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flash of lightning in the sky. The father
said, “It’s raining near Thaj.” He goes
on to say, “Since no one else saw what
he saw, and because Thaj was about
100 kilometers away, we found it difficult
to believe that my father had seen
something so far away. But the eyes of
the Bedouin are very sharp. Bedouins
eat the meat of the camel, they drink
the milk of the camel, and they walk
long distances in the desert without
shoes. This is why they are healthy and
sharp-eyed. This is why Bedouins can
see far away.”3 The father turned out to
be right.
There was a trade-off the bedouin
made with the desert. The desert
would preserve his culture, offer the
unbridled freedom to graze his beloved
sheep and camels, provide sovereignty
so that he lives under none
but the authority of Allah, and be fearless
of any interference to his pastoral
tendencies. In return, he must endure
hunger, walk the parched sand without
shoes or slippers, and don his body
with bare skin against the unforgiving
sun, i.e. compromise those bare necessities
that are the regular economy of
man. One author writes, “The life of
the bedouin was full of privations. In
the rare snowy winters, young camels
perished, female camels stopped
giving milk and the livestock starved.
A dry summer, too, spelled hardship
and danger. Even the scarce reserves
of dates and grain came to an end and
poor bedouin ate wild tubers and fruit;
many of them died of malnutrition.
Their summer pastures usually lie
close to cemeteries.”4
The bedouin not only complied with
these wishes but lived this nomadic
and meager existence quite cheerfully.
For as long as his herds of camel and
sheep were his to roam from pasture to
pasture, and his fealty to tribe and clan
was robust, he would endure anything
to body and soul in order to remain
in the sandy borders that would save
him from assimilation. He would bow
to no one and answer only to himself.
His sense of individualism and equality
was beyond anything a westerner
could imagine. Paul Harrison notes,
“A man with a lean, sinewy, piano-wire
physique, a keen, active mind, and an
incomparably free and untrammeled
spirit, he is at once the most incorrigible
individualist and the greatest
internationalist in the world. Under
a burden of poverty and hard living
conditions such as are endured by perhaps
no other people in the world, he
stand unbent and upright, cheerfully
contemptuous of all the luxuries and
comforts of more favored races…his
love of liberty and his stubborn belief
in the essential equality of all men are
at once a rebuke and a model for the
rest of the world.”5
Funny enough, but even in this bare
subsistence, the Arabs suffered from
a superiority complex. They earnestly
believed that their way of life was
superior to every other lifestyle outside
the borders of the desert expanse,
and that those who didn’t live their
way were pitiable. As Peter Mansfield
noted, “But while some of the Arabs
adopted a sedentary way of life, the
nomadic tribes, who held a strong
military advantage over the settlements,
remained convinced of the superiority
of their own style of living.
Moreover, most of the settled peoples
showed that they accepted this belief
by adopting nomadic values; some of
them abandoned their settlements for
the freedom of the desert.”6 We find
this to be true even in the seerah of
the Prophet a. A group of women had
come down from the villages to take
the newborns of Quraysh to nurse and
raise them, Haleema Sa‘diyya j taking
the Prophet a back with her to Banu
Sa‘d. The Seerah-biographers explain
that the Quraysh and other sedentary
tribes saw the nomadic code as
the quintessence of the Arab way of
life. They felt that sedentary lifestyle
had modernized them, their frequent
trade expeditions to cosmopolitan cities
to the north and south, and their
intermingling with Byzantine and
Persia even if only for business purposes
had diminished them in their
true ‘Arabness.’ Whatever changes they
felt was always measured against the
roaming nomads of the desert. This is
why sending children off to the desert
in the care of these nomads was necessary.
It was due to this superiority
complex of the nomads and the inferiority
complex of their sedentary
brothers that the Arabs remained defi-
8 July – August 2021 | AL-MADINAH