The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

部落为现代中东的历史学家提出了一个问题，尤其是那些对个性、文化和社会的微妙之处以及其他此类“无用”事物感兴趣的历史学家。总的来说，部落没有留下自己的书面记录。部落作者是现在或最近的一种现象。很少有 20 世纪的部落人物可以与城市人物相提并论，我们对现代中东的社会、知识和政治历史的理解归功于他们的著作和影响。接下来还有一个更大的记录保存问题需要解决：后殖民中东的官方记录几乎完全无法访问。难怪政治科学家和人类学家是该地区 20 世纪历史最受尊敬的守护者之一。他们知道如何创造性地并且经常雄辩地使用极其有限的工具。几十年来，可疑的政府一直禁止历史学家履行他们的职责。这就是为什么许多关于萨达姆侯赛因的伊拉克的丰富而原创的新专着如此重要的原因之一。如果部落在记录的边缘，而记录本身是禁区，那么人们可以想象为什么现代中东部落在学术想象中的构想如此糟糕。