Author's note: The fieldwork for this article was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. I would like to thank Yezid Sayigh and Claudia Aradau as well as the anonymous reviewers and IJMES editors for their constructive criticism of earlier drafts of this article. I am indebted to the Jordanian Public Security Department, which facilitated my access to a number of the sources cited in this work. Among the many Jordanians I interviewed, I would like in particular to acknowledge Yassin ʿAbdul Naʾim Bani Yassin, who introduced me to a number of the current residents of Kufr al-Maʾ.

¹ The shaykh noted that the phrase was Islamic, but the same sentiment emerges plainly in Proverbs in the Old Testament—“Better is a Neighbor that is near than a Brother far off” (King James’ Bible, Proverbs 27:10).

² In 1960, 50.9 percent of Jordan's citizens were urban dwellers, according to the UN's World Urbanization Prospects. See http://esa.un.org/unup/CD-ROM/Urban-Rural-Population.htm (accessed July 2013).

³ Antoun, Richard, Arab Village—A Social Structural Study of a Transjordanian Peasant Community (Bloomington, Ind. and London: Indiana University Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

⁴ Max Gluckman, following a structural functionalist model, proposed that negotiated or mediated settlements that lead to compromise (such as most kin-based resolutions) are common in societies where disputants have multiplex or continuing relationships, whereas adjudication or arbitration methods (such as those provided through civil courts) leading to win–lose decisions are more suited to disputants in loose or simplex (single-interest) relationships. See The Judicial Process of the Barotse in Northern Rhodesia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1955).

⁵ The estimated population of Jordan in 2013 is 6,473,271 (Jordan Department of Statistics). According to the UNHCR, the estimated number of Iraqi, Syrian, and other refugees and asylum seekers in January 2013 amounted to 704,500 individuals. See http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e486566.html (accessed July 2013).

⁶ Layne, Linda, Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities in Jordan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Aṣīl tribes claim the ability to extensively trace their genealogical origins.

⁸ Shryock, Andrew, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (Berkeley & Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Massad, Joseph, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Chatelard, Geraldine, Briser la mosaïque: les tribus chrétiennes de Madaba, Jordanie, XIXe-XXe siècle (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jungen, Christine, Politique de l'hospitalité dans le Sud Jordanien (Paris: Karthala, 2009)Google Scholar; Alon, Yoav, The Making of Jordan: Tribes, Colonialism and the Modern State (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁹ al-Qusus, ʿAwda, al-Qadaʾ al-Badawi (Amman: Jordanian Printers, 1972 [1936])Google Scholar.

¹⁰ al-ʿArif, ʿArif, al-Qadaʾ bayn al-Badu (Jerusalem: n.p., 1933)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Hassan, Muhammad Abu, Turath al-Badu al-Qadaʾi (Amman: Department of Culture and Arts, 1974)Google Scholar.

¹² Ahmed S.S. Oweidi, “Bedouin Justice in Jordan: Customary Legal System of the Tribes and Its Integration into the Framework of State Policy from 1921 Onwards” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1982). Oweidi has subsequently become an outspoken critic of the regime and has been imprisoned several times for inflammatory language, most recently in February 2012.

¹³ Antoun explicitly challenged the interpretation that emerged from Norton, Augustus Richard's 1995 compilation, Civil Society in the Middle East, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995, 1996)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Antoun, Richard, “Civil Society, Tribal Process, and Change in Jordan: An Anthropological View,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 32 (2000): 441–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ See, for example, Starr, June and Yngvesson, Barbara, “Scarcity and Disputing: Zeroing-in on Compromise Decisions,” American Ethnologist 2 (1975): 553–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ See Abu Hassan, Turath al-Badu, 257–68.

¹⁷ Massad, Colonial Effects.

¹⁸ Rogan, Eugene, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Rogan, Frontiers, 8.

²⁰ Massad, Colonial Effects.

²¹ Media reports to this effect are numerous. See, for example, Joel Greenberg, “Amid Arab Protests, Resentment Builds in Jordanian Town,” Washington Post, 9 March 2011; and Rana F. Sweis, “Jordanian Activists Struggle On,” New York Times, 17 April 2013.

²² Within academia, this conflation is apparent in Zahran, Mudar, “Jordan Is Palestinian,” Middle East Quarterly XIX (2012): 3–12Google Scholar; and Fathi, Schirin, Jordan—An Invented Nation? Tribe-State Dynamics and the Formation of National Identity, Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft des Vorderen Orients (Hamburg: Deutsches Orient-Institut, 1994), 91Google Scholar.

²³ Layne, Home and Homeland, 13. Layne gives a number of country studies written between the 1940s and 1980s as examples, and notes that handbooks represent a particular literary genre that tries to neatly categorize population groups.

²⁴ These families are located in the southern bādiya. Interview with the head of the bādiya development fund, January 2012, Amman.

²⁵ See Shryock, Andrew, “Bedouin in Suburbia: Redrawing the Boundaries of Urbanity and Tribalism in Amman,” Arab Studies Journal 5 (1997): 40–56Google Scholar.

²⁶ Massad, Colonial Effects, 56.

²⁷ Abu Hassan, Turath al-Badu, 32.

²⁸ al-Halasa, Adib, Usus al-Tashriʾ wa-l-Nizam al-Qadaʾi fi al-Urdunn (Bases of Legislation and the Judicial System in Jordan) (Amman: Institute of Arab Research & Studies, 1971), 45Google Scholar.

²⁹ For a comprehensive overview of how customary laws have been applied in the Palestinian territories, see Informal Justice: Rule of Law and Dispute Resolution in Palestine (Birzeit, Palestine: National Report on Field Research Results, Birzeit University, Law Department, 2006).

³⁰ Oweidi, “Bedouin Justice,” 37–38.

³¹ Other Jordanians are not even aware of the Convention.

³² Several shaykhs told me that the king had officially approved figures of between 25 and 35 thousand JD for diya payments; however, popular accounts suggest that much more is sometimes paid.

³³ The northeast bādiya extends from the north and east of Mafraq town to the Iraqi border; the middle bādiya lies south of Amman, extending into south-central Jordan and east to the Saudi border. The southern bādiya is in Maʿan governorate.

³⁴ Interview with Bedouin commander, June 2011. The commander is also deputy director of the PSD and the most senior brigadier in the police force.

³⁵ Meeting with the king's tribal affairs advisor, September 2011.

³⁶ For example, Berman-Kishony, Talia, “Bedouin Urbanization Legal Policies in Israel and Jordan: Similar Goals, Contrasting Strategies,” Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 17 (2008): 393–412Google Scholar.

³⁷ This dual right is not unique to the Jordanian civil legal system; it exists in several Arab countries.

³⁸ Author correspondence with a Jordanian lawyer.

³⁹ The application of tribal justice is supposedly contingent on the suspect confessing his guilt before the public prosecutor, although this does not always happen.

⁴⁰ The Jordanian Economic Observatory, al-Tahlil al-Iqtisadi li-l-Jarima fi al-Urdunn (Economic Analysis of Crime in Jordan) (Amman: Faculty of Business, Jordan University, 2011)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Antoun, Richard, Low-Key Politics: Local Level Leadership and Change in the Middle East (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1979), 70Google Scholar.

⁴² No ʿaṭwa takes place if the perpetrator and victim belong to the same nuclear family.

⁴³ Interview with Palestinian Jordanian from a Biʾr al-Sabʿ tribe, Amman, September 2011.

⁴⁴ In Jordanian civil law, the driver is always held responsible if he hits a pedestrian, even if, as was hypothetically suggested to me by irate taxi drivers, the pedestrian throws himself off a bridge onto a passing vehicle.

⁴⁵ Several Jordanians quietly expressed the view that if (God forbid) they were to hit a pedestrian, they would be better off killing him outright than seriously injuring him; if he died, his family would likely accept the sum provided by the insurance company (which they called diya even though it is not, properly speaking, blood money), and dismiss their loss as fate, whereas if he were seriously injured, the driver's family might be obliged to pay vast amounts for his medical treatment over and above what was provided through insurance.

⁴⁶ Antoun, “Civil Society,” 460.

⁴⁷ al-Zayn, Captain Khalid Khalaf, “al-ʿAdat al-ʿAshaʾiriyya wa-l-ʿUrf,” al-Shurta 357 (2011): 27Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ When I asked what would happen if the girl refused, the judge commented, “she is the loser.” Other villagers I consulted agreed that when a girl identified the rapist, this signified she was willing to marry him. In fact, civil law in Jordan rules that charges against an accused rapist can be dropped if he agrees to marry the girl in question, provided that she consents.

⁴⁹ Interview with tribal shaykh in Salt, September 2011. The shaykh also indicated that the police officer would be dealt with internally through the police court.

⁵⁰ Jureidini, Paul and De McLaurin, Ronald, Jordan: The Impact of Social Change on the Role of the Tribes (Praeger, New York: The Washington Papers 108, 1984), 43Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Antoun, Arab Village, 59.

⁵² Interview with Palestinian resident of Jebel al-Nadhif, February 2012.

⁵³ Baylouny, Anne Marie makes this argument in Privatizing Welfare in the Middle East: Kin Mutual Aid Associations in Jordan and Lebanon (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Fathi, Schirin, Jordan: A Nation Invented? Tribe, State Dynamics and the Formation of National Identity (Hamburg: Schriften des Deutschen Orient-Instituts, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Interview with tribal judge in Muwaqqar, May 2012.

⁵⁶ This is argued in several articles in Nader, Laura and Todd, Harry F., eds., The Disputing Process: Law in Ten Societies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Interview with a Palestinian Jordanian from Biʾr al-Sabʿ tribe, Amman, September 2011.

⁵⁸ These estimates were issued by the Jordanian National Department of Statistics.