Married To A Bedouin

Author: Marguerite van Geldermalsen
Publisher: Virago
ISBN: 0748122737
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
'A fascinating account of life as Bedouin in the late twentieth century' Mary S. Lovell 'This sparkling memoir is a refreshing antidote and a rare window into the legendary hospitality and mysterious customs of the Bedouin Arabs' Publishing News '"Where you staying?" the Bedouin asked. "Why you not stay with me tonight - in my cave?"' Thus begins Marguerite van Geldermalsen's story of how a New Zealand-born nurse came to be married to Mohammad Abdallah Othman, a Bedouin souvenir-seller from the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. It was 1978 and she and a friend were travelling through the Middle East when Marguerite met the charismatic Mohammad who convinced her that he was the man for her. She lived with him in a two thousand-year-old cave carved into the red rock of a hillside, became the resident nurse for the tribe that inhabited that historical site and learned to live like the Bedouin: cooking over fires, hauling water on donkeys and drinking sweet black tea. She learned Arabic, converted to Islam and gave birth to three children. Over the years she became as much of a curiosity as the cave-dwellers, with tourists including David Malouf and Frank McCourt encouraging her to tell this, her extraordinary story.

Veiled Sentiments

Author: Lila Abu-Lughod
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520965981
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
First published in 1986, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments has become a classic ethnography in the field of anthropology. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations, morality, and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But Abu-Lughod’s analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the complexity of culture. This thirtieth anniversary edition includes a new afterword that reflects on developments both in anthropology and in the lives of this community of Awlad 'Ali Bedouins, who find themselves increasingly enmeshed in national political and social formations. The afterword ends with a personal meditation on the meaning—for all involved—of the radical experience of anthropological fieldwork and the responsibilities it entails for ethnographers.

Fertile Bonds

Author: Suzanne E. Joseph
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813054100
Category : Bedouins
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A portrait of a group of Bedouins in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, a population with the highest fertility rate in the world.

Leap of Faith

Author: Queen Noor
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
ISBN: 9780753817568
Category : Queens
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Book Description
The dramatic and inspiring story of one woman's incredible journey into the heart of a man and his nation. Born into a distinguished Arab-American family, Lisa Halaby was a strongly independent young woman. After studying architecture at Princeton, her work on projects in the Middle East gave her a profound understanding both of the links between the environment and social problems, and also of the tumultuous history of the Arab nations. Then, in 1974, her life took a very different turn, when her father introduced her to the world's most eligible bachelor, King Hussein of Jordan. After a whirlwind romance, she became Noor Al Hussein, Queen of Jordan. With eloquence and honesty, Queen Noor speaks of the obstacles she faced as a young bride and of her successful struggle to create a role for herself as a humanitarian activist. She tells of her heartbreaking miscarriage and the births of her four children, along with her continuing support for King Hussein's campaign to bring peace to the Arab nations. But most of all this is a love story - an honest and engaging portrait of a truly remarkable woman and the man she married.

The Girl Who Fell to Earth

Author: Sophia Al-Maria
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062098748
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
Award-winning filmmaker and writer Sophia Al-Maria’s The Girl Who Fell to Earth is a funny and wry coming-of-age memoir about growing up in between American and Gulf Arab cultures. Part family saga and part personal quest, The Girl Who Fell to Earth traces Al-Maria’s journey to make a place for herself in two different worlds. When Sophia Al-Maria's mother sends her away from rainy Washington State to stay with her husband's desert-dwelling Bedouin family in Qatar, she intends it to be a sort of teenage cultural boot camp. What her mother doesn't know is that there are some things about growing up that are universal. In Qatar, Sophia is faced with a new world she'd only imagined as a child. She sets out to find her freedom, even in the most unlikely of places. The Girl Who Fell to Earth takes readers from the green valleys of the Pacific Northwest to the dunes of the Arabian Gulf and on to the sprawling chaos of Cairo. Struggling to adapt to her nomadic lifestyle, Sophia is haunted by the feeling that she is perpetually in exile: hovering somewhere between two families, two cultures, and two worlds. She must make a place for herself—a complex journey that includes finding young love in the Arabian Gulf, rebellion in Cairo, and, finally, self-discovery in the mountains of Sinai. The Girl Who Fell to Earth heralds the arrival of an electric new talent and takes us on the most personal of quests: the voyage home.

The Courage to Be Jewish and the Wife of an Arab Sheik

Author: Anne Hart
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595187900
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
What's a nice Brooklyn Jewish girl novelist with a fiddle doing married to an Arab Sheik dressed like a Queen of Egypt in the deserts? Playing the G-string. Comparing Mizrahi music to Klezmer and Taksim to Magham Seekah. Poetry found its mood here. At dawn I rose on October 25, 1963 to see the salmon slit that ripped the East. My eyes were weary, but the day had to begin. Above, a jet cracked the sky, leaving a feathery trail of scattering wisps of smoke. These clouds soon parted. And by the time the sun melted into the hot winds and its streams radiated to push the thermometer up to 120 degrees, I had packed and unfolded the first flaps of tent to start the new day. Between ethnomusicology, anthropology, and creative writing research, I had my hands full and two toddlers riding camelback.

Bedouin Culture in the Bible

Author: Clinton Bailey
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300245637
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
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 examines the question of whether some early Israelites were indeed nomads as the Bible presents them, offering a new angle on the controversy over the identity of the early Israelites and a new cultural perspective to scholars of the Bible and the Bedouin alike.

Bedouin Doctor

Author: Herbert Pritzke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Book Description

Living With Arabs

Author: Joan Ward
Publisher: Um Peter Publishing
ISBN: 1843963221
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
Horrendous news from the Middle East fills our newspapers and screens every day. How can we begin to understand what drives people to treat each other as they do? "e;Medieval"e; is a word often used. Well-informed commentators analyse political and military issues but give little insight into the cultural and domestic backgrounds of the protagonists."e;Living with Arabs"e; is an account of nine years spent visiting and living among the Bedouin tribes of Petra in southern Jordan; in some ways a world away from the neighbouring war zones. Through insightful accounts of day-to-day life, a world of nobility and simplicity is revealed: so too is a world of violence, gender imbalance, and the significance of Islam. It is a story that begins viewed through rose-coloured spectacles and moves to a gripping realisation of reality. The shocking, the funny, the heart-warming - it is all here.

Pillars of Salt

Author: Fadia Faqir
Publisher: Interlink Books
ISBN: 9781566562539
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Pillars of Salt is the story of two women confined in a mental hospital in Jordan during and after the British Mandate. After initial tensions they become friends and share their life stories.