To undergraduates of Western origin, one of the most alien aspects of Islamic history is the role played in it by tribes: why did they never disappear ? To seasoned Islamicists, on the other hand, it is the virtual disappearance of tribes from Europe after the age of invasions that is puzzling: why are there no Ḥāshid and Bakīl in Switzerland ? Who could imagine the Yemeni highlands or the Caucasus as places renowned for banks and cuckoo clocks ? Though tribes were prominent in many parts of Asia, they did not play the same role in Chinese and Indian civilisation either as they did in the Muslim Middle East; nor is it obvious that they played the same role in the Middle East before the rise of Islam as they did thereafter. It is hardly surprising, then, that Islamicists talk so much about tribes that non-Islamicists often suffer from the misconception that there is nothing but tribes in the Islamic world.
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