INFORMATION ON LEADERS of contemporary and recent past bedouin society may offer possibilities for thinking about the élite of the early Islamic state. This is not because Arab tribal bedouin and rural societies are unchanging, so that some awareness of how such groups function now and in the recent past can be simply superimposed onto material from the early Islamic period, but rather means that some appreciation of the constructions of bedouin identities, and the moral premises through which bedouin organised economic and political activities, does allow a more informed reading. Bedouin state that these moral premises predate lslam.

Historians at the workshop referred to the need to access the underlying views of their historical sources; but historians use ethnographic sources on bedouin society in an invariably superficial manner, ignoring the underlying moral premises around which bedouin and Arab rural society is constructed and its social, economic and political practice. Bedouin emphasis on premises and processes may be as useful for understanding the identities and functioning of early Islamic rural society as institutions and models drawn from Western historical development.

A very loose analogy can be made between the current transformation, where rural political, economic and fiscal structures are drawn from regional oil wealth and access to wealth through citizenship, with the situation in the developing Islamic state, where access to greatly increased regional wealth was through being a Muslim. In both situations, membership of a state-defined body gave access to state-controlled wealth; so information on bedouin leaders in the present has some relevance to the past.

This paper divides into sections on bedouin identity; leadership; terms for leaders; becoming a leader; the role of shaykh as spokesperson between tribe and state; changing relations between tribe and state, culminating in the transformation of the state’s control of access to wealth; and comments.

Identity

Bedouin identity is theoretically based on membership of a tribe through male descent and is actualised by behaving in accordance with “being bedouin”. Current perceptions of “being bedouin” among those who so describe t hemselves centre around moral premises of jural equality before God and therefore individual autonomy, the necessity to be generous and hospitable, and the ability to achieve economic and political aims through one’s own efforts. Herding enables a person to live “a good life”, but does not demand it; herding and the “good life” are not synonymous. Other communities or jamā’a project their social practice as constructed from the same moral premises; these may be tribal agriculturalists, as in North Yemen, or villagers of known descent and farmers, as in North Jordan.