Bedouin

The Bedouin, also written Beduin or Bedu, are Arab tribal peoples whose way of life has traditionally centred on herding camels, sheep and goats across the deserts and steppes of the Middle East and North Africa. Their name comes from the Arabic badawi, "desert-dweller", in contrast to settled townspeople. Originating in the Syrian and Arabian deserts, Bedouin tribes spread across much of the Arab world after the rise of Islam. Most Bedouin today are Muslims, many now live settled or urban lives, and others keep up a semi-nomadic life alongside modern work.

Pastoral peoples herded and farmed in the Syrian steppe for thousands of years, and Assyrian records of the first millennium BCE already name desert Arabs, using a word related to "Arab" that is still applied to Bedouin. By Roman times the desert tribes were a recognisable people made up of many families, clans and tribes, often at war with one another. They earned income by taxing caravans, collecting tribute from settled communities and carrying goods across the desert by camel. Arabian tradition divides the tribes into two great lines of descent, the Qahtanis of the south-west and the Adnanis of north-central Arabia.

Bedouin society is built on kinship. A widely quoted saying describes widening circles of loyalty, from brothers to cousins to the wider tribe against outsiders, and disputes were traditionally settled through this framework of collective responsibility rather than by any central government. The basic household, the "tent" or bayt, was traditionally a married couple with a few relatives and their children, living under black goat-hair tents. Tribes held grazing grounds and wells, and chiefs, some based in oases, oversaw trade across their territory.

Herds supplied milk, meat and wool, and the camel served as food source and transport. Courage, hospitality and pride of ancestry are central values. Coffee, roasted, ground and served in small cups before the guest, is a mark of hospitality, and oral poetry in the spoken dialect, known as nabati poetry, is the most prized art. Raiding between tribes, called ghazw, was a regulated part of traditional life. Scholars of the Islamic Golden Age regarded Bedouin speech as the purest Arabic and consulted Bedouin reciters when standardising the classical language.

Arab settlement in North Africa followed the conquests of the seventh century, but the great movement of nomadic tribes came later. In the eleventh century the Fatimid Caliphate sent the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym westward against the rebellious Zirids, and the Ma'qil and other tribes followed. The historian Ibn Khaldun described their advance in hostile terms. Their arrival did much to spread Arabic and nomadic herding across the plains of the Maghreb, while many Berber communities withdrew to the mountains.

Under the Ottoman Empire, land reforms from 1858 and settlement schemes pushed many Bedouin towards a settled life. In the First World War some Bedouin, including tribes of the Negev, first fought for the Ottomans and later, under British influence, turned against them. In the 1950s and 1960s drought, shrinking pasture and state settlement policies led large numbers to settle; in Syria the drought of 1958 to 1961 effectively ended mass herding. Historians now reject the older picture of an unchanging desert people, stressing the Bedouin's long ties with towns.

Bedouin communities live across Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, the Gulf states, Egypt, Libya and the Maghreb. In Jordan they are often described as a backbone of the monarchy. In the Negev, many Bedouin fled or were displaced during the 1948 war, and land rights and the status of unrecognised villages remain disputed; in 2020 about 210,000 Bedouin lived in Israel. Elsewhere, governments and tourism have revived traditions such as falconry and camel racing, and Bedouin festivals keep poetry, music and tent-weaving alive.

Our 900 map labels a broad desert territory in the eastern Sahara, across today's Libya, Chad, Sudan and Egypt, as Bedouins, an approximate outline of nomadic peoples rather than a state. It sits beside the Abbasid Caliphate, Makuria and Kanem-Bornu.