In the tenth century, the Banī Hilāl bedouin tribe left their traditional home-land in the Najd region of the Arabian peninsula in a mass migration that led them across Egypt and Libya westward to Tunisia and Algeria. There they conquered the major cities of the North African littoral and maintained control over extensive territories for a little over a century before being destroyed by an eastward-moving Moroccan dynasty, the Almohads (al-Muwahhidūn), in two cataclysmic battles in 1153 and 1160. At that point the Banī Hilāl tribe ceased to exist. Though traces of the once mighty confederation of clans appear in the lineages of later figures, medieval Arab historians never again refer to the Banī Hilāl as a political or military force. The tribe’s migration, their conquest of North Africa and their eventual annihilation form the basic narrative frame of Sīrat Banī Hilāl, the epic of the Banī Hilāl.

The destruction of the tribe in the twelfth century almost certainly contributed to the remarkably broad geographic distribution of tales, legends, proverbs and poems about the Banī Hilāl found in the modern Arab world. Normally only the poets of a given tribe would laud the exploits of its heroes; in the case of the Banī Hilāl, however, the absence of the tribe itself appears to have made their narrative available to a much broader public and it constitutes one of the few oral folk traditions that has achieved nearly pan-Arab status. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, oral performances of tales of the Banī Hilāl were documented in Morocco, Algeria, Chad, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.