Bedouins hospitality in the desert
Syria, Culture, 2/15/2000

Hospitality in the desert, and by Syrian Bedouins in particular, is the recognition of want; it has grown into a social grace. The stranger who comes to a tent comes, or at least in the old days came, because there was nowhere else to go. To turn a man away was equivalent to murder.

Such a society for its own sake could not afford to be anything but hospitable.

Bedouin hospitality is part of a routine imposed by the desert, and as such has existed from the earliest times. Although Prophet Muhammad, with his characteristically practical sense, might have wished to enforce the routine when he said "whoever believes in God and the day of resurrection must respect his guest," its sanctions is essentially social and not religious.

In the same way the environment has made bravery a Bedouin necessity, where differences of opinion or the right to the scanty pasturage, are always, and have always been, settled by cunning and force of arms, only the wily can hope to survive. The Bedouin is both of these almost by definition. His liberty and independence of spirit are also due to the life he leads, and are a direct byproduct of his migratory habits.

Had he been settled, he would have been subjugated long ago; his mobility has ensured his freedom and the freedom that freedom brings. The Bedouin costume has not changed in a thousand years, and the Bedouins today dress in every particular as the traveler Maqdisi described him in the tenth century.

The Syrian Bedouins are an odd mixture of qualities and limitations which the desert goes far toward explaining. Those Bedouins the traveler finds today in Palmyra and southward are, for the most part, of the Aneza tribe, which came up from Arabia in search of better pastures. Their passage was not easy, and only after a century and a half of migration and inter-tribal warfare, did they establish their supremacy in the Syrian desert about a hundred years ago, forcing Shamman tribes, their predecessors, into Mesopotamia.

The Raula tribe is by far the most important of the many sub-divisions into which the Aneza are divided, and constitutes their real strength and backbone. The size of the tribe is computed by the number of its tents, its wealth by the number of its camels: The Raula have seven thousand tents, and their camels number over a quarter of a million.

In cohesion and war-like spirit the Raula are outstanding. Outstanding also among Bedouin acts is their enterprise: In 1929 when Europeans were just beginning to realize that the "Ford" would replace the camel as the ship of the desert, the Raula had already supplemented their racing camels and Arab horses as the military transport for their raids by some twenty first-class American automobiles. This gave them a tremendous advantage over their neighbors until the latter began to develop mechanized transport.

Most of the true Syrian Bedouins lead more or less the same life and are subject to more or less the same social organization. They must be dearly distinguished both in these respects, and in respect of moral worth. The Syrian Bedouins are of two sorts: those who rear camels and those who rear sheep.

The former, who look down on shepherds, are richer and more powerful. In range and territory they also differ; the shepherds are frequently more motherly toward their pastures and tend to keep closer to the cultivation, while the camel herds with their mobile, thirst-resisting flocks, are the men of the great spaces, crossing the arid wastes and straying far south of Syrian territory.

Both, however, live by their flocks only, and this accounts for the cycle of their lives. They are a wandering people because their beasts, which constitute their whole wealth, must in this thin grassed lands move continually in search of fresh pastures. The camel-breeding tribes, migrating with the regularity of birds, move south into the great desert after the winter rains when pasture is easy to come by; later as the Summer heat draws on, they edge slowly north, and at the moment when pastures are most dry are to be found at the extreme northern limit of their range where much rainfall provides a meager grazing right through the droughts.

This is the essence of their lives, a leisurely shifting from pasture to pasture, following the green film on the desert that means food for their flocks and preservation -- rather than prosperity -- for themselves.

Previous Stories:
  Syria's Bosra, an amazing historic city, Alexanddru Diaconescu interview   (1/29/2000)
  Damascus house reminds of a British woman's love story   (4/24/1999)
  Bedouins: the splendid life of chase, hunt and horsemanship   (10/7/1998)

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