Saudi Arabia and Iraq as Friends and Enemies by Joshua Yaphe

Author:Joshua Yaphe [Yaphe, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Middle East, Arabian Peninsula, Iraq
ISBN: 9781789761511
Google: 0Uu_zgEACAAJ
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2021-12-21T16:17:56+00:00

Politics along the Border

Given all these considerations, we can see that religion was only one factor (and hardly the primary one) for Ibn Saud’s approach to alternately entice and punish the tribes on the Iraqi side of the border. Even a place like Zubayr, with its Salafi institutions of learning, held a variety of diverse and sometimes syncretic attitudes toward religion and education. He had no use for indiscriminately incorporating other Arab populations into the Najd, and even among the tribes there were only really three that mattered to him in Iraq. We will now examine them in order to consider the factors that motivated some of them to side with the Iraqi Government and others to go over to the Saudi Arabia. In each instance, we will see religion playing only a minor role in determining choices of migration to the Najd, while the factors that seemed to actually drive divisions and splits among these tribes were contestations for power, the quality of tribal leadership, and the erosion of the economic viability of traditional nomadic lifestyles. That competition had been encouraged and supported by the Ottoman Government in the late nineteenth century as a means of controlling the desert regions through offers of tax-farming rights and official recognition for loyal shaykhs.117 By the time of WWI and the founding of the modern states, tribal leaders on both sides had learned how to play the game and, in turn, how to manipulate governments on either side for their own ends.

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