ABSTRACT
In spite of R. Dozy's impassioned, beautiful, and romantic interpretation of tribalism, the internal conflicts of the Andalusi Muslims, prior to the arrival of the Syrian junds of Balj, are of what I would call a lower order, namely clan and family. Their subsequent exaggeration results from two different causes: the struggle for hegemony over the clan and for personal power, and the way in which history was written by Islamic annalists. I must again refer to the explanation of "rebellions" which I have cited in another paper. Tribal 'a~abfya was already, strictly speaking, clan-based. This latter was reduced to almost a "greater family" dimension. The reason is quite simple: the limited number of Muslim Arabs who settled in the Iberian peninsula between 711 and 740.
