Military service

The anthropologist Henry Rosenfeld claims that there is a primeval process whereby the bedouin warriors ‘defend’ the settlers against invaders, thieves and unruly elements. ¹ More recent approaches in historical research present a different picture of the bedouin’s superior military capabilities. In his discussion of the invasion of North Africa by the Banī Hilāl in the eleventh century, J. Poncet maintains that their success was due not to their military ability, but to the political and economic decline of the Maghrib and the internal political struggles which weakened the military system of the state and contributed to the destruction of its agriculture. When the Bānī Hilāl arrived from Egypt they discovered that the local leaders preferred to reach an accommodation with them. ² The French historian Claude Cahen accepts this view, and adds that during this period the political world of the Muslims underwent a process of ‘bedouization’. Local bedouin dynasties grew up on the ruins of the ʿAbassid Caliphate. In Egypt the bedouin were playing a more prominent role by the end of the Fatimid period, and Turkish elements, themselves semi-nomads, were pressing from without. In his view, it is against this background that the growth of the power of the Bānī Hilāl must be viewed. ³ In other words, the political ascent of the bedouin may simply have been the result of the collapse of other forces in the country in which they lived; but this does not prove that they played no part in the general political processes in the state. Since they enjoyed the personal and territorial liberty which nourishes belligerent tendencies, they gained strength as the government’s army grew weak. Disputing Rosenfeld’s theory, Talal Asad claims that a flourishing centre of agriculture and commerce is more likely to dominate bedouin tribes than be dominated by them. Like Cahen, he maintains that the conflict between militant pastoralism and civilization, if indeed it exists, is the result of the bedouization of the political system. ⁴ Asad sums up by saying that effective military capability is not associated particularly with nomadism, and that there is little logic in generalizations about the military advantages of nomadic mobility as against the lack of mobility of the settler population.