The History and Politics of the Bedouin

Reimagining Nomadism in Modern Palestine

Seraje Assi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367591434
• eBook ISBN: 9781351257862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines contending visions on nomadism in modern Palestine, with a special focus on the British Mandate period. Extending from the late Ottoman period to the founding of the State of Israel, it highlights both ruptures and continuities with the Ottoman past and the Israeli present, to prove that nomadism was not invented by the British or the Zionists, but is the shared legacy of Ottoman, British, Zionist, Palestinian, and most recently, Israeli attitudes to the Bedouin of Palestine.

Drawing on primary sources in Arabic and Hebrew, the book shows how native conceptions of nomadism have been reconstructed by colonial and national elites into new legal taxonomies rooted in modern European theories and praxis. By undertaking a comparative approach, it maintains that the introduction of these taxonomies transformed not only native Palestinian perceptions of nomadism, but perceptions that characterized early Zionist literature. The book breaks away from the Arab/Jewish duality by offering a comparative and relational study of the main forces operating under the Mandate: British colonialism, Labor Zionism, and Arab nationalism. Special attention is paid to the British side, which covers the first three chapters. Each chapter represents a formative stage of British colonial enterprise in Palestine, extending from the late Ottoman down to the postwar and the Mandate periods. A major theme is the nexus of race and ethnography reshaping British perceptions of the Bedouin of Palestine before and during the early phases of the Mandate, and the ways these perceptions guided the administrative division of the country along newly demarcated racial boundaries.

Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines new findings in the fields of history, ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, and environmental studies, this book contributes to understandings of the Israel/ Palestine conflict, and current trends of displacement in the Middle East.

1 The original Arabs

British perceptions of the Bedouin before the Mandate¹

In 1883, the famed British explorer Richard Burton, who had just returned from an adventurous journey that took him across the vast land of West Africa, believed he had sorted out the phrenological characters of the ‘Bedouin race.’ Writing from his prestigious post at the newly founded Anthropological Society of London, he observed:

The bones vary from the very massive to the remarkably thin, and the first points which struck me were the shortness of the lower bi-temporal diameter, the long square face, and the flatness or compression of the parietes, which every traveler remarks in the Badwain, the flower of the Semitic race.²

In the decades to follow, Burton’s racialist and pseudo-scientific observations on the Bedouin would become a central meme in British ethnography: The Arab Bedouin represent a separate race towering a hierarchy of Semitic races. To his British contemporaries and successors in Palestine, where his influence was most acutely apparent, Burton was more than an amateur explorer or curious traveler, but the founder of a new ethnographic discourse on the Bedouin, one which increasingly locks race and nomadism into a state of perpetual symbiosis.

This chapter examines the symbiotic relationship of race and nomadism in British ethnographic discourse on the Arabs of Palestine. Drawing on the legacy of British explorers in late Ottoman Palestine, I show how native Palestinian Bedouin came to be viewed as a separate race within a hierarchy of Arab races, and how in this racial reconfiguration, the Bedouin embodied not only an ideal model of racial purity, but also a racial archetype on which Arabness itself was measured, codified, and reproduced.

The explorers were a new breed of British Arabists whose interest in the Bedouin went far beyond the romantic legacy of the eighteenth century. These include, most notably, Richard Burton, C. T. Drake, Edward Palmer, and C. R. Conder. These men were writing at a time when scientific racism came to predominance in England, when British nationalism attempted to bind disparate parts of the British Isles under its umbrella, and when the British empire reached its zenith overseas. Working under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund (P.E.F.) Society, their imperial careers reflected the strong nexus of knowledge and power underpinning British policy in Palestine.

British explorers in Ottoman Palestine were guided by three ethnographic axioms. The first rests on the primacy of racial classification – a new scientific dogma necessitated by the need to manage differences overseas. The origins of racial classification in modern European thought can be traced back to the debate between monogenists and polygenists in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The two groups sought to map the origin of human race(s) by charting differences in external appearances among present and past populations. Whereas monogenism espoused a single origin of humanity as envisioned in the Biblical narrative, polygenism maintained that human races had originated in separate racial lineages with varying qualities, and hence represented a hierarchy of races. This rested on the assumption that external appearances – such as physical, biological, social, linguistic, and cultural traits – corresponded to distinct racial strata. Ironically, it is the seemingly secular polygenists who eventually ended up advocating the existence of racial supremacy among the human races. Polygenism proved especially appealing to a European sense of superiority in the age of overseas adventure, trade, exploration, and discovery. In the course of European colonial expansion in the nineteenth century – which culminated in the accumulation of new ethnographic, anthropological, linguistic, and biological data – polygenism became the intellectual hallmark of European racial thinking.³ In Palestine, this reconfiguration of human relations culminated in a new racial taxonomy which, by simply sorting out the physical and social peculiarities of the local population, insisted on viewing its demographic strata as a race apart. As a result, three ‘Arab races’ were sorted out: the Bedouin, the fellahin, and the townspeople. Only the Bedouin, however, were labeled true Arabs.

The second axiom maintains a dialectical relationship between race and nomadism. In this teleological view, the Bedouin are singled out as a pure race because they are Bedouin: thanks to a unique value system and mode of life, the Bedouin managed to survive the vicissitudes of time, preserve their racial purity throughout the centuries, and survive as the ‘original Arab race.’ The Bedouin are also mobile, evasive, and fugitive people who have yet unfolded under the protective shadow of civilization. They live deeper in the desert, on the frontier, and the fringe of the country, where the tempo of life is kept unchangeable. They are a homogenous, archaic, and primordial people living in a state of pristine existence free of foreign influence. They maintain a strict system of intermarriage and a deep-rooted tradition of blood relation and noble descent. They descend from the cradle of the Arab race, the Arabian Peninsula, and they speak pure Arabic. In short, if there existed an Arab race, then, inherently, it must be Bedouin – nomadic.

The third axiom establishes an inherent opposition between nomadism and autochthony. Locked into a state of perpetual mobility, the Bedouin are viewed as a race of stateless, unsettled, and rootless nomads. As the descendants of the original Arab tribes who invaded Palestine in the seventh century, they represent a foreign race who, immune as it was to racial assimilation, remade the country in its own image: a barren land. They are a race of conquerors responsible for the destruction of what was once the fertile granary of Roman Palestine. They are lawless intruders, enemies of the state, and barbarians at the gate. They are anathema to history, progress, and state-building. They live on primitive modes of production devoid of labor, property, and land cultivation. The Bedouin, in short, stand at the opposite end of European conceptions of belonging, autochthony, and nationhood.

As we shall see, it is the well-established link between race and nomadism, embodied in the total identification of Arabness with tribalism and conquest, which ultimately enabled British ethnographers to reinforce the image of the Arabs as a foreign race in Palestine. Not that the Bedouin of Palestine were inherently nomadic, but it suited British observers to treat them as such, a perception which boded well for their tendency to view tribal formations as the antipode of rootedness, belonging and, most importantly, state- and nation-building. This should explain the shift in British discourse from the model of the Bedouin to that of the Fellah as the locus of national revival in Palestine, a shift largely enabled by the interplay between the spatial (territoriality) and the temporal (autochthony) in British conceptions of nationhood and state-building.⁴ It should be noticed that this shift was not immediately obvious, as it marked a total reversal of early British ethnography in Palestine, where the Bedouin had been portrayed as a pure racial archetype and ideal national prototype.

Historians of the British empire tend to agree that racial thinking emerged in British literature and popular imagination in the later part of eighteenth century.⁵ These historians have explored myriad aspects of race in British colonial discourse, ranging from gender and sexuality to class and nationality.⁶ Their scholarship, however, tends to accept at face value the existence of racial thinking in this discourse, while paying little attention to its colonial origins. As Brett Linsley points out:

These kinds of studies have done a great deal to detail the duration and nature of certain epochs in racial thinking. They have, unfortunately, not sufficiently addressed the origins of racial thinking. Too often they focus on describing the manifestations of certain mindsets without adequately explaining the origins of these attitudes.⁷

There is sufficient textual evidence to suggest that British racial thinking was born in the encounter with the natives, namely, from the uneasy marriage between race and ethnography. Scholars of the British Empire have already discussed the rise of scientific racism in colonial India, and how modern theories of racial hierarchy guided British encounters with Indian society in the nineteenth century.⁸ I show that Ottoman Palestine provided yet another stage for this kind of exchange. By the close of the nineteenth century, men like Burton and Drake had already turned Ottoman Syria into a laboratory for their experiments in scientific racism. It was left to their successors at the P.E.F. Society to test their doctrine on the population of Palestine, a process which culminated in a new taxonomy of racial classification. To show that the Bedouin served as a passive agent of a new ‘scientific’ revolution is to place British tribal discourse in Palestine at the genealogy of British racial thinking and attitudes to the Arabs.

This is not to suggest that the British invented the taxonomy of racial classification ex nihilo. Nineteenth-century French travelers in Egypt and Syria, notably C. F. Volney, tended to classify the native population along purely racial lines.⁹ Race-thinking was also part of Ottoman ethnographic discourse, which crystallized in the wake of Young Turk Revolution. In fact, one defining feature of the 1908 Revolution was the secularization of Ottoman identity by substituting religion with race, hence Turkification and Turanianism.¹⁰ But more than their Ottoman forebears, British explorers in Ottoman Palestine showed a greater tendency to divide their subjects along strictly demarcated ethnic lines. In the late Ottoman period, Arabs and Jews in Palestine were rarely identified in racial or ethnic terms. Instead, local identities were largely distributed along the millet system, by which Ottoman officials classified their subjects into relatively flexible and loose religious categories. It is with the British in Palestine that the doctrine of racial classification would reign supreme.

The discovery of the ‘Bedouin race’

In 1869, after a long journey that took him from West Africa to the Americas, Richard Burton landed in Syria to assume his new post as the British consul in Damascus, a position he would hold until 1871. Official duty did not end his passion for exploration in a country...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figure
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The original Arabs: British perceptions of the Bedouin before the Mandate
• 2 The British in Palestine: the rediscovery of the ‘Arab race’
• 3 Nomadism as a racial domain: the legacy of desert administrators in Palestine
• 4 Reimaging the Arab nation: the tribal legacy of Aref al-Aref
• 5 The erasure of the Hebrew Bedouin: Zionist perceptions of nomadism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index