The Nomadic Alternative – Page 72

same calm that grows imperceptibly year after year, or stop beside

a wayside shrine to refresh the cotton prayer flags fluttering from
high poles.

They never hurry. Their discipline is automatic. They pitch and
dismantle the tents, rouse and settle the herds with the measured
precision of a ceremonial, and read each landmark as it were a sura
of the Koran. In Islam morning and evening prayers greet the dawn
and sunset. The nomads rarely pray and the orthodox piously curse
them as infidels. But the nomad's life is the very stuff of which
Islam is made. For him the breaking of camp and the settling of
herds at nightfall are prayers more meaningful than any prostration
in the mosque. The migration is of itself a catharsis - revolutionary
in the strictest sense. Each return to the same pasture confirms
a new beginning.

Empires have been smashed and great cities blown up, but life
in the black tents continues without significant change since the
days when Abraham the nomad sheikh guided his flocks on his annual
migration, on "journeys from the south even unto Bethel, unto the
place where his tent had been at the beginning". Genesis 13.3. But
the nomads of today are facing the ultimate crisis. A settled gov-
ernment likes settled people whom it can police, tax and employ.

The wildness of the nomad appals the bureaucrat, and their wayward
freedom affronts his own bitter sense of inadequacy. With the help
of experts - what else are foreign experts for? - he searches for
a final solution to the 'problem of the tribes' and publicly deplores
nomadic life as shameful anachronism in a modern state. The govern-
ments may win. Air-power has robbed the tribes of their tactical
mobility; in the last resort they can be bombed into submission -
and this has been done.

Yet the nomads of South Persia still file past the wreckage of
ancient imperial splendour without pausing except perhaps to sneer.
Persepolis is a cold and senseless edifice, grey stone, loved of
Fascist architects, coated with monumental sculptures and meaningless
vegetable ornament. Bloodless monarchs plunge daggers into the