THE ORIGINAL ARAB, THE BEDOUIN
Although we are concerned in this book with all Arabic-speaking peoples—not only in Arabia but in many lands, including Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Persia, Egypt, North Africa and medieval Sicily and Spain—it is necessary to throw the spotlight first upon the original Arab, the Bedouin.
The Bedouin is no gipsy roaming aimlessly for the sake of roaming. He represents the best adaptation of human life to desert conditions. Wherever grass grows, there he goes seeking pasture. Nomadism is as much a scientific mode of living in the Nufud as industrialism is in Detroit or Manchester. It is a reasonable and stoic adjustment to an unfriendly environment. For the surface of Arabia is almost completely desert with only a narrow strip of habitable land round the periphery. The Arabians called their habitat an island, and an island it is, surrounded by water on three sides and by sand on the fourth.
Despite its size—it is the largest peninsula in the world—its total population is estimated at only seven to eight millions. Geologists tell us that the land once formed the natural continuation of the Sahara (now separated from it by the rift of the Nile Valley and the great chasm of the Red Sea) and of the sandy belt which traverses Asia through central Persia and the Gobi Desert. It is one of the driest and hottest countries in the whole world. The area is sandwiched between seas on the cast and west, but these bodies of water are too narrow to break the climatic continuity of the Africo-Asian rainless continental masses. The ocean on the
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