    34

    result: vi

    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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