Conventional wisdom positions the Bedouins in southern Palestine and under Israeli military rule as victims or passive recipients. In The Naqab Bedouins, Mansour Nasasra rewrites this narrative, presenting them as active agents who, in defending their community and culture, have defied attempts at subjugation and control. The book challenges the notion of Bedouin docility under Israeli military rule and today, showing how they have contributed to shaping their own destiny. The Naqab Bedouins represents the first attempt to chronicle Bedouin history and politics across the last century, including the Ottoman era, the British Mandate, Israeli military rule, and the contemporary schema, and document its broader relevance to understanding state-minority relations in the region and beyond. Nasasra recounts the Naqab Bedouin history of political struggle and resistance to central authority. Nonviolent action and the strength of kin-based tribal organization helped the Bedouins assert land claims and call for the right of return to their historical villages. Through primary sources and oral history, including detailed interviews with local indigenous Bedouins and with Israeli and British officials, Nasasra shows how this Bedouin community survived strict state policies and military control and positioned itself as a political actor in the region.

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.

'"Where you staying?" the Bedouin asked. "Why you not stay with me tonight - in my cave?"' Thus begins Marguerite van Geldermalsen's story of how a New Zealand-born nurse came to be married to Mohammad Abdallah Othman, a Bedouin souvenir-seller from the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. It was 1978 and she and a friend were travelling through the Middle East when Marguerite met the charismatic Mohammad who convinced her that he was the man for her. A life with Mohammad meant moving into his ancient cave and learning to love the regular tasks of baking shrak bread on an open fire and collecting water from the spring. And as Marguerite feels herself becoming part of the Bedouin community, she is thankful for the twist in fate that has led her to this contented life. Marguerite's light-hearted and guileless observations of the people she comes to love are as heart-warming as they are valuable, charting Bedouin traditions now lost to the modern world.

The Sinai Peninsula links Asia and Africa and for millennia has been crossed by imperial armies from both the east and the west. Thus, its Bedouin inhabitants are by necessity involved in world affairs and maintain a complex, almost urban, economy. They make their home in arid mountains that provide limited pastures and lack arable soils and must derive much of their income from migrant labor and trade. Still, every household maintains, at considerable expense, a small orchard and a minute flock of goats and sheep. The orchards and flocks sustain them in times of need and become the core of a mutual assurance system. It is for this social security that Bedouin live in and retire to the mountains. Based on fieldwork over ten years, this book builds on the central theoretical understanding that the complex political economy of the Mount Sinai Bedouin is integrated into urban society and part of the modern global world.

First published in 1986, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments has become a classic ethnography in the field of anthropology. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations, morality, and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But Abu-Lughod’s analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the complexity of culture. This thirtieth anniversary edition includes a new afterword that reflects on developments both in anthropology and in the lives of this community of Awlad 'Ali Bedouins, who find themselves increasingly enmeshed in national political and social formations. The afterword ends with a personal meditation on the meaning—for all involved—of the radical experience of anthropological fieldwork and the responsibilities it entails for ethnographers.

This book examines contending visions on nomadism in modern Palestine, with a special focus on the British Mandate period. Extending from the late Ottoman period to the founding of the State of Israel, it highlights both ruptures and continuities with the Ottoman past and the Israeli present, to prove that nomadism was not invented by the British or the Zionists, but is the shared legacy of Ottoman, British, Zionist, Palestinian, and most recently, Israeli attitudes to the Bedouin of Palestine. Drawing on primary sources in Arabic and Hebrew, the book shows how native conceptions of nomadism have been reconstructed by colonial and national elites into new legal taxonomies rooted in modern European theories and praxis. By undertaking a comparative approach, it maintains that the introduction of these taxonomies transformed not only native Palestinian perceptions of nomadism, but perceptions that characterized early Zionist literature. The book breaks away from the Arab/Jewish duality by offering a comparative and relational study of the main forces operating under the Mandate: British colonialism, Labor Zionism, and Arab nationalism. Special attention is paid to the British side, which covers the first three chapters. Each chapter represents a formative stage of British colonial enterprise in Palestine, extending from the late Ottoman down to the postwar and the Mandate periods. A major theme is the nexus of race and ethnography reshaping British perceptions of the Bedouin of Palestine before and during the early phases of the Mandate, and the ways these perceptions guided the administrative division of the country along newly demarcated racial boundaries. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines new findings in the fields of history, ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, and environmental studies, this book contributes to understandings of the Israel/ Palestine conflict, and current trends of displacement in the Middle East.

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 Bedouin in the Negev region have undergone a remarkable change of life style in the course of the 20th century: within a few generations they changed from being nomads to an almost sedentary and highly educated population. The author, who is a Bedouin himself and has worked in the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture as Superintendent of the Bedouin Educational Schools in the Negev for many years, offers the first in-depth study of the development of Bedouin society, using the educational system as his focus. Aref Abu-Rabia teaches in the Department of Middle East Studies at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Bedouins, who refer to themselves simply as Arabs (originally, "Arab" was synonymous with "Bedouin"), are nomads who live in the desert, mainly on the Arabian Peninsula, raising sheep, camels and goats. Unencumbered by excessive possessions, and without most amenities, including electricity and running water, they pursue their lives in peace, practicing an ethic of mutual assistance, devotion to family, respect for the elderly and self-discipline. What they may lack in material goods is compensated by their fulfilling and meaningful way of life. The cultures of the Arab world and the desert environment, depicted so vividly in T. E. Lawrence's accounts of his experiences there, have long captured Megumi Yoshitake's imagination. But it is the ancient culture of the Bedouins that attracted the photographer's deepest interest. Over the past seventeen years that interest has become a passion, as she has devoted much of her time to photographing Bedouin families in Syria: this volume tells their stories through pictures.