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olent adults. For an indirect glimpse at how the principle
works, let's meander into the world of the Bedouin.
Bedouin culture is the mother of all Islam. The Bedouin are
desert wanderers who, until recently, traveled with tent and camel
through the Middle East and across Northern Africa, driving their
flocks of sheep and goats, and organizing caravans. The city children
of Mecca, where Mohammed was born, were given out to Bedouin
nurses to be suckled. Mohammed himself was nursed by one of these
Bedouin "foster-mothers," and spent his childhood years among the
shepherds of the desert.101 The Bedouin also made up the bulk of the
armies with which Mohammed's followers went out to conquer the
world.
The old Bedouin ways have by no means disappeared. In 1978,
an American graduate student of anthropology went to study
"interpersonal relationships" among the Bedouin of the western
Egyptian desert. Her name was Lila Abu-Lughod. And she had a
unique advantage in penetrating the most intimate aspects of Bedouin
life. Abu-Lughod's father was an Arab. In fact, he accompanied his
daughter to Egypt and introduced her to the head of the family she
would study. Why? Had Lila appeared outside the nomads' tent, pads
in hand, explaining that she was a scientific researcher, her quest
would have been over before it began. The Bedouin would have noted
that she was a woman alone. That could only mean one of two things.
Either her family cared nothing about her, in which case any man who
ran across her could do with her as he willed. Or she had committed a
deed so immoral that her family had thrown her out. In which case
any man who ran across her could, once again, do anything with her
that suited his fancy.102
With her father to make the introductions, however,
Abu-Lughod was accepted as a good, Arab girl and was taken into the
household as a step-daughter, living among the Bedouin women as
one of them. In the process, she saw details of Arab society from which
Westerners are ordinarily shut out.
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