigenous concepts; popular discourse is not the same as the official terminology used by governments. People have invoked the notion and acted on their perception of its representations for their own differing purposes.
Many settled people viewed tribes they feared as synonymous with thieves and outlaws; on their part, tribespeople feared the loss of autonomy and thought of themselves as fiercely independent and loyal to their own groups. Settled people often viewed tribal society as inferior to urban society (hadarah), the so-called civilized Islamic ideal. [See Hadarah.] They saw cities as centers of government and order and tribes as rebellious and destructive. From an urban perspective, “tribe” often meant nomads or other rural people beyond the government’s reach. Government officials tended to reify the concept of tribe in order to facilitate their own administration, declaring tribes to be identifiable corporate bodies with fixed memberships and territories; they produced lists of the tribes under their supposed authority and acted in terms of them. Such attitudes and the resulting policies both created and fortified social, political, and physical boundaries.
For tribal people themselves, the issue was not so problematic. Within their societies, their own tribal identities and those of others were clear and important ways of classifying people. Outsiders need to understand what being tribal meant for people in different contexts and to discern the patterns underlying the political, social, and symbolic expressions of people who proclaimed themselves members of tribes.
It is often more appropriate to speak of tribal or tribally organized society than of tribe because drawing boundaries around a single group may be difficult. Many Kurds, for example, are tribally organized and hold tribal identities, but we cannot speak of the Kurds as a tribe or even a group of tribes; rather, Kurdish society has tribal components.
Tribal identities are not exclusive or fixed, because tribal people also demonstrate varied linguistic, ethnic, religious, regional, class, residential, and occupational categories and traits. These crosscutting and overlapping elements make it impossible to speak of tribes as bounded, clear-cut entities. Tribal people could be urban, middle-class, white-collar workers as well as nomadic pastoralists or settled agriculturalists.
Tribal identity, like ethnic and national identity, is an “imagined” identity based on continually revised conceptions of history and tradition. Tribal groups, like modern nation-states, were “imagined communities.” In constructing their identity tribal people invented and reinvented traditions according to changing sociopolitical conditions. Many tribal groups were composed of people of diverse ethnolinguistic origins, yet each group forged its own “unique” customs and created origin legends that appeared ancient to outsiders. Symbols of group identity-such as the rituals, dwellings, apparel, and notions of honor that group members considered distinctive-emerged out of a political context and served political ends.
Tribes were formed out of the conjunction of people using resources (land for pastoralism and agriculture, water, migratory routes, trade routes, markets), external powers and pressures, and mediating agents (tribal leaders, governmental officials, regional elites, foreign agents, and outside analysts). This was a useful way of organizing people so that the people so organized, their leaders, and external powers could all benefit. The local ties of tribally organized people were created voluntarily according to principles and processes of kinship, marriage, coresidence, economics, and political association.
Tribes were formed when individuals and groups affiliated politically to local and in some cases higher-level groups and leaders. The extent of supraglacial, wider tribal ties is in large part explained by the geopolitical and strategic setting, the value placed internally and especially externally on local resources and labor, the extent of external pressures (especially government intervention and influence), the ability of groups to organize and act in terms of their own interests, and the level of military expertise and power. As each of these circumstances altered, so too did the characteristics of tribal groups, leadership systems, and identities. From before the dawn of Islam until the present, tribal people have associated with more complexly organized society, in particular the state, the market, and urban-centered religious institutions; no local group has remained isolated. The main stimulus for tribal formation related to this wider association, and tribal leaders and/or government officials were the principal mediating agents. Tribal leaders were representatives of state power to tribal members, while at the same time they were spokesmen of the interests of the tribal polity to the state.
Some scholars identify tribes as socially egalitarian units, while others see greater complexity. Tribes were not static entities, however, but were historically and situationally dynamic and had decentralizing and egalitarian as well as centralizing and hierarchical tendencies. Rather than defining tribes rigidly, it is necessary to discover the conditions under which a decentralizing or centralizing tendency was dominant within a society at a given time and then to trace its transformations through time. A continuum of possibilities may range from decentralized to centralized society (inegalitarian, hierarchical, and perhaps class-based). Groups at one end of the continuum lacked leaders beyond the level of local elders; those at the other end had powerful, wealthy leaders who formed part of a wider elite and participated in provincial and national politics. Tribal groups expanded and contracted. Small tribal groups joined larger ones when, for example, the state attempted to restrict access to resources or a foreign power sent troops to attack them. Large tribal groups divided into small groups in order to be less visible to the state and escape its reach. Intertribal mobility was a common pattern and was part of the process of tribal formation and dissolution.
A state is characterized by territorial borders (not necessarily secure or clearly delineated), a bureaucratic apparatus, some success at monopolizing physical coercion (especially for suppression), some degree of legitimacy, extraction of resources (especially taxes), maintenance of order associated with distribution of goods and services (such as roads), and a socioeconomically stratified population. Having centralizing goals, state rulers tried to control the territories they claimed and to subordinate and subjugate or pacify any autonomous groups within them. They were not always successful; because of problems with legitimacy and rules of succession, they were vulnerable to competitors, especially those with independent military resources, such as tribal leaders.
Many definitions and models of the state do not apply to the early Islamic world. Few states could claim recognized, legitimized power, for example, and claims to such achievements as territorial control were sometimes limited. Premodern and modern states must be distinguished, although certain so-called traditional or premodern elements have persisted in modern times. Modern nation-states are legal and international entities to be defined, as well, in these terms. When modern rulers came to power, they did so on the basis of a modem, Western-style military and bureaucracy, with state centralization aimed to bring about changes in government and society, including a nationalist ideology, economic development and control, modernization, westernization, and some secularization.
States in history have ranged from fragmented polities lacking autonomous structures of authority, to decentralized polities with rudimentary institutions, to centralized states maintained by a bureaucracy and standing army and claiming a monopoly of the legitimate use of power. The form, organization, and leadership of tribal groups reflected their relationship with states, and thus they have ranged from small, loosely organized, diffuse, noncentralized groups, to fragmented and ephemeral tribal confederacies, to large state-like confederacies with centralized hierarchical leadership systems. From before Islam until the mid-twentieth century, challengers to state rule as well as founders of states often required the military and technological prowess of tribal groups, while established state rulers required tribal support for levies, revenue, and regional security. Tribes were a constant in that they offered a reservoir of military force. State rulers often had to share power with tribes, and their ability to penetrate the countryside often depended on their ties to its tribal elite.
Tribal formations were ways of integrating people into state structures, while at the same time preventing these peoples’ subordination to or assimilation into the state. Tribal structures emerged as components of state rule while simultaneously enabling people to resist certain forms of state encroachment. A loosely organized, noncentralized tribal group was as much a response to external pressures as was a complexly organized, centralized one: both were adaptive strategies. A loosely organized group, protected by the diffuseness of its structure and organization, offered little to state agents to manipulate; a centralized group was able to use its complex organization to resist state pressure as well as to benefit from being an instrument of state control.
As a result of these formative and functional relationships, tribes and states through history have been interdependent and have maintained each other as a single system; they have not functioned as two separate, opposing systems. Tribes and states represented alternative polities, each creating and solving political problems for the other. State rulers especially depended on tribes for military power, revenue, and regional security. They exploited and strengthened the structures and systems they encountered, which required little effort on their part and provided order and security. Tribal people in turn sometimes depended on state intervention in regional competition and conflict, and their leaders drew power, authority, and wealth from their connections with states. At certain periods a weak state allowed and facilitated the emergence of strong tribes; strong tribes in turn helped to ensure a weak state. At other periods strong states and strong tribes coexisted, with tolerance or antagonism. Many states began as tribal dynasties from which emerged state like confederacies and eventually empires, such as the Ottoman Empire. At any time up to the early or midtwentieth century, what was “tribe” and what was “state” depended upon prevailing political circumstances; some complex polities were characterized by both tribal and state features, for example Swat and the Kalat Khanate of southwestern Asia. The term “state,” therefore, is best used to refer to a higher level of political, economic, and social complexity than usually found in tribes and tribal confederacies.
Albert Hourani’s discussion (“Conclusion: Tribes and States in Islamic History,” in Tribes and State Formation, edited by Philip Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, pp. 303-311, Berkeley, 1990) of three spheres of radiation from cities helps to explain the emergence of different kinds of tribes. The first sphere, the city and its dependent hinterland, was an area of direct administration. The second sphere, the intermediate areas where the city and its government could exercise control only through intermediate powers, contained organized and permanent tribes with effective leaders. The third sphere, the mountains and deserts and distant agricultural lands where a city-based ruler might have had some influence but where administration was weak or nonexistent, contained a different kind of tribal entity. Here “tribalism” was a system of ideas, symbols, and rituals that was sometimes dormant and only periodicaily activated. Tribal leaders in the third sphere held intermittent authority and no effective or permanent power.
Islamic beliefs and institutions were sometimes a mechanism for integrating tribes into the state. Particularly in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, close connections existed between tribal society and Islam in its more orthodox institutions and its popular forms such as Sufi orders and saintly lineages. Urban-based religious and legal scholars sometimes held some authority over tribal groups, but they could also polarize tribal society and the state.
Some scholars define tribes in terms of kinship, by which they usually mean descent. Notions of kinship, another symbolic system of classification, were important in relationships among tribal people at the local level, but kinship ties alone did not form tribes or tribal polities. Hence a definition of a tribe as a kinship or kinship-based group is not sufficient or accurate, because it places too much weight on the factor of kinship and neglects other, more significant factors. Kinship principles were often important in giving tribal people a sense of solidarity, especially at the local level, but they were also important in nontribal societies, both rural and urban. In addition, all tribal polities contained people whose ties to local and wider groups were not defined by actual or fictive kinship ties. In the larger tribal polities, no kinship system was elaborate enough to encompass all members. If tribal people asserted connections to a genealogy or common ancestor, they were making a political statement; such genealogies were charters of organization and not maps of actual kinship ties. People also conceptualized political relationships within and between tribal societies in terms of kinship bonds. By these strategies, which should not be glossed simply as “kinship,” people aimed to create a political context and operate within it. Finally, for all tribal people, it is important to distinguish among their residential and socio territorial groups (which recruited members on a voluntary basis), kinship groups (which were defined on the basis of descent-actual or fictive-and marriage), and sociopolitical or “tribal” groups (which recruited members on the basis of political allegiance).
Tribal leaders emerged from local, regional, and state relationships and processes. High-level tribal leaders drew sources of power and authority from their contacts with the state and other external forces, but they also needed support and allegiance at the local level. Their legitimacy was often based on ideologies and systems of values that they shared (or claimed to share) with their political supporters. Various symbolic systems linked tribal leaders of all levels with supporters. They include notions of a shared history, genealogies (political charters), rituals, language, notions of territory, tribal names, sentiments of honor, and conventions of residence, migration, dwellings, apparel, and expressive arts. Tribal people recognized and supported leaders more because of shared cultural beliefs than because of threats of physical coercion. Leaders were often limited in their ability to apply force because tribespeople could “vote with their feet,” deny allegiance to leaders, and form ties with other groups and leaders. High-level tribal leaders also played economic roles in a regional, often nontribal context and developed a base of power there as well; the most successful ones simultaneously cultivated the support of their political followers and their regional and governmental contacts.
Tribal leaders who wanted to expand their power and authority beyond immediate tribal boundaries often needed to invoke wider ethnic, Islamic, and/or state and national notions. Thus the Bakhtiyari khans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shared Iranian, Shi`i values and notions of kingship with many urban Iranians. Kurdish leaders, to transcend local tribal sources of authority, utilized the institutions and ideologies of Sunni Islam, particularly religious brotherhoods. In the 1950s the paramount Qashqa’i khans helped to form the National Front, an Iranian political grouping with liberal, democratic, and nationalist goals.
Members of tribes are sometimes considered also to be part of ethnic groups, especially if their groups are large and complexly organized. Like tribal identities, ethnic identities involve symbolic systems of classification invoked for political reasons under changing circumstances. Ethnicity is a wider, more inclusive construct than that of tribe. As part of the processes of socioeconomic change in the twentieth century, tribal groups were sometimes transformed into ethnic groups, especially when the people were increasingly drawn under state control. When key tribal (sociopolitical) organizations and institutions were undermined or eliminated, usually under state pressure, people formerly encompassed by these systems sometimes adopted or enhanced other traits associated with ethnic groups, particularly a self-conscious sense of distinctiveness. Some tribally organized ethnic populations can also be considered national minorities or parts of them, groups united by a shared political consciousness-a sense of “nation”-and by an interest in achieving political and cultural self-expression.
The tribal peoples of the Islamic world have historically been protected through their membership in these polities and gained advantage over many others in the countryside, especially peasants, who lacked such organizations and leadership systems. Through tribal membership people could maintain political autonomy and defend and expand their economic and territorial interests, sometimes avoiding state manipulation through diffuse structure and sometimes resisting or using it through centralization. Tribespeople also received prestige and support from tribal membership. They were aware of the benefits tribal membership often conferred, and their allegiance to and support of leaders were important elements in tribal formation. Tribal structures, organizations, and ideologies offered long-term survival value because of their highly adaptive and flexible nature; state structures, organizations, and ideologies did not offer them such advantages. Tribal ties and identities were more permanent and enduring for tribal people than the affiliations and loyalties sought, sometimes demanded, by states. States came and went for tribespeople; tribes remained a constant.
[See also Ethnicity; Nation.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abu-Lughod, Lila. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley, 1986. Study of the role of ideology and oral poetry, with a focus on women, in a settled Arab tribal community in rural western Egypt.
Barfield, Thomas J. The Nomadic Alternative. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1993 Ethnographic and historical examination of tribally organized nomadic pastoral societies in the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Africa.
Beck, Lois. The Qashqa’i of Iran. New Haven, 1986. Sociohistorical study of the formation of the Qashqa’i tribal confederacy of southwestern Iran over a two-hundred-year period, concluding with an account of the Qashqa’i insurgency following the 1978-1979 revolution.
Beck, Lois. Nomad: A Year in the Life of a Qashqa’i Tribesman in Iran. Berkeley, 1991. Intimate account of daily and seasonal activity for the nomadic pastoralists of one of Iran’s most important tribal confederacies.
Caton, Steven C. “Peaks of Yemen 1 Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe. Berkeley, 1990) Anthropological study of the role of oral poetry in Yemeni tribal society.
Davis, John. Libyan Politics: Tribe and Revolution. Berkeley, 1987. Discussion of how Libya’s government works through tribal structures.
Dresch, Paul. Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen. Oxford, 1989. Historically based anthropological analysis of the structure and function of tribes of Yemen.
Eickelman, Dale F. The Middle East: An Anthropological Approach. 2d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1989. Useful text containing a review of the literature on tribal society and nomadic pastoralism. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. Oxford, 1949. Classic study of the mediating role of Islamic institutions in North African tribal society.
Friedl, Erika. Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village. Washington, D.C., 1989. Personal stories of tribal women in a small Lur village in the mountains of southwestern Iran.
Harrison, Selig S. In Afghanistan’s Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and Soviet Temptations. New York, 1981. In-depth assessment of Baluch tribal organization in southwestern Asia and the significance of an emerging Baluch nationalist movement in regional ethnic conflict.
Khoury, Philip S., and Joseph Kostiner, eds. Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East. Berkeley, 1990. Excellent collection of theoretical and regional case studies covering historical and contemporary times.
Lavie, Smadar. The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity under Israeli and Egyptian Rule. Berkeley, 1990. Postmodernist exposition concerning tribal people in the Sinai Desert under shifting military rule.
Layne, Linda L. Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities in Jordan. Princeton, 1994. Study of the interplay of local, tribal, and national political processes as they affect the formation of collective identities in Jordan.
Tapper, Richard. Pasture and Politics: Economics, Conflict, and Ritual among Shahsevan Nomads of Northwestern Iran. London, 1979. Anthropological study of economic, political, and social processes among nomadic pastoralists of the Shahsevan tribal confederacy. Tapper, Richard, ed. The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan. London, 1983. Illuminating collection of case studies by authorities on tribal and state forms in these two areas in historical and contemporary times.
Lots BECK
