(PDF) Contesting Identities in South Sinai: Development, Transformation, and the Articulation of a "Bedouin" Identity under Egyptian Rule

Contesting Identities in South Sinai:

Development, Transformation, and the

Articulation of a “Bedouin” Identity

under Egyptian Rule

The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies

seeks to contribute by research, documentation, and publication to the

study and understanding of the modern history and current affairs of the

Middle East and Africa. The Center is part of the School of History and

the Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University.

Contesting Identities

in South Sinai:

Development, Transformation,

and the Articulation

of a “Bedouin” Identity

under Egyptian Rule

by

Joshua R. Goodman

Tel Aviv University

The Moshe Dayan Center

for Middle Eastern and African Sudies

ISBN: 978-965-224-097-2

Production and cover design: Elena Lesnick, The Moshe Dayan

Center

Printed by: Tel Aviv University Press

5

Table of Contents

Preface

A Personal Account ..............................................................11

Introduction .............................................................................21

Chapter 1

Egypt’s Vision for Sinai .........................................................47

Chapter 2

The Evolving Economies of the Dahab Bedouin — Emerging

Trends and Continuities .........................................................67

Chapter 3

Economic Competition and Marginalization ............................97

Chapter 4

Evolving Social Contacts and Frameworks .............................123

Chapter 5

Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Identity Transformation among

the Aqaba Bedouin .............................................................159

Conclusions ...........................................................................199

Epilogue

July 2011 – June 2012 .......................................................217

Bibliography ..........................................................................223

Acknowledgements

6

Table of Figures

Figure 1: Map of approximate tribal divisions in Sinai ............................. 30

Figure 2: Conducting an interview on ﬁlm. ............................................. 42

Figure 3: Ongoing construction in Dahab .............................................. 65

Figure 4: The Dahab Corniche .............................................................66

Figure 5: Urban herds .......................................................................... 80

Figure 6: Dried, preserved ﬁsh .............................................................. 82

Figure 7: Cannibis farm in South Sinai .................................................. 86

Figure 8: Bedouin girls selling bracelets ................................................. 94

Figure 9: Bedouin ‘arisha competing with Egyptian construction. ........... 103

Figure 10: Bedouin selling handicrafts on the Dahab Corniche .............. 120

Figure 11: Cairene youths strolling in the Khan al-Khalili ...................... 132

Figure 12: New forms of Bedouin dress ............................................... 141

Figure 13: Two photos of ‘Asala Center .............................................. 148

Figures 14 and 15: Wealthy and poor Bedouin homes in ‘Asala ............150

Figure 16: Grafﬁti on a wall in a Bedouin neighborhood ....................... 210

Figure 17: Grafﬁti in ‘Asala declaring “No to the Goverment.” .............. 221

Acknowledgements

7

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to recognize and thank Eli Sperling,

my close friend, colleague, and research partner. Without him, it is

very likely this project, born from our collaboration, would never

have happened. I would also like to thank him for his continuing

availability for questions, comments, and continuing debate, as

well as his support. Next, I would like to thank Daniel Cherrin, our

documentarian, for his patience, commitment, and hard work during

the course of this project. Special thanks go to him for documenting

and archiving our primary research, providing a number of photos

that appear throughout this work, as well as facilitating our close

relationship with our subjects.

I would like to recognize my thesis advisors, the late Professor

Joseph Kostiner, and Dr. Yoav Alon, both of Tel Aviv University’s

Department of Middle Eastern and African History, for their continuing

support and advice throughout the course of our research and writing.

Without their close help, this project would not have been conceived,

approved, or successfully executed. In a similar vein, thanks go out

to Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and

African Studies for its support in bringing this study to publication.

In addition to my departmental advisors, I would like to extend

my appreciation and thanks to Professor Emanuel Marx of Tel Aviv

University’s Social Sciences Department, who is not only one of the

foremost researchers of the Sinai Bedouin, largely paving the way

for my own work, but who also consistently made himself available

to answer any questions and provide valuable feedback based on his

experiences as well as his area of expertise, anthropology. He was

also kind enough to provide us with some of his own contacts in Sinai

and took valuable time out of his schedule to review a number of

chapters. Additionally, I would like to thank Professor Efrat Ben-Ze’ev

of Hebrew University’s Truman Institute for the Advancement of

Peace, for also agreeing to act as an advisor in an unofﬁcial capacity,

especially in relation to issues of anthropology and ﬁeld research.

This project is the product of my time at not one but two

institutions, and I must extend my deepest thanks to Yale University

and the MacMillan Center’s Council on Middle Eastern Studies,

Acknowledgements

8

Sociologists Jonathan Wyrtzen and Jeffery C. Alexander, and the

participants of the Middle East Social Sciences workshop for their

comments. Special thanks are due to Ellen Lust, my advisor in the

Political Science Department, for her close assistance and comments

on the ﬁnal manuscript. I would also like to extend my gratitude to

James C. Scott, whose ideas echo throughout this work. His unique

perspective on agrarian societies and their interaction with states

provided a fascinating looking glass for my work with pastoral groups.

Thanks also to William G. Nomikos, a colleague and fellow graduate

student in the Political Science department. I must also thank the

MacMillan Center for providing a ﬁnishing grant for the project,

providing me an unexpected opportunity to return to the ﬁeld in the

summer of 2012 while I was making my ﬁnal revisions.

Another important individual to acknowledge is Professor Lila Abu

Lughod of Columbia University, whose work Veiled Sentiments on

identity and the Western Egyptian Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin was a primary

source of inspiration behind this study. Also deserving of recognition

in this regard is Thomas Eriksen, whose anthropological examination

of ethnicity provided valuable insights and direction in my own

examination of Bedouin identity.

On a more personal note, I must express my deep appreciation

to my family and advisors who encouraged me to take the risk and

plunge head ﬁrst into the experience that was picking up my life and

moving it to another country. They would readily acknowledge that

this was a trying moment in my life, but they gave me the unequivocal

support I needed to make the step into that unknown. To my parents,

who never once questioned my decision and encouraged me to follow

my passions, thank you for your support and encouragement. I must

also recognize and thank two professors at Emory, Benjamin Hary

and Kenneth Stein, who both helped me to understand the decision I

was about to make and the opportunities it would present me. Their

support gave me the conﬁdence I needed to succeed abroad, and

while they have not been my ofﬁcial advisors for many years, I will

never forget the impact they had on me as I transitioned to life in the

Middle East.

My warmest thanks and deepest appreciation go to the Bedouin

of Aqaba, the Egyptian migrants, and all the others who formed the

Acknowledgements

9

basis for the research presented in this paper. To all the inhabitants

of Dahab, I dedicate this work to your uneasy coexistence and your

attempts to make the best of a difﬁcult situation. Furthermore, a

special and eternal thanks to the members of the Mzeina and Jabaliyya

tribes who welcomed us into their lives, homes, and families, who

showed us nothing but warmth and kindness, whose cooperation was

invaluable to this study, and whose friendship will remain with me for

the rest of my days.

Finally, I want to dedicate this work to the memory of Joseph

Kostiner, who passed away shortly after the completion of the ﬁrst

version of this study and my departure from Tel Aviv. His guidance

and support were instrumental both to this project as well as my early

encounter with academia. He was the closest thing I had to family

during my time at Tel Aviv University. While we did not always agree,

he was a source of unequivocal support and encouraged me to stand

by my claims and pushed me to develop more convincing arguments.

I can undoubtedly say this project would not have succeeded without

his personal support. He was a source not only of guidance, but of

inspiration, and he will be missed dearly.

1111

Preface: A Personal Account

My story begins late one evening in the winter of 2008 when I was

sitting on the beach in Dahab with a young Bedouin shop-owner and

my close friend and classmate, Eli Sperling. Eli and I had come to

Dahab in search of a break from the bustle of life in Tel Aviv, where

we were both pursuing a masters degree in Middle Eastern History.

While the purpose of our trip was purely relaxation, it was typical of

us to wander off of the beaten path and perhaps stumble into a scene

that a run-of-the-mill tourist might not. After looking into a random

shop and being invited to share a shisha with the Bedouin who

ran it, we found ourselves having a heart to heart with a complete

stranger by the beach. The ﬁrst thing that struck me was the level

of openness he was willing to show us as he began to rant about

his dissatisfaction with Egypt and the Egyptian “farmers” (fellahin),

as he pejoratively referred to residents of the Nile Valley. “Fucking

Egyptians,” he practically spat, “I hate those Egyptian farmers.” Wait,

I thought to myself, were we not sitting on an Egyptian beach? Wasn’t

this Bedouin also Egyptian?

As he launched into a tirade about the feminine qualities of the

“Egyptian man,” my thoughts wandered to Lila Abu Lughod’s work

on the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin of the Western Egyptian Desert, and the

almost identical way in which she described their dim perceptions

of Egyptian society.1 As I listened along with Eli, we both began

considering the words of our companion and how his expressions

related to the anthropological concepts we were studying in our

Middle Eastern tribalism seminar in Tel Aviv. As though a light had

been turned on in the attic, we realized that our academic experience

allowed us to place this episode in a greater sociological context.

There was a deeper, more signiﬁcant meaning behind this seemingly

random display of hostility and bravado, perhaps applicable to a much

wider Bedouin culture. This, I felt, was a signiﬁcant discovery.

Rewind a year and a half, back to my ﬁrst visit to Dahab in the

summer of 2007, shortly after my graduation from Emory University,

1. Lila Abu Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin

Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Preface

12

where I had received by bachelor’s degree, and my arrival in Tel

Aviv. While I had visited Israel on many occasions, this was my ﬁrst

time in Egypt, in fact my ﬁrst time in the Middle East outside of the

predominantly Western-oriented State of Israel. I had been eager to

see something of the “real” Middle East: a convoy of camels carrying

goods across the desert, a ﬁreside evening at a Bedouin camp singing

ancient songs about the “good old days,” really anything that made

me feel like I was actually in the Middle East, a region that, as an

American Jew, had been a personal obsession for as long as I could

remember. Looking back, I will admit, my views of the region were

perhaps overly romanticized and I undoubtedly set myself up for

disappointment. Indeed, upon our arrival in Dahab, I was struck by how

phony the presentation of “Bedouin culture” to tourists appeared to

me, how much its manifestation reminded me of tourist reproductions

of Bedouin culture in Israel. That is not to say that there were no

camel convoys or singing by the campﬁre, but it still felt artiﬁcial.

Due to a certain, albeit limited, understanding of the social history

of the Middle East, it was quite apparent to me then that the tourists

were getting duped, and there was very little in Dahab that constituted

anything resembling “traditional” Bedouin culture of the past in my

limited understanding of the subject. I feared that the presence of

the town and the tourists had caused the Bedouin and their cultural

heritage to disappear, replaced by a manufactured cultural experience

presented as authentic in order to give scuba divers and windsurfers

an “exotic” atmosphere meant to enhance their vacations.

But for the longest time, I had great difﬁculty explaining exactly

why I felt this way. I knew that something seemed phony to me, but

should this come as such a shock in a space devoted to tourism? It

wasn’t until my arrival at Yale, when during a course on Imperialism

in the Middle East I read Timothy Mitchell’s post-Structuralist account

of British imperialism in Egypt, Colonising Egypt, that it hit me. The

key was in Mitchell’s narrative of European visitors’ ﬁrst experiences

in the chaotic disorganization of Egyptian cities after their exposure to

sanitized reproductions back home:

They were confused, of course, but perhaps the key to their

confusion was this: although they thought of themselves as

moving from the pictures to the real thing, they went on trying…

A Personal Account

13

to grasp the real thing as a picture. How could they otherwise,

since they took reality itself to be a picture?...Brought up in

what they thought of as a representational world, they took

representation to be a universal condition.2

The problem for these visitors was that they had arrived in Egypt

expecting to ﬁnd something distinctly familiar, connecting their

experience in the real world to the “world-as-exhibition” they had

experienced back home. I realized my problem had been exactly the

opposite; my disappointment stemmed from the fact that Dahab’s

Bedouin experience did appear to me as “world-as-exhibition,” when

I was distinctly looking for something “authentic” that transcended the

superﬁciality that I experienced in Orientalized Western perceptions

of the Bedouin. My disappointment, ironically, stemmed from the

unexpected situation in which Dahab met all of my expectations.

But the irony was that while my expectations for the Bedouin were

quite different than most visitors to Dahab, I, too, was guilty of the

same essentialization that had been the source of my disappointment.

Looking back, this was a vitally important experience, as it helped

me understand how the tourists’ expectations and limited knowledge

created demand for certain activities, helping to shape the type of

tourism the Bedouin offered, which in turn shaped the way in which

their culture was articulated.

Returning to that beachside evening conversation: it was then

that I realized that Bedouin culture had not disappeared in Sinai, but

lingered in both altered forms as well as symbolic forms, reﬂecting

simultaneously an acceptance of development and transformation as

well as an attempt to maintain tradition. Our excitement was palpable.

Eli and I decided to pursue this subject and immerse ourselves in the

Bedouins’ contemporary environment in an attempt to understand

how the Bedouin have changed and what their present condition was.

This was the beginning of our collaboration.

Our new friend invited us back to his home where we shared

tea with his family. From there we were introduced to his cousins

and friends who lived in Dahab. Quickly they came to know us,

2. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1988), p. 22.

Preface

14

and before long we were seldom able to walk through the streets of

Dahab without being recognized and greeted. Over the course of the

next three years, our relationship with the young Bedouin (in their

teens and twenties) deepened and we came to know the community

through their eyes. This group included our friend the shopkeeper,

his older sister, divorced by the time she was 23, his mother the land

activist, his younger brothers and sisters (full and half-siblings), and

their many cousins and friends who formed the core of their social

group in Dahab. We met Bedouin shopkeepers and drivers, tour

guides, windsurﬁng and scuba instructors, local drug dealers, hotel

owners, community organizers, and school children, Bedouin with

an incredibly wide array of occupations and responsibilities. Each

had a story to tell, with similar origins but widely different hopes and

goals. With all of these individuals guiding us through the developing

landscape of Dahab, we came to perceive the town (both physically

and symbolically) in a way that we never could have imagined. Instead

of understanding Dahab only as a beachside tourist paradise, we came

to understand it as an economic and social conﬂict zone in its own

unique way.

Our greatest source of information came from the younger

Bedouin, both because of the nature of our encounter as well as the

linguistic skills that the members of this generation possessed. Despite

our limited Arabic, we found communication to be practically effortless

as our English-speaking Bedouin friends would act as translators when

needed. This group of Bedouin mediated our encounter with the

society of Sinai, and in this way, the research we gathered was most

inﬂuenced by this young generation of unmarried Bedouin who grew

up almost exclusively in an urban setting under Egyptian rule.3 The

3. While many people would not recognize a town as small as Dahab to

constitute something truly “urban,” the social and economic distinction

between urban (town) and rural (village) is vital to this study. The town of

Dahab is an important manifestation of early urbanization, and contrasts

between Dahab, loosely conceived as a type of metropole, and the

surrounding villages will be continually invoked. The distinction between

town and village is not based on size, but rather on the fundamentals of

organization.

A Personal Account

15

very nature of our ﬁeld encounter focused our research in a far more

signiﬁcant way than the types of questions we asked.

It soon became apparent that the relationships that we forged with

the Bedouin had a signiﬁcant impact on the direction of our research

agenda. As Lila Abu Lughod explains in the introduction to Veiled

Sentiments, “To ignore the encounter [between researcher and

subject] not only denies the power of factors such as personality, social

location in the community, intimacy of contact and luck to shape

ﬁeldwork and its product, but also perpetuates the conventional ﬁctions

of objectivity and omniscience that mark the ethnographic genre.”4

A fair account of the ﬁeld research preserves the transparency and

integrity of the research. It does not beneﬁt the writer to underplay

the personal connection that inevitably results from the ethnographic

experience. On the contrary, by acknowledging and embracing the

inevitable, we might come to a better understanding of the impact of

the research on the ﬁnal work, increasing the accessibility and value

of the research itself. Throughout this book, a number of personal

accounts are given. I attempt to present as personal a picture of the

event as possible while maintaining my focus on the issue at hand for

the very purpose of providing a transparent account of the research

experience.

Our ﬁrst important discovery was that as much as we were

interested in learning about the Bedouin’s culture, they were equally

fascinated with ours, listening to our tales from home with an intense

curiosity. This was not limited to stories, however, and our Bedouin

friends viewed our return trips with excitement as we would bring

much promised photographs and souvenirs along with our tales. The

Bedouin, trapped in Egypt because of restrictions against their travel

out of the country, are gripped with a perpetual wanderlust that our

tales of New York, Paris, and Tel Aviv could only partially sate. For

them, we were a window to the outside world.

It was no small shock for me to discover the strong similarities

between myself and my Bedouin friends, especially when I was

expecting to be confronted by a very foreign, even unrecognizable

culture. But as I listened to the Bedouin speak about their lives, I heard

4. Abu Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, p. 10.

Preface

16

echoes of my own thoughts, ranging from anxiety about their future

success to their attitudes about women, sexuality, and marriage, and

even their growing interest in music and sports. It was impossible not

to view them as part of a global youth that, in my late 20s at the

time of this publication, I am equally a part of. This connection was

facilitated by the openness that we were shown, the extent to which

the Bedouin were able to understand us from their daily interactions

with tourists, as well as the ease with which we were able to understand

their lives, which were not so starkly different from our own. While the

circumstances of their lives were certainly quite different, it was easy

to understand their worries about securing a good job and starting

a family, and whether they would be able to support themselves in

the future. Instead of focusing on the issues that were unfamiliar to

us, we spent much of our time discussing what we had in common,

deepening the bond that formed between us.

Further blurring the lines between the ﬁeld and our lives back

in Tel Aviv and beyond has been our ability to maintain contact

with our friends from Dahab, through social media and internet

communications such as Skype. Many of our friends have Facebook

accounts that they access almost daily, allowing us to keep in contact

when we are not in Dahab. They have the ability to follow our lives

over the internet, and we often have the opportunity to speak and

catch up, despite being as many as 5,000 miles away. These Bedouin

were not just research subjects, they were, and still are, close friends;

people who opened my eyes to new but familiar realities and gave me

the opportunity to leave Tel Aviv with a sense of accomplishment and

a greater understanding of the world around me.

My greatest regret is that I cannot be more speciﬁc when

discussing them. I cannot tell their individual stories or even write

their names. While we all agreed that it was important to produce a

narrative highlighting the sociopolitical trauma of the Egyptian state’s

development scheme and dismantling the idea that the beneﬁts rain

down evenly on all Egyptians, there is no question that challenging

the regime’s sociopolitical hegemony entails a certain level of risk. But

ﬁrst and foremost, I believe my responsibility is to my friends, and the

following work is an attempt to shed light on their situation.It should

be fairly clear that this type of subaltern or “bottom-up” analysis

A Personal Account

17

clashes quite strikingly with the “top-down” narratives perpetuated by

state authorities.

Perhaps the most important factors pushing me to focus on the

particular question of identity contestation were the politics that

were unfolding around me during my time in Sinai. While Sinai has

received increasing, and increasingly negative, attention in the media

after the fall of the Mubarak regime in February 2011,the peninsula

has long been considered a hotbed of instability. Narcotics smuggling,

human trafﬁcking, and terrorism are just a few of Sinai’s endemic

problems that have been blamed on the Bedouin. True, Bedouin have

been involved in all of these activities. The problem, which is itself

a core issue treated in this book, is that the activities of a select few

have been generalized as a cultural characteristic afﬂicting everyone

who considers themselves Bedouin. This is simply not true, and

the underlying circumstances that produce these types of behaviors

have little to do with internal aspects of Bedouin culture. Instead, I

discovered that regional and national factors, as well as basic market

pressures such as supply and demand, pushed certain groups of

Bedouin into certain illicit activities.

The primary distinction to be made among the Sinai Bedouin in

this regard is sub-regional; the social geography of North and South

Sinai are distinct. This has nothing to do with systematic differences in

the nature of the tribes inhabiting each region, but rather the policies

adopted by the Egyptian state and the nature of the Arab-Israeli

conﬂict. North Sinai, especially the areas bordering Israel and Gaza,

has become rife with the smuggling of weapons and narcotics as well

as of women and refugees across the border, due to the incredibly

high level of demand for these goods and the risk associated with

transport across a national border. Ofﬁcial embargoes on such goods

prevent legal organization of these activities, but the promise of high

proﬁts for those willing to take the risk have pushed some North

Sinai Bedouin to participate, utilizing tightly bound social networks

to facilitate such activities. Their willingness to participate in the black

economy is increased by their marginalization from the legal economy.

Egyptian policies have failed to provide the Bedouin sufﬁcient

economic opportunities in the transforming agricultural and industrial

economy of the North. In the South, production and smuggling of

Preface

18

narcotics is widespread, due not to transnational smuggling pressures,

but to local demand fuelled by the tourist market. The smuggling of

weapons, women, and refugees is entirely absent. Trade routes for

these goods and migrants do not transit the South, and furthermore,

such activities are potentially disruptive to tourism, the primary source

of Bedouin income. The relatively more open access that South Sinai

Bedouin have to the developing economy has led to signiﬁcantly

different attitudes about the worth of certain types of illicit activities,

as well as economically disruptive violence in general.

The other major issue facing Sinai Bedouin is terrorism. In the

opening decade of the 21st century, South Sinai was targeted three

times by terrorism. In October 2004, the Taba Hilton was attacked

with a car-bomb; in July 2005, a number of explosions rocked

Sharm el-Sheikh, and in April 2006, three bombs exploded in Dahab

itself, leading to multiple deaths and injuries, among both Egyptian

and foreign tourists. In all of these cases, authorities conﬁrmed

Bedouin participation and cracked down on Bedouin throughout

Sinai. However, in targeting Southern Bedouin for early arrests, the

authorities made a serious mistake. While opposition to the Egyptian

state is widespread in Sinai, violent manifestations are generally a

product of circumstances unique to North Sinai, where opposition

ideologies and greater instability have combined to generate violence

on a scale unseen in the South outside of these bombings. In the

South, on the other hand, the political and economic consequences

of terrorism are so devastating that there is absolutely no support for

it among Bedouin in the tourist areas of South Sinai.

Authorities later discovered and acknowledged that the Bedouin

perpetrators were from Northern tribes, just as the economic logic

would suggest.5 Northern tribes resent both the state and Southern

tribes, and the attacks against tourist resorts were as much an outburst

against the latter for their “privileged” economic position as they were

against foreigners or the state. These bombings devastated the tourist

economy in South Sinai, in turn causing severe economic hardship

among Southern tribes involved in tourism. Instead of understanding

that the Southern Bedouin were as much victims of these attacks as

5. Roee Nahmias, “Dahab Bombers Were Sinai Bedouins,” Yediot Ahronot

Online, April 26, 2006.

A Personal Account

19

were the tourists, the Egyptian state undertook efforts to “shield”

tourist centers from Bedouin living nearby. While Southern Bedouin

were entirely innocent of these crimes, they fell victim to the tendency

to assign cultural blame to groups instead of speciﬁc blame to

individuals. They were dangerous and subversive simply because they

were “Bedouin”; the actions of a few led to a generalized stereotype

afﬂicting the entire group.

The Egyptian state made no efforts to prevent the emergence of

such patently false and damaging stereotypes. If anything, their actions

served to reinforce them. The question is why. I believe there are two

answers. First, we all have a tendency to characterize by culture and

judge entire groups based on the actions of some of their members.

Second, it seems intuitive that the Egyptian state would show little

inclination to acknowledge the effects their own policies have played

in the Northern Bedouins’ turn to violent opposition. The state, by

virtue of its existence as the state, rarely accepts responsibility for the

negative effects of its policies. Instead, it seeks to blame others for

reasons that may be entirely spurious, while attempting to guard the

legitimacy of its actions.

Finally, on this note, I would like to insert a bit of a disclaimer

about some of the analytical decisions I have made throughout this

book. Language is a tricky thing when applied normatively. That is

to say, similar actions may be categorized differently depending on

the ideological proclivities of the speaker as well as the identities of

the actor and recipient of such action; people cannot seem to detach

language from the “good” and “bad” connotations that many words

carry. The maxim “One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom

ﬁghter” speaks volumes about the emotional connotations words carry

and the strength of the responses they provoke. It is my strong belief

that similar actions or attributes should carry similar labels, and when

I select a term, I have done so because of the analytical deﬁnition

I have attached to it. Thus, when I describe Egyptian state actions

as “neo-colonial,” this is not an accusation nor is it an attempt to

delegitimize the state. Instead, it is the recognition that the actions

of the Egyptian state (or any other state, for that matter) towards its

national periphery is strikingly similar to the manner in which imperial

centers acted towards their imperial peripheries.Joel Migdal presents

Preface

20

an identical conclusion: “Indigenously ruled regimes… often ended up

employing much the same set of policies as the Western powers did

in colonial territories.”6 Similarly, when I describe Bedouin identity as

“ethnic,” I am not making a political argument but an analytical one,

based on a well-established scholarly literature, albeit an argument

that is still somewhat contested. I hope that readers will withhold

their judgments regarding the legitimacy of such labels until after the

evidence has been presented. Legitimacy should come a posteriori,

not from the normative or emotional response to linguistic markers

used to describe events and actions.

6. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society

Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 56.

21

Introduction

Tourism development and an increasing state presence along the

Aqaba Coast of the Sinai Peninsula have motivated a number of

transformations among the local Bedouin population. Most notable of

these changes relate to patterns of social and economic organization

as the Bedouin increasingly settle in towns, pursue economic

opportunities provided by Egyptian development, and come into

increasing contact with foreigners in their daily interactions. While

Egyptian development programs have encouraged many Bedouin to

settle in towns such as Dahab and Nuwayba, they appear to be failing

to incorporate the Bedouin into the social fabric of the Egyptian nation.

This study focuses on the relationship between Egyptian development,

socioeconomic change, and the transformation of Bedouin identity

in the Aqaba Coast region of the Sinai Peninsula in the period

since Egypt reoccupied Sinai between 1979 and 1982 (henceforth

“the neo-Egyptian period”). This period has been characterized by

rapid development and attempts at national integration. Egyptian

state-building has instigated an accelerating process of acculturation

among the Bedouin that reﬂects the major transformations in

their sociopolitical environment. Absent, however, is exchange of

“traditional” identities for “modern, national” identities as envisioned

by Egyptian authorities. Instead, the Bedouin have retained a strong

sense of their heritage and tradition despite the signiﬁcant social

transformations they have already experienced. They have developed

a unique sense of cultural distinctiveness and articulate their identity in

direct opposition to an “Egyptian” identity.

The Bedouin living in Sinai’s Aqaba (Southeast) region have

reacted to the increasing presence of both state authorities and

unskilled migrant workers from the Nile Valley with hostility, leading

to the emergence of a social boundary between the Aqaba Bedouin

and the Egyptians who constitute the pool of laborers and authority

ﬁgures in Sinai. What is surprising, however, is that this boundary

is strengthening even as empirically identiﬁable cultural differences

between the two groups appear to be in decline. Furthermore,

Introduction

22

and far more interesting, the intensity of this process appears to

be tied directly to the intensity and pace of Egyptian development.

Simultaneously, the Bedouin are forming closer relationships with

foreign visitors and tourists, despite the often signiﬁcant differences

in their social conventions. These relationships constitute a primary

source of cultural transformation for the Bedouin, and in Dahab many

Bedouin are actively adopting and communicating elements of tourist

culture as their own.

How, then, are the Bedouin maintaining their identity and

heritage in the face of rapid social transformation, and what role, if

any, has the Egyptian government and its policies played in fueling

this process? While the connection between state development and

Bedouin socioeconomic transformation is quite clear, the link between

these processes and Bedouin identity is far less apparent. In order to

more effectively anticipate the sociopolitical outcomes of this type of

development and the resultant relationships formed by different sectors

of Egyptian society, it is important to ascertain the actual effects of

development on processes of integration and identity formation.

The social distance between the Egyptian and Bedouin

communities, reﬂected by the economic marginalization of the

Bedouin and their self-segregating tendencies, has led to the

reinforcement of the boundary between Bedouin and Egyptian

social categories. This situation has largely been motivated by the

Egyptian authorities’ inaccurate assumptions about Bedouin society

and the social effects of economic development, both of which were

fundamentally challenged by the unanticipated Bedouin reaction to

Egyptian development strategies. This study contends that Bedouin

identity in the Aqaba region of South Sinai, far from disappearing

in the face of new lifestyles, is actually strengthening in reaction to

Egyptian encroachment and development despite processes of social

homogenization caused by integrative development. The structural

integration of the Bedouin into the Egyptian state is not increasing a

sense of “national solidarity” among the Bedouin. On the contrary,

they communicate both a feeling of marginalization by Egyptian

authorities and a lack of national pride and belonging. Instead of

folding the Bedouin into the existing “Egyptian nation,” increasing

contact and transformation is fuelling a conﬂict between two groups

that see themselves as socially distinct.

Introduction

23

Simultaneously, the Bedouin are clearly recognizing a number of

beneﬁts that tourism development has brought to them, acknowledging

the rise in living standards even while lamenting the marginalization

due to perceived discriminatory policies of the Egyptian government.

This suggests that the Bedouin are not opposed to development, but

to the manner in which the Egyptian government is pursuing it.

Due to the economic and political importance placed on the

peninsula in the latter half of the 20th century, Sinai of the past 60

years has been marked by increasing levels of foreign penetration,

whether from Cairo, Jerusalem, or more recently, the “Lonely

Planet.” As scholars most often focus on the political and “big picture”

consequences of this type of penetration, competition, and conﬂict,

the micro-level social consequences have been given relatively little

attention and warrant closer study. This has been especially true of

the 30 years since Sinai was reoccupied by Egypt and Israeli social

scientists largely ended their research there. However, it is undeniable

that this perpetual instability, marked by frequently shifting regimes,

the intrigues of interested powers, and the recent arrival of tourism on

a global scale has ensured that change has been a constant feature in

the lives of Sinai’s inhabitants. While some of these changes have been

purely political and rather superﬁcial, others have caused signiﬁcant

dislocations in the socioeconomic patterns of everyday life.

The Bedouin, once caught between competing powers, an

environment of scarcity, and a territory marked by limited centralized

political control, are now faced with a new reality. The Egyptian

government, which regained Sinai from Israeli occupation per the

1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, has discarded its previous plan

for Sinai as military buffer to Israel and instead continued the Israeli

strategy of economic development, especially in the tourism sector.

This development has led to the emergence of urban spaces across

Sinai, sites that have supported emerging markets to create local

jobs and attract migrants from the Nile Valley searching for work in a

stagnating national economy. These towns have given the Egyptian

government a foothold in Sinai, allowing the state to bring a measure

of regulation to the peninsula; they have also created a destination for

an expanding foreign population of tourists and ex-pats, mostly from

Europe and America, who have become a common feature in the

transforming socioeconomic landscape of South Sinai.

Introduction

24

A large majority of the indigenous inhabitants of Sinai are

Bedouin, who are often assumed to be disconnected from the realities

of contemporary political life and are usually viewed as traditional

and isolated. On the contrary, it is inevitable that the lives of those

inhabiting Sinai would be dramatically affected by wars, invasions,

peace negotiations, phased withdrawals, urban development, and the

growth of tourism, and not only politically. Economically, these events

have the power to shape markets, and socially, the arrival of new

visitors carrying differing forms of culture has fundamentally altered

the Bedouins’ social space.

The native Bedouin have not ignored the Egyptian-directed

development process; indeed they could not even if they wanted to. On

the most superﬁcial level, signiﬁcant changes to the economic situation

of Sinai, with the emergence of local markets and a ﬂourishing tourist

economy, have encouraged new types of economic engagement,

while an increasing government presence has limited the ability to

continue a number of traditional activities such as herding and ﬁshing.

Furthermore, with the rapid expansion of available technologies and

increasing contact with Egyptian authority ﬁgures, migrants, and

tourists, the Bedouin have been exposed to new forms of culture

that have led them to reconsider their place in society. A notable

consequence is that they have begun to conceive of themselves as

imbedded in a much larger social environment on both a national and

global scale. This has recently become a much greater concern to the

Bedouin, leading to signiﬁcant changes in cultural conceptions and

self-image.

Analytical Frameworks

A major focus of this study is political identity. A question immediately

arises as to the best way to conceive of Bedouin identity. Is the

lens of tribalism still the best way to understand socioeconomic and

political transformation among the Bedouin? The answer to this

question is an unequivocal no, for the continuing tendency to study

the Bedouin through the lens of “tribalism” does a double disservice.

First, it perpetuates the ﬁction that there is some fundamental cultural

difference between tribal and non-tribal societies instead of conceiving

Introduction

25

“tribalism” through an organizational idiom. Second, it eliminates

any intersubjectivity with non-tribal populations, complicating any

attempt to apply the study of contemporary political processes to the

Bedouin.

Instead, I propose to utilize a signiﬁcantly different type of identity

theory to examine the identity politics of the Aqaba Bedouin, that

of “ethnicity.” While the term itself carries a number of political

connotations, my decision to adopt this category is entirely analytical,

deﬁned as “a form of interaction between culture groups operating

within common social [and political] contexts.”7 While this deﬁnition

may be unfamiliar to some, who instead perceive ethnicity to be similar

to ideas of race, there is a rich literature on the politics of identities

in interaction, to which scholars, notably social anthropologists, have

attached the label “ethnic.” In this way, I draw an analytical distinction

between tribalism, which aims to regulate relations within Bedouin

society, and ethnicity, which operates between the Bedouin and other

social groups. Tribalism is internally regulating; ethnicity is externally

regulating. At its most parsimonious, ethnicity is deﬁned as a form of

social organization based on an idiom of cultural descent.8

This political interaction of distinct social groups within national

contexts is precisely the focus of this book, and I have found that this

concept of ethnicity has provided high leverage for the analysis of

questions of Bedouin identity in a socially heterogeneous setting such

as Dahab.9 “Ethnicity” in this sense, focuses on issues of sociopolitical

7. Abner Cohen, “Introduction: The Lessons of Ethnicity,” in Abner Cohen

(ed.), Urban Ethnicity (London: Tavistock, 1974), p. xi.

8. Note that this definition implies that traits such as skin color and language

are not the sources of ethnic difference in and of themselves, but

instead are signaling devices for different culture groups, whether real or

imagined. See Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1985), p. 55. Horowitz states, “Ethnic

groups can be placed at various points along the birth-choice continuum.

But there is always a significant element of descent.”

9. J. Clyde Mitchell, “Perceptions of Ethnicity and Ethnic Behavior: An

Empirical Explanation,” in Urban Ethnicity (ed.), Abner Cohen (London:

Tavistock, 1974), pp. 27–28. When reading anthropology that dates

back to the 50s and 60s, as much of Mitchell’s work does, care must

Introduction

26

competition and provides a strong approximation of national identities

and those that develop in reaction to nationalism and nation-building.

In all of these ways, the type of identity that is the focus of this study

reﬂects many ethnic elements, and ethnicity theory, especially as it is

articulated among social anthropologists, provides a compelling logic

explaining the patterns of transformation and articulation of Bedouin

identity in the urban centers of South Sinai.

While the application of an “ethnic” framework is admittedly quite

rare in the study of the Bedouin, its importance to Middle Eastern

sociopolitical organization has not gone unrecognized. As early as

1984, Itamar Rabinovich and Milton Esman hypothesized that a

greater willingness to explore such theories of ethnicity and issues of

ethnic pluralism in Middle East societies could signiﬁcantly aid in the

explanation of patterns of conﬂict that dominate many structurally

weak Middle East states, but noted that ethnicity has not often been

used as a basis for analysis.10 Despite this hesitancy, they identiﬁed the

sectarian conﬂicts in Iraq and Lebanon, as well as the Sunni-Shi‘i rift

in the Gulf and the Muslim-Christian divide in Egypt all as phenomena

that can be studied in an ethnic framework. This contention is accurate

even though the dichotomies themselves may be religious. This has to

do with the ﬁeld in which identities are deployed. Whether religious or

racial, in contemporary national interactions, all cultural identities are

“ethnic” in this way.

Philip Khoury and Joseph Kostiner make a related claim in their

edited volume Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, in

their discussion of the developing relationship between tribesmen

and polities. They argue that in conﬂicts between the state and tribes,

ethnicity is a vehicle that tribesmen, like other social groups, might

adopt in order to oppose government attempts to increase state

be taken to distinguish between the use of the terms ethnicity and

tribalism. However observers will notice that these terms often reflect the

perceptions of “modern” versus “traditional” societies and are thus quite

illuminating.

10. Itamar Rabinovich and Milton Esman, “Introduction,” in Itamar Rabinovich

and Milton Esman (eds.), Ethnicity, Pluralism, and the State in the

Middle East (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Introduction

27

control over them.11 This statement in their introduction forms the

basis for this study, which seeks to examine social change and identity

formation in the framework of ethnic organization. The focus shall

be on examining the transformations in the social and economic

forms of organization among the Bedouin and how this relates to

the evolution in the articulation of their identity in an increasingly

“national” context.

Bassam Tibi, in his chapter in Tribes and State Formation,

supports a qualiﬁed view of Rabinovich and Essman’s hypothesis

by reconciling it with Khoury and Kostiner’s, drawing important

distinctions between tribalism and ethnicity. He shows that ethnicity

as a theoretical framework for studying tribe-state interactions

assumes importance due to the centrality of ethnic organization to the

modern nation-state (see below). Tibi distinguishes between tribes and

ethnicity in that ethnies are “sub-national divisions in the communities

of the modern nation-states of the Middle East,” while tribalism is

fundamentally non-national.12 He continues by asserting that ethnicity

presupposes the possibility of further tribal division, using the example

of the Alawites in Syria, showing how, despite their Arab heritage

and their tribally-divided society, they should be considered an ethnic

category in Syrian contexts due to the articulation of their Alawite

identity in ethnic terms.13 This is equally applicable to the Amazigh or

Berber tribes of some North African states, notably Morocco, Algeria,

and Libya, who have begun to mobilize politically, not along tribal

lines but along ethno-cultural lines.14

11. Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, “Introduction: Tribe and the

Complexities of State Formation in the Middle East,” in Philip S. Khoury

and Joseph Kostiner (eds.), Tribes and State Formation in the Middle

East (London: IB Tauris, 1991), p. 3.

12. Bassam Tibi, “The Simultaneity of the Unsimultaneous: Old Tribes and

Imposed Nation-states in the Modern Middle East,” in Philip S. Khoury

and Joseph Kostiner (eds.), Tribes and State Formation in the Middle

East (London: IB Tauris, 1991), p. 139.

13. Ibid., p. 138.

14. See Jonathan Wyrtzen, “Colonial State Building and the Negotiation

of Arab and Berber Identity in Protectorate Morocco,” International

Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011). Wyrtzen demonstrates how

Introduction

28

The state is the primary factor in ethnic identity formation in two

major ways. First, as a territory with established boundaries, it sets

the scope for national sociopolitical interactions, deﬁning the arena or

political ﬁeld in which ethnic identity is shaped and deployed. Second,

it is a vehicle for the distribution of resources and the pursuit of group

interests, which are manifested in state policies. In the words of

Barkey and Parikh, “it has already become evident that state policies

constituted one of the major determinants of mobilization and shifting

identity patterns.”15 The social group controlling the state drives the

formation of primary national identities and ideologies, and it will

be against this group that other identities form. In these two ways,

the contemporary state is the primary arena for group mobilization

and the articulation of identities. Furthermore, it is not the state that

assumes importance in an examination of ethnic identities, but it is

ethnic identity that assumes importance in the contemporary reality

of the state system and state-society interaction. This, as Mitchell

explains, is because so often “political oppositions are phrased

in ethnic terms and in so doing provide the sentiments in terms of

which social actions may be justiﬁed.”16 It is this link between ethnicity

and national context that makes ethnicity theory applicable in an

examination of tribe-state relations in Sinai, as the state has, to a large

extent, created the basis for a Bedouin ethnicity through its policies

towards the group as a whole.

government policies created the basis for an ethnic “Berber” solidarity that

crossed tribal boundaries. This concept of state policy and identity will be

explored later in this paper. Regarding ethnopolitical Berber mobilization

in Morocco and Algeria in more recent years, see Bruce Maddy-Weitzman,

“Contested Identities: Berbers, ‘Berberism’ and the State in North

Africa,” The Journal of North African Studies 6.3 (2001). For a short

discussion of ethnopolitics between Arabs and Berbers in Libya, see Ishra

Soleiman, “Denied Existence: Libyan-Berbers under Gaddafi and Hope

for the Current Revolution,” Muftah, March 24, 2011, <http://muftah.

org/?p=961>.

15. Karen Barkey and Sunita Parikh, “Comparative Perspectives on the

State,” Annual Review of Sociology 17 (1991), p. 542.

16. Mitchell, “Perceptions of Ethnicity and Ethnic Behavior,” p. 30.

Introduction

29

Within this framework, this study aims to analyze the marginal

status of the Aqaba Bedouin as a result of the realities that the

Egyptian state, especially though its development policies, has

created for them, speciﬁcally through the link between socioeconomic

transformation, acculturation, and identity formation. This will begin

in chapter one with an examination of Egyptian goals for Sinai.

Chapter two examines the Bedouins’ adaptation of their economic

practices to adapt to the realities of Egyptian development and the

proliferation of tourism in the region. Chapter three examines the

other side of this coin, the increasing economic marginalization of

the Bedouin. Chapter four focuses on the social transformation of the

urbanizing Bedouin. Finally, chapter ﬁve examines the transformation

and articulation of a Bedouin identity to determine the relationship

between state policies, socioeconomic transformation, and processes

of Bedouin ethnogenesis, which is deﬁned as the articulation and

emergence of previously non-ethnic identities in an ethnic idiom.17

This study will show that state policies regarding development

and integration in South Sinai are motivating transformations in both

dominant modes of socioeconomic organization as well as Bedouin

identity including expressions of social solidarity. It is simultaneously the

goals of development and the manner in which state policies fuelling

integration have shaped Bedouin-Egyptian interactions that have led

to the emergence of the frameworks necessary for socioeconomic

transformation and the emergence of ethnically-articulated identities

among the Aqaba Bedouin.

Definitions

Before continuing, a few deﬁnitions should be presented in order to

clarify the terms and concepts central to this paper. First and foremost,

the subjects of this study are the Bedouin of the Aqaba Coast of the

Sinai Peninsula, and more speciﬁcally, the sedentary Bedouin of

Dahab. The focus of the research has been on the younger generation

of Bedouin who did not spend a signiﬁcant portion of their lives living

17. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, p. 64.

Introduction

30

in the desert or under Israeli rule and whose social experiences have

developed exclusively under expanding Egyptian rule from 1982

onwards. As a trend, these Bedouin are the ones most active in the

urban markets of Dahab, and thus represent the “cutting edge” of

Bedouin transformation. They also embody the core of an emerging

Bedouin elite at the top of distribution networks connected to tourism,

which has become the primary source of revenue for the Bedouin.

Figure 1: Map of approximate tribal divisions in Sinai, reproduced from

Murray, G.W., Sons of Ishmael: A Study of the Egyptian Bedouin

(G Routledge & Sons Ltd. London, 1935)

Introduction

31

As the geographical focus of this study is Dahab, which lies in

the territory of the Mzeina Bedouin (see Map, Figure 1), a majority

of these subjects come from the Mzeina tribe, inhabiting the Sinai

coast along the Aqaba Gulf from Nuwayba to Sharm el-Sheikh, and

inland to Santa Katarina. However, tribal divisions have not mirrored

developments in Egyptian policy and do not constitute a primary

source of differentiation for the purposes of this study. Within Dahab,

Bedouin from other tribes, such as the Jabaliyya and ‘Aleqat, also

seek work. Furthermore, the area north of Nuwayba is the territory

of the Tarabin tribe, whose members also participate in development

and tourism but are not from the same confederational grouping as

the Mzeina and other southern tribes: the Tawara, and therefore

hold a much different tribal identity. For the purposes of analytical

accuracy, then, tribal identities will only be used in speciﬁc reference

to tribal issues. In other contexts, the term “Aqaba Bedouin” will be

used to identify them primarily on the basis of their nationally-deﬁned

territory (the Aqaba Coast of Sinai, Egypt) and the activities which are

dominant in the region, notably tourism, as opposed to their tribally-

deﬁned territory. In instances where I am speciﬁcally referring to the

sedentarized Bedouin of Dahab, I use the term “Dahab Bedouin.”

Two terms that must be deﬁned are “state-building” and “nation-

building,” considered here to be two distinct but related processes,

both integral to a study of state-sponsored development and

identity transformation. State-building is a process aimed at building

institutions that reﬂect regime preferences while increasing state

control over its territory and inhabitants. It seeks the integration of

the periphery into the center for this purpose, through the creation

of transportation and communications infrastructure, coercive control

(such as army and police), the application of national laws and

policies and the effective collection of taxes. Nation-building, on the

other hand, is psychologically-oriented. As deﬁned by one political

scientist, nation-building is a process of “weld[ing] disparate elements

of the populace into a congruent whole by forging new identities at

the national [=state] level at the expense of localism or particularistic

identities.”18 In other words, it is the state’s (or other elite groups’)

18. Amitai Etzioni, “A Self-Restrained Approach to Nation-Building by

Foreign Powers,” International Affairs 80.1 (2004).

Introduction

32

dissemination and reiﬁcation of nationalist ideologies and values

across the whole of its population. The goal of this process is the

standardization of values, ideologies, and identities among a state’s

population to increase national solidarity and speciﬁc patterns of

sociopolitical conformity. While state-building seeks to strengthen

the state or the polity, nation-building seeks to forge a uniﬁed social

body, the nation, to overcome the inevitable existence of sub-national

social divisions. In blunter terms, nation-building may be thought of as

a process of legitimization of a social and institutional order created

by those controlling the state. Nation-building strategies are pursued

through mandatory education and national media outlets, tourism,

museums and other public spaces, and mandatory national service,

all of which play an important role in the socialization of identity and

values.19 State- and nation-building are the two processes by which the

Egyptian state seeks to increase its authority in Sinai. These processes

will be repeatedly addressed throughout this work.

Finally, a major concept presented in this paper is “modernization.”

Modernization most accurately refers to a cluster of theories seeking

to explain the effects of economic development and the sources of

social and political change. Originally, the founders of modernization

theory sought to locate the sources of participatory government

in contemporary trends of economic development, notably

industrialization and its accompanying social trend, urbanization.

Seymour Martin Lipset, considered one of the formative scholars

of modernization theory, showed a correlation between economic

output and democracy.20 The mechanisms through which this process

supposedly operates were given greater expression in various other

works, notably Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society,

which presents a theory linking economic development to participatory

19. See for example Byron G. Massialas, Education and the Political System

(Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1969); see also Benedict Anderson, Imagined

Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,

2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

20. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic

Development and Political Legitimacy,” The American Political Science

Review 53.1 (1959), pp. 69–105; See also Lipset, Political Man: The

Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960).

Introduction

33

government through processes of social change allegedly caused by

economic growth. For Lerner, industrialization yielded urbanization,

which in turn promoted the emergence of a mass media, which drove

increasing literacy, culminating in greater demands for participatory

government (democracy).21 In a nutshell, the idea is that economic

development drives social development which yields positive political

development, and by implication, all good things go together.

This is not to say that my own analysis in any way relies on the

components of modernization theory. Instead, it recalls a comment

once made by the renowned Middle East scholar Elie Kedourie, who

said, “When…policies… together with the doctrines and principles

which justify them, are considered, then it is realized what a large

part verbal traps and dubious dogmas have had in the construction

of doctrines and the shaping of policies.”22 Modernization theory can

be considered one of Kedourie’s “dubious dogmas,” enjoying little

empirical support at the micro-process level. Samuel Huntington

was more explicit in declaring modernization theory an “erroneous

dogma,” which simply cannot account for the abundance of anomalies

whereby industrialization and economic development have failed to

produce positive social and political developments.23

The abundance of critiques and the persistence of anomalies,

however, have not prevented the emergence of a number of extensions

and inversions of modernization theory. Perhaps the most problematic

have been social variants of modernization focusing on the role of

economic growth and institutional change in the disappearance of

traditionalism and the emergence of national identities. This strand of

modernization theory conceives of ethnic or particularistic identities

as “primordial sentiments … forg[ing] ties of emotion rather than

interests … [that] would be replaced through modernization by loyalties

21. Daniel Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle

East (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1958). Moreover, the parallels

between modernization and structural conceptions of nationalism, notably

by Gellner and Anderson, should be apparent and will be addressed later.

22. Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version, and Other Middle-Eastern

Studies (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), p. 2.

23. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 6.

Introduction

34

to the class and the nation,” loyalties that are labeled rational instead

of emotional.24 In a political sense, “modernization” entails a “marked

redistribution of power within a political system: the breakdown of

local, religious, ethnic, or other power centers and the centralization

in national political institutions [my emphasis].”25 Not only does

the mantra of modernization enshrine the national state as the sole

legitimate authority, but by combining economic and political strands

of the theory, it also casts state development as both benevolent and

efﬁcient when the reality may be much more traumatic for regions

undergoing this development.

The impact of modernization theory on economic ideologies

and development paradigms has had serious consequences for the

direction of national and global development. Since economic growth

is assumed to produce positive social and political outcomes, then by

implication more or faster growth is better than less or slower growth.

This produced a focus on maximizing economic efﬁciency. Moreover,

since the principal unit of political and economic organization is

assumed to be the state (this is certainly the case if we are interested in

outcomes such as democracy), the primary focus of the modernization

paradigm is not the individual, but the state. Modernization supports

a developmental strategy based on top-down economics singularly

focused on maximizing efﬁciency and growth through privatization,

reliance on international ﬁscal institutions, free trade, and foreign

investment and control; it focuses more on national economic interests

than on microeconomic successes and often does little to address the

economic needs of a great portion of the population.26

Simon, in an excellent and critical review of development rhetoric,

argues that deﬁning modernization in terms of economic efﬁciency has

meant that we no longer predicate modernity on increases in individual

24. Barkey and Parikh, “Comparative Perspectives on the States,” p. 542.

See also Andreas Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict:

Shadows of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),

pp. 42–43.

25. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, p. 142.

26. David Simon, “Development Reconsidered: New Directions in

Development Thinking,” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human

Geography 79.4 (Current Development Thinking) (1997), p. 187.

Introduction

35

wellbeing.27 Policies aimed at maximizing economic efﬁciency have

often ignored questions of whether economic transformations have had

positive or negative impacts on the quality of life of a state’s subjects,

whether it empowers locals to make their own decisions, and whether

this development is socially and environmentally sustainable.28

Regardless of the observed consequences of economic development,

the modernization paradigm’s tendency to privilege the welfare of the

state has rendered it an attractive model for state-building projects

and top-down development. The combination of social and economic

strands of modernization enables the state to dismiss peripheral

concerns and competing interests by casting them as “traditional” or

otherwise irrational. Modernization, as a development paradigm, is

very friendly towards states and national goals by legitimizing them

and delegitimizing regional development concerns that clash with

central interests, which are framed in the rhetoric of the greater

good or the national interest. Further perpetuating the centrality of

the modernization paradigm in global development and post-colonial

state-building has been the dominance of neoliberal policies favored

by USAID, the IMF, and the World Bank.29

In this way, modernization is given an objective existence

as the foundation of the state’s development strategy, guiding

assumptions and expectations for development, and thus has very

real consequences for the Aqaba Bedouin. Borrowing from political

scientist Alexander Wendt’s constructivist approach to objectivity, “If

men deﬁne situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”30

27. Ibid., 185. See also a discussion of economic reconstruction of Iraq:

Haytham Bahoora, “Shock-and-Awe Nation Building: Iraq’s Neo-Liberal

Reconstruction,” Jadaliyya.com, Arab Studies Institute, May 14, 2012.

Web. <http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5522/shock-and-awe-

nation-building_iraqs-neo-liberal-re>. For Lenin, this was the sacrifice that

modernization entailed.

28. Ibid., p. 187.

29. Ibid., p. 185. Simon calls neoliberalism the “contemporary incarnation”

of modernization. See also Hutington, Political Order in Changing

Societies.

30. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 330.

Introduction

36

What is important to note here is that I am not claiming that these

development authorities necessarily adopt an explicit modernization

paradigm in their approach to development, that is to say, that

the state does not claim that the modernization of such peripheral

populations is the overarching goal of development.31 However, the

coincidence in the case of Dahab is striking, and the rhetoric of the

state and its developmental agencies appears predicated on many of

the assumptions of economic modernization to justify policies whose

beneﬁts have tended to target a narrow, politically connected group

of ofﬁcials and entrepreneurs. This issue will be explored in greater

depth in chapter one.

What is important to clarify is that the processes of “modernization,”

notably economic development, urbanization, the construction of

transportation and communications infrastructure and the rise of mass

media, the expansion of education and literacy, and the emergence

of bureaucracies, to name a few, are better deﬁned as “integrating”

processes. These processes lead to the adoption of similar

organizational forms and similar expressions of dependence on state

structures. This encourages cultural homogenization, but is superﬁcial

and not necessarily linked to an adoption of “modern” or “national”

identities as predicted by proponents of social modernization. Samuel

Huntington acknowledges this reality in Political Order in Changing

Societies when he states that in contrast with the above “facts” of

integration, “progress towards many of the other goals which writers

have identiﬁed with political modernization [including]… national

integration—often is dubious at best.”32

This study is not interested in distinctions between “modern” and

“primitive” societies, and instead focuses on the relationship and

interactions between various social groups bounded by a state as

levels of “stateness” increases in Sinai. I deﬁne stateness, following

Joel Migdal, as the state’s appropriation of forms of social and

economic control from non-state actors.33 In this regard, the state

31. The Development reports, though, do clearly show this to be at the very

least an ancillary objective.

32. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, p. 35.

33. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States. See discussion in Chapter

One: A Model of State-Society Relations, pp. 10–41.

Introduction

37

should be understood as “regime,” one of a number of social actors

competing for sociopolitical inﬂuence within its deﬁned territory.

To be “modern,” in the rhetoric of the state system, is to willingly

subordinate non-state forms of sociopolitical control and solidarity to

state interests and organs, a demand that has met much resistance

along the peripheries of the developing world. This is one potential

explanation for the persistence of “traditional” societies within

hegemonic “modernizing” states and suggests a coincidence of

identity and interest. In fact, a basic premise of this argument is that

the modern-traditional dichotomy, far from providing useful analytic

leverage on issues of social change, actually obfuscates the dialectical

and co-produced nature of social transformation. The link between

this structure of competition and identity will be discussed in chapter

ﬁve.

The Bedouin are not autarkic, a society able to exist independently

from the rest of Egypt (as in thinking about Egypt as a “modern”

society and the Bedouin as a “traditional” society), but have come to

constitute a unique social category within Egyptian society. It would

be helpful to recall the words of Friedrich Nietzsche when he noted,

“The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature

opposites (as for example “warm” and “cold” [or in this case “modern”

and “traditional”]) where there are, not opposites, but differences in

degree.”34 Instead of examining a transition from “traditional” to

“modern” modes of living, the focus shall be on increasing levels of

state control and integration and how the Bedouin have responded to

these changes.

Research and Methodological Approaches

While this work is based in large part on ethnographic ﬁeld

research conducted in Sinai, it draws on a number of other sources

34. Frederich Nietzsche, Der Wanderer und sein Schatten, in R.J.

Hollingdale (ed. and trans.), A Nietzsche Reader (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1988). Quoted in Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and

Nationalism—Anthropological Perspectives (Anthropology, Culture

and Society), 2nd ed. (New York: Pluto, 2002), p. 162.

Introduction

38

of information. It will be beneﬁcial to discuss the particulars of the

research as well as the location, Dahab. However, this project relies

on a number of other disciplines and methodological approaches in

addition to ethnography, and some words should be said about my

preference for a multi-disciplinary approach. I have attempted to rely

as evenly as possible on the different disciplines chosen for this study

instead of relying exclusively on one. The primary disciplines engaged

in this study are social anthropology, sociology, and history, though

support was sought further aﬁeld, including from political science,

social psychology, and the emerging ﬁeld of tourism studies. More will

be said about each discipline and their interaction.

The decision to make Dahab the geographical focus of the project

stems from the special attention this part of Sinai has received

for the development of tourism, which has been a primary tool

highlighting and magnifying the identity processes under study. As

the mainstay of the Aqaba Bedouin economy, tourism has led to

a “traditionalization” of Bedouin economic practices, that is, the

communication of these practices through the language of tradition

as a way to make these economically valuable practices symbolically

meaningful to consumers, who search for an “authentic” cultural

experience. Effective symbolism, in this case, legitimizes these

activities as “authentic.” Tourism can, in this way, be considered the

commercialization of culture for economic gain. This culture, however,

far from being a true representation of how the Bedouin live today,

is largely constructed based on perceptions about the Bedouins’

heritage and “traditions,” and is thus economically analogous to other

symbolic identity processes that are the focus of this study. This type

of culture under-communicates aspects of acculturation and focuses

instead on elements preserved from an idealized, distant past. Just

as ethnic identity links contemporary culture to images of the past,

tourism does the same.

Heritage tourism in Dahab has the effect of exaggerating the

communication of culture, allowing for a clearer examination of the

processes involved in the formation and communication of identity.

Furthermore, heritage tourism provided the opportunity to contrast

tourist conceptions of Bedouin culture and the actual progress of

socioeconomic transformation in order to analyze the role of culture

Introduction

39

in identity formation. Tourism as a lens was an invaluable aid in the

study of identity politics, especially the construction of culture and

tradition and the symbolic purposes they serve.35 Special attention

was given to manifestations of identity through tourism, a central

theme in the research. However, tourism so strongly connects culture

and economics that it may be the case that the economic aspect of

social conﬂict, a well-established but contested theory, is somewhat

overdetermined by the force of particular circumstances.

The ﬁeld of tourism studies played an important role in studying

the economic and social effects of tourism development. While this

ﬁeld is still fairly new, tourism as a global, cultural phenomenon

undoubtedly deserves the attention of social scientists, and a number

of works on the subject in general, as well as in the Middle East

speciﬁcally, had a profound impact on this analysis, and even played

a role in shaping the direction of the research conducted in the ﬁeld,

providing for the use of certain aspects of tourism as way points and

bases for further analysis, such as the state’s role in formal versus

informal tourism and how each might approach a single concept,

such as employment. Tourism is an issue that cannot be divorced

from the Aqaba Coast; it was vital to this work to explore the ways

in which tourism affects communities and economies. The volume on

tourism in the Middle East edited by Rami Daher is an excellent and

encompassing look at the various aspects of tourism—combining such

ﬁelds as economics, cultural anthropology, sociology, and political

science—and demonstrates how truly dynamic tourism studies can be

as an independent ﬁeld of inquiry.

Further increasing the value of Dahab as a research site is its

origin not as an administrative center, colonial outpost, or military

base, but as a Bedouin date oasis, a traditional forum for Mzeina

social interaction. Dahab’s origin as a tourist center dates from the

establishment of traveler camps set up by Bedouin to serve Israeli

visitors to Sinai after the 1967 War instead of a tourist resort

35. Rami Farouk Daher, “Reconceptualizing Tourism in the Middle East,”

in Rami Farouk Daher (ed.), Tourism in the Middle East Continuity,

Change, and Transformation (Minneapolis: Channel View Publications,

2006), pp. 16, 19.

Introduction

40

planned and built through government projects.36 Dahab’s Bedouin

neighborhoods around ‘Asala comprise the largest urban Bedouin

settlement on the coast, and they have developed organically from an

exclusively Bedouin space to a bustling commercial and tourist center.

Since Bedouin neighborhoods in Dahab are not the result of an

Egyptian urban plan, the space remains a manifestation of authentic

Bedouin transformation instead of a Bedouin tourist façade reﬂecting

external assumptions about the Bedouin; the Bedouin presence in

Dahab is more reﬂective of the Bedouin condition than the spaces

constructed to fuel Egyptian tourism.

The bulk of our ﬁeld research was conducted in Sinai between

March 2009 and May 2010, in which I, along with my research

partner, Eli Sperling, would take trips to Dahab for about a week

every other month. Additionally, I was able to undertake two longer

periods of research, each consisting of about four weeks, in the

summers of 2011 and 2012. From our base in Dahab, spending the

majority of our time with the Bedouin around town, we were able to

acquire a unique perspective on the effects that development in Sinai

and Egyptian policies have had on the lives of the Bedouin. We had

the opportunity to explore the ties between the Bedouin and foreign

tourists, through the relationship we forged with our subjects, as well

as the relationship between the Bedouin, the authorities, and the

Egyptian migrants. As a town about half-way down the Aqaba Coast,

Dahab provided a perfect base to travel throughout the sub-region.

Our excursions ranged from visits to Sharm el-Sheikh to compare the

economic roles of the Bedouin between the two towns, to trips into

the desert to participate in Mzeina social functions such as weddings

and even a ritual goat slaughter, to Bedouin tourist camps in order to

explore the role of Bedouin culture in Sinai tourism. While we felt that

these excursions did not greatly inform us about the historical practices

or lives of the Bedouin, we were able to construct a broad picture of

how development has affected the lives of the Sinai Bedouin today

36. Interview with a Bedouin Divemaster, July 24, 2009; see also Smadar

Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation Mzeina Allegories of

Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (New York: University

of California, 1991), p. 68.

Introduction

41

and were shown how Bedouin notions of tradition were reconciled

with the changes to their world.

The goal of the ﬁeld component of the research was to construct a

broad picture of the realities of contemporary Bedouin life, especially

in an urbanizing setting, as well as to immerse ourselves in the Bedouin

tourist economy. From this it was possible to draw conclusions about

Bedouin self-identity and image, notably how Bedouin imagine

themselves and their cultural heritage and how they communicate

themselves and their community as separate from Egyptians.

Additionally, we focused on patterns of socioeconomic organization

and attempted to compare these forms to those adopted by other

social groups within the Egyptian state in order to draw conclusions

about the factors motivating certain socioeconomic transformations.

The ultimate goal was to ascertain whether the transformations we

identiﬁed within the community were motivated by internal structures

and dynamics or by external pressures.

The ﬁeld research came from a mix of observational methods

including mapping demographic patterns in the town, charting

types and locations of construction and development, and observing

Bedouin-Egyptian-Tourist interactions through what ethnographers

describe as participant observation as well as formal interviews (See

Figure 2). This raw data was then ﬁltered through intense analytical

sessions between myself and my partner in which we discussed our

observations and used “thick descriptions” to analyze the events we

had witnessed and attach underlying meaning to them.37 While the

number of formal interviews we conducted were quite limited, with

no more than ten individuals being recorded, our method of informal

interviewing, based on the concept of “snowball sampling,” brought

us into contact with dozens of Bedouin holding many different

occupations and social positions. Additionally, we were able to

interview about ten migrant laborers, from Egypt and Sudan, who had

traveled to Sinai in search of employment. Snowball sampling, which

entails the assistance of current subjects to recruit future subjects,

while a non-random sampling process, has the beneﬁt of allowing

us to construct a clear picture of the social networks that exist both

37. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description, Towards an Interpretive Theory of

Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 2000).

Introduction

42

within Dahab itself and how they connect to villages outside of the

town. This non-randomness was an important element in tracing

distribution networks that have emerged through tourism and inter-

familial as well as inter-generational relationships.

The reﬂections of the previous paragraph raise two major issues

that we confronted over the course of our ﬁeldwork. The ﬁrst is highly

complicated and had the potential to threaten our ability to collect

data. This has to do with our interview methodology. We quickly found

our attempts at formal interviewing frustrated by the Bedouin, who

appeared to react to our questioning with suspicion. It was important

to ﬁnd a method of accessing this information while simultaneously

building trust with those we were interviewing. In order to accomplish

this, we were largely required to turn off the cameras and recording

devices and be less direct in our questioning.

We found that the greatest level of success came when we posed

our questions anecdotally and in a largely quid-pro-quo manner. By

this I mean we would exchange stories with our Bedouin interviewees

Figure 2: Conducting an interview on ﬁlm.

Photo by author, September20, 2009.

Introduction

43

and compared their answers with experiences from our lives, or, more

commonly, attempted to lead the Bedouin to a certain issue by framing

it against the backdrop of our culture. For example, if we wanted to

discuss Bedouin marriage requirements, we might tell the Bedouin

about marriage practices in America, or tell a story of a particular

friend or family member’s marriage, and then ask about their own

experiences. We found that this worked quite well, and often it would

set the Bedouin off on long stories with valuable tangents that gave

us more information than a simple question and answer would have.

Furthermore, this allowed the Bedouin to volunteer information that

they felt was important to the topic, providing an opportunity to study

concepts from their perspective.

The second aspect of our research design was the issue of teamwork

in the ﬁeld, which, from the anthropological literature guiding our

research, appeared to be quite rare. Nevertheless, working in a team

was invaluable. Not only did this kind of work allow one of us to ﬁll in

gaps the other might have missed, it also encouraged discussion and

debate, fuelling analysis and the consideration of multiple points of

view. While we did not always agree on the meanings behind what

we saw, our differences of opinion more often than not added to

the quality of the material as we attempted to reconcile, convince,

or disprove each other’s concepts. Working as a team allowed us

to support one another, and gave each of us an advisor intimately

familiar with the research. We continually challenged each other’s

ideas, which forced us to carefully construct our theories and raise the

quality of our work. While in the end, each of us authored our own

papers and focused on different aspects of our experience, there is

no doubt that Eli’s ideas are reﬂected in my own work and mine are

reﬂected in his.

One ﬁnal but immensely important issue to mention in a discussion

of ﬁeldwork is the issue of potential bias. While we interacted with a

wide variety of people in Dahab, the focus of our research was the

Bedouin, and thus a large majority of our time was spent interacting

with Bedouin. There was a danger, I was warned, that my feelings for

my new-found friends would affect my ability to analyze the situation

objectively. This concern was voiced through my advisors, who

warned me that my sympathies might lead me to developa narrative

Introduction

44

that is overly critical of the Egyptian government or overly delicate in

regards to the Bedouin. In short, the objectivity of the researcher, and

by implication the integrity of the work, is called into question because

of an emotional connection or a tendency of the subjects to present a

biased view that is accepted and adopted by the researcher.38

In this way, ethnography more often than not is a double-edged

sword necessitating a delicate balancing of two very distinct identities

that may very well be impossible to separate: the ﬁrst being the friend

and the second the researcher. Without the friend, the researcher’s

job would be impossible. At the same time, it is the friend that

endangers the objectivity of the researcher, who is supposed to be

dispassionate and analytical. Thus, to the researcher, the friend is both

indispensable and a liability, and in the ﬁeld, not a moment went by

without consideration of the balance that we had to maintain between

them.

Unfortunately, there is no scientiﬁc method to counter this

tendency towards sympathizing with one’s subjects. In the words

of John Van Maanen, “Neutrality in ﬁeldwork is an illusion.”39 In

this case, all scholars who conduct this type of work might be

susceptible to accusations of bias, whether personal or ideological;

it is the responsibility of the researcher to navigate this path with

as much attention to avoiding such traps as possible. From my own

experience, to ignore the friend is impossible and only calls attention

to the researcher, generally leading to concerns and suspicion among

the ethnographic “subject.” The Bedouin have little use for formal

data gathering methods such as surveys, and are generally less willing

38. This has been a perpetual concern to ethnographers, both inside and

outside of the field of anthropology. See, for example, Annette Lareau and

Jeffrey J. Shultz, Journeys through Ethnography: Realistic Accounts of

Fieldwork (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).

39. John Van Maanen, “Playing Back the Tape,” in W.B. Shaffer and R.A.

Stebbins (eds.), Experiencing Fieldwork: An Inside View of Qualitative

Research (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1991); quoted in Timothy Pachirat,

“The Political in Political Ethnography: Dispatches from the Kill Floor,”

in Edward Schatz (ed.), Political Ethnography: What Immersion

Contributes to the Study of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2009).

Introduction

45

to participate in these formal environments. The only alternative

is to always maintain self-awareness and to understand that this

emotional response is an inevitable consequence of the experience of

ﬁeld research. This process, I imagine, is very personal, varying from

researcher to researcher, and it would be difﬁcult, if not impossible, to

draw an accurate picture of the relationship between the researcher

and the subjects just by reading the work without any mention of

the personal experiences of the research. It is my goal to present as

transparent a picture of the research experience as possible, allowing

readers to understand my own ethnographic perspective.

The research we conducted in the ﬁeld did not present a complete

picture of the historical development of the Bedouin community, only

their present situation. Thus, this type of data was insufﬁcient to address

the types of historical questions that were vital to this study, including

how and why Egyptian development was undertaken, as well as how

this development has transformed the Bedouin socioeconomic order.

History was just as important to this analysis as anthropology, and so

constituted a second, yet equally important methodological approach.

Historical information about Sinai comes from two main sources:

ﬁrst, the diaries and surveys produced by visitors and colonial ofﬁcials

during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, and

second, the accounts and analyses of historians and social scientists

who spent time researching in Sinai in the 1970s and 80s, as well

as a number of studies published by their Egyptian successors. Since

the Egyptian reoccupation of Sinai, however, the freedom to conduct

research has been limited and our record for the past 20 years is not

as detailed as it was in the 20 years before that.

Many of the early diaries and surveys of Sinai have already been

digested by historians and social scientists and consequently held little

value for this work, as subsequent analyses published in the 1970s,

80s, and 90s proved signiﬁcantly more useful. These sources blurred

the lines between anthropology and history, as they were often

social histories or anthropological studies from previous decades

that provided the opportunity to construct a coherent timeline of

events and an encompassing picture of the Bedouin community and

its transformations across the previous decades. Reliance on history

enabled the analysis of the transformative processes that development

Introduction

46

in Sinai has instigated. This is an adaptation of a practice that is gaining

favor among anthropologists, increasingly utilizing historical texts; I

took this practice and reversed it by taking past anthropological studies

and using them as historical texts, providing sufﬁcient information to

compare, for example, employment patterns of the Aqaba Bedouin in

the nineteenth century, the 1970s, and today. In this way, it became

possible to examine not only the shape of the Dahab Bedouins’

current socioeconomic order, but to trace its development over the

past decades to analyze the transformative effects of development.

47

Chapter 1

Egypt’s Vision for Sinai

This chapter presents an analysis of the Egyptian development project

in Sinai in order to ascertain why Sinai development was undertaken

and how Egyptian authorities went about setting and attaining their

goals. Additionally, it will examine how a number of speciﬁc Egyptian

policies have shaped the direction of socioeconomic development

within the Bedouin community. With this perspective, Egyptian

priorities for development and the role envisioned for the Bedouin in

relation to the Egyptian vision for Sinai will become clear. In a study

of Bedouin reactions to development, an examination of Egyptian

approaches is the key to understanding Bedouin transformational

responses and identity processes.

The Egyptian development project in Sinai is merely a single

aspect of a larger plan for the development and integration of Egypt’s

vast, unsettled territory. In May 1974, faced with serious economic

stagnation and the beginnings of a population crisis, the government

of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat prepared a plan, known as “A New

Map of Egypt,” that aimed at extending Egyptian central authority to

territories far from the Nile Valley and developing them so as to make

them productive contributors to the Egyptian economy.40 As Sinai

at this time was still under Israeli control, the Egyptian development

plan focused on areas such as the Western Desert, the Mediterranean

coast, the Red Sea coast, and the Lake Nasser region. The project

had the broadly-stated goal of relieving social and economic pressures

on the population, and by implication, on the central government.41

40. Dames and Moore International, Sinai Development Study, Phase I:

Final Report (Washington, D.C.: United States Agency for International

Aid, 1985) Vol. 1, “A Strategy for the Settlement of Sinai,” 3.1 “National

Goals,” p. 47.

41. Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation, p. 75.

Chapter 1

48

The plan eventually adopted to oversee the development of

the Sinai Peninsula, as a piece of this greater strategy to increase

industrial and agricultural development in Egypt, was aimed at fulﬁlling

goals identiﬁed by the government to address central problems; the

primary concerns were not the wellbeing or interests of peripheral

populations, but those of the central state. One of the stated aims of

the Sinai Development Study (SDS-I), published in 1985 by Dames

and Moore, Inc. in conjunction with USAID, was to “ensure social

justice for the residents of these regions [under development],” to aid

in the reduction of “regional disparities.”42 However, this would only

be the case inasmuch as the goals and interests of these residents

aligned with those of the state. In fact, in the research and planning

stages of the project, the Bedouin were treated only superﬁcially and

were never actually consulted on potential courses of development

or Bedouin-Egyptian cooperation. Central Egyptian planners viewed

the Bedouin as a marginal population that did not need to be directly

included in Sinai development, but would react to development by

assimilating into Egyptian society.

In their attempt to impose “legibility” on the Bedouin, the Egyptian

state made a number of incorrect assumptions about the fundamental

nature of Bedouin society and the natural consequences of economic

development.43 Egyptian development strategies ultimately resulted

in the socioeconomic marginalization of the Sinai Bedouin. These

assumptions, compounded with their “modernization”-oriented

approach, facilitated the emergence of a number of obstacles

frustrating Bedouin participation in budding tourism industries in the

Aqaba region. Many of these assumptions or miscalculations were

based on Egypt’s focus on the critical crises that the regime faced

in central Egypt, for example the need to maximize tax revenue,

provide jobs, and spread the population. In focusing on these goals,

the Egyptians neglected to consider a situation whereby speciﬁcally

Bedouin interests might clash with Egyptian development goals. Not

42. Dames and Moore, Sinai Development Study, Vol. 1, p. 48.

43. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve

the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1998). Scott refers to legibility as the manner in which a state categorizes

and defines a concept so that the state may interact with it.

Egypt’s Vision for Sinai

49

only did they not make an effort to ensure the Bedouin a dominant or

even a protected place in the developing tourist economy, they failed

even to undertake a comprehensive study of the Bedouin and their

standards of living in order to determine how best to harmonize their

plan with existing conditions on the ground; the Bedouins’ customary

socioeconomic order and recent transformations were not examined

or considered in the scope of development.

Egyptian National Crises and the Need for

Development and Integration

In the early 1970s, Egypt faced a number of social and economic

crises stemming from major demographic shifts, destructive economic

policies, and President Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s ﬁxation on the conﬂict

with Israel. Egypt’s economy, which Nasser had based on the socialist

model of import-substitution and nationalization, was on the verge

of collapse. Compounding a lack of productivity, a rapid population

increase created a shortage of employment. While Nasser promised

jobs to all university graduates, stagnant economic growth and rampant

corruption meant that there were not nearly enough opportunities to

satisfy Egypt’s population.

Making matters worse, the urban centers of Egypt experienced

rapid population increases due to the dual processes of urbanization

and accelerating population growth. Cairo, which in 1960 had a

population of three and a half million,44 and in 1989 of 14 million,45

today has an estimated population of 20-25 million inhabitants.46 As

Cairo’s population expands, the conditions in the city have deteriorated

44. Janet Abu Lughod, “Migrant Adjustment to City Life: The Egyptian

Case,” The American Journal of Sociology 67 (1962), p. 22.

45. Thomas W. Lippman, Egypt After Nasser: Sadat, Peace, and the

Mirage of Prosperity (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 166.

46. André Raymond, Cairo, trans. Willard Wood (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2000), p. 13. In 2000 Raymond supports the lower

figure of 18 to 20 million. The higher estimate of 25 million comes from

a consideration of the potential contribution of the unofficial residents of

Cairo as well as the figure stated by everyone in Egypt.

Chapter 1

50

for its inhabitants. Overcrowding is now a fact of life and living

conditions for many have become less than sanitary. Additionally, the

huge population has put an incredible strain on Cairo’s aging urban

infrastructure, which is in severe need of renovation and replacement

and has barely been able to support a city of 20 million inhabitants.

Population growth and urbanization have had a devastating impact

on Egypt’s ability to maintain food self-sufﬁciency.47 Processes of

urbanization, concentrated heavily in the Nile Valley, have created a

situation whereby land suitable for agriculture is being converted into

residential zones to accommodate an increasing number of citizens.48

While Egypt’s population has grown rapidly in the Nile Valley, the

amount of cultivable land has not increased despite Nasser’s massive

land reclamation scheme, which aimed at converting unproductive

desert into cultivable land suitable for agriculture. As settlements

expand, they continuously encroach on the limited amount of arable

land. Egypt, once a major exporter of agricultural products, has

become dependent on massive food imports to supply the needs of

the population.49

When Anwar Sadat became president of Egypt in 1970,

overpopulation, under-employment, food shortages, and economic

stagnation were the major socioeconomic crises facing the Egyptian

state. In order to address these crises, the Egyptian government

enacted a number of policies aimed at bringing economic as well as

social relief to Egypt. Perhaps the most well-known of these policies

was Sadat’s program of Inﬁtah, or “Open Door” economics, aimed

at attracting private and foreign investment, and bringing an end

47. While World Bank figures show that the rate of population growth

is slowing, it is still well above rates in Europe and North America.

Moreover, this has done little to relieve pressures on the state to continue

supplying sufficient food to urban populations. Source: Google Public

Data from World Bank, updated Jan 17, 2013. <https://www.google.

com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_grow&idi

m=country:EGY&dl=en&hl=en&q=population%20growth%20rate%20

egypt>.

48. Dina F. Ali, “Case Study of Development of the Peripheral Coastal

Area of South Sinai in Relation to its Bedouin Community” (MA Thesis,

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1998), p. 13.

49. Lippman, Egypt After Nasser, p. 128.

Egypt’s Vision for Sinai

51

to the state-dominated economic policies of Nasser.50 As a clear

rejection of the Nasserite economic model based on etatism, Sadat’s

freer-market Inﬁtah was a highly visible concept. It was not, however,

the only plan developed to address Egypt’s ills. Another of Sadat’s

programs, geared simultaneously at relieving both the population and

food crises, was the “Green Revolution.” This “revolution” strove to

tame the Egyptian frontier, extract valuable natural resources, convert

deserts into farmland, and relieve the immense population pressures

in Egypt’s cities and along the Nile River.51

With this “Green Revolution,” Sadat envisioned a massive

population shift out of Egypt’s urban areas along the Nile into the

desert, namely the Western Desert around the oases of Siwa and

Bahariyya, the Eastern Desert along the Red Sea Coast, and later,

the Sinai Peninsula. It was the government’s hope that relieving

overcrowding would increase economic productivity, bringing added

relief to the economy in addition to alleviating urban congestion. It

additionally hoped to convert the desert into cultivable land, bringing

Egypt back to food self-sufﬁciency.

The goals of the Sinai Development Project, as outlined in the

development reports published in the 1980s and 90s, are consistent

with the crises mentioned above. As stated in the SDS-I study prepared

in 1985, the national goals were the following:

Social1.

Slower population growth in Cairo and the cities of the •

Delta

Reversal of Brain Drain, in part by creating well-paid, high •

tech, modern economic activities within Egypt

Economic2.

Expanded private sector•

Foreign aid reduced, later eliminated•

Strategic3.

Food self-sufﬁciency, improved yields and land reclamation •

50. P.J. Vatikiotis, The History of Modern Egypt, 4th ed. (London:

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), p. 430; see also Raymond Hinnebusch,

“The Politics of Economic Reform in Egypt,” Third World Quarterly

14.1 (1993).

51. Lippman, Egypt After Nasser, p. 126.

Chapter 1

52

Integration of remote areas into the mainstream of Egyptian •

civilization.52

The ﬁnal goal, the integration of remote areas into “Egyptian

civilization,” suggests an added aim of increasing state control over its

territory and simultaneously working for the socialization of peripheral

populations and regions to integrate them into the Egyptian nation.

These goals, far from striving to protect the unique characteristics

of Egypt’s peripheral populations, suggest that a major aim of the

Egyptian government is to transform the character of these territories

to reﬂect Egyptian national values and characteristics. This is a major

element in the process of nation-building. Economic development in

Sinai aimed both to increase Egyptian state presence and control in

Sinai and to socialize peripheral populations into Egypt’s national

society.

It is clear from even this superﬁcial examination of the crises Egypt

faced and the goals the government set that regional integration and

development in Egypt was undertaken to serve the center instead

of the peripheries. Despite claims about the importance of regional

equality, Egyptian development was less about extending the amenities

and services available in central Egypt to the various peripheries as it

was about the development of these peripheries in order to solve the

problems of central Egypt.

From the “Green Revolution” to the

National Project for the Development of

Sinai — A Plan for 2017

Between 1979 and 1982, when Egypt re-gained Sinai after the Camp

David Accords and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, the concept

of developing the deserts was extended to the Sinai Peninsula. The

values and goals of the Green Revolution were reproduced in the Sinai

Development Studies and played a primary role in shaping Egyptian

goals for Sinai. Soon after the Egyptian reoccupation, planning

for Sinai development began. The SDS-I Sinai Development Study

was commissioned by USAID in order to survey Sinai and present

52. Dames and Moore, Sinai Development Study, Vol. 1, p. 48.

Egypt’s Vision for Sinai

53

its recommendations for the best development strategies. This plan

eventually yielded the Egyptian Ministry of Planning’s National Project

for the Development of Sinai (NPDS), which was adopted by Egyptian

authorities as the ofﬁcial strategy to develop Sinai between the years

1994 and 2017. These plans hoped to transform Sinai into a multi-

sector economy through large-scale foreign investment and the

settlement of over a million Egyptians in the peninsula.53

There is remarkable similarity between the two development

reports, and the NPDS can easily be considered a continuation of

the development strategies recommended in the 1985 SDS-I report.

The major difference between the two is in the scale of development.

The SDS-I had for its goal one million Egyptian settlers in Sinai while

the NPDS hoped to attract over three million,54 reﬂecting an ever-

increasing need to relieve Nile Valley population pressures by both

enticing urban Egyptians to seek better working conditions in Sinai

as well as convincing rural Egyptians to seek employment in Sinai

instead of in the urban centers of the Nile Valley.

The development reports identify tourism as a huge potential

market in Sinai, suggesting that Sinai could compete with international

tropical vacation destinations; the Aqaba Coast was recommended

as particularly suitable for international tourism development.55

They further suggest that basing tourism on large-scale private

and foreign investment could potentially fund other development

projects, highlighting the economic importance of tourism and tourist

development to the Egyptian authorities in their endeavor to create

industry and infrastructure in Sinai. The SDS-I study, and later the

NPDS, proposed to expand the Aqaba Coast’s tourist capacity by

attracting “major international beach tourist resorts along the Gulf of

Aqaba,” as this would be the most direct way to maximize both growth

and (taxable) proﬁt.56 The plan foresaw continuous development along

53. David B. Ottaway, “Egypt Tries Hard to Lure Settlers to Sinai Region,”

The Washington Post, April 25, 1983.

54. David Homa, “Touristic Development in Sinai,” in Tourism in the Middle

East Continuity, Change, and Transformation, ed. Rami Farouk Daher

(Minneapolis: Channel View Publications, 2006), p. 239.

55. Dames and Moore, Sinai Development Study, Vol. 3, “An Economic

Development and Investment Plan, 1983 to 2000,” p. 80.

56. Ibid., p. 77.

Chapter 1

54

the Aqaba Coast and the eventual growth of Dahab’s population from

just over 2,000 to over 90,000 inhabitants between 1994 and 2017,

and the growth of Sharm el-Sheikh’s population from just over 2,000

to over 130,000 in the same time frame, almost all of whom would

be Egyptian families enticed to move from the Nile Valley.57

While an in-depth analysis of the two development plans is beyond

the scope of this study, there are two major aspects that must be

discussed in relation to how the Egyptian government chose to relate

to the Bedouin in their development scheme. The ﬁrst is to what

extent the reports consider the needs and probable reactions of the

Bedouin; the second deals with the issue of the formalization of tourist

economies.

The Bedouin and Development

The SDS-I report purports to have conducted an in-depth study of

the population of Sinai, and volume six of the report deals exclusively

with Sinai’s social development. However, the study focuses

overwhelmingly on migrant social development and questions of how

to attract and maintain such a high number of Nile Valley migrants

in Sinai. There is little said in this report about the Bedouin outside

of population estimations, and even less is said about the proposed

integration of this population into development strategies beyond the

need to provide “opportunities for employment.” While the SDS-I

does not contain a sufﬁcient treatment of Sinai’s Bedouin populations,

the NPDS contains even less.

The SDS-I report predicted that increasing service- and

construction-sector jobs would induce the Bedouin the shift away from

“traditional employment” which, according to their understanding,

was “livestock grazing,” and attract the Bedouin populations to settle

closer to the coasts.58 In this, the report identiﬁed and described the

57. “Distribution of the Existing and Target Population in South Sinai,”

Final Report on the National Project for the Development of Sinai,

translated in Ali, “Development of the Peripheral Coastal Area of South

Sinai,” p. 24.

58. Dames and Moore, Sinai Development Study, Vol. 6, “Settlement and

Social Development,” p. 17.

Egypt’s Vision for Sinai

55

major transformation in Bedouin economics experienced during the

Israeli occupation, the shift of Bedouin populations to coastal centers

for purposes of employment. It failed, however, to recognize the fact

that this process had already begun and that by the 1980s, herding

and “livestock grazing” were not these Bedouins’ primary sources

of subsistence. The authors were unable to see the link between

increasing sedentarization and the growth of urban economies and

employment opportunities. They failed to recognize the effects of

development and increasing state control on the declining access

of the Bedouin to pastures and wells needed to maintain a pastoral

economy. There was no discussion of how jobs would be allocated

between the local Bedouin and unskilled migrants from the Nile Valley

seeking the same service and construction sector jobs mentioned

above. Finally, there was no provision or discussion regarding the

potential recognition of Bedouin claims according to their customary

laws, speciﬁcally regarding certain rights of access, for example to

valuable stretches of shoreline for ﬁshing or tribal gatherings. Nor was

there any discussion as to the proposed legal status of the Bedouin or

their land claims, nor any discussion of compensation for developing

on Bedouin land or of providing housing and other services to the

community.

This is the extent to which the SDS-I treated the Bedouin.

Conspicuously absent are any recommendations regarding the

integration of Bedouin populations into the developing economies of

Sinai, or visions of how the Bedouin would function in close proximity

to these estimated one million migrants. Additionally, in the section

dealing with tourist development, the authors mention a number of

possible types of tourism, ranging from beach and resort tourism to

religious and cultural tourism. This discussion, however, makes no

mention of the possible role the Bedouin might play in this industry,

notably in the culture tourism sector. Culture tourism, according to the

SDS-I, would focus on incorporating Sinai into the existing “Cairo,

Luxor, Giza circuit,” integrating Sinai into Egyptian heritage instead

of focusing on its own unique culture.59

The goals for the NPDS focus even more heavily on the issues

facing central Egypt, and the previously mentioned desire to ensure

59. Dames and Moore, Sinai Development Study, Vol. 3, p. 82.

Chapter 1

56

social justice for peripheral populations is absent from this version.

Not once in the section outlining objectives for Sinai development

are the Bedouin even mentioned, and instead the report focuses

on its goal of “building new societies” to vary the lifestyles available

to Egyptians.60 Thus the role ascribed to the Bedouin by those

responsible for development has been peripheral at best.

The report does, on the other hand, set the goal of appropriating

over 90 percent of Bedouin land for development, allowing Bedouin

to retain a mere seven percent of the territory they once exploited.61

While the Bedouin had previously used this land for ﬁshing, holding

tribal gatherings, and more recently, running tourist camps, Egyptian

authorities hoped to utilize this land for the development of large

multinational resorts that had the potential to yield large tourism

revenues for the central government.

Egyptian development authorities, in conjunction with USAID,

based this land appropriation goal on the assumption that Bedouin

do not value land the same way that the development agency would

due to their “nomadic lifestyle,” and believed this appropriation would

be accepted by the Bedouin. The report went even further, stating

that “the NPDS works for the urbanization of the tribal population

and at the same time [for] maintain[ing] their tribal cultures as it is

part of Sinai heritage.”62 How, then, did the Egyptians propose to

reconcile the conﬁscation of Bedouin territory for development with a

desire to preserve the cultural heritage of the Bedouin? Furthermore,

how did they expect to achieve the urbanization of the Bedouin

while neglecting to envision a formal role for them in the developing

tourism-based urban economy? Finally, assuming that there were

more migrants at any given time than available jobs, how would

employment be allocated between migrants and local Bedouin? These

are questions that Egyptian planners and developers, as well as their

American counterparts representing USAID, failed to address.63 The

60. David Homa, “Touristic Development in Sinai,” p. 241.

61. Ibid., p. 252.

62. Ibid., p. 241. Quote taken from Sinai report titled “Sinai: Location and

Natural Resources,” Government publication (1995).

63. While many defend organizations such as USAID for their good

intentions, Joel Migdal rightly points out that there is a huge disparity

Egypt’s Vision for Sinai

57

fact that the Bedouin have intended to participate in the development

and future economies of Sinai, notably the tourist sector, has all but

ensured that the vision the central government created for Sinai would

be complicated by a clash between local Bedouin and central Egyptian

interests.

Tourist Development along the Aqaba

Coast — Egyptian Preferences

The Egyptian development strategy is best examined through a lens

of “modernization.” While as an academic theory, modernization has

been the subject of ongoing debate, and the mechanisms through

which the process supposedly operates produce questionable

outcomes, modernization continues to hold relevance for developing

states as a popular paradigm for third-world development.64 This is not

to argue that Egyptian authorities adopted an explicit “modernization”

approach to Sinai development, which would assume that a primary

goal was social development of the periphery instead of revenue

maximization. In fact, the state appears little concerned with the

Bedouin outside of the implications for maintaining a tight security

presence in the Peninsula. Instead, both written and anecdotal

evidence strongly supports the revenue maximization approach. The

positive externalities anticipated by the modernization paradigm, such

between declarations of intent by state leaders and the actual execution

of policy on the ground. Furthermore, good intentions and the desire

for macro-level transformation say nothing about their knowledge of

micro-level social and economic dynamics. Migdal, in 1988, argued that

scholars need to examine the impact of social policies from a bottom-up

perspective. Ten years later, Simon suggested that while “sustainability”

had become an ostensible goal of development agencies, the addition of

the label “sustainable” was accompanied by few policy changes and no

greater sensitivity to the micro-level impact of development. Today, while

progress has been made on the scholarly side, aid agencies have not

changed significantly. Migdal, Strong Societies, Weak States, pp. 260-1.

Simon, “Development Reconsidered.”

64. Simon, “Development Reconsidered,” p. 185.

Chapter 1

58

as social integration, economic rationalization, and increasing state

control of its territory, are often assumed to be associated with the

type of neo-liberal development policies in play in Sinai. The failure

of these policies to yield the assumed beneﬁts warrants the same

type of criticism that has underpinned the modernization debate for

decades. Furthermore, it would be hard to deny that the promises of

“modernization,” notably rationalization of the economy and political

stabilization, are themselves attractive goals for state authorities,

and it is quite probable that both neo-liberal goals and sociopolitical

“modernization” arguments work together in this regard.

The course of tourism development in South Sinai was shaped by

the requirements that the Egyptian government needed this sector to

fulﬁll and reﬂect the basic assumptions stated above. As one of the

earliest established sectors of the developing Sinai economy, tourism

has become the primary economic activity along the Aqaba cost (as

opposed to industry, concentrated on the West coast, and agriculture,

concentrated in the North). The authorities have favored courses of

tourism development guaranteeing high returns for the government.

This has led them to place major emphasis on formalized tourism

development, focusing on large, multinational resort chains which

invest large sums into development, and from which high taxes and

fees can be extracted.65 In one extreme example, a recent report states

that one of the major casinos in Sharm el-Sheikh pays $24 million in

royalties to the government each year, in addition to its annual taxes.66

While the major resorts undoubtedly pay less, international companies

must maintain the proper permits to operate their businesses, and

these companies have no trouble paying the high fees. This focus

has maximized revenue for the state; however, it has ensured the

marginalization of local inhabitants by channeling revenue ﬂows out of

the local economy and to national projects and foreign shareholders.

The formalization of tourism has made it harder for the Bedouin to

participate in and beneﬁt from Aqaba tourism.

65. Homa, “Touristic Development in Sinai,” p. 252.

66. Adel Abdellah, “Even Tourists and Tourism Operators Say Yes to the

MB,” EgyptVotes.org, Jan. 4, 2012. <http://www.egyptvotes.org/en/

politics/item/400.html>.

Egypt’s Vision for Sinai

59

Smaller hotels have been discouraged due to the perception that

these will not generate the same level of revenue and channel it back

into further development. In a similar fashion, tourism advertising has

focused on expensive resorts and vacation packages aimed at families

and wealthier tourists rather than at backpackers and young travelers.

The government has reasoned that focusing on wealthier tourists will

generate the most revenue per visitor.

This focus on development of formal tourism in Sinai has two

major implications for the Bedouin. The ﬁrst has to do with revenue

leakage, a consequence of the preference for large, foreign-owned

hotel chains. While these chains build resorts that have the potential

to generate signiﬁcant revenues, a majority of these proﬁts ﬂow out of

the locality where they are generated. For example, the Hilton, one of

the largest and most expensive resorts in Dahab, channels most of the

revenue it generates out of Sinai, into the accounts of the company and

its owners and as payments to the Egyptian government for permits

and as taxes, translating into high leakage out of the local economy.67

Formal tourism development, while favored by Egyptian authorities

for its potential to generate high returns, is actually an obstacle to the

Bedouins’ ability to access locally generated tourist revenue.

This is in direct contrast to smaller hotels and local operations,

which guarantee relatively low leakages as they are prone to be

owned, operated, and staffed by locals instead of foreign investors

and migrants. Small-scale tourism is therefore “capable of higher

integration into the local economic structure; it is capable of producing

a higher multiplier effect on the local economy than the formal

tourism sector,” whereas the formal sector relies heavily on foreign

or external elements.68 For the Bedouin, smaller hotels and locally-run

tour companies would ensure a signiﬁcant amount of revenue would

remain in the community, allowing the Bedouin to realize more proﬁt

from economic activities within their territory. However, Egyptian

preferences to work with foreign tourism agencies and international

hotel chains make it harder for the Bedouin to access their share of

the proﬁts being collected. Additionally, the regulations have made it

67. Daher, “Reconceptualizing Tourism in the Middle East,” p. 22.

68. Ibid., p. 24; see also Martin Opperman, “Tourism Space in Developing

Countries,” Annals of Tourism Research 20 (1953).

Chapter 1

60

signiﬁcantly harder for the Bedouin to build and own their own hotels,

which the Egyptians have attempted to replace with larger chains,

using the justiﬁcation that the Bedouin do not meet the safety and

quality standards of the large resorts, and that Egyptian regulations

are for the safety and beneﬁt of its tourists.69

The second implication for the Bedouin is their marginalization

from the tourist spaces in general. As one of Egypt’s main national

goals has been the creation of jobs for Nile Valley Egyptians, migrants

from those areas, not the Bedouin, are considered to have ﬁrst

priority when it comes to access to employment. Additionally, the

Bedouin are considered to be less reliable because they do not have

the professional levels of education favored by the modernization

paradigm; many businesses avoid hiring Bedouin altogether, due to

conceptions of the Bedouin as stupid, lazy, or something more sinister

(see chapter four). For the Aqaba Bedouin, this limits their ability to

engage the formal tourist sectors in any manner more substantial than

as menial employees in the large resort hotels, leaving them searching

for ways to protect their livelihood by ensuring the continuation of

informal economies.70 Primary ways in which they establish informal

economic connections are through hiring out jeeps and pickup

trucks to carry travelers between locations, by organizing Bedouin

cultural events such as camel treks and oasis visits independently of

the resorts, and through the operation of illicit economies such as

drug dealing or smuggling. All of these issues, and how the Bedouin

cope with them, will be discussed in greater depth in the following

chapters. It is important, in any event, to highlight that the nature of

Egyptian development policies have had profound effects on courses

of socioeconomic transformation among the Aqaba Bedouin by

creating obstacles to Bedouin participation in Aqaba tourism.

69. Ben Beasley-Murray, “The Tourism Development Agency uses

environmental rhetoric to justify demolishing Bedouin-owned camps in

favor of big hotels,” Cairo Times, September 30, 1999.

70. Heba Aziz, “Employment in a Bedouin Community: The Case of the

Town of Dahab in South Sinai,” Nomadic Peoples 4.2 (2000), p. 32.

Egypt’s Vision for Sinai

61

Dahab and Development

Dahab has been affected by formalization to a signiﬁcantly lesser

extent than the other major Sinai tourist center, Sharm el-Sheikh,

which is dominated by international resorts. This only serves to

increase Dahab’s signiﬁcance as a center of Bedouin life, as their

access to economic opportunities in Dahab is freer than in Aqaba’s

other tourist centers. This has to do with the origins of tourism in

Dahab, which was pioneered by the Bedouin themselves, as opposed

to state-directed tourism in the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh.

During the Israeli occupation in the 1960s and 70s, Dahab became

a popular coastal location for Israeli travelers and backpackers. The

Aqaba Bedouin quickly seized upon this concept and began building

campgrounds for the backpackers to stay. As recently as the mid-

1990s, Dahab continued to be dominated by Bedouin-owned

campgrounds.71 As Dahab’s popularity increased among these

low-budget travelers, the number of campsites increased, soon to

be complimented by restaurants, and later, hotels, dive shops, and

surf clubs, increasingly owned by Egyptian businessmen and some

foreigners. Dahab, over the past 20 years, has transformed from

a backpacker destination into a major center for water sports such

as scuba, sailing, and surﬁng, but it continues to be deﬁned by its

laid-back, Bedouin/backpacker character, reﬂecting the informal or

grassroots origins of Dahab tourism.

Large-scale development in Dahab did not truly begin until the

mid-1990s, more than a decade after the Egyptian reoccupation. At

this point, Egyptian authorities began focusing development in Dahab

on formal tourism, and a number of large multinational resorts have

sprung up by the beach, including a Hilton, a Le Meridien, and a Soﬁtel,

in addition to others. However, the smaller-scale tourist establishments

have remained a permanent ﬁxture in Dahab proper, as they were

well established by the time the Egyptian development project began.72

These cater to middle- and lower-budget travelers, such as young

backpackers, and involve the Bedouin to a much greater extent than

resorts such as the Hilton. This has allowed the Bedouin a signiﬁcant

71. Conversation with a Dahab business owner, February 12, 2010.

72. Aziz, “Employment in a Bedouin Community,” p. 32.

Chapter 1

62

role in the economy of Dahab by encouraging the establishment of

informal economic ties directly with tourists, cutting out the state or

its foreign representatives, with limited success.73

Recently, however, state-supported resort tourism development

has begun to expand, and discriminatory Egyptian policies have led

to land appropriation and even the demolition of Bedouin-owned

businesses.74 The number of remaining Bedouin camps has begun to

decline as land is being purchased or claimed for three- and four-star

hotels. With its large Bedouin presence and ever-increasing Egyptian

attempts to force the town to conform to Egyptian ideals, Dahab has

become a primary arena for competition between the Aqaba Bedouin,

attempting to preserve their livelihood, and Egyptian authorities,

attempting to utilize Sinai’s resources to pursue national goals.

The Emergent Reality of Dahab

Development

While development in Sinai has been largely successful, and tourism

along the Aqaba Coast has boomed in the past two decades, one aspect

of the NPDS has been a resounding failure. While initially, Egyptian

authorities were optimistic that Egyptian families could be enticed out

of the cities to settle in Sinai, this rarely occurred; the Egyptians failed

to devise a strategy to settle Sinai with Nile Valley migrant families

and create a new Egyptian society in the peninsula. Very few families

agreed to move to Sinai (most are the families of the few doctors,

teachers, and businessmen working in Sinai, but not of those involved

73. Laleh Behbehanian, “Policing the Illicit Peripheries of Egypt’s Tourism

Industry,” Middle East Report 216 (2000), p. 33.

74. Personal observations from multiple trips to Dahab, combined with

repeated statements from the Bedouin asserting that the discriminatory

treatment of the Bedouin regarding land and economics is getting worse.

See also Beasley-Murray, “The Tourism Development Agency uses

environmental rhetoric to justify demolishing Bedouin-owned camps in

favor of big hotels.”

Egypt’s Vision for Sinai

63

in tourism or other menial labor).75 This has rendered Dahab, similarly

to other tourism towns along the Aqaba Coast, unviable as an Egyptian

community or an Egyptian society as envisioned by early Egyptian

and American planners. Instead, a majority of Egyptian migrants in

Sinai are young, unmarried men traveling in search of work so that

they can make the money necessary to start a family according to

Egyptian social custom.76 A secondary source of Egyptian migrants is

the pool of married, but underemployed, Egyptian males who pursue

migratory labor in Sinai. Egyptian development plans have, to a large

extent, already compensated for this by adjusting their population

goals down and altering the course of development in Sinai’s towns

from residential construction for families to residential construction for

male workers, resulting in dormitory-style living in the town centers.

Egyptian migrants have decided to relate to Sinai employment

in a similar manner to other forms of Egyptian migrant labor, as a

means of making money to send back to support the family at home

in the form of remittances. Egyptian migrants in Sinai interviewed

for this study had stories of migratory remittances, and admitted

that their only interest in living in Sinai was to make money to send

home to support their families, who remain either in rural villages or

in the cities of central Egypt. Sinai, speciﬁcally through tourism, has

become a source of foreign capital for Egyptians. In this way, Sinai

is emerging as an alternative to migratory employment in Gulf oil

industries or education, which, since the 1960s, has been the primary

means to bring foreign capital into Egypt.77 The major difference is

that in Sinai, Nile Valley migrants are favored by authorities, while

those seeking employment in Gulf states are often denied civil rights

and are subject to many other restrictions on their movement and

employment. Egyptian migrants in Sinai say that working there is

preferable to traveling to the Gulf because it is signiﬁcantly closer

75. Conversations and home visits with Egyptian migrant laborers in Dahab,

March 2009–February 2010.

76. Personal observations of Dahab’s demographic structure, multiple trips to

Dahab, March 2009–February 2010.

77. Nazih N. Ayubi, The State and Public Policies in Egypt Since Sadat,

Political Studies of the Middle East Series (Reading, U.K.; Ithaca Press,

1991).

Chapter 1

64

to home and migrants in Sinai are subjected to less discriminatory

treatment from Egyptian authorities. For these reasons, there is

an increasing desire for Egyptians to seek migratory labor in Sinai

than abroad.78 This trend is a clear result of the relative beneﬁts of

Egyptians seeking employment within their own borders.

Many Egyptians come to Sinai from the cities and the villages

of the Delta and Upper Egypt in search of work, and follow their

acquaintances and kin. Jobs are most frequently allocated along kinship

lines or among friends. A majority of laborers interviewed in Dahab

acknowledged that their job came from an opportunity given to them

by an older brother or cousin, who acts as a host to new migrants.

Thus patterns of development and employment in Sinai suggest that

to central Egyptians, Sinai is not a place to settle and raise a family,

but to make money to support the rest of the family at home. This

concept of remittances will appear occasionally throughout this work,

showing the types of employment and settlement patterns resulting

from Sinai development.

Development in Sinai has been closely controlled by the Egyptian

state in order to reﬂect the goals of the Egyptian state as opposed to

the interests and developmental concerns of any periphery. In this,

attempts to increase state presence and instruments of control in the

Egyptian periphery are clearly visible. Egyptian security forces exercise

tight control over the main transportation routes across and around

Sinai, able to regulate or restrict the movement of all but the Bedouin.

Furthermore, Egyptian utilities and services have given the Egyptian

government the role of primary caretaker and distributor of goods

78. None of the Egyptian laborers in Sinai interviewed for this study

challenged this statement; they all declared their preference to remain in

Egypt to pursue work, and many stated that Sinai was their only viable

option, as there were no jobs in the cities of central Egypt. A majority of

migrants from urban Egypt indicated that their desire to move to Sinai

was to seek better paying jobs and escape the crowded conditions of the

city. When asked about the possibility of seeking employment outside of

Egypt, not a single respondent declared a preference to give up their

Sinai jobs for foreign employment. It is clear from their responses that

there is a certain feeling of entitlement among Sinai laborers, that they

feel more comfortable there than in a foreign country.

Egypt’s Vision for Sinai

65

and services in Sinai’s growing towns. Elements increasing Egyptian

control in urban spaces include utilities such as water and electricity,

which have been made widely available, as well as services, notably

health, security, and education, all of which, however, suffer from

under investment, resulting in poor quality public goods. Through

development, Egypt has been able to extend these services to the

towns of South Sinai, increasing the reliance of Sinai’s residents

on Egyptian goods and services. This dependence has developed

unevenly, however, and the Bedouin have, to differing extents, been

able to avoid relying on the outcomes of Egyptian development. As

a trend, the Bedouin living in desert villages enjoy relatively greater

independence than those in the towns. The following chapters

examine a number of consequences of increasing Egyptian control

and increasing reliance on Egyptian goods and services.

While the Egyptian authorities have invested a great deal of time

and effort into determining how best to utilize the available resources

to maximize the beneﬁt to the central state, they did not adequately

prepare themselves to deal with an Egyptian population that was not

ready to commit to national life in Sinai or a Bedouin population that

would attempt to participate in the Egyptian project according to their

own interests. Egyptian goals have clashed with the interests of the

Bedouin and their vision for the future.

Figure 3: Ongoing construction in Dahab.

Photo taken by author, February 10, 2010.

Chapter 1

66

Figure 4: The Dahab Corniche. Photo taken by author,

February 20, 2009.

67

Chapter 2

The Evolving Economies of

the Dahab Bedouin —

Emerging Trends and

Continuities

The development of urban centers along the Aqaba Coast is a new

phenomenon for the Bedouin. Whereas historically, these Bedouin

had to travel long distances to access towns and their markets and

practiced subsistence economics within their tribal territory, Israeli

and Egyptian development has led to the emergence of local towns

with their own markets. This has had a noticeable impact on Bedouin

economic practices by encouraging the Bedouin to participate in the

opportunities these towns generate, producing a perceptible shift

towards greater reliance on the market economy and a simultaneous

decline in the productivity of their subsistence economies. Far from

leading to a rejection of pastoral economies in favor of those in the

towns (a shift from “traditional” to “modern” economies), the Bedouin

have adapted their economic practices to the changing situation by

increasing their presence in tourist centers and altering their lifestyles

to help them access new sources of income while attempting to

preserve the security their subsistence economies provide. These two

economies do not operate independently of one another; rather, each

system is shaped by the limitations of the other, and elements of one

may be applicable in the other. The Aqaba Bedouins’ contemporary

subsistence economy can only be understood in relation to the

prevailing conditions of the expanding market economy.79 A stylized

ideal-type model would view these economies as mutually dependent

79. Emanuel Marx, “Changing Employment Patterns of Bedouin in South

Sinai,” in Emanuel Marx and Avshalom Shmueli (eds.), The Changing

Bedouin (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984), p. 185.

Chapter 2

68

but separate; however, it would be more useful to understand Bedouin

economic practices as existing on a continuum of “market” on one

extreme and “subsistence” on the other. In practice, all Bedouin

economics fall somewhere in between the two poles, and Bedouin

economic practices simultaneously rely on and beneﬁt from the rules

of both.

The Bedouin have never subsisted from a single-sector economy,

despite popular images that they focus solely on pastoralism. While

a major focus on Bedouin economic practices deals with nomadic

pastoralism, the husbandry of camels, goats, and sheep, the Bedouin

could not possibly subsist off of animal products alone, and the sparse

resources of the Sinai desert render pastoralism unfeasible as a single-

sector economy.80 They have instead engaged in a practice described

by Philip Salzman as “multi-resource nomadism,” which includes not

only animal husbandry, but also some combination of agriculture,

trade, smuggling and raiding, as well as wage labor.81 While Salzman

discusses this phenomenon regarding Baluch nomads, his ideas have

been applied, almost wholesale, to the Arab Bedouin. Of Salzman’s

notion of “multi-resource nomadism,” Emanuel Marx states, “All

Bedouin, except a small number of highly-specialized camel-breeding

groups, engage in a ‘multi-resource economy,’ combining pastoralism

with a variety of other occupations.”82 Similarly, as various studies of

Sinai Bedouin economic practices have revealed, these Bedouin have

80. Aziz, “Employment in a Bedouin Community,” p. 33; cf. Emanuel Marx,

“Economic Change among Pastoral Nomads in the Middle East,” in

Emanuel Marx and Avshalom Shmueli (eds.), The Changing Bedouin,

ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984).

81. Philip C. Salzman, “Multi-Resource Nomadism in Iranian Baluchistan,” in

William Irons (ed.), Perspectives on Nomadism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972).

Salzman specifically refers to “multi-resource Nomadism,” however

subsequent studies of the Bedouin, notably by Marx, have qualified this

concept by demonstrating that these Bedouin need not maintain nomadic

lifestyles to continue pastoral or multi-resource modes of living. Thus when

considering this ‘multi-resource’ economy of the Bedouin, we should not

assume that it is only applicable to groups that remain nomads.

82. Ann Gardner and Emanuel Marx, “Employment and Unemployment

Among Bedouin,” Nomadic Peoples 4.2 (2000), p. 22.

The Evolving Economies of the Dahab Bedouin—Emerging Trends and Continuities

69

never maintained an autarkic economy, and interaction with centers

of trade and labor has always played a role in their subsistence.83

Reliance on towns and markets, while variable to some extent, has

been a ﬁxture of Bedouin economic practice.

In this way, the economy of the Aqaba Bedouin is varied, and

different aspects of their economy have occasionally assumed more

or less importance due to the sociopolitical circumstances they have

faced. It is not a case where “traditional” aspects of the economy

are in permanent decline, and even with the presence of the town

and its markets, “traditional” or subsistence-based economic practices

continue to hold economic importance for the Bedouin, especially as

a source of economic security.

The major transformation of the Aqaba Bedouin over the past

40 years has undoubtedly been a result of the proliferation of wage-

labor employment in the towns along the coast. While income from

this type of labor has become the primary source of income for the

Bedouin, they have not abandoned other economic practices. Non-

income generating economic practices, such as the preservation of

ﬂocks and orchards, have either been adapted to take advantages of

new economic opportunities or stem from perceptions of political or

ecological instability, not cultural factors demanding the maintenance

of “traditional practices.” While some of these practices have been

preserved, their relative importance to the subsistence of the Bedouin

has changed. Cash-income labor is now the mainstay of the Aqaba

Bedouin economy.

83. See various studies on Bedouin economies, notably in South Sinai: e.g.,

Dan Rabinowitz, “Themes in the Economies of the Bedouin of South

Sinai in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, “International Journal

of Middle East Studies 17.2 (1985); Aziz, “Employment in a Bedouin

Community”; Marx, “Changing Employment Patterns of Bedouin in

South Sinai.” See also Marx, “Economic Change Among Pastoral

Nomads in the Middle East” for a more general discussion of the Bedouin

and “multi-resource” economies.

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70

Wage Labor and Employment

among the Mzeina

Wage labor is not a new practice among the Aqaba Bedouin. In fact,

they have known migrant employment since the mid-1800s, when

it played a supplemental role to Bedouin subsistence. Since then,

wage labor has transformed from a source of supplemental income

into a primary source of Bedouin livelihood; it has risen and declined

in cycles reﬂecting periods of political instability in Sinai, when

employment tends to become insecure and subsistence economies

allow the Bedouin to weather the turbulence. Wage labor is actually

complimentary to the Bedouin economy, and furthermore, is not

a radical new innovation but an increasingly important source of

income.

Before wage labor, the Bedouin of South Sinai relied on a number

of practices to supplement their subsistence economy. While the

Bedouin did operate a pastoral economy, in reality, most of their

food was imported from markets like Cairo and Gaza and had to be

purchased.84 Before the accession to power of Muhammad ‘Ali in

the early 19th century, the Sinai Bedouin, like many other Bedouin

tribes, derived this income from raiding, the extortion of khuwa or

protection money from towns, and the transportation and protection

of people and goods across their tribal territories.85 The income from

these practices would be used to purchase the agricultural products

that the Bedouin relied on but could not produce themselves including

cereals, grain, tea, and sugar, as well as other necessities such as

clothing and weapons. In the 1810s, however, Muhammad ‘Ali began

to pacify the Bedouin in the Egyptian deserts and Sinai.86 Despite

vigorous attempts to resist ‘Ali’s advances, the Tawara Bedouins’ free

reign in the towns of Egypt and their ability to raid caravans traveling

through Sinai was substantially curbed.

84. Emanuel Marx, “Oases in South Sinai,” Human Ecology 27.2 (1999).

85. Rabinowitz, “Themes in the Economies of the Bedouin of South Sinai,”

p. 219.

86. See Gabriel Baer, “Some Aspects of Bedouin Sedentarization in 19th

Century Egypt,” Die Welt des Islams 5.1/2 (1957).

The Evolving Economies of the Dahab Bedouin—Emerging Trends and Continuities

71

Due to the limitations of a pastoral economy, particularly when

relying on territory that is underproductive and undependable, the

supplementation of animal husbandry with some kind of income-

earning practice is necessary.87 Various studies (e.g., Salzman, Marx,

Sweet88) have shown that pastoral nomads must supplement their

animal-based economy. In the past, additional income was largely

derived from raiding and trading; however, the proﬁtability of these

practices has declined as states have used their military might to pacify

the tribes and increase security along trade routes. In response, some

tribesmen began selling their labor to Egyptian industry, including the

manganese mines at Umm Bogmah and the petroleum ﬁelds of Abu

Rudeis on the west coast of Sinai. More substantially, young men

began traveling to Egyptian cities such as Suez and Cairo in search

of employment as migrant laborers.89 Although this work was largely

supplemental, many Aqaba Bedouin did engage in wage labor at some

point in their lives starting from the mid-19th century.

Until the Israeli occupation of the Sinai in 1967, wage labor

functioned as a supplement to the subsistence economy of the

Aqaba Bedouin. A number of factors encouraged a shift towards

greater reliance on a cash economy after the Israeli occupation. First,

increasing Israeli security and policing, as well as the imposition of

an international border at the Suez Canal, brought activities such as

smuggling—an offshoot of raiding that developed independently of

wage labor—to a halt. The Israeli preference to employ the Bedouin

in Sinai development increased both the number and proximity of

jobs, allowing the Bedouin to seek employment signiﬁcantly closer

to home. The Aqaba Bedouin began working in infrastructure and

construction within Sinai, operating motor vehicles, and participating

87. Salzman, “Multi-Resource Nomadism in Iranian Baluchistan,” p. 66.

88. Louise E. Sweet, “Camel Raiding of the North Arabian Bedouin: A

Mechanism of Ecological Adaptation,” in Louise E. Sweet (ed.), Peoples

and Cultures of the Middle East, vol. 1 (New York: The Natural History

Press, 1970). This study demonstrates that the most specialized Bedouin

groups, the Arabian camel-rearing Bedouin, are equally dependent on

markets to accrue their food supplies.

89. Marx, “Changing Employment Patterns of the Bedouin of South Sinai,”

p. 178.

Chapter 2

72

in the budding tourist economy, from setting up camps and coffee

shops to guiding desert safaris to selling drugs to young backpackers.90

After the 1973 War, the Israeli authorities increased their

employment of the Bedouin by giving them free access to towns and

cities in Israel, and the Bedouin began pouring into Eilat and Be’er

Sheva in addition to Sharm el-Sheikh; in the mid-1970s, almost all

working-age Bedouin males were employed in a wage-paying job.91

This had two major consequences. First, the economic opportunities

available to the Bedouin both increased and diversiﬁed, resulting in

a decline in the relative signiﬁcance of pastoralism to the Bedouin

as it comprised a smaller and smaller share of Bedouin economics.

This additionally shifted the foundations of the Aqaba Bedouin

economy from multi-resource nomadism to wage labor, fully realized

in the 1970s. Despite this shift, the animal producing economy of

the Bedouin has been maintained, and at times has even been in

resurgence. Increasing reliance on employment opportunities closer to

home is also leading to a decline in nomadic movement and increased

sedentarization. This has to do both with increasingly secure access to

water and fodder for ﬂocks as well as increasing reliance on the towns

for livelihood instead of the natural environment.

Employment trends among the Bedouin in

Dahab under Egyptian Rule

A consistent and continuing trend under Egyptian rule has been

the increasing localization of employment. While before the 1960s,

employment was limited to Egyptian cities, and during the Israeli

occupation was extended to the large urban centers of Sharm el-

Sheikh, Eilat, and Be’er Sheva, during the neo-Egyptian period, from

1982 onward, there has been accelerating growth of employment

centers even more locally, with the emergence of market towns in

Taba, Nuwayba, and Dahab. The number of jobs is increasing, as is

their proximity to the homes of the Aqaba Bedouin.

90. Aziz, “Employment in a Bedouin Community,” p. 34.

91. Marx, “Changing Employment Patterns of the Bedouin of South Sinai,”

p. 181.

The Evolving Economies of the Dahab Bedouin—Emerging Trends and Continuities

73

Tourism continues to be the primary source of income for the

Aqaba Bedouin under Egyptian rule, but the market has undergone

a signiﬁcant change in transition from Israeli control back to Egyptian

sovereignty. While the Bedouin did not have to compete with Israelis

for jobs, as the Bedouin monopolized the unskilled labor pool and the

tourism industry, under Egyptian rule, competition for employment

between the Bedouin and unskilled migrant laborers has been intense.

These unskilled workers have come to Sinai from both Egypt and the

Sudan to take advantage of the jobs that Egyptian development has

promised them.

In Dahab, patterns of employment in the tourist industry have

experienced a major transformation. In the years of the Israeli

occupation, tourism in Dahab was largely run by the Bedouin

themselves. They set up campsites and restaurants and employed

other tribesmen. Non-Bedouin businesses during this period had

to purchase land directly from the Bedouin. Even after Dahab was

reoccupied by Egypt, development remained slow in the 1980s and

early 1990s, giving the Bedouin a large degree of freedom. This early

period of low-budget tourism development cemented for the Bedouin a

place in the Dahab economy. At the turn of the millennium, however,

the Egyptian government placed higher priority on economic growth

in Dahab, and began implementing large-scale tourism development

along the beaches according to the goals outlined in the NPDS.92 This

gave the Egyptian government the primary responsibility of regulating

Dahab’s tourist economy and deprived the Bedouin of a great deal

of their economic freedom, increasingly forcing them to rely on the

goodwill of the state to maintain Bedouin employment and ownership

opportunities.

Consumerism is a relatively new concept for the Bedouin, but a

major issue when examining social attitudes towards employment. In

a pastoral economy, there are a number of ways to display wealth,

notably through practices of granting hospitality, as the ability to host

others is a sure sign of prosperity, as well as through the production

of luxury items instead of subsistence items, for example raising

92. Interview with owner of a dive shop in Dahab, video archives, May 14,

2009.

Chapter 2

74

horses in Arabia.93 The Western conception of consumption, based

on the concept of saving money to accrue luxury items, appears to

have been imported into Sinai only through the arrival of Israeli and

European tourists, who introduced the Bedouin to consumer goods.94

The availability of these items close to home, coinciding with the rise

of local markets, has been the major factor encouraging the adoption

of consumer lifestyles, which has, in turn, encouraged more and more

Bedouin to pursue wage-paying jobs with the goal of accumulating

capital. This process, however, is incomplete and is supplemented by

a common trend of gift-giving, whereby the Bedouin accrue consumer

items through the relationships they have formed with foreigners. In

this way, the maintenance of close relationships with foreigners is as

important to patterns of Bedouin consumerism as employment, and

wage labor is not the only path to consumerist lifestyles. Furthermore,

these consumer goods are not always kept by the Bedouin; they are

occasionally sold for cash, and should be considered a form of savings

or investment that can be converted into currency when necessary. In

this way, the turn towards a consumerist economic orientation is also

a product of the rising cost of living.

For the Bedouin, employment does not differ signiﬁcantly from

other forms of subsistence: it is a means to provide basic necessities

such as food, shelter, and security, and secondarily for purposes of

consumption. An implication of this approach is that Bedouin attitudes

towards employment differ from those in Western, industrialized

nations: maintaining oneself in a job to ensure a continuous ﬂow

of income is unnecessary, and perhaps even wasteful, taking away

from other activities that contribute equally to the subsistence of

the family or the maintenance of relationships with foreigners. The

Bedouin work to earn the money they require to purchase items the

family needs, mostly food, clothing, and locally available consumer

goods. Bedouin concepts of saving place a higher value on preserving

and storing necessities for times of emergency than on cash, which

has no real utility except in the short term. While the adoption of

93. William C. Young, “The Bedouin: Discursive Identity or Sociological

Category? A Case Study from Jordan,” Journal of Mediterranean

Studies 9.2 (1999). p. 289.

94. Aziz, “Employment in a Bedouin Community,” p. 34.

The Evolving Economies of the Dahab Bedouin—Emerging Trends and Continuities

75

consumerist tendencies is accelerating and wage labor is increasingly

viewed through a lens of consumerism, many of the Aqaba Bedouin

continue to view employment as one of a number of practices geared

towards subsistence.

This being the case, many Bedouin seek temporary employment

in Dahab. This means that a Bedouin will work for a limited period of

time, perhaps one to two weeks, make some money, and then take

an equal or longer period off. A Bedouin working as a waiter at one of

the restaurants on the Dahab corniche explained that he only worked

when he needed the money, whether it was to provide food for the

family or buy a new bathing suit, and that he might work a week or

two to make what he needed and then stop until he needed more.95

This tendency, not uncommon today among the Dahab Bedouin,

has encouraged a view of the Bedouin as lazy and unreliable, leading

to accusations that the Bedouin despise work and prefer poverty.96

Such attitudes, however, reﬂect the values of a capitalist society that

favors steady employment, the accumulation of capital, and saving,

which are necessary to drive a consumerism-based society; they do

not accurately reﬂect the values of the Bedouin. A pastoral economy

simply cannot be maintained by sloth, and claims that it is are entirely

divorced from the reality of life in the desert.

Another Bedouin described his employment history as one of

low duration and high mobility. He changed jobs according to where

the tourists were concentrated and when. His ﬁrst job, as a Bedouin

tour guide, was only successful during the cool winter months, so he

would limit his time working as a guide, and in the summer he worked

as a waiter at his brother’s beachside restaurant before becoming a

Divemaster.97 He explained that he maintained both a summer and

a winter job, not because he needed the constant ﬂow of money for

himself, but so that he would be able to send continuous money home

to his mother and sisters who live in a desert village. Dahab is a source

95. Conversation with a Bedouin employee, September 22, 2009.

96. Proof of the existence of these attitudes needs no citation as it is recounted

in almost every traveler’s journal and official recollection regarding the

Bedouin. These attitudes continue to be held by many Egyptian migrants

working in Dahab. This topic will be addressed in greater detail in chapter

4 of this study.

97. Interview with a Bedouin Divemaster, July 24, 2009.

Chapter 2

76

of remittances for the Bedouin as much as it is for Egyptian migrant

workers. All of the Bedouin living in Dahab have family in Sinai’s

desert villages, and their sedentarization has created permanent

channels for the ﬂow of tourist revenue to the Bedouin not living in

Dahab or other urban centers. Many more Bedouin rely on tourist

revenue than live in Dahab.

Furthermore, these Bedouin have grown accustomed to labor

insecurity, because in addition to political instability having the

potential to undermine their access to employment, they also know

that they can be dismissed by their employers without any notice. This

being the case, the Bedouin value the ability to work in a number

of different occupations and quickly change from one occupation to

another. This allows them to pursue a wide variety of job opportunities

whenever they might be available in order to mitigate the insecurity

of the job market or the potential ﬁckleness of Egyptian employers.

While providing a measure of ﬂexibility for the Bedouin, this practice

has also limited their vertical mobility in the tourist economy because

it has created a lack of specialization among Bedouin workers. This

lack of specialization is caused by reluctance to make risky, expensive

investments in a single skill. This, according to Dan Rabinowitz, “in

turn, limits the Bedouins’ incorporation into the wider economics

on which they are dependent. They tend to perpetuate themselves

as pools of unskilled laborers, available for hire by the economies of

Egypt… at any time.”98 This allows the Bedouin to pursue a wide

range of jobs, but prevents them from progressing beyond the level

of menial employment and generates negative perceptions regarding

their work ethic.

The major exception to the above discussion has been the

increasing employment of young Bedouin, in their early twenties, in

the windsurﬁng clubs attached to the multinational resorts along the

Dahab Lagoon, as well as in a few scuba shops that employ Bedouin

as Divemasters in addition to drivers and gear carriers.99 Many of

these Bedouin began windsurﬁng and diving as a hobby during their

98. Rabinowitz, “Themes in the Economies of the Bedouin of South Sinai,”

p. 225.

99. Divemaster being a high-skilled job and drivers and gear carriers being

low-skilled.

The Evolving Economies of the Dahab Bedouin—Emerging Trends and Continuities

77

teenage years, and have become natural candidates for employment

in these sectors of the tourist economy. More will be said in the next

chapter about the willingness of some foreign employers to work with

the Bedouin, but for now it is important to note that these Bedouin,

who have turned their hobbies into steady careers, represent a small

minority of Bedouin employees in Dahab.

Bedouin employment, for the most part, is limited to the peripheries

of the Dahab tourist economy. Since Egyptians prefer to hire other

Egyptians, there is little Bedouin presence at the larger resorts or the

Egyptian-owned hotels, with a few exceptions. Instead, the Bedouin

occupy jobs that can be considered self-employment such as driving a

jeep or selling handicrafts, working for other Bedouin, or working as

menial laborers in shops and restaurants. These occupations allow the

Bedouin more freedom, both to pursue a wide variety of jobs and to

decide when to work and when not to. While wage labor has become

the primary source of income for the Bedouin, its insecure nature and

reliance on a single sector of the developed economy, tourism, has

led the Aqaba Bedouin to maintain other economic practices as well.

The Maintenance and Adaptation of

Subsistence Economies

The maintenance of Bedouin subsistence economies in the urban

environment, as shown by the previous generation of Sinai researchers,

is a type of economic insurance against political and economic

instability. The Bedouin have experienced this instability in the past

and know that these periods often lead to increased unemployment

or shocks to the tourist market. In times like these, the Bedouin fall

back on their subsistence economy and the social patterns comprising

it.100 These structures help prevent food shortages, deprivation, and

starvation among the Bedouin in times of crisis or instability. The

strength and vitality of the subsistence economy is directly dependent

on the state of the market economy.

A number of events that occurred in the Sinai over the past

century have reinforced the need for the Bedouin to maintain these

100. Marx, “Oases in South Sinai,” p. 343.

Chapter 2

78

modes of subsistence. Most notable were the wars fought in Egypt

and the Sinai: World War I and the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956,

June 1967, and October 1973, a number of which, most notably

the October War, froze the economies of the Sinai and led to full

unemployment. More recently, the waves of unrest and terrorism

that struck the Aqaba Coast in the early 2000s in Dahab, Taba, and

Sharm el-Sheikh, discussed in the preface, as well as in the aftermath

of the national uprising in January 2011 that I detail in the epilogue,

brought an immediate halt to the ﬂow of tourists, leading to a spike

in unemployment in a depressed tourist economy.101 Through these

events, which had devastating economic consequences in South Sinai,

the Bedouin have learned that they cannot rely on governments to

provide and maintain stable economies and that in times of crisis, the

Bedouin must be able to rely on themselves. Additionally, they have

discovered the fragile nature of international tourism and the danger

of having to rely on a single sector for a majority of their income.

By maintaining a subsistence economy in times of prosperity and

activating it in times of need, the Bedouin have largely avoided major

food and ﬁnancial crises.

Perhaps more importantly, while this alternate economy has often

been viewed as economically unproductive, especially compared

to the wage labor opportunities available in the towns, it has great

contemporary relevance to the Bedouin as they integrate into Dahab’s

tourist market.102 Despite this lack of productivity, these practices have

not been abandoned, nor have the tribal social structures that support

them. Largely based on pastoralism and agriculture and grounded in

tribal social structures, the subsistence system is often viewed as the

remnant of the Bedouins’ “traditional” modes of living. However, they

have been largely adapted to ﬁt the developing reality in Sinai and

are more reﬂective of contemporary conditions, such as the political

101. I had the opportunity to visit Dahab in July 2011, four months after

the end of the January Revolution; tourism had only slightly begun to

recover. Despite the absence of instability in the Aqaba region itself,

the protests led to a virtual disappearance of tourists from all of Egypt

immediately following the uprisings.

102. Marx, “Changing Employment Patterns of Bedouin in South Sinai,”

p. 173.

The Evolving Economies of the Dahab Bedouin—Emerging Trends and Continuities

79

situation and the availability of market opportunities, than of conditions

of the past. Many economic practices have been maintained, such as

herding, ﬁshing, and smuggling, but the form that they have taken is

signiﬁcantly different today, as old practices have been adapted to ﬁt

new circumstances born from processes of urbanization and tourism

development. In fact, a number of these “traditional” practices have

only recently become quite lucrative and have given the Bedouin a

competitive edge in the market economy.

Herding

Perhaps most central to the study of the Bedouin is the role of herding

and pastoralism. One of the most popular images of the Bedouin is

as herders of goats and camels, and it has even been suggested that

herding is the major criterion deﬁning the Bedouin. For the Aqaba

Bedouin, however, pastoralism has always been a limited-value

practice.103

In the subsistence territory, ﬂocks are taken to pasture by the

young girls and camps would move in order to ensure the ﬂocks would

get sufﬁcient food and water.104 Today among the Aqaba Bedouin,

the picture is signiﬁcantly different. The label “nomadic pastoralism”

suggests that camps move in order to ensure the provision of food

and water to their ﬂocks, the source of the nomad’s livelihood. In the

subsistence territory, technological development, notably pumps and

generators, have largely mitigated the need for nomadic movement.

In Dahab, this necessity is further mitigated by the overabundance

of organic waste left around Bedouin neighborhoods. Instead of

having to bring the ﬂocks out to pasture, they are let loose in the

streets of ‘Asala to graze on the heaps of trash available to them (see

Figure 5). As water is also readily available from government-sunk

wells and urban plumbing, the Bedouin do not need to move their

103. Emanuel Marx, “Tribal Pilgrimages to Saints’ Tombs in South Sinai,” in

Ernest Gellner (ed.), Islamic Dilemmas: Reformers, Nationalists, and

Industrialization: The Southern Shore of the Mediterranean (New

York: Mouton, 1985), p. 113.

104. Gardner, “At Home in South Sinai,” p. 53.

Chapter 2

80

ﬂocks in pursuit of water and pasture. Urbanization and technological

development have negated the need for nomadic movement.

While many Bedouin families living in Dahab own goats and sheep,

very few own enough animals from which to subsist. The Aqaba

Bedouin seem to agree that 50 to 60 goats are needed for subsistence.105

In the 1980s, Ann Gardner estimated the average ﬂock size to number

fewer than 20 goats, with a large herd consisting of 40.106 Flock sizes

began to further decline in the 1970s as increasing opportunities for

employment rendered herding less ﬁnancially attractive.107 Today, the

average size of goat ﬂocks is somewhere between six and ten animals,

and their function has not changed. These herds are not for subsistence

purposes; it would be very hard to maintain larger, subsistence ﬂocks

due to the sparse vegetation available for grazing, which needs to be

supplemented by expensive food purchases. Furthermore, the urban

dietary staples of these ﬂocks, consisting mostly of garbage and poor

quality fodder, have undermined the quality of the products derived

105. Marx, “Tribal Pilgrimages to Saints’ Tombs in South Sinai,” p. 113.

106. Gardner, “At Home in South Sinai,” p. 52.

107. Rabinowitz, “Themes in the Economies of the Bedouin of South Sinai,”

p. 223.

Figure 5: Urban herds.

Photo by Eli Sperling, May 15, 2009.

The Evolving Economies of the Dahab Bedouin—Emerging Trends and Continuities

81

from them. The quality of the meat has suffered signiﬁcantly and the

Bedouin have claimed that the milk from urban goats is essentially

useless unless the goats are maintained inside and fed with purchased

grains or vegetables, which quickly become ﬁnancially prohibitive. In a

day-to-day context, these ﬂocks are at best unproductive and at worst

a drain on Bedouin resources. Instead of considering

Contesting Identities in South Sinai: Development, Transformation, and the Articulation of a "Bedouin" Identity under Egyptian Rule

Abstract and Figures