More on Tribal Shaykhs

Some thoughts on this tribal shaykh stuff...

Buried in this article, one finds information that the two chief duties of tribal leaders in today's Iraq are intervention with central authorities and keeping the peace. There's nothing new about that whatsoever. There's another side to the coin, too: The central authorities have historically chosen the tribal leaders they want to work with.

I've been reading some pre-Islamic Arabian stuff for my dissertation, and the Sassanids basically appointed tribal leaders to serve their own interests - keeping the Bedouin from raiding their territory and serving as proxies in warfare. This was done by a combination of prestige by association, gifts of money to be distributed and weapons to be used to fighting, and not dealing with lesser shaykhs. The early caliphate also promoted certain shaykhs in the same manner. During the Crusades the Mamluks had an office called the Amir al-Arab, or "Commander of the Bedouin," which basically went to one or more tribal chiefs through whom they worked. Even in the 20th century, you find the same patterns. In Lawrence of Arabia, Auda brags about how the Ottomans pay him for peace along the frontier, while the British are quite obviously taking a hand with Sharif Husayn. Many of the tribal chiefs in Iraq are called "Shaykhs of the '90's" because that is when Saddam brought them to prominence hoping for more influence with the Shi'ites.

So what the coalition is doing is simply continuing the millennia-old pattern of interaction between tribally organized rural areas and city-based state structures. However, I can't help but wonder how it plays into our overall plans for Iraq. Because if these shaykhs base their importance on serving as a bridge to the government and resolvers of conflict, I'm not sure they'd want to see an open democracy and state legal system giving individuals direct access to government and eliminating the need for their influence. Yemen, which while not a democracy has certain elements of one, might be an interesting case study of this issue. If we're basing our understanding off colonial British studies, though, we're off on the wrong track just because colonial British anthropologists tended to get stuff wrong in their explanations of how tribes actually functioned socio-politically.

This, of course, does not negate the fact that I simply don't think tribal leaders have that much influence these days. Both Peter Sluglett and Juan Cole, who know far more about modern Iraq than I do, have suggested as much. The population is too urbanized and organized into occupational and religious groups as the main channels of political participation. My pet idea to build democratic institutions in Iraq is actually to legalize labor unions. The Bush administration is taking the corporate-friendly route of assuming foreign investment will bring stability with economic prosperity, but I can't help but think that societies are built off people rather than money, and in any event without labor you have often fundamentalist religious groups as the only noteworthy organizations headed into some hypothetical caucuses or elections, which is something we allegedly don't want.