ABSTRACT
Bedouin tribes can be divided into those which claim to be, and perhaps are, genealogically homogeneous and descended from one ancestor, very often bearing the name of the tribe, and those which admit to being composed of different unrelated elements. A classic example of the first type are the ’Aniza who claim descent from one ancestor, Wāyil, and who, from a homeland in the region of Khaibar, spread out to occupy the Syrian desert sometime in the eighteenth century. Even among the ’Aniza, however, there are areas of vagueness such as the Muwāhīb clan, who are sometimes counted as part of the Sba’a and sometimes as of non-’Anizi origin. Other examples of genealogically homogeneous tribes are the Bani Ka’b of Khuzistan and the Āl Murra and ’Ajmān of southern and eastern Arabia. The Shammar, although a long-established unit both politically and in terms of geographical location, admit to being an amalgamation of the ancient tribes of Taghlib, ’Abs and Hawāzin, with the ’Abda section claiming descent from the ’Abīda of Qaḥṭān.1 Similarly the Muṭair claim to be a coalescence of elements from ’Aniza and other tribes. 2 The Ḍhafīr are perhaps the example par excellence of a coalescence of different tribal elements. Their name, according to their own tradition, signified ‘plaited’ or ‘woven together’ and describes the action of their formation tiḏāfaraw ‘they become woven together’. Each element of the tribe, how ever, retains a tradition of its original connection with some other group within the Arabian peninsula. The longestablished division of allegiance within the tribe into Buṭūn, following the
Āl Suwaiṭ, and Ṣmida, following Aba Dhrā’a, does not correlate at all with genealogical origin. In a number of early works, accounts of the composition of the tribe appear which agree in general, though showing differences of detail. These occur in the works of Musil, Oppenheim and the Admiralty Handbook of Arabia. 3 The differences result from the fluidity of bedouin tribal groups in general and perhaps particularly in the case of a confederation such as the Ḍhafīr. The nature of the composition of bedouin tribes and the degree of historical reality of their genealogies has been interestingly discussed elsewhere. Also the tendency of European observers to wish to fit them into easily classifiable groups has been shown to be somewhat different from the way in which the Arabs themselves view the situation. 4 We do not need to dwell on this here, but it is enough to say that the very act of asking for information on tribal groupings does put a certain amount of pressure on the informant to produce a tidy classification. It is therefore not unlikely that the account of the structure of the Ḍhafīr tribe given here may show similar faults of over-simplification.
