The Bedouin and the Christians

There’s a lot of shit we don’t know about the Arabs. You see unfortunately you can’t write about the Arabs without writing about a) their rich poetic tradition, which is great and b) their traditional codes of honour, which are not so great. The Arabs, and in particular Muslim Arabs, must be the most capricious and unpredictable pan-ethnic group on the planet. And the severe mood swings of their religion are nothing short of bipolar!

I’m only speaking the truth, and the truth is important here. I actually wanted to write a book on the subject. I wanted to tell the truth from both sides. I wanted to tell how for 200 years Christians flooded the Middle East with Jewish and Muslim blood, because like any story there’s an obligation to tell both sides. Could I write about the wealth of knowledge and the Islamic Golden Age without writing about stoning women to death for being raped? It’s unlikely. So, with regret I’ve had to give up on that particular project.

But what is an Arab?

Do you know what? Bollocks to it! I am going to write a little bit about the Arabs because we should all know this. First of all, human beings aren’t born with an inherent capacity to hate. It has to be taught. And terrorism is a crime committed out of irrational hatred by people whose hearts and minds have been completely corrupted and chiselled into gross delusion of the realities. Terrorism is the fruit of blind irrational hatred. I hope you picked up on the word irrational, for currently England, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium and France are ‘infected’ with those who resent our way of life and loathe us personally for absolutely no rational reason other than they’ve been taught to do so.

While non-Muslims believe the religion of Islam originated in Mecca, Muslims believe it’s been present since the time of Adam, who they believe to be the first prophet and messenger of Islam (followed by Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, in that order)

So where do we start? What’s an Arab? What’s a Muslim? Why are they so angry? What makes them think they have the right to insist everyone else believes what they believe? Is it really that important? Why are they so hostile? The answer, of course, is that they’re not. It’s only the radical Islamists who are losing the head about it. The rest of them seem pretty cool to me.

So, let’s get our facts straight. What’s a Muslim and what’s an Arab? Okay, well the word ‘Muslim’ is the Arabic word meaning ‘One who submits to God.’ Simple as that. Got it?

Arabs are a pan-ethnic group of people with multiple racial genes. You can mostly find them inhabiting Western Asia, Northern Africa, parts of the Horn of Africa, Bordesley Green and Sparkhill in Birmingham. The term ‘pan-ethnic’ in this context is really no more correct than Americans labelling all Spanish speakers as Latin American or Chicanos, but it’s going to have to do for now because, although they share a common language, a common religion and similar physical characteristics there are tribal affiliations and intra-tribal relationships that play such an important part of Arab identity that in all honesty it’s just one big melting pot. Most Arabs, however, have direct or partial tribal relationships to the nomadic indigenous occupants of the Syrian Desert and Arabia, situated North-East of Africa.

Any the wiser?

No?

Okay, well you can skip this blog if you’re not into it, I won’t be offended. But I suspect you wonder what I’m going to come out with next. So, let’s take a look at the Bedouin.

You see, the word ‘Arab’ has had several different meanings over the centuries, but at times 'A'raab' was used exclusively by Bedouin nomads. And this mob have been around forever. The name actually means one who lives out in the open, as in the open desert, and I remember being on a bus driving through the Negev Desert of Southern Israel from the Gulf of Aqaba to Jerusalem, a distance of 200 miles, with the Sinai Peninsula on the west and the Wādī ʿAraba on the east, and seeing Bedouin tribes (camel nomads) herding livestock, and pitching traditional tents woven from goats' hair. The view was timeless, and they had a majesty and nobility about them that I couldn’t shake.

Most nomads prefer to settle near a river, which kind of makes sense, but the Bedouin prefer to live in the Arabian and Syrian deserts, the Sahara Desert of North Africa and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. They have a rich poetic tradition and traditional codes of honour known as Sharaf and Ird.

Sharaf is masculine and can be achieved, reinforced, lost, and won back. It involves maintenance of honour and protection of the woman’s ‘Ird’. Now the Ird, which is feminine, takes some explaining because although a woman is born with her Ird intact and although she can lose it through sexual infraction, it’s different from virginity. The man must protect the Ird of the women in his extended family, which could be his wives, sisters, daughters, even his mother. And this is rooted in modesty (in both dress and behaviour), fidelity, conformity and ‘appropriateness’.

They believe the ‘virtue’ of a man is violated if, say, his daughter is not dressed appropriately. The man is supposed to control the women in his family, and if he loses control then his virtue is lost in the eyes of the community and he has to ‘cleanse’ his family's honour. This can be through abortion, murder or forced suicide.

Unbelievable, isn’t it?

Even a rape victim is not accepted as a victim because the virtue of the whole family is seen to be violated. An estimated 5000 rape victims a year are murdered ‘honourably’. Sometimes acid is thrown in the victim’s face to disfigure her.

Un-fucking-believable!

I’m going to come back to this later because a) this blog is about the Bedouin and b) I’m too angry to write anymore about it.

The Bedouin, and this is interesting, claim their ancestry from Ishmael, son of Abraham and ancestor of Muhammed, although the Christians view him as the ancestor of the biblical Ishmaelites. Now you see Ishmael’s mum wasn’t Abraham’s wife, Sarai, but Hagar her handmaiden, which wouldn’t have gone down too well with Sarai at all, who by all accounts was drop-dead gorgeous. However, there’s a little bit of incest going on here that’s worth recording (what biblical story is complete without incest in one form or another) because Sarai was Abraham’s half-sister. They shared the same dad, you see, and his name was Terah. So, Terah’s daughter was also his daughter-in-law, which either way you look at it would have saved money on Christmas cards.

Now Sarai may well have been a hot number, but she was barren until she was about 90, when she gave birth to Isaac. Abraham held a great feast, but Ishmael started taking the piss. Sarai was so hacked off at this that she asked Abraham to get rid of both him and Hagar, which he did, sending them both out into the desert. And many people today regard the Gaza/Israeli conflict to have its roots in the ancient rivalry between Isaac and Ishmael, or more accurately between their mothers Sarai and Hagar.

That’s where it all kicked off, you see. Nowadays we’re well aware of the political tension and civil wars between Israel and the Muslim countries. Territories regarded by the Jews as their historical homeland are regarded by the Palestinians as belonging to them, and by the Pan-Islamists as Muslim lands. And most university-indoctrinated lefty wankstains seem to feel the same. No wonder the UAE has announced their cutting funds for citizens who want to study in the UK for fear Emirati students will be radicalised by the Muslim Brotherhoods on British campuses. British universities are now a hotbed of indoctrination. The Arab states recognise this and now view Europe as a dangerous Islamist hotspot.

So you see, the Gaza/Israeli conflict has its roots in the ancient rivalry between Isaac and Ishmael, or more accurately between their mothers, Sarai and Hagar. But how many millions of people have died over the last 4000 years because two wives didn’t like each other? It was all going to end in tears obviously, but no one thought it’d still be going on 4000 years later!

(African-Americans, by the way, have assigned Hagar as a symbol of the plight of the slave woman).

Both the Bible and the Quran agree on the story so far, but in Islam Ishmael is viewed as a prophet, and both Jewish and Islamic traditions consider him as the ancestor of the Arabs. There are no genealogies in the Quran, but a biography of Muhammad was compiled by an Arab Muslim historian known as Mohammed Ibn Ishak. It goes something like this (and I’ll cut out loads of chunks because it’ll do your head in if you were to try reading it all – I’ll just leave in the interesting bits);

This book contains the life of the Apostle of God: Muhammad was the son of Abd Allah, son of  …… Nabit, son of Ismail (Ishmael), son of Ibrahim (Abraham), the Friend of God, son of  …… Sham, son of Nuh (Noah), son of Lamech, son of Matushalakh (possibly Methuselah, who lived to be 969, the oldest man in the Bible), son of Akhanukh - who, as is believed, was the prophet Idris (traditionally identified with the Biblical Enoch), the first prophet, and the first who wrote with the reed - son of ….. Shays, son of Adam, to whom may God be gracious!

Now in the Christian tradition Enoch was the great grandfather of Noah, who’s mentioned several times in the Quran, so that would make sense.

Interestingly, Noah’s wife, Naamah (who some say was Ham’s wife), is viewed in the Quran as an evil woman, although Christians believe her to have been very pleasant. In contrast, both Christians and Muslims believe Mary, mother of Jesus, to be among the best of women. Naamah was supposedly the daughter of Enoch, so it kind of looks like Noah married his great-aunt. Noah was apparently 502 years old when Naamah gave birth to Shem, so she must have been about a thousand when the ark sailed!

Maybe I’ve got it wrong somewhere, but I don’t think so. They all lived to ripe old ages in the Bible and the Quran.

But if we leap forward 2000 years or so we can look at the Crusades because back in 1095 the Roman Catholic Church commenced a 200-year campaign in the Holy Lands. Historians still argue as to the reasons for this and the subsequent six major Holy Wars. Some see them as a defensive war against Islamic conquests, while others view them as intrusive, papal-led expansion attempts by Western Christendom. Interesting how the perspective changes with the point of view.

Either way, the objective of the Crusades was to crush all Muslims in the Holy Land, and the Christians attempted this in what can only be described as a genocidal war. The whole of Western Europe marched against the Middle East in what is now known as the Dark Ages with the express purpose of killing Arabs, and of doing so in unbelievably brutal fashion – torturing, raping, enslaving, burning alive and eating (men, women, children & babies).

‘The knights could hardly bear it, working as executioners and breathing out clouds of hot blood.’

The war crimes are well documented, so it will serve no purpose to elucidate further here.

You see, all I’m saying here is that we’re not whiter than white ourselves, and there’s very little in the Quran that isn’t also in the Bible. The difference between the Quran and the Bible, of course, is that was from a more savage, bloodthirsty age, and now we’ve moved on. By ‘we’ I mean Anglo-Saxons and those of Western descent currently living in Christian countries.

Christianity was legalised in the year 315. They’d been persecuted for 300 years but in 315 the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, possibly due to his mother, Helena’s, influence, decided to cease the persecution of Christianity across the Roman Empire, and from then on it was legal.

Well, fuck me, that’s all they needed. As soon as it was legalised Christians started ripping down Pagan temples, killing Pagan priests and over the course of the next 300 years they murdered thousands of Pagans.

What was that commandment? Thou shalt not kill. Oh yeah, that was it.

Paganism, by the way, has absolutely nothing to do with Devil worship or wild orgies at midnight. It’s got nothing to do with the Devil, Satan, demons, vampires, zombies, Frankenstein or anything of the sort. In fact, Pagans see Satan as a Christian concept.

Paganism has its origins rooted in the ancient nature religions of the world. African Pagans practiced a form of tribal religion, possibly similar to Voodoo. European Pagans would include Norse, Celtic, Greek and various traditions of Witchcraft and Wicca. And Native Americans religions would often be called Pagans.

But back in the year 315 Pagans celebrated the sanctity of Nature, honouring the divine in all things, and I recall the people in India greeting us with the Añjali Mudrā gesture and the word Namaste, indicating ‘I bow to the divine in you.’ Pagans viewed earth as the mother of us all, and see all life as one. To the Pagans every single person is a miracle and sacred creation. Every plant, tree or rock is unique and splendid. And life has four main principles;

1. To live in harmony with nature

2. To develop spiritual potential

3. To be aware of the divine in everyone (Namaste)

4. And to help all people to do the same

And I can kind of go along with that. In fact, forget the ‘kind of’, I really can go along with that. But, as you can imagine, that was enough for the Christians. ‘Fuck it,’ they cried, ‘Let’s kill the fuckers! All of ‘em.’

And they did. By 356 Pagan services became punishable by death. They even turned Pan, God of Nature, into their representation of the Devil.

And on it went. In 415 the female philosopher, Hypatia of Alexandria, was ripped to pieces by a Christian mob who felt threatened by her scholarship, learning and depth of scientific knowledge. A bloke called Thomas Heath, who wrote a lot about the history of mathematics in Ancient Greece wrote that ‘her eloquence and authority attained such influence that Christianity considered itself threatened.’

And I’m telling you, the Christians were on a fucking roll! In 782 Emperor Charlemagne, King of the Franks, had 4500 Saxons beheaded because they wouldn’t convert to Christianity. You hear of Muslims doing this nowadays, and we rightly react with fury and indignation, but we forget that throughout history Christianity has done the same.

And then came the Crusades, and I don’t intend to go on and on about the Crusades, although I would like to leave this blog with an eye-witness account by the Archbishop of Tyre, who’s considered the greatest chronicler of the crusades; ‘It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them.’

‘Quite right too,’ said the Christians.