| Month's Details for: November 2000 |
Honor is important in Bedouin culture. Any slight or injury to a member of a tribal group is an injury to all members of the group. Likewise, all members are responsible for the actions of any fellow nomad. Revenge is the only way to erase slights.
If revenge is sweet, so is hospitality. A Bedouin invites a traveler to enter his tent and partake of a meal prepared much as the Old Testament describes. It will include sweet tea and bitter coffee. The guest will spend the night with his host amid cushions and quilts that are spread out for him. The ethic of welcoming a guest remains so powerful that it is captured for contemporary Bedouins in oral poetry. One Bedouin from Sanai gave a lecture on being a good host. His lecture included this poem:
Take from me, Salman, some weighty advice. And accept it, Salman, though it’s told to you in verse. If you spot strangers traveling from lands far away, stand in front of the tent till they see you and turn. Then shake out the carpets and make yourself mild.…”
Pray that God will raise up believers who will go to them with the gospel of reconciliation between God and man through Jesus Christ, the great reconciler. Pray that all Bedouin peoples will soon understand that they need reconciliation with their Creator.
WHERE HAVE ALL THE BEDOUINS GONE?
Roaming nomads pose a threat to governments, so it has long been in the interest of governments to control them. Nomadic peoples don’t fully participate in the economy. Nor do they regularly contribute taxes. In the early 1800s and shortly after Napoleon’s misadventure in Egypt, the Pasha of Egypt dispatched his army to detain the Aulad Ali Bedouin leaders. The Pasha exiled them to the Nile Delta where they were given a deed to land. The Bedouins were left roaming in the desert, without proven leadership. This surely delayed any plans afoot by this group of Bedouins. One estimate in the 1970s placed the sedenterization rate of the Aulad Ali Bedouin near 80 percent. This left 20 percent at various stages of nomadism. Today, that number is undoubtedly even lower. The process of sedenterization for the Bedouins continues today.
THE SEDENTERIZATION OF THE BEDOUINS
The 20th century has brought massive sedenterization of the Bedouin. Once 10 percent of Arabs were nomads, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Today the rates are between one to two percent. Much of this change came from industrialization and the advent of the automobile in America and Europe, followed by the discovery of oil in Arabia and elsewhere. These changes meant a greater demand for oil, the Arab World’s greatest asset. Though the settled Arabs often share the oil wealth with their nomadic cousins, Bedouin herders have sometimes settled down to have paid jobs with the oil industry.
OMAN: FROM NOMAD TO OIL WORKER
JORDAN: FROM NOMAD TO SOLDIER
This naturally disturbs Bedouin culture. The true Bedouin tribe was a fully nomadic group based on camel herding. The tribes and animals existed in a symbiotic relationship. The camels supplied most of the food and the other needs of the Bedouin, while the tribesmen assured the animals’ survival by locating and guiding them to adequate pastures.
CHANGES BROUGHT ABOUT BY ISRAEL
Recent efforts to control Bedouins include Saudi Arabia and Syria nationalizing Bedouin rangelands. Jordan has severely limited goat grazing. Conflicts over land use between the herders and settled farmers have increased since then. And there is no end in sight.
The 21st century will probably see the increasing marginalization of the Bedouin peoples in the Arabic speaking world. This will mean that there will be fewer Bible translations needed, and fewer church planting teams needed to see every people group evangelized in this vast region. Yet today, the Bedouin peoples remain lost in a deceptive world of folk Islam, which keeps them from knowing the True Savior. We must pray for them, so that these noble and proud people may share in the inheritance and the blessings that we have in Christ.
Pray that the Holy Spirit will visit every Bedouin settlement and give them the true freedom that only Christ can offer.
Formidable obstacles call for a formidable people. The Bedouins are such a people. The Bedouins adapted by becoming nomads and roaming the desert, often times in search of food and water for their livestock. Their domain is the desert sweeping 3,000 miles from Jordan to Morocco. Bedouins are Arabic-speaking nomadic Arabs who migrated west from the deserts of Arabia towards Egypt and then further west. The word Bedouin originates from the French word for desert.
This form of hospitality also relates to a man being reconciled to his enemy. These are rugged men who use everything to their advantage, including hospitality. A diplomatic corps axiom says, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer.”
Bedouins still roam the desert. But their lives have drastically changed since the days when they epitomized the ideal of the Arab culture.
For centuries, the livelihood of Aulad Ali Bedouins of the western deserts of Egypt depended on their transiting dates from the oasis at Siwa to market. The once great distance, dangerous to all, became manageable with lorries and asphalt roads. They can no longer get paid handsomely for their efforts.
Let’s take Oman as an example. Oil wealth arrived in the late 20th century. Until 1970, Oman refused overtures by foreigners and petroleum companies. The lure of money proved a powerful enticement for the king’s son who staged a coup against his father. At the time of the coup, the nation’s infrastructure included six miles of paved road and a few hundred telephones. Nomads roamed freely through the desert via camel. Now 30 years later, the Bedouins roam in Toyota four-wheel-drive trucks. Many of them oversee their flocks of sheep and camels part-time. But most of their livelihood comes from working for the petroleum companies. Living in temporary settlements, they move every three to four months in search of better grazing for animals, but they live within driving distance from work in the petroleum industry. Telephone companies offer long-distance phone service for the price of a local call. This keeps Bedouins in close contact with their relatives across this Texas-sized nation. In this case, the Bedouins
In Jordan, between the late 1940s and the late 1960s perhaps 50 percent of nomads and seminomads voluntarily became sedentary. In this country on the eastern edge of Bedouin country, the military has been luring recruits out of the desert for 70 years into the Arab Legion under the British and its successor force, the Jordan Arab Army. In the late 1970s, Bedouins comprised a disproportionate share of the army’s higher command levels. This lucrative, secure career that carries high prestige and conforms to martial tribal attitudes also carries a price tag. Army service has been an important influence for social change among nomadic tribes because it fosters desire for education and it gives the tribes money to trade in their camels towards investment in trucks and the more economically significant sheep.
The Zionist dream of Palestine in Jewish hands also forced changes. About 900,000 Arabs live in Israel, of whom are 100,000 Bedouins. Bedouins are considered by the Israelis to be Arabs in a Jewish land, even though they have a long history of serving in the Israeli military. Jewish settlers on the West Bank and aerial bombing ranges in the Negev Desert hold priority over Bedouin interests. This second-class citizenship leaves the Bedouins in a position where they have no recourse if Jewish settlers drive them off their land. They sometimes become squatters within 20 miles of luxurious villas.
