The Nomadic Alternative – Page 84

Muruwah - the Arab definition of manliness - spells out the

nomadic ideal - fury in battle, patience in hard times, tenacity
in revenge, protection of the weak, defiance of the strong. Each
man is stamped with fierce individualism and offers his loyalty to
a leader if the leader offers his own loyalty back. Once the leader
wavers - loses, in the Arab sense, his baraka - the rest turn on
him. Nomads are sons of Ishmael the wild man whose "hand shall be
against every man and every man's against him". The Bedouin of today
are much given to this sort of sentiment. "I against my brother:
I and my brother against my cousin: I, my brother and my cousin
against our neighbour: all of us against the foreigner."

But if the tribe seems fit to dissolve into chaos, other
institutions stick it together. The precarious character of a
pastoral existence demands unwavering loyalty among kinsmen in crises
and this solidarity tempers the competition of daily life. All nomads
are the stuff of heroes, and in theory all are born noble. No inno-
vation or departure from accepted custom can succeed without the
consent of all. An individual proprietor may wield influence through
the size of his herds and the number of his sons, but no leader can
negotiate an agreement binding on his successors. A nomad khan or
sheikh is no social innovator, but the delegate of his tribe appointed
to deal with outsiders. Jethro inveighed against his son-in-law
Moses' anti-democratic autocracy: "The thing that thou doest is
not good. Thou wilt surely wear away both thou, and the people that
is with thee." Exodus 18.17-18. The nomad refuses servile obedience
to any written law code, and his signature on a document is as
worthless as the paper on which it is written.

The nomad sings his law out loud and his wilful illiteracy is
the very mark of his independence. His code of behaviour filters
down the generations by word of mouth and in theory remains unchanged.
But each guardian of tradition inevitably reinterprets the word of
the forefathers in the light of the present. Of necessity changes
of custom occur, often with startling rapidity, but these pass
unrecognized by people who do not feel themselves slavishly bound