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V











                  Chapter Two

                  The Tribal Structure of
                  Society








                  1 The basis of the tribal organisation of the
                      population in Eastern Arabia

                  Ageless characteristics and changing conditions
                  “By and large, Arabia south of the Fertile Crescent has kept its
                  political as well as its social independence. The reason, simple
                  enough, is that the hard facts of Arabian climate and scene are not
                  only changeless but their inhospitable rigour have [sic] always
                  constituted its defence. No one has long or keenly envied the
                  Arabians their country; they have on the whole been little molested,
                  by reason merely of the very aridity and heat, dust and desert, of
                  which so much of the peninsula is formed, and by which its various
                  provinces are divided. They have enjoyed the safety of the undesired,
                  and have lived lives to which a hundred generations have specialised
                  them, in conditions barely tolerable to others.”1 As this sums up the
                  position of most of the Arabian Peninsula through the centuries of
                  worldwide conquest and colonisation, so its south-eastern corner
                  was indeed by-passed by the main stream of history altogether. This
                 cannot be said of the same region today, while its oil helps to keep the
                 industries of the world running.
                    When the new age opened for this area, the local population had
                 had only a distant glimpse of the industrialised world, its ways of
                 life, its endeavours and its values. Adapting to some features of this
                 other world would be difficult enough for a conglomerate group of
                 people who had no particular clearly-defined concept of life nor of
                 their position in their own environment. How much harder it must be
                 to make a success of the necessary adaptation in the case of the
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