Return of the Sheik

THE town of Kharma lies several kilometers northeast of Fallujah in the dusty corridor of farmland that skirts the Euphrates River. This is the ancestral seat of the Jumaily tribe. According to its paramount lineal sheik, Mishan al-Jumaily, it numbers more than 100,000, and is present as far south as Basra and as far west as Jordan and Syria. Sheik Mishan describes the tribe’s reach with an expansive and proud wave of the hand, as if to indicate all Arabia.

Even in Iraq, one of the most modern countries in the Arab world, the nation-state remains an often-dysfunctional graft onto feudal life. Outside the largest cities, and above all here in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, the essential political and social structures are the tribes: enormous extended families bound together by unique traditions and deep collective memories. Members of a tribe refer to one another as “cousin.”

THE town of Kharma lies several kilometers northeast of Fallujah in the dusty corridor of farmland that skirts the Euphrates River. This is the ancestral seat of the Jumaily tribe. According to its paramount lineal sheik, Mishan al-Jumaily, it numbers more than 100,000, and is present as far south as Basra and as far west as Jordan and Syria. Sheik Mishan describes the tribe’s reach with an expansive and proud wave of the hand, as if to indicate all Arabia.

Even in Iraq, one of the most modern countries in the Arab world, the nation-state remains an often-dysfunctional graft onto feudal life. Outside the largest cities, and above all here in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, the essential political and social structures are the tribes: enormous extended families bound together by unique traditions and deep collective memories. Members of a tribe refer to one another as “cousin.”