Bedouin Tribes and the Imperial Intelligence Services in Syria, Iraq and Transjordan in the 1920s

Abstract

Bedouin tribes were among those most affected by the mandate frontiers and new regimes imposed across the Middle East. Their nomadic traditions clashed with confinement within a single state. In the Syrian mandate in particular, the French authorities attempted to transform nomadic bedouin into sedentary farmers. Yet bedouin tribes were far from the loyalist smallholders envisaged by French planners. Their unwritten customary laws had never been regulated by central government and sedentarization was inevitably regarded as detribalization thinly disguised. In the interior of Syria and Iraq the writ of the central government frequently counted for little with indigenous populations for whom livestock raiding and inter-tribal dispute remained facts of life. Pioneering work on the bedouin has brought together historians, anthropologists and social scientists. This article discusses the policing of the nomad populations of Syria, Transjordan and Iraq, and the central role of imperial intelligence services in the policies pursued. Tribal control defied easy categorization or force majeure solutions. It was quite unlike the authorities' concurrent struggles with emergent nationalist protest and inter-communal violence amongst the sedentary populations of the new Arab states. Preventing bedouin dissent was less a matter of repressive policing than of penetrating nomad society to secure the compliance of its leaders.