Arab News Blog

UPDATE 1: Pakistani jets bomb suspected militant hideouts in lawless tribal region near Afghan border.
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UPDATE 2: Karzai pledges tribal leaders to be consulted before any coalition push in Kandahar.
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UPDATE 2: Pakistani troops back by helicopter gunships kill 30 militants and capture key tribal areas.
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UPDATE 3: Missiles fired from U.S. drones kill at least five militants in restive Pakistani tribal area.
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“US soldiers killed an Iraqi tribal chief’s son and wounded his wife in what the Americans on Saturday called a tragic accident, although local accounts of the incident differed.”

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U.S. drone attack in tribal belt near Afghan border, second such strike in 24 hrs, security officials say.
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“Angry Arab tribal leaders and nationalists had begun armed resistance, murdering British and French. The British and French bombed and machine-gunned hostile Arab enclaves in reprisal.”

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[Webshaykh’s note: Dr. Saad Sowayan, as the post below will explain, has been collecting, analyzing and documenting the oral poetic traditions of the Arabian Peninsula, especially his native Saudi Arabia, since his graduate research. He has now completed two major works, available for reading on the internet, but still in search of an appropriate publisher. I invite readers to look over his impressive documentation and analysis and communicate with Dr. Sowayan any ideas that may help forward his project.]

by Dr. Saad Sowayan, King Saud University

After 10 years of continuous hard work, I managed to finish the two books, which, taking the size and importance of each, I consider to be my lifetime projects.
A) Legends & Oral Historical Narrative from Northern Arabia (1131 pages)
B) The Arabian Desert: Its Poetry & Culture Across the Ages: An Anthropological Approach (820 pages).

The first work, as its title says, is a collection of Bedouin narratives and poems relating to tribal genealogies, camel marks, tribal territories, water wells, sheikhs, warriors, tribal judges, tribal poets, personal histories, as well as narratives relating to raids and counter raids amongst tribes and other events. All of these are told by competent narrators & reciters in the various tribal dialects and all go back to pre and early 20th century. I have been engaged in taping this voluminous material during the span of the 4 years extending from 1982 up to 1985. Since 1995 I have been engaged in archiving, indexing, transcribing and editing this taped material which came to a total of several hundred hours of recorded interviews. Legends & Oral Historical Narratives from Northern Arabia (1131 pages) is the result of this effort very carefully transcribed and edited in Arabic script with full voweling tashkeel. The work comes with a very detailed table of contents and an introduction explaining the nature of the material along with some linguistic remarks and explanation of the transcription method I used. All in all, the work is a primary source on Arabian nomadic tribal culture, oral literature and vernacular language. This work constitutes a compliment to the works of P. Marcel Kurpershoek published in English by Brill in Leiden.

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“This is highly similar to the methods of colonial administration through local “traditional” proxies deployed by the British throughout South Asia and Africa. It is also similar to American attempts to enlist “traditional” local power structures (churches, highland ethnic tribes, etc) in counterinsurgencies in Vietnam and elsewhere. There’s a structural reason why such alliances are tempting: local tribes and traditional leaders rarely define their interests in ways that conflict with those of a faraway power like Britain or America. In contrast, state-building ideological movements like the Vietnamese Communists or the Taliban often do define interests that entail geopolitical conflict with other states. It’s important to recognise that the Taliban are trying to build a state in Afghanistan—a bad state, one inimical to the values and interests of the free world, but a state nonetheless. To oppose a state-building movement by backing local power structures that maintain national fragmentation is a strategy that may run against the current of modernisation. There are a number of other disturbing elements in Major Gant’s paper. On first meeting “Sitting Bull”, he quickly decided to aid him in recovering territory the elder claimed had been seized by a rival tribe—a decision one critic called participating in “tribal cleansing”. His description of his Afghan experience is shot through with an exoticist enjoyment of gazing at himself dressed up in local clothes, his arm flung around the shoulder of a tribal elder. But mostly, what the “tribal strategy” needs is a clearer sense of what exactly it is fighting for. In the age of empire, colonial support for tribal authorities gave the lie to the “white man’s burden”, “mission civilisatrice” fiction that European powers were running Nigeria and Vietnam for their own good. American and European state-building efforts in Afghanistan were initially sold as an effort to build a fairer, more modern, more prosperous, safer state for Afghans (especially Afghan women) to enjoy. If Afghanistan is instead to have a backward, traditional, patriarchal tribal society, should America be helping it to get there?” (thanks Laleh)

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Bombers kill leader in Pakistan’s tribal belt where military says new expanded operation kills 15 militants.
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