Page 2 - A Hand book of Arabia Vol 1 (iii) Ch 3

(

CHAPTER III

THE BEDOUIN TRIBES

Tuts chapter is designed to give an account of those tribal
constituents of present-day Arabian society which are essentially
nomadic—those, in short, to which Arabs themselves concede the
name Bfedu. The Bedouin (Becliiwi) type of society is the product
of desert and ‘steppe conditions, and cannot survive long under
others. A tribe which has left such conditions to settle in an oasis
or other permanentlytarable land does not necessarily cease to be
a tribe, but it does cease to be a nomad or Bedouin tribe. Therefore
all jhose tribes of which most members now inhabit continuously
fertile lands or tracts of oasis character will be excluded from the
following consideration—such, for example, as the tribes of Asir,
Yemen and hinterland, the Aden Protectorate, Hadhramaut and the
.South Littoral, Oman, and the Trucial Coast (see Chapters XIV
and XV).,
On the ot'hdr hand, Bedouin constituents of Arabian society which
Have passed wholly or in part northwards out of the peninsula are
included. Not having changed the essential conditions of their
life, but still ranging deserts and steppes, the}- have remained
Bedu. It would be unsatisfactory not to take account here of
the tribes of the Syrian Hamad and the Mesopotamian Jezlrah.
:
They are regarded by the peninsular Bedouins as forming one great
social block with themselves, and some, e. g. certain constituents
of the great Anazah group, still pass at regular seasons southward
into the peninsula, while others have their own home ranges in
the peninsula itself. Moreover, many, like the Ruweilah, Dhaflr,
and Huweitat, move habitually from one side to the other of the
border-line, and some, e.g. the Mesopotamian Shammar, though
they stay to the north of it, are integral parts of larger tribal
units still at home in the south.
For convenience, we adopt a geographical division of Bedouin
tribes into Northern, Central (Western and Eastern), and Southern.
At the outset, a tree of tribal descent from the Arch-Patriarch,
Abraham, will show what Arabs consider to be the true Bedouin stock,
to know tills pedigree is of practical value to any one who has to deal
'Vlth Arab nomads, owing to the value which they themselves attach
fo genealogy, the social distinctions which they base upon it, and
the estimation in which they hold those expert in its intricacies.

VJ
. •••• •.
• • .
;