Every society has subterranean fractures—ethnic, regional, racial, tribal, or sectarian. Given the right confluence of events, these can erupt and take on new life. When imperial and colonial powers produce a body of knowledge about those they rule, they often construct sociodemographic categories along these very fault lines. In the Middle East, this process has coincided with an attempted regional remapping using imagined and yet real (although newly configured) social categories. With the democracy project fading, the mosaic—in which the region is conceptualized as a multitude of discrete sociocultural units based on sect, ethnicity, and tribe—has appeared. Complex social categories are distilled into bounded categories whose correspondence to reality is problematic.

Empire and colonial rule remap space, reassign temporality, and recategorize and redistribute people as well as resources and wealth. When these reformulated social categories become avenues for distributing resources and access to power, and perform some of the functions once the preserve of the state, they may then begin to resemble the colonial reifications that produced them in the first place. The mosaic describes difference but usually fails to explain how communities emerged historically and their relationships with each other and the state. Of most importance, it often ignores the power relations among and within communities and their fluid boundaries.

To deliver the new Middle East—what C. Rice has dubbed its “birth pangs”—a body of knowledge was in order. Is there a re-Orientalization process at work? First published in 1973, Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind is in a new printing and is read by U.S. military personnel; Philip Carl Salzman's new book casts the region as essentially tribal.Footnote ¹ Invoking sect and tribe suggests an absence of modernity and a unified state with universal citizenship because of the primacy of primordial ties and identities.

The current reading of and acting through tribes and sects recalls 1950s and 1960s anthropology. By the late 1960s, however, critiques of the concept of tribe were widespread. A seminal critique of the concept of sect argued that it was crosscut by other social formations and ties, particularly class. Yet, old ideas about sect and tribe have found a new home in U.S. military parlance, the media, and some think tanks and sectors of the academy.

Iraq has been imagined as three geosocial units isomorphic with ethnicity, tribe, and sect: a Kurdish north, a Sunni triangle in the middle-north, and a Shiʿi south. U.S. occupation forces structured political representation along sectarian lines. Paul Bremer appointed a twenty-five-member Iraqi Governing Council, which “was an indicator of how the United States read the politics of Iraq at the time and laid down a precedent for its future”Footnote ²: thirteen Shiʿa, five Sunnis, five Kurds, one Turkmen, and one Assyrian Christian. Was this a conscious policy of divide and rule? By activating these constructs, formerly latent social formations and affiliations became tangible.

This is not to say these sorts of social formations do not exist—they certainly do. The concept of sect is critical but not sufficient in understanding the region. It must be historicized and conceptualized at the intersection of external and internal events and cannot be positioned as a solitary explanatory device any more than Islam can be. In addition, the politics behind its invocation must not be neglected. Of most significance, we need to probe how concepts of sect (and tribe) are then appropriated by the local population.

The state and its resources are critical for sectarian organizations. Sects and their leaders thrive when they have greater access to and control over resources than the state does, or, as in Lebanon, the state is organized, and distributes resources, along sectarian lines.Footnote ³ The “success of sectarian organizations is a mark of the weakness of the state.”Footnote ⁴ A strong, repressive state that terrorizes its citizenry can also promote sectarianism, tribalism, and family solidarity. These become strategic sources of protection from state violence and are reinforced as arenas of safety and trust.Footnote ⁵

Salzman asserts, “Scratch a tribesman or urbanite, and under the patina a tribesman will often be found.”Footnote ⁶ Indeed, tribe now competes with Islam as an explanatory device.Footnote ⁷ Tribes do exist, but they are being imagined and mobilized in ways that assume coherency and corporateness and a questionable vision of shaykhly power. Rather than corporate entities, tribes are a way of reckoning relatedness. They are both ideological invocations, with cultural expectations of loyalty and obligation for support and protection rather than biological categories of descent, and strategic resources. They are often riven by conflict among lineages, clans, and families. Like sect, tribe can take on a reality when it controls more resources than the state and can command loyalty. Arming “tribes” supports social formations that can challenge the state and directs loyalties and identity inward.

More interesting questions are how tribal loyalties and ideologies are mobilized in new ways. The Sunni Awakening Councils, for instance, funded and mobilized by the United States, were to fight al-Qaʿida. When allocated the power to arm and pay kinsmen and settle disputes, tribes become more tangible. Where shaykhs once had limited powers—“first among equals”—and had to achieve a consensus among senior males, U.S. authorities may be endowing them with new powers.

If sect and tribe are reinvigorated for understanding and acting toward the Middle East, the onus is on the academy to provide a vigorous critique and devise new frameworks of understanding as to how their deployment may be making them a reality on the ground. We must not overlook the violence that has compelled people to seek safety in sectarian and tribal enclaves and identities or underestimate their resistance to this process.