❝In North Africa, their role was inseparable from government; as warriors, they formed an aristocracy in partnership with the state. As nomads, they did indeed bring about an extension of pastoralism. On the other hand they flowed into a settled rural population heavily dependent on the lords of the land.❞
❝Self-reliance made them natural warriors, whose 'asabiyya or clan spirit gave them the will to power [...] Desert dwellers though they were, the Banu Hilal were from the outset the creatures of civilisation. They belonged, in the terminology of Ibn Khaldun, to the Arabs of the fourth generation, that is, to the generation after the conquerors who had left Arabia to create the Arab empire. While those conquerors had disappeared into the mass of the population of that empire, as subjects rather than rulers, the Arabs of the fourth had been left behind in their homeland to carry on with their traditional way of life, and emerge as a new nation outside the civilisation created by their predecessors. They were not, however, the archetypical savages he postulated at the root of human society. The Banu Hilal belonged within the mental and material orbit of Islam. Tracing their lineage to the North rather than the South Arabians, they shared in the culture of Arabism that pervaded the religion, the literature and the life of the medieval civilisation.❞
[A Companion to the History of the Middle East]