Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev is the first comprehensive study of Bedouin law published in English, including oral, pre-modern law. The material for the book, collected over the course of forty years of field work by Clinton Bailey, one of the world's leading scholars on Bedouin culture, is of permanent scholarly value. Bailey shows how a nomadic desert-dwelling society provides for its own law and order in the traditional absence of any centralized authority or law enforcement agency to protect it. This comprehensive picture of Bedouin law, offers readers a unique opportunity to understand Bedouin law by highlighting the close connection between the law and the culture from which it emerged.

The first contemporary analysis of Bedouin and biblical cultures sheds new light on biblical laws, practices, and Bedouin history Written by one of the world’s leading scholars of Bedouin culture, this groundbreaking book sheds new light on significant points of convergence between Bedouin and early Israelite cultures, as manifested in the Hebrew Bible. Bailey compares Bedouin and biblical sources, identifying overlaps in economic activity, material culture, social values, social organization, laws, religious practices, and oral traditions. He examines the question of whether some early Israelites were indeed nomads as the Bible presents them, offering a new angle on the controversy over the identity of the early Israelites and a new cultural perspective to scholars of the Bible and the Bedouin alike.

Emptied Lands investigates the protracted legal, planning, and territorial conflict between the settler Israeli state and indigenous Bedouin citizens over traditional lands in southern Israel/Palestine. The authors place this dispute in historical, legal, geographical, and international-comparative perspectives, providing the first legal geographic analysis of the "dead Negev doctrine" used by Israel to dispossess and forcefully displace Bedouin inhabitants in order to Judaize the region. The authors reveal that through manipulative use of Ottoman, British and Israeli laws, the state has constructed its own version ofterra nullius. Yet, the indigenous property and settlement system still functions, creating an ongoing resistance to the Jewish state.Emptied Lands critically examines several key land claims, court rulings, planning policies, and development strategies, offering alternative local, regional, and international routes for justice.

This book complements A Grammar of the Bedouin Dialects of the Northern Sinai Littoral: Bridging the Linguistic Gap between the Eastern and Western Arab World (Brill: 2000) thus completing the author's description of Bedouin dialects of Sinai. Earlier and new data are synthesized in a dialectometrical approach for a subdivision into eight groups.

Modern medicine has penetrated Bedouin tribes in the course of rapid urbanization and education, but when serious illnesses strike, particularly in the case of incurable diseases, even educated people turn to traditional medicine for a remedy. Over the course of 30 years, the author gathered data on traditional Bedouin medicine among pastoral-nomadic, semi-nomadic, and settled tribes. Based on interviews with healers, clients, and other active participants in treatments, this book will contribute to renewed thinking about a synthesis between traditional and modern medicine — to their reciprocal enrichment.

The first contemporary analysis of Bedouin and biblical cultures sheds new light on biblical laws, practices, and Bedouin history Written by one of the world's leading scholars of Bedouin culture, this groundbreaking book sheds new light on significant points of convergence between Bedouin and early Israelite cultures, as manifested in the Hebrew Bible. Bailey compares Bedouin and biblical sources, identifying overlaps in economic activity, material culture, social values, social organization, laws, religious practices, and oral traditions. He also examines the question of whether some early Israelites were indeed nomads as the Bible presents them, offering a new angle on the controversy over their identity as well as new cultural perspectives to scholars of the Bible and the Bedouin alike.

Introducing the Negev–Bedouin land issue from the international indigenous land rights perspective, this comparative study suggests options for the recognition of their land. The book demonstrates that the Bedouin land dispossession, like many indigenous peoples’, progressed through several phases that included eviction and displacement, legislation, and judicial decisions that support acts of dispossession and deny the Bedouin’s traditional land rights. Examining the Mawat legal doctrine on which the State and the Court rely on to deny Bedouin land rights, this volume introduces the relevant international law protecting indigenous land rights and shows how the limitations of this law prevent any meaningful protection of Bedouin land rights. In the second part of the work, the Aborigines’ land in Australia is introduced as an example of indigenous peoples' successful struggle for their traditional land rights. The final chapter analyzes the basic elements of judicial recognition of the land and shows that the basic elements needed for Bedouin land recognition exist in the Israeli legal system. Proposing practical recommendations for the recognition of Bedouin land, this volume is a key resource to scholars and students interested in land rights, international law, comparative studies, and the Middle East.

This volume presents annotated English translations of 74 awards handed down by tribal arbitrators and other legal documents obtained from the Bedouin of the Judean Desert. The documents address such legal issues as blood and sexual offenses, family disputes, inheritance, private transactions in land and water rights, tribal boundaries, contracts and obligations. The documents, some of which date back to the 19th century, provide vital information on the process of Islamization of the tribal customary law in the precinct of the tribal judge. The facsimile reproductions of the manuscripts are included, rendering direct access to the original documents. The study is intended for students of Islamic law, of customary law and of comparative law, and historians interested in the legal, social and economic history of modern Palestine and Jordan. A linguistic essay, by Dr. Mūsā Shawārbah, based on the Bedouin documents, appears at the end of the study.

This book is the first complete geo-based account about the High Mountains of Sinai Peninsula. A series of seventeen expeditions (Phase I: 2000-2008) were conducted to study the geography and human occupation development, providing exclusive highly detailed maps. Between 2010 and 2013 (Phase II), the study has undergone an extensive analysis/modeling process, supervised and sponsored by IMT Institute for Advanced Studies; scientifically collaborating with the EURAC - European Research Academy, towards a global perspective. It is a multidisciplinary geographical account which focuses on a local Bedouin community which inhabits a transitional mountain area of a rich and complex context, reflecting the socioeconomic and geopolitical paradoxes of the Middle East, the decade prior the revolutions of the Arab Spring. It presents a complete image for the local aspects in a keystone Arab state; a state of a significant share: 'the Egyptian National Reforms Revolution of January 25, 2011 CE'.