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| Africa: North |
| The Bedouin connection |
| 2005-07-25 |
| Five years ago, during a visit to Cairo, I was told by an employee of the U.S. government that Egypt's internal security services are among the best-informed in the world -- because so many Egyptians are on their payroll. So how is it that on Saturday, terrorists managed to penetrate one of the country's most isolated towns, the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh, surrounded by hundreds of kilometres of empty desert, and kill close to 90 people? Well, the Sinai desert is not as empty as one may think. Soon after the bombings, Egyptian authorities arrested more than 70 suspects, many of them local Bedouin. This set of tourist-targeted bombings in Sharm may be connected to last October's hotel bombing in Taba, another Sinai resort. In that attack, too, Bedouin are accused of involvement. Some of the locals apparently, have become radicalized allies of al-Qaeda. The Bedouin of Sinai are a congeries of tribes that moved into the Sinai desert with the rise of Islam many centuries ago, as nomads and semi-nomads. They are distantly related to the Hashemite Bedouin of the Hijaz, who fought with Lawrence of Arabia, and whose urbanized and Westernized descendants now hold the throne in Jordan. Many engage in camel, goat and sheep rearing, combined with contraband smuggling, oasis agriculture and desert trade. Despite their poverty, the Bedouin have always felt themselves to be superior to the settled townspeople and tillers of Egypt's villages. They believe they are the true sons of Ishmael, and that their way of life is somehow purer than that of city-dwellers. They also speak a different dialect of Arabic than do the settled Egyptians, and follow customs that are more egalitarian and less hierarchical. After the First World War, when the British were the stewards of Egypt and the Sinai, the Bedouin were allowed to live their lives without much harassment. But things changed when the British left. The Egyptian government sees the indigenous Bedouin as backward and economically irrelevant, and has run roughshod over their rights in its bid to develop the Sinai. Many of today's Bedouin fondly remember the period of Israeli control following the Six-Day War, from 1967 to 1982. The Israelis reverted to the British mode of hands-off governance. Like the Israelites of old, the tribes wandered the peninsula, smuggling whatever they could to whomever they could, as they have done from time immemorial. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #11 Sharm used to be a beutiful place before peace broke out. |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2005-07-25 20:54 |
| #10 Re #9, I am. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-07-25 18:35 |
| #9 Is anyone else getting a "Round up the usual Bedouin" vibe off of this? |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-25 13:50 |
| #8 Practiced animal husbandry until they were caught at it. (HT Tom Lehrer) |
| Posted by: SR-71 2005-07-25 13:28 |
| #7 "Da-a-a-a-a-a-dy!" |
| Posted by: mojo 2005-07-25 11:44 |
| #6 News this AM said they were looking for 6 Pakis - linked to AQ, not bedouins... |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-07-25 11:24 |
| #5 Interesting. Where I came from the lesson was that one raised corn and reared children. The introduction of kids muddied the waters as one doesn't rear the offspring of goats. |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-07-25 11:23 |
| #4 Just to be pedantic, rear v. reared, rear·ing, rears v. tr. To care for (children or a child) during the early stages of life; bring up. raise v. raised, rais·ing, rais·es v. tr. To breed and care for to maturity: raise cattle. My old high school english teacher drilled this set of definitions into us: you raise cows (makes milking motion), you rear children (makes spanking motion). |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2005-07-25 10:46 |
| #3 When the Israelis held Sinai, the coastal resorts had clothing optional sections, to accommodate the Scandinavian tourists (as well as Israelis looking to try something that just wasnt done in Israel proper) The young Bedu men liked to come down withing viewing range to get a sense of what Western Civilization had to "offer" |
| Posted by: liberalhawk 2005-07-25 10:38 |
| #2 Many engage in camel, goat and sheep rearing So that's what they're calling it nowadays. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-07-25 10:11 |
| #1 So the Egyptian invasion of the Sinai is the root cause of the recent bombing? |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-07-25 10:09 |