Kirjahaku

Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev is the first comprehensive study of Bedouin law published in English, including oral, pre-modern law. The material for the book, collected over the course of forty years of field work by Clinton Bailey, one of the world’s leading scholars on Bedouin culture, is of permanent scholarly value. Bailey shows how a nomadic desert-dwelling society provides for its own law and order in the traditional absence of any centralized authority or law enforcement agency to protect it. This comprehensive picture of Bedouin law, offers readers a unique opportunity to understand Bedouin law by highlighting the close connection between the law and the culture from which it emerged.

Two-thirds of all Palestinians are Jordanian citizens living on the East and West Banks; a sizable number also reside and work in various parts of the Arabian Peninsula. With the questions of ultimate sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip attracting much international attention since Israel's occupation of these areas in 1967, the solution to the Palestinian question is often seen as entirely dependent on Palestinian relations with Israel, despite the fact that only one-third of the Palestinians live in the occupied territories. In contrast, Palestinian relations with the Arab states, including Jordan, are generally portrayed as a sideshow to the main theater of conflict. This book examines the thirty-five-year struggle between the Hashimite monarchy and the forces of Palestinian nationalism over the future identity, and perhaps location, of those two-thirds of the Palestinian people who have been Jordanian subjects since 1948. Dr. Bailey bases his study on "open" sources: reports appearing in the Arab, Israeli, and world press, in addition to academic studies and published memoirs of persons involved in the events described, providing an accurate portrayal of the significant developments in Jordan's Palestinian challenge over the past thirty-five years.

This book attempts to portray the thirty-five-year struggle between the Hashimite monarchy and the forces of Palestinian nationalism over the future identity, and perhaps location, of those two-thirds of the Palestinian people who have been Jordanian subjects since 1948.

The first contemporary analysis of Bedouin and biblical cultures sheds new light on biblical laws, practices, and Bedouin history Written by one of the world’s leading scholars of Bedouin culture, this groundbreaking book sheds new light on significant points of convergence between Bedouin and early Israelite cultures, as manifested in the Hebrew Bible. Bailey compares Bedouin and biblical sources, identifying overlaps in economic activity, material culture, social values, social organization, laws, religious practices, and oral traditions. He also examines the question of whether some early Israelites were indeed nomads as the Bible presents them, offering a new angle on the controversy over their identity as well as new cultural perspectives to scholars of the Bible and the Bedouin alike.