But as happened in the case of the village shaykhs reviewed in the previous chapter, relying on the bedouins was not without its problems. The ‘Abbādī and Hawwāra tribesmen, for example, who guarded Ismail Pasha’s troops that accompanied him in his ill-fated Sudan campaign, occasionally deserted and fled back to their provinces. Moreover, the different tribes were in constant rivalry with one another and when they thought that they were not treated equally by the authorities, they rebelled and attacked the countryside, the very thing the government had sought to prevent by employing them.

XREF: Connects to the earlier claim about village shaykhs' unreliability (loc 410) — both deal with Egyptian intermediaries' failures in state service.

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 661