The Arabic word qabila, with its plural form qaba"il is usually translated as "tribe": it refers at once to a group of people who, often irrespective of their degrees of relationship to each other, make up an entity which is held to be at once social, economic, and political. This is both an oversimplification and a stretching of credulity. The essential theme of this book is the Islamic or Muslim tribe, its internal relations, its relations with other, similar tribes, and its relations with the wider regional or national society of which it is a part. Manifested through three particular examples at the western and eastern extremities of the Muslim Middle East, two from Morocco and the third from the frontier region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. David M. Hart postulates that the Arabic-Islamic and Middle Eastern concept of qabila entails a great many paradoxes: it means different things to different people, to different actors in different situations.