Tribe and State in a Nested Polity

Imagining Iraq, 1534 to the Present

Michael A. Cole

GOVT 796, Final Paper

Prof. Peter Mandaville

March 2008
 Iraq can best be understood as a network of discrete polities arranged under a single state.

The state has shallow roots in Iraq despite the country’s long history, but the country has never

been ungoverned by some form of authority. The Islamic, Ottoman, and British Empires, the

Arab Sharifians, and Ba’athists have conceived of, and claimed to govern, “an Iraq” from abroad

or from Baghdad as a frontier between kingdoms (Persia, the Hejaz, and Ottoman Anatolia), a

collection of provinces, a united kingdom, and a modern territorial-state, respectively. Much of

the historical and political science literature on Iraq records its development as a unified political

entity, whether autonomous or subject to another state, and therefore fails to capture much of the

substance of life and politics in Iraq.1 In fact, the critical political exchanges that impact Iraqis’

lives are those between Baghdad (Iraq’s political center) and the local authorities whom Iraqis

recognize and trust. These creative, dynamic exchanges articulate the substance of various Iraqi

identities, define or deny Iraq’s state, and determine the contours of both state and tribe through

so that neither can be understood in isolation from the other. (This paper will focus on tribes, but

could also have profitably explored the relationship between the Iraqi state and clergy; state and

leading families; or state and village councils). Beyond descriptions of competition among

1
Sluglett 141
various actors—rural and urban, indigenous and foreign, traditional and modern—the history of

tribe-state interaction brings useful concepts to bear upon the question of a united Iraq – its

reality, desirability, solvency, and definition – and should inform policies pursued by the Iraqi

government, as well as foreign governments engaged in Iraq, as they engage Iraq’s tribes in the

future.

Definition of a set of concepts – polity, state, nation, and tribe – lends clarity to each of

Iraq’s component parts, as well as to the whole. A review of Iraq’s history informed by these

concepts exposes the dynamic relationships among groups in the production of Iraqi identities.

The ideologies, structures, and internal power-balance of the Iraqi tribes and the Iraqi state may

change with each era, but the “ideal constructs” of tribe and state remain consistent. Ferguson

and Mansbach explain,

Today, as in the past, a rich variety of polity types interact across global and

regional issues. There is, moreover, great variety within each type – family,

tribe, city, and so on. Each is merely an ideal construct, or model, which

manifests itself in a range of forms in real-world polities during a particular

time and also over time.2

Indeed, Iraq’s history bears out the consistent relevance of its central social groups and power

relationships across distinct periods. These central concepts are closely intertwined: Whereas the

state, tribe and nation are each polities, the state and tribe are also potentially, but not

necessarily, nations. The faultlines that define Iraq’s political world develop where the Iraqi

state and indigenous groups contend to either define or to deny the Iraqi nation.

2
Ferguson and Mansbach 37
 The polity is a community with a distinct identity, a hierarchy with roles and means for

continuity, loyalties based on a shared belief in linked fates, and capacities to mobilize for the

satisfaction of collective values.3 “Among other things, polities differ in degree of hierarchy,

centralization of authority, institutionalization, mobilization capacity, homogeneity, and size,”

and these qualities affect polities’ strength relative to one another.4 As readers of Classical and

Enlightenment philosophy well know, man has conceived a wide variety of means of organizing

communities to realize shared values. The state, a form of a polity, is distinguished by its

bounded territoriality and its institutional character. Conventional definitions of the state

indicate that it possesses “a permanent population, a defined territory, and a national government

capable of maintaining effective control over its territory,” as well as the Weberian claim to “a

monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force or violence within a given territory.”5

As a concept, the nation is more amorphous and contentious than the state, and history

bears out that it is among the most forceful drivers of human events. Benedict Anderson defines

the nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and

sovereign.”6 Each quality is salient: The nation’s limited character distinguishes it from

messianic religious communities that anticipate absolute hegemony; sovereignty indicates the

nation’s temporality, its ability to change despite unchanging religion, and its independence from

religious authority; that it is a community suggests fraternal, horizontal relations among its

members. The nation is real only when it is imagined, which is to say, only when a sufficient

3
Ferguson and Mansbach 36
4
Ferguson and Mansbach 37
5
Lim 6
6
Anderson 6
number of a community’s members perceive a current uniting them across physical distance and

individual differences that clearly distinguishes them from other groups of humans.

Anderson uses history to expose the means by which nationalists assert their

independence from others, define themselves, describe their histories and aspirations, construct

or identify “concrete manifestations” of their nations, and pursue and marshal resources (both

intellectual and physical) for national action (e.g., cultural pursuits, state-building).

Long before Anderson showed us the need for nations to be imagined, Ernest

Renan … pointed out in 1882 that if a nation is to perpetuate itself it needs to

be willed. ‘The existence of a nation is … a daily plebiscite’. Now, there can

be no doubt that this stress on consciousness, imagination, and will is indeed

true to life, although (as we shall see later) different nations are imagined and

willed in different ways.7

Just as nationality is brought into existence by its members’ imagining, the nation wields no

power without its members, and can only inform action as its members desire.

The concept of the tribe calls for articulation, but does not bear precise definition. As the

set of behaviors and institutions developed by each tribe (e.g., leadership, conflict mediation,

property rights) is unique, and understanding a tribe’s actions relative to other tribes and to the

state depends heavily on historical context, precise categories of tribes tend to mislead more than

they explain. Philip Khoury warns against conceiving of “ideal types” of tribes and states

because these types obscure important complexity. For example, idealized concepts might

suggest tribes and states are inherently incompatible, but examples of their sustained coexistence

are plentiful (e.g., Iraq and Iran). Tribes are often multi-confessional and trans-national; some

7
Canovan 54
claim between 250,000 and 550,000 members across the Middle East; and few remain

exclusively urban or rural. Iraqis belong to about 150 trans-national tribes, as well as hundreds

of smaller tribes resident only in Iraq. Although Middle Eastern tribes have developed oral

histories that recount many generations, few can claim truly unbroken lineages. This is

particularly true of Iraqi tribes due to their encounters with the state between the sixteenth

century and the present, as the states regnant in Iraq have, in various situations, attempted to

disbanded or buttress Iraqi tribes, replace their leadership, disperse their members, or otherwise

utilize them for the state’s ends.

Richard Tapper suggests that the tribe is “a state of mind, a construction of reality, a

model for organization and action.”8 The term generally refers to a variety of localized groups

whose members are united by blood or kinship myths, which contribute to the identity and

organization of the community:

Many anthropologists of the Middle East adopt the notion of tribe as a descent

group, the classical model of tribal society among Arabs and in the Middle

East generally, conforming with Ibn Khaldun’s conception.... Such groups

may not be territorially distinct and politically united under a chief, but many

modern proponents of this notion of tribe would deny the term to any group

without a descent ideology.9

The tribe is near the core of a language of symbols and cultural references that continue to feed

Arab political discourses and resonate with many Arabs from traditional villages to modern

cities. The term “tribe” supplies rhetorical means to identify common ground among diverse

publics through shared ethics (e.g., traditional values of generosity, fellowship, and courage), and

8
Khoury 56
9
Koury 52.
lends significance to public exchange that transcends politics by virtue of the term’s close

associations with religion. As a source of symbolic continuity with the past, the Arab tribe and

its related imagery have remained uniquely stable through many centuries of sharp change.

Following his death in 632 CE, the Prophet Muhammad’s success at achieving Arab

unity under the banner of Islam was immediately diminished as the ummah divided by sect and

by tribe.10 When the Islamic Empire reached Iraq under Abu Bakr between 636 and 639 CE, the

Islamic armies arrived with their tribal networks intact.11 The Qu’ran’s forty-ninth Sura affirms

tribes’ central role in Muslims’ lives, explaining in the Divinity’s voice,

O mankind, We have created you from a male and female, and set you up as

nations and tribes so you may recognize [and cooperate with] one another.

The Qu’ran identifies historical figures with their tribes, making the tribe a recognizable part of

the human landscape for Muslims. The seventh Sura even classifies each of the devils that

monitor sinners as the member of a tribe, establishing a supernatural parallel for the human tribe

that is comparable to the armies of angels and families of prophets found in each of the

monotheistic faiths.

Bassam Tibi places the tribe in a political context that includes Islam:

In Ibn Khaldoun’s world … there were three effective principles of political

order: the natural cohesion of tribal life; the principle of military-

administrative slavery; and religion. No single one of these was perfect or

exempt from eventual decay; but, in various forms of combination with each

11
Ferguson & Mansbach 282
 other, they held out some hope of at least a measure of political stability,

temporary place, and effective government.12

Indeed, the tribe is the oldest and most stable social institution in the Middle East; it is second

only to Islam as a legitimate source of authority for many Arabs; and it remains a fertile source

of commonality among and within communities and states across the region. As Tapper

explains, “[W]hether tribes should be identified culturally (a descent ideology) or structurally

(chiefship and/or politicoterritorial unity),” there is broad agreement among scholars that tribes

function on a scale smaller than that of the state, possibly constituting “secondary states” with

ambiguous and sometimes contentious relationships to the states within which their members

reside — and potentially creating a redundancy of functionality and taxation that is essential to

understanding tribe/state interactions in Iraq.13

Despite nearly five centuries of interaction with various states and empires, Iraq has

never retained a stable, native state-structure for long and its people have never fully dispensed

with their tribal associations. However, through sustained engagement in a still-ongoing

dialectic process, the parties involved have repeatedly reconceived of Iraq as a single polity or as

the home of multiple polities, variously imagining and denying an Iraqi nation or asserting the

existence of multiple nations. Beyond two-dimensional discourses of modernization and

domination, history shows that Iraq’s central social institutions and central governments have

molded the Iraqi polity and each other through intermittent rivalry and cooperation—the present-

12
Khoury 122
13
Khoury 53
day product of which is a “nested polity” of layered, overlapping, or embedded polities.14 In a

nested polity,

It is as though one political form were superimposed on another. The latter

may lose some of its separate identity, but in the process, the dominant polity

may assume some of the trappings and features of the nested polity. The

impact of nested polities will be felt in the unique attributes of the successor

polity and show up in significant variations among institutions, ideologies,

and behavior in each type of polity.15

Politics are always changing or “becoming,” as they come from, or move toward, another polity-

type.16 In Iraq, hybrid political and institutional forms have created unique modes of political

action.

The literature on imperialism and modernization is dominated by portrayals of

asymmetry (technological, military, etc.) between Western empires and traditional societies, but

in Iraq, indigenous political cultures and the political culture of each imperial state have long

exerted power on each other:

If the rulers of the Middle East have been preoccupied by a tribal problem …

the tribes could be said to have had a perennial “state problem”…. A focus on

the role of tribes in state formation in the Middle East needs to be

complemented by awareness of the role of states in “tribe formation” – and

deformation.17

14
Ferguson and Mansbach 395
15
Ferguson and Mansbach 395
16
Ferguson and Mansbach 29
17
Khoury 52
A review of Iraq’s history confirms that the effects of these cultures on each other were, in turns,

creative, transformative, and destructive. Talal Asad summarizes a history of worldwide

imperialism in which,

The conditions of reinvention were increasingly defined by a new scheme of

things – new forms of power, work, and knowledge. It tells of European

imperial dominance not as a temporary repression of subject populations but

as an irrevocable process of transmutation, in which old desires and ways of

life were destroyed and new ones took their place.18

Asad continues, “The radically altered form and terrain of conflict inaugurated by [encounters

between “modern” and traditional societies produced] new political languages, new powers, new

social groups, new desires and fears, new subjectivities.”19

As elsewhere, political actors in Iraq have employed “technologies of power” to change

Iraq’s political cultures and identities. Iraqis’ interaction with both Ottomans and Europeans

increased dramatically in the min-nineteenth century. For example, during the period 1870-

1914, Iraq’s international trade increased eighteen-fold.20 This increased interaction coincided

with modernity’s rapid technological development, with effects felt even in Iraq, (e.g., the

opening the Suez canal and the deployment of powered river transport in Iraq) and the aggressive

implementation of Enlightenment political ideas in Europe as well as the Ottoman Empire (if not

immediately or consistently in Iraq). The various “technologies” (broadly understood)

developed by states to organize and control populations and territories (e.g., police, the courts,

the military, taxation, record-keeping), and by industry to increase production and efficiency,

18
Vincent 133
19
Vincent 135
20
CARDRI 1
also affected deep cultural change when they were introduced to traditional societies such as

Iraq:

Just as modern modes of locomotion (railways, motorcars, etc.) have altered

concepts of time and space, so Turner reminds us that modern modes of

representation (e.g., film and video) have helped to reconstitute colonized

subjectivies. All these things have certainly been very important for the

changes that Western hegemony has brought about. It is necessary, however,

to extend the concept of technology to include all institutionalized techniques

that depend on and extend varieties of social power.21

European powers controlled industrial technologies in Iraq, including steamship and rail

transport well into the Ba’athist period, and the best agricultural and manufacturing tools still

remain out of reach for most Iraqis. However, from the late nineteenth century and throughout

the Hashemite monarchy, modern transport (especially automobiles), print media, bureaucracy,

modern management methods, ideologies, and centralized legal systems permeated Iraq and

changed it forever. Government, military, universities, social movements, private citizens and

tribes all capitalized on modern tools and ideas for personal gain, to build the Iraqi state, to

contend for authority against foreign powers, and to increase the capabilities of non-state

authorities. Even today, Iraq’s modernization remains incomplete by the standards of most

modernization theorists, as Iraqis employ modern tools (for their tactical utility) to achieve

objectives that are distinctly mixed if judged by the standards of modernization.22 Iraq’s history

shows that “technologies of power,” which have elsewhere generally advantaged empires over

21
Vincent 132
22
Inglehart and Baker 49
traditional peoples and governments over civil societies (including tribes), have instead

empowered Iraqis to mitigate that asymmetry.

The Ottoman Empire’s 1534 conquest of Iraq marks a turning point in the historical

record of Iraq and the Empire’s tenure in Iraq, which effectively ended in 1917, set the terms for

Iraq’s modern tribe-state relations. A detailed historical study of discrete tribes’ interactions

with the state and other tribes, and their social and economic foundations remains, notably, in its

infancy.23 Writing in Baghdad in 1925 about Iraqi tribes in the seventeenth century, during the

Ottoman occupation, the British administrator and historian Stephen Longrigg lamented, “We

can but study examples of that process [of the tribal body, ever building up and breaking down,]

assigning name and date to a few among countless cells.”24 Contemporary oral history traditions

suggest the presence of a vibrant community of tribes in Iraq across the pre-Islamic period, and

travelers of the Islamic Imperial period refer to tribes’ oral histories.25 The Ottoman Empire’s

copious administrative records offer the first regular accounts of Iraq’s tribes. They refer

intermittently to Ottomans’ relationships and conflicts with tribal groups, well as to the methods

the Imperial government devised to administer Iraq’s provinces, and to conditions throughout the

period.

The Ottomans finally took control of Baghdad in 1534 after repeated attempts to wrest

the territory from Persia’s sphere of influence and to acquire a foothold among fiercely

independent tribes. They set out to re-establish Baghdad as the administrative center of what

became the three Ottoman-Iraqi provinces: Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. Garrisons were built

throughout the provinces to secure trade-routes and to support imperial administrators, especially

23
Khoury 56
24
Longrigg 78
25
Mandaville 487
in their management of revenue, tax-yielding agricultural properties, and of conflicts with tribes

and tribe-supported sects in Mosul and southern Baghdad (e.g., Wahhabists and Shi’ite Persians

in the mid-eighteenth century).26

The historical record indicates little interest among Ottoman leaders in programs intended

to improve living conditions in Iraq or to bring Iraqis into the broader life of the Empire until the

mid-nineteenth century; those first three centuries saw Iraq riven with difficulties. Hitti

describes the Arab provinces’ government under the complicated pre-1864 Ottoman system of

regional government, in which both a pasha and a bey claimed authority over a single area:

It was not long [after arriving] before the Ottoman pasha sent from

Constantinople ceased to exercise any real control over local affairs. His

ignorance of the colloquial and of the local scene was a decided handicap.

His tenure of office was at best of short duration…. Under the dual form of

control, the native sank deeper in the abyss of misery and poverty. By pasha

and Mamluk the cultivator of the soil was relentlessly exploited and driven

into a state of abjectness…. Corruption and bribery prevailed. Insecurity,

famine, and pestilence added their quota of misery.27

Batatu charts Baghdad’s recorded “calamities” between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries:

He recounts seven floods, four wars in which populations were enslaved or slaughtered, four

famines, two mass-starvations, six plagues, and two episodes of civil strife.28 The floods are

blamed on the Ottomans’ failure to maintain the city’s ancient levies and their intentional

destruction of northern damns to irrigate the Sultan’s farmlands.

26
Nakash 443
27
Hitti 720
28
Batatu 15
 Iraq’s late Ottoman period brought protracted new conflicts between tribes and the

government as the Empire responded to its increased interaction with Europe and to its dramatic

financial and institutional ills by entering a period of attempted large-scale modernization.

Although Napoleon I intended primarily to upset British interests in Egypt when he landed in

Alexandria in July 1798, his support for the Ottoman Sultan’s provincial government set off

more than a century of regional conflict and Imperial administrative reforms—not only in Egypt,

but also across the Empire.29 While buttressing the Porte’s authority in Egypt, French officials

and the governor Muhammad Ali instituted policies informed by Bonaparte’s French Revolution

and Western modernization.30 Napoleon III’s assertion of authority in the Holy Land in 1851,

the resulting War in the Crimea (1853-1856), and the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878)

continued, by providing external stimulus for reform, the introduction of Western ideas and

technologies to Ottoman cities and governments, while also depleting the Empire’s treasuries:

The Empire took out its first international loan in 1854, and by the end of the nineteenth century,

payment on its debt consumed nearly all of its annual revenues.

Governments from Europe to Russia accepted by the end of the Crimean War that the

Ottoman Empire was both an integral part of international political and economic affairs, and

that it would become insolvent without dramatic change. (In 1881, European creditors

established the Ottoman Public Debt Administration as a parallel, European-controlled

bureaucracy within the Empire responsible for ensuring the payment of the Empire’s foreign

debt.) Urged by his advisors, principally the future Grand Vizier Mustafa Resid, to reform the

Empire by engaging the West and its ideas, Sultan Abdulmecid in 1839 commissioned the

Gulhane Decree, which promulgated basic values for Imperial government, including

29
Palmer 57-60
30
Palmer 61
liberalization, increased equality and protection for religious minorities, and a renewed focus on

the Sultan as the center of government.

The word Tanzimat, which indicates the specific reforms that followed the Gulhane

Decree and which lends its name to the period of Ottoman history between 1839 and 1876,

means “auspicious restructuring.” Tellingly, its translation to Russian is “perestroika.”31

Historians remained divided over the precise years of the Tanzimat period for decades, but most

now accept a broad period of change indicated by specific pieces of legislation presented to the

Sultan and his Divan.32 It was the most sustained attempt by the Ottoman Empire to preserve the

state by centralizing authority and secularizing government. Emerging as they did from the

exhaustion of the Sultan’s armies and navy in Europe and the Mediterranean (against Egyptian

forces), and requiring the support of military leaders, the Tanzimat reforms began with

modernization of the army (e.g., conscription, European-style drilling, new weaponry and ships).

As Palmer describes the Tanzimat program’s chronology of reforms, increased military spending

drove reformation of tax collection, and thus of the bureaucracy that supported it. He asks:

But how could taxes be raised without closer administrative links between the

capital and the provinces without the improvisation of a new civil service?

And good gunnery, accurate navigation, skilled accountancy, as well as

efficient administration all required better learning than the old religious

foundations could give; hence the appointment in 1845 of a council … to

report on ways of developing a widespread secular educational system.

The Ottoman polity was comprehensively reimagined as a new, modern state closer to the model

of the Empire’s European competitors. The “Tanzimat Men,” Constantinople’s cosmopolitan

31
Palmer 134
32
Palmer 111
young modernizers, organized and launched reform programs as modern, central social-planners

of the day were taught, but they also engaged broader international discourses (of culture,

modernization, secularism, etc.) and attempted to extend the application of new ideas to their

rural countrymen. The urban landscape of Constantinople soon featured boulevards with

theaters and open, public spaces that reflected the new Ottoman’s cosmopolitan outlook. The

bureaucratic center reached out to the periphery in new ways. Although they were

unaccustomed to Constantinople’s attentions, the vilayets (Turkish and foreign) soon received

bureaucrats in their coffeehouses,33 and found themselves linked to the state by administrators at

the neighborhood (muhtar) and provincial (pasa) levels. Increased global cultural exchange and

a newly pervasive state thus delivered the world to the Ottoman and the Ottoman Empire to its

many component societies.

The Tanzimat reforms’ effectiveness varied by issue and region.34 While many historians

agree that they failed in their most progressive objectives – their goals of abolishing religious

discrimination and the increasingly inadequate feudal structures of taxation, in particular35 – the

reforms nonetheless had, by implementing new technologies of power, a dramatic impact that

reverberates to the present. Writing about the state and tribes on the frontiers of Iraq and

Transjordan, Eugene Rogan remarks, “A shadow Ottoman paternalism long outlived the empire

of the Sultans.”36 The Provincial Reform Law of 1864 created twenty-seven provinces (vilayets)

and divided each into districts (sanjaks) and neighborhoods (nahiyes), with the village and urban

quarter forming the basic administrative units. Governors and bureaucrats sent from Istanbul

33
Beeley
34
Hitti 727
35
Hitti 727
36
Paler 266
were advised by councils composed of local leaders. (This structure was implemented in rural

and urban settings alike; it persists in Jordan and the Arab Gulf States, and was revived in Iraq in

2003). The new law facilitated the Porte’s central control at an increasingly local level, while

also providing a forum to incorporate local opinion in decisions by Imperial administrators.

The Provincial Reform Law of 1864 and the Land Law of 1858 reached Iraq in 1867

when the reform-minded “Tanzimat Man” Midhat Pasa arrived in Baghdad, succeeding a series

of ineffective and corrupt administrators and intent on implementing modernizing reform in Iraq.

The Land Law had two objectives: “to reestablish the state’s legal right of ownership, and to

provide each cultivator with a secure title to his fields, without which he would neither invest in

improving production nor pay his taxes on a regular basis.”37 Whereas the previous,

longstanding regime had operated inconsistently across the Iraqi provinces using land categories

for Sultanate and state lands, and private and tribal properties, often overlapping and disputed,

the new regime (implemented in Iraq by Midhat Pasa) defined categories based on use, including

private property, state property, religious endowment lands, communal or public land, and barren

land.38 Importantly, the new law codified for the first time the Lockean principle that those who

cultivated a parcel of land for a specific period of time could acquire title to that land. The new

law also established a system of verifiable titles and corresponding maps to inform the state and

landowners, and to regulate the lands’ management.

Both the Provincial Reform Law and the Land Law met resistance from Iraqi tribes.

Whereas the prior, more fluid technologies of power had permitted tribal shaykhs to define their

properties and commitments as necessary to meet the needs of their communities, the new laws

37
Cetinsaya 8
38
Cetinsaya 8
reflected the needs of the Ottoman state as it struggled to compete on the world stage, and

imposed impersonal, formal procedures from afar.

The manpower demands raised by the new state structures were met by an

expanding bureaucracy, trained in growing numbers by a modern school

system, whose authority was not personal but inherent to their office.

Through the public bureaucracy, the Ottoman state extended its infrastructural

power by new systems of accounts and book-keeping. Government officials

were able to exchange information with increasing ease along new roads,

shipping connections and telegraph lines. In effect, the Tanzimat reforms had

extended the infrastructural power of the Ottoman state and replaced the

interest groups in the military, land regime and bureaucracy with salaried

professionals. By the 1850s local elites no longer posed a challenge to the

central government’s rule in the provincial centers of the Empire.39

Midhat Pasa understood the “tribal problem” as one of land and taxes, and he attempted to

achieve harmony between the laws sent from Istanbul and the tribes’ needs (as expressed by the

shaykhs) by providing new classes of land-tenure and tax-duties intended to reflect tribal

identities and customs, including shaykhly privileges, cyclical land-use, and tribal taxes.40

By the end of Midhat Pasa’s tenure in Iraq in 1872, the Tanzimat Reforms had provided

opportunities for Iraq’s native elites, especially tribal shaykhs, to establish themselves as land-

owners without necessarily extending the privileges of law and property to the communities (or

individuals) the shaykhs claimed to represent. However, despite the changes in the technologies

of power used by the Ottoman state in its relationship with Iraq’s tribes, the Iraqi tribe remained

39
Rogan 4-5
40
Cetinsaya 9
intact as a social institution. The Ottoman state struggled to extract badly-needed tax revenue

from its Iraqi holdings without the tribes’ cooperation. Rogan explains:

The frontier order of tribes and chiefdoms [in Iraq and Transjordan] was the

single greatest barrier to direct Ottoman rule. In effect, tribes performed many

of the same functions which the state claimed as its prerogative. Foremost

was taxation. The Ottomans frequently sought to extract taxes from

agricultural communities only to find that the cultivators had already paid a

large part of their surplus to the dominant tribe in that region. Such double

taxation frequently provoked peasant flight and village abandonment. The

military strength of the tribes also challenged the state’s monopoly of coercive

force. Ottoman attempts to subordinate tribes by military means were costly

and seldom effective.... Tribes provided a system of justice which proved

effective as resolving disputes and preserving order. In effect, a functional

chiefdom provided security and a system of justice all defined in indigenous

terms in return for taxation, making the state redundant in a frontier…. While

the frontier might not have needed the state, by the second half of the

nineteenth century the state needed the frontier.41

Rogan’s discussion of competition between Iraqi tribes and the Ottoman state amply bears out

Tapper’s suggestion that tribes may, in general, function as “secondary states” within larger

states.42 Surveying the Ottoman period, it becomes clear that the tribe-state relationship is a

dialectic process by which each is molded and defined. As the country moved toward

independence throughout the Mandate period, the challenge of defining “an Iraq” and the roles

41
Rogan 9 (emphasis added).
42
Khoury 53
of its component parts in the future unitary Iraqi state were added to the dilemma of resolving its

internal power-balance.

Writing in 1926, at the height of Iraq’s inter-war Mandate period (1917-1932) and five

years into Emir Faisal I’s reign (1921-1933) in Baghdad, Quincy Wright wrote,

The government of Iraq … is a compromise of Wilsonian ideas, British

traditions, and Iraq conditions…. Thus the doctrines of government by the

consent of the governed, nationality, and self-determination, which had in fact

become the liberal criteria of political progress in Europe during the

nineteenth century, were taken to the East….43

British administrators, most of whom had recently been transferred from Colonial Office staffs in

India, expressed their intention to build a new state-structure and to develop the country’s

infrastructure for successful participation in the international community and international

commerce. As in the Ottoman period, the primary foci of legislation and contention between the

administration and Iraqi tribes were land and tax reform, and administrative and authority

structures. However, the British Mandate administration, and later the Hashemite Monarchy,

developed complex relationships of patronage, dependence, and administrative integration with

the shaykhs and tribes that signaled the possibility of a new synthesis of interests, if not

necessarily of identities.

Short of staff, in need of allies in post-Ottoman Iraq, and possibly at the suggestion of

former Ottoman officials who worked for the post-War mandatory regimes, British

administrators were compelled by practical necessity to engage tribal shaykhs and large land

owners to assist in local government (a pattern that would be repeated by Saddam Hussein after

43
Wright 743
the 1991 Shi’a Intifada and by the Coalition after the 2003 occupation). The British estimated

that the shaykhs had been disempowered by the tribes’ permanent settlement as farmers and

townspeople under the late Ottoman regime due to the tribes’ diminished need for leadership in

martial campaigns for resources, and due to the distribution of tribal lands among property

owners under the Tanzimat reforms. The British therefore concluded that the tribes would prove

loyal to either the Mandate authority or the Iraqi government.44 The tribes appeared to be in a

transitional period: Former nomads in the south established farms with small family groups

where they would formerly have depended on extended tribal groups; tribes in the middle

Euphrates area divided their time between grazing on traditional tribal land and months or years

spent in the desert as nomads; and still other tribes were engaged by large landowners as tenant

farmers in feudal arrangements that they lacked the resources to escape.45 Secure that the

Ottomans’ violent “tribe problem” had been resolved by the tribes’ newfound stability (economic

and otherwise), the British and Iraqi governments invested shaykhs with land, landlord’s rights,

and official positions as arbitrators in the new Mandatory regime.46

Sir Henry Dobbs, the High Commissioner of Iraq’s Occupation and Mandate for six years

(1923-1929), is credited with the design of Britain’s land and tribal policy. In a note to the

Colonial Office in 1926, he advised that difficult communication and travel in Iraq would inhibit

the administration of its vast land, and that the large-scale redistribution of land to the cultivator

of each small parcel would ease the administrative burden for the Mandatory government.47

Citing the importance of Iraq’s tribes to its social structure and the distribution of its resources,

44
Sluglett 232
45
Sluglett 233
46
Sluglett 240
47
Sluglett 249
and asserting that shaykhs with land were generally humane leaders, he recommended that

shaykhs should receive and administer land on behalf of their tribes. The Tribal Civil and

Criminal Disputes Regulation of 1916 operated under the conservative principle that the British

would not confer new rights on those who had none, but would recognize rights already in

existence.48 Therefore, it recognized the tribes’ authority to pursue traditional means of dispute

resolution. Those Iraqis without tribe memberships and those who lived outside tribal

communities were subject instead to the administrative legal code administered by British

Political Officers and the Iraqi officials who were to succeed them. The tribes’ dominance in

Iraq’s rural society informed the design of Britain’s post-Ottoman government. By

acknowledging the tribal shaykhs’ authority and by placing the additional authority of the

Mandatory state behind them, the British began a process of reviving tribal loyalties and

authority while attempting to gain the shaykhs’ loyalty for the new Iraqi Hashemite Kingdom, as

well as their support for the new state’s police and administrative functions.49

British expectations of the shaykhs’ benign, efficient leadership and loyalty proved

unfounded. While the tribes did use the land granted by the state, the investiture of ownership of

large pieces of land in the shaykhs as individuals (as contrasted with the Tanzimat principle of

recognize cultivators’ rights to small parcels) departed significantly from traditional tribal

conceptions of semi-communal land-ownership and land-acquisition through conquest.50

Therefore, Iraq’s tribes did not always acquiesce to the state or cease their efforts to acquire new

territory through the more traditional means of conquest.51 Traditionally, the balance of power

48
Sluglett 239
49
Sluglett 246
50
Vinogradov 128
51
Vinogradov 128
within a tribe among tribesmen, their shaykh, and eligible contenders for the shaykh’s mantel

had traditionally assured communities’ ability to replace their leader with one more humane or

more effective at promoting the tribe’s interests. But the Mandatory state’s new identification of

a single shaykh from each tribal group as a quasi-feudal land owner and as an object of

patronage by the state afforded him the latitude to abuse his authority with little fear that a

competitor would arise from within the tribe to offer the community more than the shaykh (as

supported by the state) could provide. Moreover, as Amal Vinogradov notes in her discussion of

tribes’ role in the 1920 Revolt, many factors militated against tribal loyalty to the Mandatory

government, including increased religious fundamentalism and nascent nationalism.52 British

patronage failed to earn the tribes’ loyalty or to prevent the country’s first concerted national

movement in the 1920 Revolt. The policy, which was recommended and encouraged by some

shaykhs, served to undermine the tribes’ fragile internal power-balances, and to codify in Iraq’s

national character some characteristics of the tribe.53

Upon his installation on Iraq’s new throne in 1921, one of Emir Faisal’s most important

tasks was to assemble a government of leaders for a country that did not consistently recognize

itself as a united country. Batatu explains, “The chief accent of royal policy was on the urgent

and yet exceedingly difficult task of cultivating among Iraq’s diverse elements enduring ties of

common feeling and common purpose.”54 This task was complicated by the precedent of the

Mandatory Authority’s Tribal Disputes Regulations, which remained in place until the 1958

Revolution and which established distinct standards of rights, justice, and administration for

52
Vinogradov 129
53
Pool 340
54
Batatu 25
tribal and non-tribal Iraqis, and therefore (in most cases) between rural and urban populations.55

Moreover, the elites selected by the British and by Faisal were provided with incentives through

the Mandate reforms to maintain the status quo throughout the Mandatory and Hashemite

periods of Iraq’s history.

Two centers of political power came to dominate the attention of the British, and

remained in government during Faisal’s reign: the tribal shaykhs and Sharifians, identified with

rural and urban populations, respectively.

Parliament and cabinet symbolized that complementarity: cabinets were

dominated by Sharifians and parliaments by the shaykhs and rural landowning

interest so that these two institutions ensured the persistence of the great

bargain: The stability of the dominance of the shaykhs in the rural areas and

the stability of the dominance of the Sharifians at the centre.56

British Mandate officials, overestimating the shaykhs’ role as Iraq’s de facto elite,

reserved for them positions in government, but discounted non-tribal elites without clear

constituencies, such as “notable” families with respected lineages, clergy, and major-

landowners. The Sharifians’ careers had been shaped by the same Ottoman provincial

system which they helped to expel from Iraq and Transjordan: Most had attended

boarding and military schools in Baghdad and Istanbul and served the Empire in various

capacities, only to join Faisal and various Arab-nationalist movements in the construction

of the new Hashemite state.

The differences between the principal factions in Faisal’s government grew more acute

throughout his reign and until his dynasty’s sudden ouster in 1958. Whereas the shaykhs in

55
Batatu 23
56
Pool 348
government proved disorganized and lacked a comprehensive vision for Iraq, they enjoyed social

standing and proximity to the landowners on whom the Hashemite state’s revenues depended.

The Sharifians, who had few roots in Iraq, brought a “modern” professionalism to government

and a facility with the urban effendiyya, but were dependent on (and often grew wealthy from)

Faisal’s patronage in land grants. The shaykhs and the Sharifians both lacked qualities for

critical governing, but within a generation, both had emerged from separate, traditional elites to

effectively join in forming a distinct economic class dependant for the development of their new

land-holdings on the government and the wealthy.

The initial structural complementariness of central politicos and provincial

tribal shaykhs burgeoned into a fused systematic class interest of landowners.

On the surface, Iraqi politics was one of instability: cabinet changes, political

crises, personal rivalries and manoeuvres. Yet the developments described

here point to a firm socio-economic cement underpinning this “stability in

instability.”57

Each faction’s internal stability, and the stable system produced by the two factions,

ultimately proved inadequate to maintain the support of the mass of Iraqis. The feudal

arrangements facilitated by British reforms were perpetuated by the shayks’ and

Sharifians’ shared dependence on large landholders, and the urban effendiyya

increasingly turned away from the new state and toward communism and nationalism for

solutions to various social ills.

Revolts, protests, and coup-attempts by peasants, tribesmen, communists, nationalists,

and students so plagued the reigns of Iraq’s three Hashemite kings that Faisal II’s deposition in a

57
Pool 347
violent coup by Arab Nationalists led by Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1958 met with little resistance.

In asserting a distinct Arab identity and right to independence, the Arab Nationalists were

preceded by the early nationalist principles of the 1913 Arab Congress seeking greater autonomy

for Arabs within the Ottoman Empire and a similarly nationalist program of Turkicisation by the

Young Turks, and were informed by the movement that had established the United Arab

Republic earlier in 1958. Qasim’s new Republic of Iraq abolished the British 1924 Tribal

Disputes Regulation and 1933 Law Governing the Rights and Duties of Cultivators.58 Citing the

effects of the Mandate Authority’s reforms in vesting large landholdings in the hands of the

shaykhs, the early Iraqi nationalists conflated tribalism with feudalism and sought to purge them

both with a program of agrarian reform.

After taking power in 1968, the Iraqi Ba’ath Party built upon the Qasim government’s

reform program by placing limits on land-ownership and establishing peasant cooperatives.59

The Party propounded an ideology of freedom from foreign domination, unity among Arabs, and

Michel Aflaq’s Arab Socialism—which differed significantly from Marxism and Russian

Communism, as it was intended primarily to overturn effects of colonialism, but not to define

economic systems. Tribalism was a primary object of Ba’athist antagonism, and the new

government’s first act was to denounce tribalism in a public communiqué.60

The Ba’athists sought to exacerbate what they saw as the disintegration of

‘premodern’ tribalism, linked as it was in their minds to collaboration with

British Imperialism, backwardness and state weakness. This process was

58
Baram 3
59
Baram 3
60
Baram 1
 driven forward by experiments in the collectivization of land ownership in

1970 and nationalization of land in 1971.61

The Ba’athists’ collective land ownership schemes failed, but other economic developments

succeeded in generating jobs in cities, and Iraq’s urban population climbed 206.1% between

1965 and 1988, while the rural population increased a mere 18.6%.62 Concerted effort to recruit

Ba’ath Party members in the rural towns and to implant Party observers within communities

drove both mass urbanization and large-scale departure from tribal lands.63 Saddam Hussein also

drove wedges between the classes (peasants and shaykhs, and tribes and sadah) and generated

animosity towards shaykhs in general by arguing that land-reforms that redistributed large

parcels were in the interest of the poor. When opportunities presented themselves and served

Hussein’s interests, he replaced overly independent shaykhs with more pliable client-shaykhs or

simply dissolved certain tribes and confiscated their lands. Dale Eikelman noted in 1989 that,

despite having been officially outlawed, the tribes remained a critical link in public

administration of rural areas.64 The continued de facto strength of traditional tribal communities

became an embarrassing symbol of the Ba’athist government’s weakness. The open secret that

Hussein recruited his personal guards from his own tribe and hired close advisors from select,

powerful Sunni tribes from the center of the country also argued for the tribes’ institutional

strength and relevance to Iraqi social stratification.

Saddam Hussein began to reverse his position on the tribes and tribalism during the last

phase of the exhausting Iran/Iraq war in the late 1980s, when he granted explicit recognition for

61
Dodge 162
62
Baram 3
63
Baram 3
64
Baram 4
the first time to Shaykhs who pledged their loyalty to him.65 This growing recognition of the

Ba’athist state’s long-standing, but furtive, reliance on the tribes accelerated after the 1991 Shi’a

Intifada as Hussein came to identify the tribes generally and the shaykhs personally as sources of

support and symbolism. In his consistent effort to articulate an Arab-Iraqi national identity that

would bridge the divide between the sects, the southern tribes were valuable allies as Iraqi

Shi’ites, and in the countryside, where Hussein’s regime (like all others before his) found the

greatest resistance.66 Amatzia Baram explained in 1997, “Since then tribalism has become,

alongside Arabism, the glory that was pre-Islamic Mesopotamia, and Islam, a major ingredient of

the Ba’ath-manufactured Iraqi identity.”67 Hussein expanded his practice of appointing loyalists

as shaykhs, while deposing disloyal shaykhs and taking land from tribes as a punishment for

disloyalty; he also resumed the practice of granting land to shaykhs as a form of patronage (an

Ottoman practice which had continued without interruption until Qasim’s renunciation of the

tribes in 1958); he appointed loyal shaykhs as mukhtars to enforce Ba’athist orthodoxy in the

villages; and he armed the tribesmen, and appointed them as officers in both the regular Iraqi

army and special tribesmen units. Many tribes that had, for decades, withdrawn into the

countryside or integrated into the cities (including al-Dura and Khadamiyya) emerged in support

of the Ba’athist government in exchange for its patronage.

… As the Baath sought to extend their totalitarian and patrimonial grip on

society, they tried to either co-opt tribal groupings, where they would be

useful for the stability of the ruling elite’s power, or break them where they

were perceived as a threat .… In effect, [Hussein] decentered responsibility

65
Baram 7
66
Baram 7
67
Baram 7
 for the provision of order to reinvigorated and recreated tribal networks and

‘tribal shaikhs’. By appointing ‘recognised shaikhs’ across Iraq, Saddam

Hussein targeted another … channel of power to run alongside the others that

served him so well over the twenty or so years of his rule.”68

By 1993, Hussein adopted the position that “the Ba’ath [Party] is the tribe of all tribes.”69 In the

Republican Palace, which he expanded and redecorated after the Gulf War and Intifada, the

North Wing’s largest ballroom was lined with statues representative of Iraq’s most powerful

tribes. Baram notes that while Hussein asserted that the tribes were of a lower order than the

party, “he tribalized the party itself,” and by extension, the Iraqi state.70

Today, tribes across Iraq are assuming a leadership role in rebuilding communities and

security, though their relationships with government and foreigners are often tense. Following

the Hussein regime’s deposition in 2003, even tribes that had supported the Ba’athist government

remained stable, and many shaykhs rose to prominence as community leaders who had survived

the Ba’ath without fleeing Iraq. Wherever their loyalties lay under the former regime, their

appeal to tradition resonates with many Iraqis in the ongoing struggle to re-imagine Iraq after

decades of Ba’athist propaganda that shifted almost kaleidoscopically in the vision of Iraq the

regime portrayed. These shaykhs have an important voice in many of the debates that will shape

Iraq’s future.

The Coalition Provisional Authority never developed a policy with regard to Iraq’s tribes,

and its leadership hesitated to release directives to guide relationships with any of the country’s

indigenous authorities. However, the U.S. occupation, like every administration and government

68
Dodge 163
69
Baram 18
70
Baram 18
in Iraq, initially found Iraq to be well stratified and organized for action despite its lack of a

functioning government in the capital. The U.S. military has since come to forge partnerships

with certain tribes in order to maintain security in communities and to prevent the development

of terrorist cells, but the relationship is characteristically ambiguous and lacking in trust—just as

tribe/state relationships have been since the Ottoman period. In a typical example, U.S. officers

in Ramadi have partnered with Shaykh Abdul Sittar and a coalition of Sunni tribal leaders from

throughout Anbar Province to secure important towns and stretches of road. Soldiers often

deliver tens of thousands of dollars to shaykhs for the task, and the United States has spent more

than five million dollars in a similar fashion with excellent results throughout Ramadi. The Iraqi

government is working with a number of tribes to combat terrorist groups (particularly, Al Qaeda

in Iraq), but the partnership is fraught with tension.

Some members of the Shiite-controlled government in Baghdad have accused Sunni

tribes of prolonging the Ba’athist resistance prior to Saddam Hussein’s execution, and remain

wary of arming the tribes, as weapons can be used to further sectarian violence just as easily as

in the present counterterrorist partnership. However, both the U.S. military and the Iraqi

government increasingly find that productive, public relationships with tribes, often through

multi-tribe councils, can produce solutions to pressing problems and gain broad public approval.

For example, the U.S. Institute of Peace worked with Iraqi local governments in the autumn of

2007 to broker an agreement between tribes in Mahmoudiyya (south of Baghdad) to cooperate in

preventing terrorism and redeveloping the local infrastructure and economy. Although the

present government’s official documents rarely acknowledge tribes as a component of Iraq’s

diverse (multi-ethnic, multi-confessional) body politic, their capacity to weather hard times and
function even when other sources of authority fail, will enable them to exert significant influence

on the contours of the Iraqi state and its politics.

No discussion of how Iraq should be governed should be approached before satisfactorily

answering the questions of what Iraq is, whether there is an Iraq to govern, or which Iraq is to be

governed. The exercise yields valuable insight regardless of which answers each question yields,

because the questioner will have sifted through the layers of identities and authority that

compose the country near the center of many contemporary political dilemmas. The Iraqi

government claims to lead an Iraqi nation which its proponents say emerged from centuries of

common rule and experience within borders that have changed little since the sixteenth century.

Iraqi tribes claim rights to various levels of self-government as discrete, autonomous polities

with ancient roots, linked by traditions and histories that pre-date the state. In fact, neither the

state nor the tribes are recognizable descendants of the political ancestors they claim. Centuries

of coexistence and mutual influence have forged an Iraq in which reconstructed identities and

authorities reinforce each other: the laws of the state are validated by their roots in the tribe, and

the authority of the tribe is validated by the law and ideology of the state. Claims of legitimacy

and privilege by reason of antiquity are undermined by the fact of the parties’ recent invention

(by imagination and reconstitution), and their modern unification in a nested polity.71

71
Ferguson and Mansbach 397
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Appendix A: Iraq’s Tribal Land Patterns
www.baghdadmuseum.org/dq02.htm