Gideon M. Kressel is head of the Social Studies Unit at the J. Blaustein Institute for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

The West and the Middle East differ in profound ways on such matters as individual achievement, personal identity, and loyalty. In the West, individuals are on their own in the marketplace, creating networks and assessing their position in accord with a fairly explicit cost-benefit calculus. Economic ties and political relationships tend to reflect a direct connection to the capitalist system.

In the Middle East, by way of contrast, life gives greater weight to ascription; more specifically it is based on agnation, a system based on patrilineal kinship.¹ The structure of society is based on agnates, men connected to other men through a common male ancestor.

I shall argue² that agnation has profound effects on the Middle East’s worldview and especially on its ability to deal with modern life. In the political realm, agnation interferes with a society’s ability to accept cultural pluralism, civil rights, democracy, humanistic principles, individualism, and the full participation of women. In the economic realm, it obstructs collecting funds for community projects and infrastructure, large-scale businesses and joint ventures, and a capital market capable of competing against foreign investments. Until agnation is clearly recognized and dealt with, the Middle East cannot fully shake itself free of these many implications and cannot make the progress to which it aspires.

The huge role of male lineage and tribes in the Middle East derives from the desert milieu. Evolutionist theory contends that where the land is reasonably fertile, family units of mothers and children can make their living by small game and food gathering or, later on, by farming; in such places, mothers tend to dominate the social grouping and fathers are relatively free to come and go. This is the case, for example, in southern Africa, beyond the so-called Bantu Belt. In the distant past, until about ten thousand years ago, the Middle East probably had such a social structure.

But then desertification of the steppes set in, which led to the domestication of livestock and with it the rule of fathers over their families. In the view of anthropologists, large patrilineages result from livestock raising and particularly from the domestication and herding of camels.³ The logic is simple: the power and status of a nomadic patrilineal group depends principally on the number of combatant men available. The larger an agnate group, the larger the territory it can protect against competing groups, and therefore the larger its camel herd and the greater its power. Feuds are the chief mechanism by which tribes effect changes in status; groups of an equal size, each claiming a superior social position, challenge each other through feuding relationships.

This being the case, agnate groups have every incentive to increase the size of their group. They do so via several well-tried strategies, such as having many sons, marrying patrilineal cousins to each other, and taking more than one wife. The patrilineal community structure dictates a preference for marrying paternal kin, especially paternal cousins. When a son marries the daughter of his father’s brother, daughters bear children for one’s own agnate group, not someone else’s. After one’s own daughters are married off within the lineage, it is desirable for men to go out and wed the daughters of weaker groups, perhaps in polygynous marriages. Outside marriages in general, and poly-gynyous ones in particular, offer a quick way to increase the relative size, power, and status of the agnatic group. At times, more exotic efforts are relied on, such as abducting the women from other, usually weaker groups of agnates, or falsely inflating the agnate group’s numbers (something made easier by the absence of an accurate census and the many relatives who live at a distance).

The drive for family and tribal size has profound implications for nearly all interactions between members of the Bedouin community, including daily activities (leading the herds to watering places), ceremonial occasions (the circumcision of boys and weddings), and politics (who allies with whom). It also determines the role of women: to bear children and thereby to increase the status of her husband and his agnates. This being their purpose, women are confined as much as possible to the household and restricted in their social activities to the lineage circle. Strict confinement of daughters bespeaks a powerful tribe and symbolizes the social élite. In contrast to her more urbanized sisters, a Bedouin woman may work as unpaid labor within family enterprises, and an unmarried woman may work in towns but in both cases they are always under the strict supervision of male relations.

Stress on family size leaves little room for notions of romantic love; agnates undertake matchmaking with agnate purposes in mind. Men have some choice of partners but women almost none. In addition, women are discouraged from taking interest in sex, both through their upbringing, which stresses extreme modesty, and through female circumcision, which denies them the physical organs to take sexual pleasure.

Prestige being measured by the number of men of the lineage group, challenges to its size are of grave concern and usually imply an attempt to raise the challenger’s lineage along the social ladder. Insulting a man’s personal qualities—his honesty, benevolence, grace, sexual potency, or intelligence—without involving his agnate group, can be tolerated. But to question the chastity of the female members of his lineage—casting doubts on the patriarchal line of descent and signaling its low rank by proclaiming the accessibility of its daughters—is to disgrace the lineage as a whole and invite a feud.

Such are the classic patterns of desert life, documented by ethnographers and explained by theorists. But most Bedouin have relocated from desert to town over the centuries. This process has sped up in recent decades due to two main factors: economic forces (nomadic herding no longer pays its way) and government policy (states don’t like wandering constituents). Remarkably, sedentarization and urbanization have not appreciably changed the desert’s agnatic social structure: even when Bedouin make the transition to urban life, they continue greatly to value the size of their agnate groups. They no longer need to control large territories of pasture land or watch over scattered, foraging herds, and have no use for large agnate groups, but still these remain highly valued. Specifically, I have found this to be the case in Israel, the case I know best,⁴ where many formerly nomadic people now live either in their own townships or in their own neighborhoods within Israeli towns.⁵ Because patrilineal hierarchies continue to thrive in the Middle East, alternate structures have failed to take hold.

More remarkable yet, desert ways continue to prevail even among long-term urbanites and even in the largest of cities, where unequivocal loyalty to one’s agnates remains a paramount duty for men. An outside observer might expect patrilineages to be replaced by voluntary associations such as political parties, club activities, labor unions, neighborhood committees, library circles, and the like—as in the West, where the role of the extended family has much decreased—but this is not the case. The system of patrilineal hierarchy retains its hold and the agnatic tradition maintains itself over many generations and in entirely new environments. Studies on villages (Boujad in Morocco, Hamra Oasis of Oman) show this reality,⁶ as do those of varied cities (Cairo, Tripoli in Lebanon).⁷ The entirety of Iraq, including its capital, Baghdad, fits the pattern.⁸ Even Beirut, deemed “mostly” Western,⁹ fits this pattern.

Why is patrilineage and the code of agnation so tenacious among Middle-Easterners? The answer may have to do with its function in determining the pecking order; the number of agnates still determines social rank, which in turn enhances a family’s ability to exert its will over others. Just as in the desert, the selection of a leader depends on how many agnates are available on his side to fight—which in urban terms can mean fighting, offering political support, giving money, or (in Israel) voting.

In contrast to other parts of the world, where modernization and urbanization appear to have much reduced the intensity and frequency of feuds and their related patterns of high birth rates,¹⁰ clan disputes, including blood feuds, remain a significant social phenomenon in the Middle East. A leading Egyptian newspaper reported some years ago that

Even in those Middle Eastern countries where the authorities show little tolerance or understanding of feuds, they do not abate, not will they, so long as patrilineal hierarchies continue to thrive

In 1990-92, for example, a blood feud in the Bedouin neighborhood of Jawarish in the (mainly Jewish) town of Ramla, claimed the lives of no less than seven young people, seriously injured another nineteen men, and resulted in many more light injuries. Throughout the fall of 1997, violence between rival clans of the Jawarish and the murder of Hamida Jarushi riveted Israeli attention,¹² climaxing when one side fired an anti-tank missile against the other.¹³

Blood feuds show the longevity of the agnate system with special clarity; they signal that the migration of workers from the countryside to the town does not undo agnatic loyalties.¹⁴ Feuds continue because they serve as a mechanism to put lineage solidarity to the test. The number of skirmishers is the key measure of power and esteem, and groups of agnates provide hierarchy and societal backbone. A squabble that starts with two youngsters at odds has the potential to spill over to the adults and eventually lead to widespread turmoil that can interfere with normal life both in the town and in the families’ rural places of origins. Large assemblages of men, all equal as “wielders of the sword” (colloquial Arabic, darabat as-sayf or idrab sayf, a term used in the counting of agnates), evince what Durkheim calls “mechanical solidarity.”¹⁵

Blood feuds invariably bring participants into conflict with law enforcement agencies, which view killing exclusively from the viewpoint of Western ethics—the individual, not his group, is personally accountable. In Israel especially, this conflict of ethics is starkly drawn. In some ways, feuds are getting worse, as elders in the urban centers seem to be losing control of their lineages to successful, middle-aged entrepreneurs who, although adhering to the principles of agnation, are not acquainted with the traditional formulae for de-escalating a feud and reconciling the opposing parties.

Feuds have implications far beyond the individuals directly involved. Among other problems, they cause destructive and wasteful conflicts within the community; deprive individuals of other potentially beneficial economic and social associations; thwart the development of individual conscience and thinking; and impede the evolution toward democratic principles and market economy.¹⁶ One can go further and argue that the framework of feuding provides the backdrop for conflict between states. The Middle East’s notoriously high incidence of fighting across international borders relates to this personal feuding; governments, like families, stress such matters as kinship, honor, and revenge. Most notably, these have been recent themes of the conflict between Iraq and its neighbors, Iran and Kuwait; northern and southern Yemen; and Morocco, Mauritania, and Libya.¹⁷ These themes were also critical in the delimitation of Saudi Arabia’s borders with its neighbors.¹⁸

If agnation had value in forming cohesive and protective societies in tribal settings, today it poses a crippling barrier to the Middle East’s ability to enter into modern life. That is, agnatic cohesion ties them down. Specifically, it inhibits a wide range of developments in the economic, civic, and political spheres.

The patrilineal structure goes far to account for the failure to move farther along with economic advancement. Patrilineages induce large families and high birth rates; combined with modern medicine and urban life, this has led to rapidly growing populations and a population explosion that threatens most Middle Eastern societies today.¹⁹ Agnatic pressures also make governments nearly helpless to reduce birth rates. So long as status is based in large part on fecundity, and this connection is supported by religious belief, a fatalistic approach, and indifferent governments, the population will continue to grow still faster. To break this pattern requires creative new approaches,
ones that deal with the agnatic substratum of beliefs.

Emphasis on the self-sufficiency of the family group has the effect of limiting exchanges between families, thereby depriving them of the benefits of economic specialization. Rather than go out and hire or be hired by others, families prefer to establish a profusion of small but self-sufficient workshops, retail shores, and warehouses. This way, each agnate group has its own set of commercial enterprises and custom commits the households to do their shopping from agnates, not others. In contrast, joint ownership of businesses or real estate by people from different lineages is extremely limited.²⁰ In Lebanon, for example, nearly all industrial firms are family enterprises. Possibilities for trade and economic specialization are restricted because of the similarity of these units among agnate groups. A reluctance to employ non-agnates further discourages the growth and diversity of commercial enterprises.

This reluctance to cooperate financially with other agnate groups explains why individual or family capitalism, the most primitive form of industrial capitalism, prevails in the Middle East. At the other extreme, there are some capital-intensive industries of the sort that call on large-scale investors such as multinational corporations, national banks, and governments. Scarce is the in-between level of entrepreneurial corporation—plants employing a few hundred workers, run jointly by more than one main owner and a handful of shareholders.

This reluctance to undertake long-term collaboration on financial projects with other households or with non-agnates impedes the development of complex projects. Agnation presents barriers to investment by making Middle Easterners wary of entrusting family savings to the capital market or to bank issues. Joint entrepreneurial projects undertaken to enhance capital investments usually depend on the initiative of “Western” partners (a term that now also includes East Europeans and East Asians) whose associations are not limited by considerations of lineage.²¹

Middle Eastern labor unions and guilds are also partly characterized by their agnatic skew.²² Agnatically-based guilds that include only the members of a family or tribe exist in profusion; the result is hundreds of similar unions of blacksmiths, tanners, carpenters, and the like. Patrilineal infrastructure thus increases the number of identical family guilds, each of them incapable of bridging its differences with others so as to work together in pursuit of common interests. Agnatic ties thus inhibit movement toward trade unionism or a sense of class struggle. Lack of cooperation also weakens the guilds collectively vis-à-vis competitors abroad when local markets begin to carry imported consumer goods.

Agnatic attitudes toward women also have importance for economic life, resulting in the loss to society of their intelligence and labor. To face this problem is no easy matter, however, for it requires dismantling the boundaries of agnation that confine married women, often notwithstanding their professional skills, to household activities. The agnatic logic and political structure, which ranks groups by the number of their males, will have to give way to a different hierarchy, one in which enfranchised women take their rightful place.

Agnation does have its positive side, too. It de-emphasizes the social importance of wealth; tribal elders, rather than the rich, make key decisions. Wealthy and poor agnates tend to live alongside one another in the clan’s cluster.²³ Strong agnatic cohesion reduces the potential for class conflicts. And it creates a liberal climate for international trade; to facilitate foreign capital investment, regulations are continuously made more inviting.

Agnation helps account for the lack of civic infrastructure that underlies social institutions throughout the Middle East. For many centuries, the region’s urban society has been characterized by a specific pattern whereby settled Bedouin form neighborhoods of tribal groups in which all residents claim descent from a common male ancestor.²⁴ These neighborhood clusters form enclaves of rival groups that present an obstacle to unified planning for urban improvement and expansion.

Agnatic perceptions inhibit the delivery of community services and the levying, collection, and distribution of taxes; families are distinctly uneager to spend their hard-earned revenues on maintaining inefficient and unnecessary “civil servants.”²⁵ Reluctance to sit down and work with members of other groups of agnates impedes the establishment of urban taxation systems, including a property tax for funding projects of public concern. Consequently, scant autonomous funds are available to finance public projects (with the important exception of the oil-rich states, which get their funds not from taxpayers but consumers of oil and gas). The state plays hardly any role in such financial matters as social security, insurance policies, and welfare. Government support for the indigent and elderly is also limited because this remains a kin group affair rather than a social one. The family is always supposed to aid its own kin, with the nearest agnates bearing the heaviest burden. The shortcomings of this “agnatic welfare system” help explain the massive migration of Middle Easterners to the West, where they seek alternative arrangements.

Each town quarter tends to develop its own jobs, schools, clubs, places of worship, etc.²⁶ Thus, for example, it is very difficult to situate a mother/child clinic, as women from one group avoid walking through the area of another group, where they would be prey to the eyes of men there. Though most Middle Eastern governments encourage European-style schooling methods, the reluctance of lineages to collaborate with each other hampers their spread; rivalry over matters of female honor (‘ird) get in the way of progress. Extracurricular educational networks, such as youth movements, artistic workshops, libraries, sport clubs are especially lacking for boys and even more so for girls.

Voluntary associations are generally weak, a result of their contradicting the imperatives of agnation. Neighbors belonging to different kin groups rarely cooperate to improve the quality of life. Public areas become squalid as appeals to clean them up usually fail. Attempts to establish institutions to deal with public issues rarely succeed. The reluctance to allow females to engage in activities outside the family unit has prevented the emergence of assertive movements for women’s liberation. Ironically, the larger cities, once under direct colonial control and now home to a more Westernized element, still retain some municipal institutions and so show more cooperation than do small towns.

Agnatic considerations influence urban landscapes. When it comes to civil engineering, the relative weakness of the municipal council as opposed to the patrilineage leads to haphazard building and the creation of an “architect’s nightmare.”²⁷ Further, tradition inhibits patrilineally unrelated families from living in a single apartment house, so one- and two-story buildings abound, even in towns where space is at a premium. High-rises are only reluctantly constructed, no matter how urgent the need to economize on land use (for example, in Egypt, where residences consume precious Nile Valley land). The resultant urban sprawl creates great problems for the municipal authorities to plan public works or provide such municipal services as water, sewage, and electricity.

But not all is bleak. Benefits of agnation include less juvenile delinquency, certain types of crime (such as sexual assault), and alcoholism. Middle Eastern societies suffer less from street-gangs and have a lower incidence of households headed by unmarried mothers. When each person counts himself part of an extended family, anonymity and alienation are relatively rare. The Marxist notion of “human dust” hardly applies.

The West counts on citizens having the general good in mind but agnation calls on each person to take care of his family’s needs, if necessary at the expense of other families. As a result, the notion of a civic-minded individual who disinterestedly supervises the proper use of public funds is almost nonexistent.

In most Middle East towns, mayors are appointees assigned by the central government; councils of dignitaries consist of the elders of the local lineages. When elections are held, as in Israel, members of each patrilineage call on their agnates to vote for their own candidate. Community and public leaders depend on their own agnates to support them as candidates for political office. Worthiness for office is defined not by skills, probity, and vision, but by having cohesive support from the elders, other agnates, and the actual number of male (and in some cases female) members of those lineages. Women acquire importance in democracies, where votes count, not swords. When elections take place and women have an equal say, this tilts the political balance in their favor. This does not end the system of agnation but it provides a major psychological step forward.

Social reforms have difficulty when they run up against the limits set by agnation. Political platforms that advocate the liquidation of tribalism do not get far; if they do, they are hardly ever applied (the collapse of the Ba‘th Party dogma on this point bears noting). Socialism theoretically should uproot practices such as tribes competing over numerical supremacy and women being confined, but decades of socialist practice in countries as varied as Egypt and Yemen failed to achieve this.

Attempts by Middle Easterners to move beyond the Bedouin network of social organization have had little success. Fundamentalist Islamic movements represent, ironically, the one major success at uniting members of multiple kin-groups. Though ostensibly backward-looking and fearful of novelty, these have uniquely managed to cut across the boundaries of agnatic affiliation^.28 This may point to Islam being the one force powerful enough to coalesce peoples who otherwise are divided by acute tribalism. In this sense, Islam may help Muslim Middle Easterners cope with modernity, particularly in its emphasis on renovation (tajdid) and reform (islah).

Despite its profound importance as a factor in public life, agnation is usually overlooked in political analyses of the Middle East, a reflection of the materialist outlook (emphasizing economics rather than tradition or emotion) that so dominates our discourse. Agnation falls outside the materialist analysis because, in the final analysis, it aims not for money but for social power and prestige. Wealth is but a pleasant by-product of the drive to outstrip the neighbors numerically and politically.

Can this value system undergo gradual change, eliminating its harmful aspects while retaining its advantages? Can Middle Easterners give up the assumption that advancement results from superior numbers of family members and replace it with the idea of personal achievement? Can they acknowledge the negative role of agnation and fight it?

In theory, yes, and by moving either toward an individual approach, so that each person makes up his own mind about politics and party affiliation; toward a larger approach, whereby all tribes fuse into a single whole. This could be a nation-state or something larger—such as the umma (world community of Muslims)—and it would promote a sense of belonging that would ultimately create larger, more open social units to replace the tribal ones. But the chances of success here are meager; nations hardly exist and the umma never overcame tribal boundaries for a lengthy period of time.

The mechanism for such changes remain unknown at this time, but it is clear that change must come from below, from the peoples of the Middle East themselves, and not from outside or above. Change will not come about because outsiders call for an end to agnation’s narrow worldview and its replacement with a broader sense of belonging; this decision must come from within. And that will result only from some basic renovations in the way Middle Easterners approach life. Governments cannot effect this change, for in the Middle East they nearly all owe their existence to the exertions of Western colonialists, leaving a wide gap between their tribal structures at the micro level and their governments at the macro level. Nor can it come from the present religious authorities, for while Islam in theory dispenses with loyalties of the tribal sort, the religion developed its idioms out of tribal ones.

If outsiders, government officials, and men of religion cannot prompt such a change of outlook, who can do so? Exposure to the culture of individualism and the lure of capitalism are most likely to wean Middle Easterners from agnation.

The large body of Middle Easterners living in the West are one means of transmission; if they absorb new mores from their Western neighbors and bring these attitudes to their home countries, they could effect a transformation in attitudes. This schema faces two problems. First, Middle East migrants all through the century have gone west and north and few have returned. Second, many of those who did return were only superficially Westernized—learning the externalities but not changing in basic ways.

Middle Easterners who already live in a mostly Western country and are in close contact with a wide range of neighbors might make a better transmission of the non-agnatic outlook: the Arabs of Israel, for example. Several developments in Israeli Arab life offer hope of change, such as their acceptance of municipal elections and reliance on the State Umbudsman’s Office in cases of civil rights infringement. Israel also presents a model and a challenge to the Palestinian Authority with regard to such issues as civil rights and women’s participation in public affairs.

Whoever is the catalyst, the motor force for change ultimately lies in the people’s own wishes to adopt a different kind of behavior and integrate into the growing, different world that evolves around them.

¹ The term agnation derives from Henry Maine, Ancient Law (London: John Murray, 1905), pp. 52, 129-134.
² Drawing on two of my books, Descent Through Males: An Anthropological Investigation into the Patterns Underlying Social Hierarchy, Kinship, and Marriage among Former Bedouin in the Ramla-Lod Area (Israel) (Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992) and Ascendancy Through Aggression: The Anatomy of a Blood Feud among Urbanized Bedouin (Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1996).
³ Alois Musil, The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins (New York: The American Geographical Society, 1928), ch. 3.
⁴ I have had the fortunate experience of living in proximity to my research site for approximately thirty years. My closeness to Northern and Negev Bedouin communities has permitted me to serve as a counselor and a mediator; the insight I have gained from these experiences has enabled me to recognize the highly consistent behavioral logic underlying agnatically-based customs among the Bedouin groups.
⁵ An estimated 90,000 Bedouin remain in the Negev Desert of Israel; about 40,000 of them still live in isolated “illegal” dwellings, settlements, or tent communities.
⁶ Dale F. Eickelman, The Middle East: An Anthropological Approach, 2nd ed. rev. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1989), “Introduction,” and idem, “Is There an Islamic City? The Making of a Quarter in a Moroccan Town,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 5 (1974): 274-294.
⁷ Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), Ch. 10; John Gulick, Tripoli: A Modern Arab City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Fuad I. Khuri, Tribe and State in Bahrain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
⁸ Amatjia Baram, “Neo-Tribalism in Iraq: Saddam Husayn’s Tribal Politics, 1991-1996,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 29 (1997): 1-3.
⁹ Samir Khalaf, “Primordial Ties and Politics in Lebanon,” Middle Eastern Studies, 4 (1966): 243-269; idem, “Family Associations in Lebanon,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 2 (1971): 235-250; Samir Khalaf and Emilie Shwayri, “Family Firms and Industrial Development: The Lebanese Case,” Economic Development and Culture Change, 15 (1966): 156-169. Also see Fuad I. Khuri, From Village to Suburb: Order and Change in Greater Beirut (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 102ff.
¹⁰ For an exception to this rule, and a case that resembles the Middle East, Anton Blok, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village 1860-1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) and Jane C. Schneider and Peter T. Schneider, Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily, 1860-1980 (Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1996).
¹¹ Al-Ahram, June 29, 1970. Harold Glidden, “The Arab World,” American Journal of Psychiatry 128 (1972): 984-988.
¹² Yedi‘ot Ahronot, Ma‘ariv, Ha’aretz, and The Jerusalem Post, Nov. 10, 1997.
¹³ Ha’aretz, Nov. 11, 1997.
¹⁴ David M. Hart, “Clan, Lineage, Local Community and the Feud in a Rifian Tribe,” in People and Cultures in the Middle East, Vol. 2, Life in the Cities, Towns and Countryside, ed. L. Sweet (Garden City, N. Y.: Natural History Press, Vol. II, 1970), pp. 3-75.
¹⁵ Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (London and New York: Collier-Macmillian, 1893), Ch. II.
¹⁶ See David M. Hart, Traditional Society and Feud in the Moroccan Rif (Rabat: Editions La Poste, 1997).
¹⁷ See Richard Schofield, Kuwait and Iraq: Historical Claims and Territorial Disputes (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, 1991).
¹⁸ See John Wilkinson, “Territoires des tribus nomades et delimitations frontières en Arabi,” in Steppes d’Arabies: Etats, pasteurs, agriculteurs and commerçants: le devenir des zones sèches, ed. Riccardo Bocco, Ronald Jaubert and Françoise Métral (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), pp. 103-134.
¹⁹ The Economist, Jan. 4, 1998, estimates 700,000 “economic refugees” from the Middle East went to Europe via Italy alone.
²⁰ Khalaf and Shwayri, “Family Firms and Industrial Development,” pp. 156-169.
²¹ A. B. Zahlan, The Arab Construction Industry (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1984), Ch. 12.
²² Gabriel Baer, Egyptian Guilds in Modern Times (Jerusalem: The Israel Oriental Society, 1964).
²³ Eickelman, “Is There an Islamic City?” pp. 274-294.
²⁴ William Lancaster, The Rwala Bedouin Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
²⁵ Hossein H. Askari, J. T. Cumming, and Michael Glover, Taxation and Tax Politics in the Middle East (London: Butterworth Scientific, 1982).
²⁶ Fuad I. Khuri, “Ideological Constants and Urman Living,” in The Middle East City: Ancient Traditions Confront a Modern World, ed. Abdulaziz Y. Saqqaf (New York: Paragon House, 1987), p. 71.
²⁷ Jane M. Hacker, Modern Amman: A Social Study (Durham, N.C.: University of Durham, 1960), pp. 54-55.
²⁸ Michael Gilsenen, Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt: An Essay in the Sociology of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).