Bedouin

This study examines spoken Arabic language in Harran with examples. It aims to find out the features of this language of this region and the proverbs used by people.
The research has indicated that as in other Arabic dialects in Harran, the first letter of the words in the shape of kashkasha, istinta‘, taltalatu bahra, failun are read by kasra (a vowel sing indicating a short i), and pronouns of third person (he/she) are pronounced by shadda (doubled consonant), and that it has the features of such dialects imala and akalun al-baragis. It has further showed that Harran proverbs have words which are used in classic literary language. 
Keywords: Harran, Harran Arabs, Harran dialects, Proverb, Arabic language

This paper examines the chronological implications for the prolonged use of matchlock muskets by Bedouin during the Ottoman period (1453-1918). Although the technology behind the matchlock ignition system is from the fifteenth century, this weapon was used by many Bedouin until the beginning of the twentieth century. As a result, the presence of gun parts from matchlock muskets poses a potential problem for identifying Bedouin occupations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the southern Levant and in northern Arabia. This issue is heightened by the paucity of diagnostic artifacts found at archaeological sites associated with the Bedouin during the Ottoman period.

Review by Angela Sutton-Vane, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter; appeared in JOURNAL OF ARABIAN STUDIES; Arabia, the Gulf, and the Red Sea, Vol. 1, Issue 1, June 2011

Bedouin Weaving was published by Arabian Publishing Ltd, London in 2010.  It was written during a period of huge and continuing social change in the Middle East – with the first oil boom waning and many nomads settling to take jobs in the oil industry – Bedouin Weaving records the textile crafts of a disappearing culture.

RD HOBBS reviews "Talking Hands" by Margalit Fox.
Fox, M. (2007). Talking hands; What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
A team of researchers descend on a village in southern Israel where a Bedouin tribe has 4% deaf population because of the custom of cousins marrying one another. The "organically grown" language of the deaf is an opportunity for linguists to study are relatively new language that should give clues as to how languages come to be. Half of the book is devoted as a narrative of the linguists visiting, recording, photographing, and filming families in their homes, and the other half of the book as intermittent chapters discuss language, linguistics, language in the brain, grammar, and language evolution. Comparisons are drawn between Sign languages, sign language communities, grammars, and more.

After centuries of being a proud, socially bound, nomadic group, the Bedouins are becoming the victims of their own asabiyah. While the Bedouin remain nomadic desert tribes with a centuries old code of behavior involving intermarriage among family members they will risk extinction. By becoming urbanized the Bedouin are finding a way to prolong their existence, but the price they are paying for that continuation is the loss of their culture. They are, in fact, being forced to emulate those around them, becoming more like modern Arabs and less like traditional Bedouins. Due to their own behavioral codes and the incursion of the modern world, the once great Bedouin people may no longer exist within a few more generations.

"Islamization of Bedouin judiciary among the tribes of Awlad Aly in Matrouh, Egypt.

سعت الحرآة الإسلامية خلال العقدين الماضيين إلى إحداث تغيرات اجتماعية في المجتمع البدوي بصفة عامة.يأتي ذلك في إطار الرغبة نحو تأسيس مجتمع إسلامي جديد، ليس في البادية فحسب، وإنما في المجتمع المصري ككل. تهدف هذه الدراسة إلي رصد أبعاد عملية أسلمة القضاء البدوي بين أولاد علي بمطروح، والتي نتج عنها تأسيس القضاء الشرعي آنمط من الحكم يقوم على فض المنازعات بتطبيق نصوص من الشريعة الإسلامية. تكمن أهمية الدراسة في تقليل الفجوة المعرفية القائمة حول أسلمة المجتمع البدوي، ولفت انتباه صناع القرار إلى أهمية الإسراع في تحقيق الاندماج الاجتماعي للبدو في مصر. تم الاعتماد على بيانات ميدانية باستخدام أدوات البحث الكيفي ببعض القبائل. ورآزت الدراسة على اسلمة المجتمع البدوي، والتغيرات المصاحبة لهذه العملية، وأهمها دور المهاجرين في التوجهات الدينية، وآذلك تأثير التعليم على تكوين عصبية دينية بدوية، وتجاوب النخبة البدوية الجديدة معها. ورصدت الدراسة مظاهر التغير في القضاء البدوي عبر مراحله المختلفة، بدءا من التوسط في النزاع، ثم التفاوض حول المشورة، وجلسات التحقيق، وإصدار الحكم، وصولا إلى تدابير تنفيذ الحكم الشرعي.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
During the past two decades, the Islamic movement sought to ring about social changes in the Bedouin community in general. This comes within the framework of the desire to establish a new Islamic society, not only among Bedouins in the desert, but in the Egyptian society as a whole. The study aims at monitoring the dimensions of the islamization process of Bedouin judiciary rules among the tribes of Awlad Aly in Matrouh, which resulted in the establishment of Islamic ruling as a mode of governance for conflicts resolution. The importance of the study is to reduce the gap in the existing knowledge about the Islamization of the  Bedouin community, and to draw the attention of decision-makers to the importance of accelerating the achievement of social integration of the Bedouin in Egypt. The study relied on field data using the tools of qualitative research for some tribes. The study focused on the Islamization of the Bedouin community, and the changes associated with this process, the most important of which is the role of migrants in religious orientation; the impact of education on the composition of Bedouin religious fanaticism; and the response of the new elite Bedouin to the Islamization. The study monitored the manifestations of the change in the Bedouin judiciary  system through the various stages from mediating in the disputes, to negotiation advice and hearings, sentencing, leading to measures to implement the Islamic ruling.

"

Anyone who has ever watched a movie set in the deserts of the Middle East has probably seen the exotic, but familiar representation of the area’s nomads. These nomads, known as Bedouins, are almost always shown in traditional dress and riding camels through the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert. While this image of the precarious lifestyle of the Bedouin may have been accurate at some point in time, with the incursion of modernity, expanding cities, and the complications of living such a close and isolated lifestyle, this nomadic group may be slowly slipping into the annals of time.

What Fernand Braudel once said of the Mediterranean sea can be said of the Sahara desert: drawing up boundaries is a difficult task. However, some geographers attempted to do so, and their endeavors were part of what may be termed the “invention” of the Sahara. In our introduction we pointed out some key figures of this invention (Leo Africanus, Eugene Daumas, Emile Carette, Henri Duveyrier, Robert Capot-Rey ...) then briefly presented the various contributions to the project, from a historical perspective. Indeed the Sahara-inspired dreams of today’s solar engineers are every bit as wild as the utopias of technicians from the colonial era. Similarly, the rumors fueled by media about AQIM are not very different from those once spread about the Senussi brotherhood. In the same way, the political thinking of the Tuareg in Mali and Niger is not so far remote from the thinking of the Moorish scholars of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. And again, the current migrations in the Sahara desert were preceded by other migrations, even if those took place under the duress of the slave trade. We cannot say that the Sahara has remained unchanged for centuries, but the movements and ideas that travel through it were not born yesterday.

The Bedouin of the Middle East have been one of the region's most marginalized groups in modern times. This study assesses the interplay between state policies and the Bedouin in the last 150 years, from a comparative standpoint. We examine the development of land laws in the Middle East as they have affected the Bedouin, from the enactment of the Ottoman land laws of 1858 up to the present. Moreover we explore whether the land laws and the fate of the Bedouin are associated with the characteristics of the regime in each country. We find that the imposition of land laws and policies directed at nomadic and sedentarizing Bedouins has depended on disparate factors such as the origins of the leadership of countries (i.e. Bedouin or non-Bedouin) and the social and economic models embraced. Regimes with origins in the tribal-Bedouin fabric of the Middle East have pursued land policies that were favorable to the Bedouin, whereas regimes drawing their strength from urban elites and with socialist outlooks encouraged very different policies. We also consider whether the case of the Bedouin in Israel is unique or reflects a larger regional context.

With the establishment of Israel in 1948, military government was imposed on regions inhabited by the Palestinian-Arab majority, including the Palestinian Arab-Bedouin tribes of the Naqab (Negev). The justification was that the Arab population who remained in Palestine, and became citizenry of the newly established state, perceived to pose a threat to Israel's security. The article examines the establishment and dissolution of the tribal courts in the Naqab during the military government period by means of a critical analysis of official archival documents and newspaper reports published at the time. These sources reveal the power structure and the security considerations for the establishment of the tribal courts in the Naqab. Additionally, the article shows how the case of the tribal courts sheds light on patterns of action employed by the military government and the Israeli political system from 1948 to 1966, and the policies implemented towards the Arab-Bedouin population in the Naqab.

This article examines Ottoman imperial and provincial relationships with Bedouin tribes living along the Hijaz Telegraph Line route. Using the construction of the Hijaz Telegraph Line as a case study, it demonstrates how anti-Bedouin rhetoric was strategically employed to justify actions policies recommended by provincial powers determined to block the imperial government’s plans to build a link between the Hijaz and Istanbul. It also shows how sabotage of the telegraph lines carried out by some Bedouin
tribesmen was often instigated by oppressive measures put in place by the same provincial powers. Overall, it argues for the necessity of understanding the context in which rhetorical tools were employed when historians analyze rhetoric for the purpose of drawing conclusion about the nature of Ottoman imperial rule along the empire’s frontiers at the end of the nineteenth century.

During the late Ottoman and British Mandatory periods the cultural and environmental landscape of Palestine changed dramatically. This was reflected in both urban development and rural settlement patterns. In the last decades of Ottoman rule much of the newly settled rural low country of Palestine, including the coastal plain and Jordan valley, was strongly influenced by Bedouin tribes, who were living in various states of mobile pastoralism. By the end of the British Mandate the majority of the Bedouin, with the exception of those living in the Negev in Southern Palestine, had become sedentary in one form or another. The Bedouin actively built about 60 new villages and dispersed settlements, comprising several thousand houses. The Mandate authorities estimated the population of these Bedouin villages to be 27,500 in 1945. Our paper examines who the inhabitants of these Bedouin villages were, tracing them from their nomadic and pastoral origins in the late Ottoman period to their final sedentarization under the British Mandate. We examine how Mandatory land policies and Jewish land purchases created legal and demographic pressures for sedentarization. In shedding light on these intertwined topics we illustrate the increasingly limited role the Bedouin played in the rural landscape due to constraints placed upon them and show how, as a result, their settlement was part of a change in the environment in the period.

The Egyptian frontier has been a source of challenge to Ottoman sovereignty since Napoleon's campaign, followed by the campaign of Mehmet Ali in Ottoman Syria, and the opening of the Suez Canal which attracted various European powers' attention, leading to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. These external challenges and inter-imperial politics were augmented by intra-imperial local challenges, mainly the attempt to better rule the aşayir of the urban (of the urban ﻋرﺑﺎن‬ of the Gaza sub-district). The chapter narrates the road to building the new sub district and town of Beersheba as an imperial, political, social and cultural project.

This article examines petitions sent to Istanbul at the end of the nineteenth century by Bedouin groups from the kazas (subdistricts) of Jaffa and Gaza, on Palestine’s central
and southern coast. The Bedouins’ use of the petition process shows that many of them, especially those who had gone through a process of sedentarization, played according
to the rules prevailing among the urban and rural populations in their vicinity. Their petitions also demonstrate vividly the extent to which they were involved in city politics
and social life. Bedouins confidently put forward claims to landownership based on their own legal interpretation of their rights and, at times, even adopted the dominant
discourse on good governance.

The Bedouin of the Negev in southern Israel constitute an indigenous Arab- Muslim ethnic minority within the State of Israel, which carries many of the characteristics of a settler society. In recent history, many of the once semi-nomadic pastoral Bedouin have experienced profound transitions, as a result of processes of sedentarization, forced displacement, and induced urbanization. These transitions and processes have been extensively studied from a variety of perspectives. In particular, attention was given to Bedouin adaptation to the governmentally planned urban environments within a general framework of ‘normative’ ‘developmentalist’ discourse. Such studies addressed issues relating to the transformations in customary tribal systems, changes in the status of women, children and elders, and measures of urban economy, employment and poverty. More recently, studies situated in the critical theory paradigm have sought to depict the Negev region as a struggle arena between the dominant settler society and its marginalized indigenous Bedouin population. In these studies, Bedouin space is conceived as a twofold by-product of state agency: first, the product of deliberate institutional neglect, or even socio-spatial engineering and second, a product of Bedouin defiance and struggle instigated by and directed against settler policies. This critical and at times even radical postcolonial current of the discourse on Bedouin space faces criticism emanating from within the circles of bureaucrats, government officials and town planners. Their arguments reflect long held hegemonic notions of social control, national interests and the logics of abstract-rational planning; they attempt to show that Bedouin spatiality is not a product of misguided policies but rather the product of uncontrolled and even ill-intentioned actions on the part of the community. The continued existence and self development of non-formal un-sanctioned traditional Bedouin villages is thus conceived by national authorities as haphazard and unplanned, a product of the ‘chaotic nomad’, environmentally degrading and archaic, as well as a threat to national order and hegemony. Taking together the bulk of past socio-spatial research concerning the Bedouin, whether adopting normative, critical or established political geography paradigms, we find that Bedouin space is more often than not conceptualized as an outcome of settler policies and planning, or as an amorphous, merely temporal spatiality. Such perspectives have led to the absence of almost any in-depth ethnographical inquiry into Bedouin space and to ignoring the community-based agents involved in its indigenous making. However, in the last few years a new circle is forming of Bedouin and non- Bedouin researchers attempting to address these omissions. Their studies emphasize critical social theories that focus on the human agency and engage methodologically with the qualitative and subjective, offering a more ethnographic perspective on current Bedouin constructed spatialities. This book offers a platform for a selection of their works portraying the unfolding of Bedouin geography mostly on the local scale and with conscious emphasis on internal Bedouin agency.

Entre los numerosos mitos y leyendas griegas, existen figuras que, ya en la propia antigüedad, alcanzaron gran importancia. Nos referimos al mito de las amazonas, cuya existencia podemos retrotraer hasta el siglo VIII a.C. o incluso antes, pues ya aparece esbozado en los relatos de Homero y que pervivió con increíble fuerza tanto en Grecia como en otras importantes culturas como la romana, etc. El mítico reino de las amazonas, como otros muchos relatos legendarios griegos, se ubicaba en los límites del mundo conocido, en el interior de Anatolia. Ello pone fácilmente en relación a estas mujeres guerreras con el imperio más importante que se desarrolló allí hasta el siglo XII a.C., nos referimos a los hititas. Diversos autores opinaban que las amazonas no sólo existieron realmente, sino que se trató de sacerdotisas-guerreras hititas asociadas al culto a la Diosa Madre que, conocidas por los griegos, fueron la base para la creación del mito amazónico. El objetivo de este estudio busca indagar acerca de la verosimilitud de esta posibilidad, si bien remota y precariamente fundamentada, para descubrir hasta qué punto podemos asociar este mito a la cultura hitita.

This article addresses the orchestration of domestic lighting as an object of anthropological study. It takes Bedouin domestic architecture in southern Jordan as a starting point in an analysis of how light is used as means of safeguarding spaces as part of hospitality practices central to Bedouin culture. By arguing that things are ‘ecstatic’ in the sense that they transcend their own tangibility, the article shows how objects, such as tinted windows, impose themselves on other objects to shape the particular visual presence of the world that informants opt for. Such a presence of the world is analysed through the notion of ‘atmosphere’ as the perception of the world through a contemporaneity of subjective emotions, cultural ideals, and material phenomena. Thus, while boundaries between interior and exterior may be upheld by tangible material strategies, such as walls, these boundaries may also simultaneously be permeated by the ecstasy of material things, which aim to safeguard other aspects of life through less tangible strategies.

The chapter explores travellers' descriptions pf desert dwellers around Saint Anthony's Monastery, Eastern desert of Egypt in order to identify the multiple relationships between nomads and monks; It explores the imagined desolate deserts and the mobility of desert life and its inhabitants. For further information about this book go to  <https://ucla.academia.edu/CotsenPress>  and also visit The Cotsen Institute Press https://escholarship.org/uc/cioa

This article explores the techniques and strategies used by Ottoman authorities to control the Bedouin with a specific focus on the province of Hijaz between 1840 and 1908. Using primary sources from the Ottoman and British archives, it argues that the Ottoman Empire developed a ‘politics of negotiation’ towards the tribes in its attempt to secure cities and major pilgrimage and trade routes against tribal attack. The principal agents of the empire who made this negotiated governance possible were the amir of Mecca and the governor of Hijaz. As a result of this policy, imperial authorities had to give significant concessions to the tribes, and they thus incorporated them into the province’s imperial order. When the Ottoman economy went through a crisis, as in the 1900s, negotiated governance and order faced great problems.

In this chapter, I analyze the cross-border exchanges that have been occurring over the last fifty years between the Bedouin in the Negev and their kin and network members who became refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan after 1948. I examine how such encounters have linked cross border populations through an intricate web of relations, while still fostering feelings of difference, power relations, and thus reinforcing boundaries between these groups.

Cet article de recherche correspond à une enquête de terrain en vue d’analyser la place de la population bédouine du Néguev dans la société israélienne. Cette étude, première étape d’un projet de doctorat, introduit des éléments de réflexion sur la signification du sort réservé aux Bédouins de cette région, au sein d’un État jeune, encore soucieux de justifier son existence. En effet, les mécanismes politiques de la construction du pays semblent à l’origine du refus de prendre en considération les revendications de ces habitants, qui possèdent pourtant la citoyenneté israélienne.