The time from the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt to the First World War, roughly the nineteenth century, was a period of social, political, and economic turmoil that proved to be the end of an era in the Levant. The primary reason for examining the nineteenth-century tribes is that it was the last period in which the major tribes and tribal confederations of the region, such as the Anaze, the Adwan, the Beni Sakhr, the Shammar, were in actual political control in the Levant. These tribes had their territorial borders and power structures, intertribal hierarchies, and conflicts. They created and maintained alliances and confederations and, on several occasions, complex state-like power structures that can throw light on the concept of the tribal state.
The Ottoman administration had little to no authority in these tribal regions. The last Ottoman governor in the region who had any actual power was Achmed Jezzar (“the Butcher”), Pasha of Acco and on several occasions of Damascus. He had been appointed by the government to restore order in the Palestinian region after an uprising, and he did so, but at a heavy cost: he left the countryside depleted; the less subservient tribes simply moved out of the area and out of his reach and wreaked havoc farther to the south and east (Browne 1806: 422; Buckingham 1825: 5; Cohen 1973: 107-08, 163-64). After Jezzar’s death, the various tribal groups in the region took control again.
The Wahabi uprising, followed by the Egyptian rule of Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim Pasha, transformed the country for a short period and thoroughly upset the sociopolitical structure of the Ottoman dominions. Travelers in Jordan and the Arabian Peninsula, such as Seetzen (1854-59), Burckhardt (1822, 1829, 1830), and Buckingham (1822, 1825) reported regular clashes and actual wars between the Wahabi and their opponents, both the Turks and the opposing tribes. The Egyptian pashas beat the Wahabis and maintained a tight control over the region. Robinson and Smith (1841: 156) report that even the tribes of the Beni Sakhr and the Howeitat in Jordan paid taxes to the Egyptian government.
However, after the Egyptian defeat at the hands of the British, the region fell back into its former state of relative anarchy. Anarchy, that is, as far as Ottoman rule was concerned. The region had a political configuration of its own, with power once again in the hands of various powerful tribes and families, each with their own territory, and answering to laws that were universally known and recognized.
The main areas of interaction between the Ottoman government and the tribal south were the ports of trade with the Mediterranean and Europe, such as Gaza, Acco, Jaffa, Saida, Beirut, and Tripoli, and the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. The government was responsible for the safety of the Hajj routes for the pilgrims, which went through various tribal territories. The government paid the tribes surra, protection money, to stop them from attacking the pilgrims — which amounted to permission to cross their territory. This was an old practice, and a considerable source of income for the tribes.
Ever since the Napoleonic invasion, the Ottoman sultans realized that in order to keep their empire and compete with the european powers, they had to reform, get rid of corruption, and take control, both in the cities and also in more peripheral territories. The Tanzimat, a series of reforms in administration, land use, and political organization, instigated by Sultan Abdulmajed I and continued by Abdel Aziz (1839-1876), began to make itself felt shortly after the withdrawal of the Egyptian forces (Findley 1986). The initial effect of these measures was limited, and especially in peripheral areas such as the Hauran and southern Transjordan, it took a long time before they had any effect.
In these peripheral areas power was shared and contested between the main tribes, the Beni Sakhr, the Adwan, the Howeitat in the south, and the various tribes of the Anaze confederation in the north and east. Tribal towns such as Nablus, Hebron, and Kerak also continued to resist Ottoman power until the end of the century. A comparable situation existed in the Arabian Peninsula, where a power struggle between the Ibn Sa’ud and the Ibn Rashid led to the creation of several independent emirates.
Nevertheless, the Tanzimat began to gain ground in Jordan and Palestine. In 1867, at the request of the local farmers, the Ottoman armies invaded the Belqa, with the support of the Beni Hassan (Oppenheim 1943: 179; Wood 1869, quoted in Shryock 1997: 260). They defeated the Adwan and abolished the practice of Khawa (protection fees) (Shryock 1997: 77). In the 1880s the Hauran and Jaulan came under the control of the Damascus government. Schumacher (1886: 25) describes the Hauran as “wheat country” and the Jaulan as “grazing country.” It would take until the very end of the century, however, before the government managed to get a grip on the south. The Kerak Plateau was controlled from Kerak by the independent Majali family. When, finally, an Ottoman government was established in Kerak in 1893, the Majali stayed in actual power, alongside the Ottomans, and even today they are one of the most powerful families in the country.
So around the turn of the century the Ottoman empire had re-established its control over much of the region and the tribes. However, the World War turned everything upside down again. The Bedouin tribes saw their power curbed by a more efficient Ottoman administration, and their camel-based economy weakened by the coming of the railways. Many sided with the foreign powers against the Turkish empire. There were several uprisings, one of which was led by Hussayn, supreme Sharif, and his four sons. The British supported this revolt in an effort to undermine the authority of the Ottomans. The involvement of the Bedouin and other tribes in the war has been described by T. E. Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926/1962). The war divided the tribes of the region into two camps and changed the political map forever. Afterward, the Western powers divided the region among themselves, with little regard for tribal territories and sensitivities. The sons of Hussayn were made rulers of states under mandate of France and England, and they rewarded the tribes that had supported them with wealth and positions of power.
Other tribes retreated into the desert, and the farming tribes welcomed the new security. The creation of the State of Israel and the cultivation of the Negev was the final blow to the tribes’ political and economic organization, albeit not to their existence as tribes. Tribal societies remain an important source of influence in the region. Tribal affiliation is an important part of the social networks, and election results are decided by tribal loyalty, rather than political
EVELINE VAN DER STEEN
Ideals (Shryock 1997: 146, 278, 324-26). Concepts of honor have not changed significantly, nor has the concept of group responsibility. Within the state structure, the tribal organization has found a new form.
My second reason for choosing the nineteenth century as an ethnohistoric model is that it has by far the largest corpus of sources describing tribal society. Napoleon’s expeditions brought a large number of scientists, historians, and geologists in their train. They described and mapped the region and triggered both the curiosity of Western scholars and the greed of adventurers.
The eighteenth-century Danish expedition that included Carsten Niebuhr was an exception; now came a stream of scientific expeditions and individual adventurers exploring the East. Most of these focused on the Holy Land and Egypt. Jordan remained largely terra incognita, and Arabia was only slowly being discovered.
Many of these travelers published accounts of their travels, in one form or another. for the Holy Land alone there are over 5,000 sources from the nineteenth century (Ben-Arieh 1979: 11-18). The scope and the quality of these accounts vary widely, and we have to take this into account when we study these sources. Most travelers and explorers, certainly in the earlier period, had other axes to grind, and considered their encounters with the local tribes as a nuisance at best (van der Steen, forthcoming). But others lived among the tribes, spoke the language, and got to know them well.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, John Lewis Burckhardt (1822) and Ulrich Jasper Seetzen (1854-59) were the first two Westerners to travel in Jordan since antiquity. They did so to perfect their disguises as Arabs to be able to explore the interior of Africa. Neither reached their goal, both dying before they could travel into Africa. However, whilst living as Arabs in the Levant, they became very familiar with Arab society east of the Jordan and described it in detail. Other travelers, such as Irby and Mangles (1868), Robinson (1856; Robinson and Smith 1841), and Palmer (1871), were more interested in finding and describing antiquities. They considered dealings with the tribes a necessary evil, an attitude that is reflected in their accounts. Nevertheless, their observations, however biased, are valuable because they throw light on the role of the tribes in society, and on the power structures that they found so obstructive and irritating.
Finally, Alois Musil (1907-08, 1927, 1928a-b), at the end of the nineteenth century, belonged to a new generation of travelers who were genuinely interested in the customs and habits of the local population. He lived with the Rwala Bedouin and was the first to use photography extensively as a tool in his research. His publications on the tribes of the region are invaluable because he observed and recorded the beginning of the end of tribal hegemony in the region. The accounts of Lawrence of Arabia, which marked the end itself, have already been mentioned.
Two case studies illustrate the interaction between government and tribal society, and the concept of tribal state formation, respectively. The first is taken from nineteenth-century Palestine and concerns one of the most colorful tribal leaders in the region: Akila Agha.
World History
