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Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East

University of California Press

The title of this essay, "Tribes and State Formation in Islamic History," is wonderfully ambiguous. It is not clear what any of the key words mean. What I would like to do is discuss a certain type of rural social organization commonly called tribes, but which is better described as chieftaincies, in relation to states and empires in the greater Middle East (that is, the Middle East, Inner Asia, and North Africa) from the beginning of the Islamic era to the nineteenth century. First, I would like to make some general remarks about the longue durée in Middle Eastern history to indicate the framework in which I see the relations of tribes or chieftaincies and empires. By the Islamic era Middle Eastern patterns of tribe-empire relations already had a history reaching back to the fourth and third millennium B.C ., when neolithic village communities evolved into societies on the scale of temple-city, city-state, and empire, and agrarian-urban-imperial societies came into being. By then Middle Eastern societies were organized around a tripartite structure of parochial units (lineages, villages, tribes, or chieftaincies), religious associations, and empires. On the eve of the Islamic era the region was divided into two imperial realms, the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, whose populations were each organized into several Christian churches and other religious collectivities and into smaller local units on the scale of family, lineages, or small clientele and residential groups. In this period there was a clear differentiation of empire and religious bodies, though the authority of rulers was based on religious charisma and entailed a considerable degree of control over religious institutions.

The Islamic era represented profound continuities and equally profound changes. In this era the basic institutional framework ofpast Middle Eastern civilization—the tripartite arrangement of tribal, religious, and empire collectivities, and the sedentary-agricultural and city-commercial economies—were taken over in toto. At the same time the Islamic era generated new variations on the older institutional structures, above all, a new religious culture and new political identities.

These redefinitions proceeded through three principal phases. The first was the early Arab-Muslim empire (seventh to tenth centuries), which set the cultural norms for the new civilization. The second was the age of the Turkish migrations and Saljuqid regimes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in which these cultural ideals were translated into the framework of a mass society. By then the bulk of the Middle Eastern population had been converted to Islam, and the processes of forming an Islamic identity, Islamic religion, and Islamic forms of state and community were largely complete. The third and final phase was the reorganization of these Islamic Middle Eastern societies into their definitive premodern forms under the Ottoman and Safavid empires and the several Islamic states of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.

At the same time that Middle Eastern societies were acquiring their Islamic identity, the twin processes of Islamization and state formation spread from the Middle East proper into the peripheral regions of Arabia, North Africa, and the steppe lands of Inner Asia. The Arab and Turkish migrations induced state formation and the spread of Islam in areas that hitherto had not been organized as state or imperial societies. These new regions became integral parts of a greater Middle Eastern Islamic society, organized on the tripartite institutional framework of tribes or chieftaincies, religious associations, and empires. I shall briefly introduce each of these institutions.

The concept of tribe is unclear and controversial. The word is used to refer to a kinship group, an extended family, or a coalition of related families. It may refer to the elite family from whom some larger confederation gets its name, to a cultural, ethnic, or other non-familial social group, or to conquest movements of pastoral peoples without regard for the internal basis of cohesion. I will not take a position about the meaning of tribe except to make clear that I am not talking about small-scale family groups, cooperative herding, or village communities but about political entities that organize fragmented rural populations—be they small kinship or clientele groups or ad hoc alliances of individuals conceived as an extended family—into large-scale alliances. Such large-scale political entities may be conceived by their members in terms of a common mythic ancestry,but usually the leadership is defined in terms of patriarchal, warrior, or religious chieftaincies. In the Middle East, chieftaincies are generally found among pastoral peoples, though this type of social structure is also present among semisedentary, mountain, and even peasant populations. Although I may use the word tribe for convenience, it should be clear that tribes in my sense are not familial or ethnic groups but political and religious chieftaincies whose composition varies greatly.

The second type of collectivity in the Islamic era was the religious associations. These were made up of the followers or devotees of an 'alim , a Sufi, or some other holy man who was an inspired teacher and exemplar for his group. Such associations were generally local, but they were commonly affiliated into larger networks such as the madhdhahib or schools of law, theological schools, Sufi turuq , and Khariji or Shi'i sects. In Muslim societies we do not find a hierarchical organization of such groups, though the authority of certain master teachers may become widespread. Religious associations were in principle separate from state or imperial regimes, having different personnel and a different ethos from that of the state elites. In many instances, however, states managed to achieve some kind of control over their operations.

The third principal institutional feature of Middle Eastern societies was states or empires. Middle Eastern empires in this period were commonly organized by conquering or other military elites. They administered the regions they controlled through a combination of bureaucratic and quasi-feudal means—the iqta ' being the most common form of decentralized fiscal administration—and were legitimized by a combination of Islamic and non-Islamic symbols. Almost every Middle Eastern regime cultivated its identity as a successor state to that of the Prophet in Medina or as a regime serving an Islamic religious purpose; at the same time, each patronized an artistic and cultural style that established its cosmological-universal, cosmopolitan-cultural, or patrimonial claims to legitimacy.1

These collective structures were systematically interrelated. Although tribes and empires represent, in one sense, an evolutionary sequence, once the sequence had been fully realized, the issue became one of the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of tribal chieftaincies and imperial entities. Ever since the third millennium B.C . empires have been the most encompassing collective bodies. Tribes had a large role to play in Middle Eastern societies, but they almost always played their part in the context, or under the umbrella, of empire regimes. By the Islamic era tribal populationsconstantly interacted with...