The phrase I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger, serves as the foundational legal and social contract for the Bedouin people, a hierarchy of loyalty that extends from the self to the entire genetic group. This adage, often quoted as I and my brother are against my cousin, I and my cousin are against the stranger, defines a system where justice and order are dispensed through self-help and collective responsibility rather than a central government. The individual family unit, known as a tent, traditionally comprised three or four adults and any number of children, yet the true power lay in the shared feelings of common ancestry that bound tribes together. Disputes were settled, interests pursued, and justice maintained through this framework, creating a society where courage, hospitality, loyalty to family, and pride of ancestry were the highest virtues. This ethos persisted even as the Bedouin spread from the Syrian Desert and Arabian Desert to the vast deserts of North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia, adapting their pastoral nomadic lifestyle to the harsh realities of the Middle East and North Africa.
Camels As Divine Gifts
Camels were regarded as a gift from God, serving as the main food source and method of transportation for many Bedouins, with their extraordinary milking potentials under harsh desert conditions making them indispensable to survival. These animals provided meat, dairy products, and wool, forming the staple diet of the Bedouins, while their cultural significance was elevated to the point where camel races were organized during celebratory occasions such as weddings or religious festivals. In areas where rainfall was unpredictable, camps were moved irregularly depending on the availability of green pasture, but where winter rainfall was more predictable, some Bedouin people planted grain along their migration routes to provide a resource for livestock throughout the winter. In regions such as western Africa, where there was more predictable rainfall, the Bedouin practiced transhumance, planting crops near permanent homes in valleys where there was more rain and moving their livestock to highland pastures. This deep connection to the land and the animals that sustained them created a dynamic reciprocal relation with urban centers, challenging the notion that Bedouin society was a world without time or a fossilized reflection of an unchanging desert culture.
Poetry As Social Control
Oral poetry, known as nabati poetry, was the most popular art form among Bedouins, serving as a means of conveying information and social control in a society where having a poet in one's tribe was highly regarded. In contrast to the more common forms of Arabic poetry which were often in Modern Standard Arabic, Bedouin poetry was recited in the vernacular dialect, allowing it to function as a tool for social cohesion and historical record. The Bedouin were asked to recite certain poems by early Medieval grammarians and scholars seeking to develop a system of standardizing the contemporary Classical Arabic for maximal intelligibility across the Arabophone areas, and consensus was relied on to decide the pronunciation and spelling of a given word. This oral tradition persisted even as the Bedouin engaged in raiding or ghazw, a well-regulated traditional habit of raiding other tribes, caravans, or settlements, which was not considered war but a game in which camels and goats were the prizes. The poet's role was to maintain the honor codes of the Bedouin, ensuring that the tribe's reputation remained intact through the recitation of verses that could elevate or destroy a family's standing.
A plunder and massacre of the Hajj caravan occurred in 1757, led by Qa'dan al-Fayez of the Bani Sakher tribe in modern-day Jordan, resulting in the death of an estimated 20,000 pilgrims who were either killed in the raid or died of hunger or thirst as a result. This event, which represented the peak of such attacks, was likely prompted by the major drought of 1756 and served as Qa'dan al-Fayez's vengeance against the Ottomans for failing to pay his tribe for their help protecting the pilgrims. The raid included the death of relatives of the sultan and Musa Pasha, marking a turning point in the relationship between the Bedouin and the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman authorities viewed the Bedouin as a threat to the state's control and worked hard on establishing law and order in the Negev, leading to the issuance of the Tanzimat land reforms of 1858, which offered legal grounds for the displacement of the Bedouin. This new Ottoman land law instituted an unprecedented land registration process meant to boost the empire's tax base, yet few Bedouin opted to register their lands due to lack of enforcement by the Ottomans, illiteracy, refusal to pay taxes, and the lack of relevance of written documentation of ownership to the Bedouin way of life at that time.
The Great Migration West
The 11th century witnessed the most significant wave of Arab migration, surpassing all previous movements, when the Bedouin tribes of Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym, who originated from central and north Arabia, moved westward into the Maghreb areas and were joined by the Bedouin tribe of Ma'qil, which had its roots in South Arabia. The Fatimid caliph dispatched these large Bedouin Arab tribes to defeat the Zirids and settle in the Maghreb, giving each tribesman a camel and money to help them cross from the east to the west bank of the Nile. According to Ibn Khaldun, these tribes were accompanied by their wives, children and stock, and they settled in the Maghreb after repeatedly fighting battles against the Berbers, such as the Battle of Haydaran. They heavily transformed the culture of the Maghreb into Arab culture, and spread nomadism in areas where agriculture was previously dominant, playing a major role in spreading Bedouin Arabic to rural areas such as the countryside and steppes, and as far as the southern areas near the Sahara. Sources estimated that the total number of Arab nomads who migrated to the Maghreb only in the 11th century was at around 1 million Arabs, and their arrival broke the balance between nomads and sedentary populations in favor of the nomads.
The Negev Displacement
Prior to the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence, an estimated 65,000 to 90,000 Bedouins lived in the Negev desert, but after 1948, only 15,000 Bedouin remained, with other sources putting the number as low as 11,000. The Jahalin tribe, for instance, lived in the Tel Arad region of the Negev prior to the 1950s, and in the early 1950s, they were among the tribes that moved or were removed by the military government, ending up in the so-called E1 area East of Jerusalem. In September 2011, the Israeli government approved a five-year economic development plan called the Prawer plan, which implied a relocation of some 30,000 to 40,000 Negev Bedouin from areas not recognized by the government to government-approved townships. In a 2012 resolution, the European Parliament called for the withdrawal of the Prawer plan and respect for the rights of the Bedouin people, while in September 2014, Yair Shamir, who heads the Israeli government's ministerial committee on Bedouin resettlement arrangements, stated that the government was examining ways to lower the birthrate of the Bedouin community in order to improve its standard of living. As of 2020, there are 210,000 Bedouins in Israel, with 150,000 in the Negev, 50,000 in Galilee and the Jezreel Valley, and 10,000 in the central region of Israel, all of whom were granted citizenship in 1954.
The Maghreb Arabization
The arrival of the Banu Hilal, followed by the Banu Sulaym in the 12th century, broke the balance between nomads and sedentary populations in favor of the nomads, and the lands ravaged by Banu Hilal invaders had become desertified and turned into completely arid desert, according to Ibn Khaldun. The Zirids abandoned Kairouan to take refuge on the coast where they survived for a century, and Ifriqiya, the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym spread is on the high plains of Constantine where they gradually choked the Qal'a of Banu Hammad, as they had done Kairouan few decades ago. From there, they gradually gained the upper Algiers and Oran plains, some were taken to the Moulouya valley and in Doukkala plains by the Caliph of Marrakesh in the second half of the 12th century. The Maqil group had already disintegrated into different populations in the Maghreb and had given rise to the Beni Hassan along with other related groups, who expanded southwest and occupied Sanhaja lands in the 13th century after invading and defeating the Berber confederation. The Sanhaja has long had to pay tribute to the nomadic Bedouin Hassani invaders, and this took place during the Char Bouba war in modern-day Western Sahara and Mauritania from 1644 to 1674, which after decades of confrontations ended up completely Arabizing the native Berber population, destroying their language and culture and giving rise to the contemporary Sahrawi people.
The Modern Sedentarization
In the 1950s and 1960s, large numbers of Bedouin throughout Midwest Asia started to leave the traditional, nomadic life to settle in the cities of Midwest Asia, especially as hot ranges shrank and populations grew. For example, in Syria, the Bedouin way of life effectively ended during a severe drought from 1958 to 1961, which forced many Bedouin to abandon herding for standard jobs. Similarly, governmental policies in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Tunisia, oil-producing Arab states of the Persian Gulf and Libya, as well as a desire for improved standards of living, effectively led most Bedouin to become settled citizens of various nations, rather than stateless nomadic herders. Governmental policies pressing the Bedouin have in some cases been executed in an attempt to provide service such as schools, health care, law enforcement and so on, but in others have been based on the desire to seize land traditionally roved and controlled by the Bedouin. In the summer of 1999, the Egyptian army bulldozed Bedouin-run tourist campgrounds north of Nuweiba as part of the final phase of hotel development overseen by the Tourist Development Agency, dismissing Bedouin rights to most of the land, saying that they had not lived on the coast prior to 1982. In recent years, some Bedouin have adopted the pastime of raising and breeding white doves, while others have rejuvenated the traditional practice of falconry, as they navigate the complex relationship between their ancestral heritage and the demands of the modern world.