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.

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.

For 3000 years the Bedouin people have conveyed the wisdom of their culture from one generation to the next by means of spoken proverbs. This anthology presents 1,350 of these proverbs, almost none of which have been heard outside the Bedouin world before. Clinton Bailey has collected Bedouin proverbs and documented the life and survival techniques of this hardy people during more than thirty years of fieldwork in the Negev and Sinai deserts. His is the only extensive written record of the rapidly disappearing Bedouin culture. The rich treasury of proverbs is organized around various subjects relating to the primary theme of Bedouin life: survival under harsh desert conditions. Bailey presents each proverb in Arabic and English, situates it within Bedouin culture, and explains how it relates to economic, psychological, or social survival. He provides an unprecedented view of Bedouin life as well as insights into the wider Arab world and the Arabic language.

Emptied Lands investigates the protracted legal, planning, and territorial conflict between the settler Israeli state and indigenous Bedouin citizens over traditional lands in southern Israel/Palestine. The authors place this dispute in historical, legal, geographical, and international-comparative perspectives, providing the first legal geographic analysis of the "dead Negev doctrine" used by Israel to dispossess and forcefully displace Bedouin inhabitants in order to Judaize the region. The authors reveal that through manipulative use of Ottoman, British and Israeli laws, the state has constructed its own version ofterra nullius. Yet, the indigenous property and settlement system still functions, creating an ongoing resistance to the Jewish state.Emptied Lands critically examines several key land claims, court rulings, planning policies, and development strategies, offering alternative local, regional, and international routes for justice.

This book complements A Grammar of the Bedouin Dialects of the Northern Sinai Littoral: Bridging the Linguistic Gap between the Eastern and Western Arab World (Brill: 2000) thus completing the author's description of Bedouin dialects of Sinai. Earlier and new data are synthesized in a dialectometrical approach for a subdivision into eight groups.