Libya's Tribal Landscape
As in other Middle Eastern tribal societies, Libya's tribes are arranged in a pyramidal lineage scheme of subtribal, clan, and family elements, the basic unit of tribal life. Before Libya became independent in 1951, the country's tribes operated to a large degree as autonomous political, economic, and military entities. Some 70 to 80 percent of the country's approximately one million inhabitants were then identified as members of a tribe, with true bedouin—those leading a nomadic or seminomadic existence—accounting for about a quarter of this total.
Sourcing and Commentary
Meftah Ali Dakhil, "Migration, Development, and Place Preferences: The Example of Libya," (Ph.D. Diss., University of Kentucky, 1989)
Mohamed Farag Malhauf, "A Study of Newly Developed Communities in Libya," (Ph.D. Diss., University of California-Berkeley, 1979)
Foreign residents comprised less than 50,000 of the total population. The loyalties of the smaller urban population were largely confined to the extended family. Whether settled pastoralists, bedouin, or townsfolk, all Libyans found security among—and were intensely loyal to—their kin, the ultimate guarantors of their survival.
By 1992, 76 percent of Libya's estimated population of 4.5 million was urbanized.Sourcing and Commentary
Population Reference Bureau, Inc., "World Population Data Sheet," Washington, D.C., 1992
Almost 1.5 million of this total were foreign workers, mostly Egyptian nationals. If we were to believe regime pronouncements or the comments of some Libyan citizens, we could conclude that the tribal underpinnings of Libyan society dissolved during the transition to an urban environment. On the contrary, rural migrants who flocked to Tripoli during the oil boom of the 1960s and 1970s congregated in loosely woven family and clan groupings. Many retained patterns of social organization specific to particular hinterland tribes, sometimes lending areas of the city's more recently populated suburban districts the flavor of a "Warfalla town" or "little Zintan." Family and tribal affiliation became even more highly defined outside the municipal boundaries of Tripoli and Banghazi, Libya's primary urban centers. In many cases bedouin tent settlements, strictly arranged according to lineage affiliation, sprang up on the edges of Libya's numerous smaller towns during the oil boom, creating a settlement pattern that remained intact as tents were replaced by permanent housing. Some Libyans worked to preserve social cohesiveness in government-planned housing areas by reserving adjoining homes for family expansion, using them as shelter for livestock in the interim.Sourcing and Commentary
John Davis, "Libyan Politics: Tribe and Revolution," (London: I.B. Taurus & Co., Ltd., 1987) In other cases migrants abandoned rural farmhouses or urban apartment dwellings where contiguous family expansion was not an option or where floor plans and community layouts ignored sensibilities of family and clan association.Sourcing and Commentary
Mahmoud Hassan Daza, "Understanding the Traditional Built Environment: Crisis, Change, and the Issue of Human Needs in the Context of Habitations and Settlements in Libya," (Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1982)
Abdulkrim Mohamed el-Marghani, "Libyan Settlements and Migration Adjustment," (Ph.D. Diss., Colorado State University, 1982)
On a practical level, the average Libyan's loyalty to traditional patronage networks and authority figures survived the urbanization process and in many cases continued to transcend fealty to the state or nontraditional leadership well after the last bedouin tent settlement disappeared in the mid-1970s. Concerns on the part of Libyans polled at the height of the urbanization experience that traditional values and lifestyles would be lost as the country's youth succumbed to modernizing influences appear unfounded.Sourcing and Commentary
Mustafa O. Attir, "Trends of Modernization in an Arab Society: an Exploratory Study," (Tripoli: Arab Development Institute, 1979)
Abdullah A. El-Hammali, "Aspects of Modernization in Libyan Communities," in "Social and Economic Development in Libya,", eds. E.G.H. Joffe and K.S. McLachlan (Boulder: Westview Press, 1982) Younger Libyans tend to balance their need for modern urban amenities with a conscious desire to perpetuate traditional social structures. Many prefer to live among relatives for economic and political reasons or possess minimal means, such as good transportation, to maintain close contact with their kin.Sourcing and Commentary
El-Taher Mostafa el-Garid, "Economic Segmentation, Kinship Resources and Socioeconomic Achievement in Libya," (Ph.D. Diss., University of Utah, 1987)
Bashir L. Shebani, Hannelore Wass, and Wilson H Guertin, "Correlates of Life Satisfaction for Old Libyans Compared With the Judgments of Libyan Youth," International Journal of Aging and Human Development (24; 1986-87) Members of the newly formed middle class who fill the technocratic ranks of Qadhafi's regime often view this continuity as a source of national strength and stability, some having attributed the social and political ills they witnessed as students in the West to a breakdown in family patterns of restraint.Sourcing and Commentary
Sharon Wilson Foerster, "The Effects of a U.S. Educational Experience on the Traditional Cultural Values of Libyan Students," (Ph.D. Diss., University of Texas-Austion, 1981)
Urbanization admittedly has worked to attenuate individual loyalties among better-educated Libyans toward the formerly monolithic tribal unit. This group in particular recognizes that professional growth derives from personal abilities, not from tribal patronage networks. Nonetheless, their devotion to the family and in many cases the clan remains strong, and they continue to evaluate professional interlocutors partly on the basis of tribal histories that are honed from adolescence. Hiring practices based on merit may have supplanted parochial interests where teaching, engineering, and other critical skills are needed, but, as this discussion intends to show, traditional recruitment methods prevail where regime security is concerned. One can conclude that Libya's leadership has not necessarily tried to shape modern national institutions at the expense of traditional ones.Sourcing and Commentary
See especially Lisa Anderson, "Tribe and State: Libyan Anomolies," in "Tribe and State Formation in the Middle East," Eds. Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner (Berkley; University of California Press, 1990)