Auteur: Azzar
Date: 2001-11-13 03:39:53
Find out where you come from, read on ...
The land is a desert, an entirely arid area where, the people known as Arabs have lived since time begun. Like their land, the people who inhabited it, have never produced anything, so there is no record whatsoever kept of any people having been there before them. If there was, the Arabs have destroyed and eradicated any reference to previous civilisation before them, just like they did in every single country they have raided and colonised. No one knows exactly when the Arabs arrived to that part of the word and where they came from. The only probably reliable source of information we have, is a legend which
is still being told among the people of the desert: It was thought that the first person who settled in Mecca, was an illegitimate child of a Jew and his female slave from Jerusalem,. After the birth of the child, the master of the slave had noticed that the baby was of a mixed race, therefore his son and everybody knew that. To stay in line with the customs of the Jews of those days, the Jewish master killed the mother but kept and raised the child. When the child grew up, he realised how differently from other Jewish boys he was being treated. After he grew up, he started working for a very wealthy Jewish businessman escorting caravans. He could not bear people picking up on him anymore on his origins. One day
while he was on a caravan across the desert, he decided to stay in an oasis known as Mecca. Caravans used to rest there and refill from a well known as Zemzem, for the long and ever lasting journeys across the desert. From that day onward, everybody who asked him about his origin or the reason of him being alone in a so far and empty place, he only answered by the few words: I am "Arabi", from the Arabic words "3ar abi" meaning the "illegitimate of my father". Since then he was known as Arabi and his children as Arab "3ar ab", hence the words 3arabi for singular and 3arab for plural. The way of life in this part of the world was dictated by the land, it is mainly nomadic and
pastoral beside piracy and prostitution. It was in small oases that the social structures governing the life of the desert were maintained. The basic units were small groups, their numbers dictated by the necessities of life, which might be called clans or sub-tribes. A tribe was made up of clans which, rightly or wrongly, acknowledged some kind of kinship. Each tribe had its eponymous ancestor. The "ideologists" and "politicians" of the desert worked out genealogies in which the ties of kinship attributed to these ancestors reflected the various relations between the groups, which bore their names. Arabs were bound by no code of law, and no state existed to enforce any statutes with a backing of a police force or anything of that kind. The only protection for any man's life was the certainty, established by custom, that it would be dearly taught. Blood for blood and life for life was the motto of those days. The vendetta is one of the pillars of the bloodthirsty Arabic society. Given the appalling poverty of the desert against which the Arabs had to contend, there was a strong temptation to lay forcible hands on the often very relative wealth of whose who were somewhat more fortunate. What ensued was a raid, the rules of which were laid by tradition. Some clans had grown rich by preying on the settled tribes, caravans or even on other nomads. Some used their ephemeral wealth to keep slaves- foreigners bought or taken captive in the course of a raid. But the conditions of nomadic life did not lend themselves to the maintenance of slavery as an institution, with its constant watch on the captives' movements. In this highly crude primitive and highly unstable society, there was no room whatsoever for arts, with one exception however: that of words. The poet was a man (Women then, just like now, had no part to play in the society except for the sexual part of it!) of importance, and feared, because, due to the ignorance of the Arabs, he was thought to be possessed by a spirit. The poet's chief use was as a propagandist; he was the journalist of the desert....
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