Tents and houses

Assalamu Aleikum!

I drove over to visit an imam with one of the Muslim brothers I work with. The imam is from Mauritania and his mosque is on the outskirts of the town. He was friendly and interested in meeting a Muslim from the UK. Unfortunately our conversation was limited as he spoke no English and I speak very little Arabic. He was from Africa but he didn't look African. He looked either Arab or Indian. I wondered about the Arab influence in that part of Africa.

When driving through the town you see lots of big tents outside the houses. This was especially so in the outskirts. The Bedouin have only been in permanent dwellings for a couple of generations and their ties to the nomadic lifestyle are still strong. It reminds me a bit of Gadaffi's tent in Libya. It also reminds me of something I read a long time ago about the Australian govt building houses for the Aborigines and the complaint from the whites that they didn't look after their homes. That they slept outside! The Aborigines were still tied to the land and their nomadic existence.

An excellent book about nomadic lifestyle/Australia is Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. In fact I would rate it as one of my all time favourite books. It has little nuggets like the idea that babies cry when they're not being rocked because in a nomadic culture the baby will always be carried on the mother's back and hence be rocked as she walks. If there is no rocking going on then the adult is not around for protection.

I guess things like the hajj are nomadic experiences. It has always been my dream to do the hajj 'properly' i.e. overland. It always seems a bit of a cheat flying. One minute you're in London and a few hours later you're in Mecca. In the old days doing the hajj took years and was a real achievement when completed. It would be marvellous to recapture some of that in this modern age. Maybe stop over in Bosnia, Istanbul, Damascus etc for weeks at a time.

Getting back to the local Bedouins they will often go to the desert. This includes the kids and it is often a complaint from the teachers here that kids will be absent from school for weeks. They're usually looking after their family's camels. They range over the Empty Quarter into Saudi Arabia and Oman. With it being desert there are no real borders or at least none that you could see. In this day and age with passports and visas it is refreshing to hear of people travelling without these boundaries.

Masalamah
Yahya