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The Bedouin connection
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 2005-07-25 |
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