World War II had a major political, economic and social impact on the Middle East. In Syria, the overthrow of the pro-Vichy French government and subsequent Allied occupation in 1941 disrupted the already fragile political order under the French colonial regime, eventually paving the way for independence. Recent scholarship has further highlighted the role of Allied-imposed supply regimes, shedding light on their profound influence on both wartime dynamics and post-war transformations in the region. Nevertheless, this period remains largely understudied in the historiography on the modern Middle East. This paper addresses this gap by examining the impact of wartime supply regimes on tribal populations in the Syrian Jazira region. Specifically, it focuses on the so-called Office des Céréales Panifiables (O.C.P.), which was introduced in 1942 by the British and French colonial powers, with limited Syrian and Lebanese participation, to establish a state monopoly on the Syrian grain market. The Jazira’s population, as the main producers of grain in the region, was significantly affected by policies that mandated the seasonal delivery of pre-determined grain quotas to the O.C.P. Using archival material from the French and British colonial administrations, supplemented by material from Syrian newspaper, this paper analyses two interrelated sets of conflicts. First, it examines the tension between the rigid categorisation of administratively defined tribes, which formed the basis of the O.C.P.’s quota system, and the fluid social structures within the tribal population. This tension contributed to widespread resistance to O.C.P. policies and ultimately led to the failure of the supply system. Second, the paper examines the implications for tribal shaykhs and mukhtar-s, who, as representatives of the tribal collective, assumed primary responsibility for ensuring the “correct” and timely delivery of grain, and were consequently held accountable for the failure of the system. These dynamics, the paper argues, led to a crisis of tribal categories and politics of tribal representation that had underpinned the larger political order in rural Syria throughout the colonial period. Against this backdrop, tribal politics thus emerged as a central issue of negotiation and conflict between various tribal and state actors vying for political influence at the dawn of Syrian independence. In that vein, the paper seeks to contribute to recent scholarship that has considered tribes not simply as historical actors, but as contested categories that were continuously reconstituted within a broader social and political context.

Since Faleh Abdul-Jabar and Hosham Dawod’s seminal volume “Tribes and Power” (2003), which focuses heavily on Iraq, interest in the revival of tribalism in that country from the 1980s and 1990s to the present has steadily increased. After Abdul-Jabar’s first comprehensive article on the Arab Socialist Baʿth regime’s deconstruction and reconstruction of tribes (1968–2003), very few studies have analyzed the exact mechanisms of this process and its consequences for Iraq's tribal landscape. In discussions about tribes in Iraq, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (sāda, as they are called in Iraq) are hardly mentioned, although entire tribes among Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, i.e. hundreds of thousands of Iraqis claim Prophetic descent. The Prophet's descendants are usually interpreted as a kind of religious status group whose neutral position outside the tribes enabled them to function as mediators in tribal conflicts. But how is it that so many of them are considered tribes today? This contribution investigates the tribalization and bureaucratization of Prophetic descendants by the Baʿth regime in Iraq using the example of a special sub-group among them, namely al-sāda al-rifāʿiyya (the descendants of the Sufi saint sayyid Aḥmad al-Rifāʿī who died 1182 in Southern Iraq). This distinct genealogical subgroup emerged at the end of the Ottoman Empire through the networks of the Rifāʿiyya Sufi brotherhood and is still important in Iraq’s tribal landscape today. Drawing on social anthropological theories of kinship in modern nation-states (S. McKinnon), my analysis of Iraqi genealogical literature since the 1960s and a newly available Baʿthist state census of the Prophet’s descendants in 1999 will show how the regime bureaucratized “acts of kinship” (M. Lambek), thereby institutionalizing and categorizing al-sāda al-rifāʿiyya and other Prophetic descendants as tribe(s). As part of the regime’s politics towards tribes and its religious politics, it reestablished a state-controlled Syndicate of the Prophet's Descendants (niqābat al-ashrāf) in the Ministry of Interior, which was responsible for the legal control, official registration and authentication of all the Prophet's descendants in Iraq. As this policy also aimed to assign a new missionary role to the sāda as moral exemplars for the purification of society from religious radicalism, I argue that the state-sponsored resurgence of tribalism in Iraqi society must also be interpreted in light of the general Islamic resurgence in the country and the region as a whole since the 1970s.

An estimated 70% of Yemen’s population self-identifies as tribal (qabā’il). The term, as used in Yemen, reflects territorial, rather than genealogical, identification. As is the case elsewhere in the region, Yemeni tribes have not been isolated. They have cooperated with, or resisted, states throughout their history. Since the 20th Century, tribal Yemenis have actively participated in the governments of the Yemen Arab Republic, PDRY and the unified Republic of Yemen. Qabā’il refer to an ethic of legal equality, highly effective institutions of labor mobilization, and customary laws based on mediation and conflict resolution that have ensured security in tribal areas even during the current conflict. It is notable that all legal cases have been, and continue to be, documented in writing. Yet the management of private property, and other matters locally defined as personal, are not legislated by customary law although these may fall under the rubric of state law. As Sheila Carapico noted in her seminal, Civil Society in Yemen (1998), tribal models were applied successfully to the well-known Yemeni Development Associations of the late 20th Century. In the latter part of the last century, some tribal Yemenis have used remittance wealth to distribute electricity to their and adjacent villages for a fee, achieving access rates higher than those of the subsequent centralized electric grid. Some tribes have also worked in tandem with international organizations on development projects. The government’s recognition of tribal law since the 1980s has provided considerable relief to Yemen’s beleaguered justice system. International organizations, however, do not usually consider rural communities as capable civil society actors. Instead, they focus on urban non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that rarely involve the rural majority in Yemen. The time is ripe for the international community to change its perspectives on Yemeni and other tribes in the region. Based on field research and experience in development in Yemen, this paper examines the potential roles of Yemeni tribal institutions, arguing that some of these are ideally suited to contribute to nation building and sustainable development post-conflict. The paper’s thesis supports Franz Fanon’s 1960s’ injunction for governments of agrarian countries to prioritize the locally perceived needs of rural communities (2014) as well as the recent World Bank’s tentative approaches to bottom-up development.

For roughly a millennium, Yemen was to some degree or other ruled by an imam of the Zaydi denomination, who claimed descent from Muḥammad, the prophet of Islam. Whereas Zaydism requires the imam to be from among the descendants of Muḥammad – commonly referred to as ahl al-bayt – as they are thought to possess qualities not found in the rest of humanity, through the course of history it was primarily their genealogical distinction from the Yemeni population that afforded them their position as rulers, as their status as outsiders permitted them to mediate and arbitrate in tribal disputes. With the fall of the Imamate in 1962, the ahl al-bayt lost much of their political and social roles and South Arabian genealogy – that is the claimed descendance form the mythical ancestor Qaḥṭān – became one of the primary markers of national belonging. Since its emergence in the early 2000s, the Huthi movement has sought to restore the ahl al-bayt to their former station in society and politics. Named after the al-Ḥūthī family, which belongs to the ahl al-bayt, the movement rose to power in 2015 and now rules large parts of north-western Yemen. Claiming a divine right to rule over Yemen as a nation state, the Huthis face the same problems encountered by earlier rulers, both imams and presidents. As ahl al-bayt they are not part of the nation, belonging to which became contingent upon being of South-Arabian descent, and with a large part of society organized in tribes, they rule over a population adhering to concepts of order and belonging antithetical to the state’s claim to singular authority and demands for undivided loyalty. The paper will investigate how the movement addresses these two conundrums. Analyzing the movement’s ideological output, the paper will argue that the movement employs a two-pronged strategy. By on the one hand trying to bridge the genealogical separation between ahl al-bayt and South Arabian lines of descent and on the other hand advancing projects such as the codification of customary tribal law and trying to bind the tribes through charters, the movement attempts to redefine the roles of both the ahl al-bayt as well as the tribes in ways as to make them integral and, in the case of the tribes, controllable elements of the “Yemeni people” (al-shaʿb al-Yamanī), which the Huthis frequently refer to.