Since the 1970s an increasing number of TV series dealing with Bedouin culture and society - usually designated as musalsal bedawi - has been produced by the Syrian and Jordanian film industries. Many of the contemporary musalsals which address a wide range of historical, social and political issues are written, directed, produced, and enacted, by Bedouins themselves. This gives rise to the question whether such movies promote new images about "Bedouinity" and modern tribal identities. Generally, the contemporary musalsals are narrating historical events which are reinterpreted from a Bedouin point of view and in which the Bedouins themselves appear as the major locus of historical agency. Thus, the present paper raises the questions whether such stories may be understood as representing counter narratives to mainstream history. This brings forward additional questions: Who decides upon the selection of the scripts? What tribal segment(s) claim to have the authority over such counter narratives? What are the constraints that Bedouin film makers are exposed to when conceptualizing the story lines? This last question has to be adressed in particular since the audiences of these TV series are situated in highly politicized nation states which are subject to complex power-configurations. Often, the production of the musalsals is financed by high-ranking Bedouin sheikhs or tribal segments from the Gulf countries, thereby promoting their own vision on the interpretation of historical "events". Though the musalsals are subject to the interplay of status and power, they are consumed and debated by a highly diverse group of customers whose own interpretions are depending on social class, gender, age, and their affiliation to different tribal groups and/or segments. It is thus important to analyze the diverging ideas and interpretations that the adressees put forward with regard to the musalsals and who thereby generate new meanings which the producers, directors and script writers initially never intended. In some cases, the competing interpretations of the musalsals have even led to the outbreak of new intertribal conflicts in some of the Middle Eastern nation states. Being based on anthropological research undertaken among Jordanian and Syrian film makers, financees, and consumers, the present paper aims at demonstrating the complexity of this seemingly unproblematic field of the Bedouin film industry by tracing the motivations and intentions of the various participants and their entanglement in relations of power, conflict, and competing claims of authority over the interpretation of the past.