Desert mythologies

This is not a myth in the manner of Lévi-Strauss that is in question here, one of those heroic stories from the dark ages that societies tell themselves in an attempt to think about their world. It would rather be one of those imaginary productions that cling to a distant referent, to reconstruct it, and perhaps even to make it happen a little. Work in the field of travel literature has accustomed us to these perspectives of external objects that are constructed and reconstructed “in our own way” with adaptations that make them familiar and useful.

What about the “Bedouins”, these nomadic Arab shepherds, these “desert dwellers” (for that is the etymological meaning of the term) of the Middle East and later of the Sahara? Before the XVIII^e century, we have only a few terrifying stories about them, as if they only came out of their margins to plunder caravans and rob pilgrims. Little by little, however, the image becomes clearer with the multiplication of relationships, sharpened by a new curiosity for difference, with the romantic emotion that is taking hold in literature. And it is some of the greatest writers of this time who are attached to visiting the Orient or, at least, to evoking the places and the men who populate them. Voltaire and Rousseau, Chateaubriand and Lamartine, Nerval and Flaubert, and soon, going slightly outside the frame, Daudet and Maupassant. On the Bedouins, it is therefore a beautiful library that we can consult to trace lines such as literary history, following in this the history of ideas, likes to construct.

A noble savage?

The merit of Sarga Moussa’s book is, however, not to limit itself, as has been done too often, to these great authors and to take the risk of calling upon a whole legion of lesser-known but otherwise competent observers, whom he has endeavored to analyze and on whom he has produced texts usefully gathered and completed here. We will therefore find, in addition to analyses by contributors from The Exploration of Egypt like Du Bois Aymé or Jomard, pioneers like Tavernier or the Chevalier d’Arvieux, or like the immense Volney, curious and original figures: such as this Dom Raphaël de Monachis, Coptic dragoman of the Egyptian army repatriated to France where he will teach Arabic vulgar (in other words dialectal) at the Collège de France; or those adventurers who headed towards the desert, like Count Waclav Rzewuski who went to Syria to look for Arabian horses that he was to bring back to Poland – his text, written in French, but known only to hippologists, remained in manuscript form until the edition that Bernadette Lizet gave it to Corti editions –; or Jean-Louis Burckhardt, the first to offer the world a detailed description of the Holy Places of Islam, who produced a compendium on the Bedouins published in English after his death and translated into French in 1835.

Without limiting himself to these contributions, all important although unequal and unequally known, Sarga Moussa broadened his investigation to an impressive number of French texts and those translated into our language where the term “Bedouin” appeared. In this way, however, he took, as we will see, the risk of amalgamating heterogeneous productions, inscribed in very different registers.

What emerges first of all from putting this documentation into perspective thus analyzed? An observation, indisputable but nevertheless quite predictable: during this first XIX^e century, with the multiplication of occurrences and descriptions, we leave the rather schematic and fairly terrifying evocations to consider these inhabitants of the desert in a more positive way. A progress? It is not so simple: rather than a passage from ignorance to knowledge, from hostility to sympathy, it is an ambivalent construction that is put in place, and Sarga Moussa sees himself forced, to account for it, to oppose to the negative myth that underlines the fearsome characteristics of a society, a “counter-myth” (p. 109 and passim), positive this one, developing the presentation of a world apart, in its own civilized way, and conceived in the ideological shadow of Rousseau’s “noble savage” ‒ under the aegis of Diderot too, since from “bad” he becomes “good”: a little savage no doubt, but good.

A question of land?

The perplexity in which the author leaves us concerning the concept of Bedouin is obviously due to his literary or rather nominal approach to these questions. If we are impressed by the number of references, we quickly see that they are gleaned from texts belonging to very diverse registers: to be most often present in travelers’ texts where they often appear in a surreptitious, superficial and distant way, they are sometimes elaborated in the context of more serious developments, produced following investigative stays… If stereotypes, prejudices, vague opinions, favorable or hostile, are deployed without control and moreover in the greatest disorder for most, things are not the same for travelers who, like Carsten Niebuhr or Jean-Louis Burckhardt, produce real sums on the region, from prolonged stays, a good command of the language and direct experiences of relations with the groups. For observers of this quality, one cannot judge as negative a characterization such as warlike aggressiveness or mediocre religiosity, while others will attribute with some levity perfectly imaginary virtues to the Bedouins.

But in all this another register emerges, conducive to the development of other stereotypes. Because social facts do not speak, so to speak, for themselves and the fierce Bedouins do not confide easily, nor do they put on a show. We learn about them less through direct observation and exchanges than through local informants: more or less literate multilingual interpreters, often from minority ethnic groups – Arab Christians or indigenous Jews -, traders or agents of the Ottoman power based in the city, who therefore all have in their own way a good knowledge of Bedouin social realities but who carry information situated and inscribed in social relations, with quite clear prejudices against the Bedouins, which their listeners take at face value. The image that is constructed in this way, to sometimes sound like vulgar racism, is often based on concrete contact.

Even if the boundary between these registers is often porous, even if, without it being possible to always establish that these authors have read each other, certain ideas are clearly in the air of the times, it is obvious that these registers should be treated separately, and that their assertions cannot be put on the same level. Some, which are moreover produced and circulate far from the facts they evoke in order to make a rather casual use of them, are only abracadabra considerations, which moreover tend to remain so – like, for example, the term Bachibouzoukwhich, originally to designate very real auxiliaries of the Ottoman army, end up as insults of Captain Haddock. Others tighten the facts more closely, and must be taken more seriously. Putting all this in the same bag introduces confusion and makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a clear and distinct definition of the Bedouin to emerge.

A contradictory image

Is there any progress in knowledge about this distant world? In fact, by its very richness, but also by its disparities, the data collection carried out by Sarga Moussa makes it difficult to identify secular trends concerning these representations. Firstly because the nominal approach of his documentation is not without letting a lot of things slip through, and this for a simple reason: it is that if the term “Bedouin” is indeed derived from Arabic, the informants more frequently use the term “Arabs” to designate the desert nomads who live from itinerant livestock breeding and occasionally from pillaging. This linguistic inconsistency does not facilitate attempts to identify an identity, and complicates the author’s task.

Is this why the qualifications applied to the Bedouins remain uncertain, floating between an evanescent myth and a “counter-myth”? One would rather push the hypothesis that this only reflects a reality that is in itself essentially contradictory. Moreover, whether one looks at the Bedouins from near or far, from the Arab world or from Europe, the result will always be approximately the same: because this is due to the structure of this society which, due to the very variations of the environment in which it moves, of the political groups in which it is inscribed, finds itself confronted with the most contrasting situations from which it must, in order to survive, escape in different ways. Many observers have pointed out this anthropological oxymoron, precociously underlined by a Mr. Turpin, contributor to theEncyclopedia (quoted here p. 94):

Never has a people united so many opposites. How can generosity be reconciled with plunder, humanity with the habit of shedding blood without remorse, respect for the social contract with the feeling of ferocity inspired by vengeance, submission to laws and customs with the unbridled love of independence?

The remarkable breadth of the sample of texts examined in the work has been mentioned. However, despite a final chapter on the extension of the myth beyond the middle of the XIX^e century – the date of Flaubert’s trip to Egypt – we say to ourselves that we should certainly look at these trends over a longer period, because basically in this first XIX^e century, no clear upheaval occurs in the image of the Bedouin, as is the case, for example, with the vision of the beach in Alain Corbin’s great book, The Territory of the Void (1988). We say to ourselves that this is a game of scales and that the analysis lacks the extensions that we should seek in other later authors, particularly English ones – the names of Doughty or YOU Lawrence emerges from a cohort of observers remaining in France who are largely ignored – who have fed the information on this marginal society. The chain is much longer and would concern other regions (the Sahara of the Tuaregs in particular) and other genres (painting in particular, which is only very little mentioned here) where the echoes of these inhabitants of distant margins that have reached us can be felt – this book could also be a final avatar of it. But, to return to the problem raised by the title of the work, it does not seem that these enrichments of information have made disappear the devilishly negative ideas that the colonial and postcolonial powers have continued to maintain with regard to the Bedouins: they would have even attached themselves, all of them, to making them disappear as a social group. And as for the representations that our modern and civilized metropolises are capable of with regard to nomads, we have seen what is happening with the political discourses that the Roma or the migrants who have recently emerged from the deserts of Africa and the Middle East are the subject of today.