Last week I went and spent a few days living with the bedouin of southern Jordan. Their lifestyle is relatively modern, their values are very traditional, and their arabic was relatively easy for me to understand. The next couple posts are from my writing i did there.

So we have spent today basically identically to the first day in the Baadiya, which means we walked around meeting various members of the extended family of Abu Dannah which basically makes up the population of Bir Abu Dannah. Ahmed introduced me to his 1942 perfectly preserved German infantry rifle. I also met one of the oldest surviving members of the Abu Dannah family, who offered me half of his land (which apparently is significant) if I said the Shahada and became a Muslim. That was followed by much more drinking of that excellent sweet tea. The whole day was fascinating, but the more informative experience came later. A cousin of the Abu Fawzi family that i stayed with is a 14 year old kid named Muhamed, who has taigh himself English with the help of a textbook, TV, and a prodigious, if not photographic memory. While my Arabic was working for simple communication, Muhamed was the first chance I had to get a sense for the politics and beliefs among the bedouin themselves. TO begin with, the whole set of political assumptions and beliefs are quite different from mine. Iraq was for obvious reasons the most popular subject. Saddam Hussein is a hero to these people, for being a strong arab leader who stood up to the western powers, and the way he died certainly contributed to his martyr status. I tried to point out to Muhamed that Saddam had done some awful things to his own people, and muhamed brushed it off, saying those people tried to kill him, therefore justifying what happened to them. IT also illuminated something that had happened earlier, when i had been walking between villages with the brothers of my host family and a a friend of theirs, who holds a religious position of some sort at the mosque. Zaid has a ringtone on his phone that consists of inspirational traditional music with Saddam Hussein speaking his own poetry in a voice over. The other guest told me in arabic that that ringtone makes his heart beat faster, and I got the sense that he was expecting an argumentative responce. I didn't know at the time, however, that it was Saddam, so i didn't oblige. I have discussed it with other people, namely muhamed,who pointed out after a rather exasperated exchange that according to the rules of Islam, this disagreement should compliment, rather than diminish our friendship. There was also at least a hint of admiration in his eyes when he talked about al-Jubr, the insurgent sniper who has allegedly killed "160" US troops. Also on the subject of different assumptions, many people, even the Britain educated Dr. Fawzi, are skeptical about whether the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Arab terrorists. I often found myself taking a much more American government line in an attempt to balance out what i was hearing. It was frustrating at times, but the biggest trap would be to assume that I am any different from them, no matter how genuinely i believe personally in the accuracy of my base of political and factual assumptions.