Clinton Bailey – författare

The desert-dwelling Bedouin have always been a subject of intense fascination. Their culture and ethics are still largely a mystery, both for the peoples with whom they share the Middle-Eastern and African lands, and for those living in the West. Like other non-literate peoples, the Bedouin have a strong oral tradition and use poetry for many forms of communication and entertainment. Clinton Bailey has spent the last twenty years among the Bedouin of Sinai and the Negev studying their culture and recording their poems as recited around campfires. This book presents the fruit of his work: 113 poems reflecting Bedouin attitudes to a variety of personal, social, and political experiences. Each poem is translated into English, appears in Arabic script and transliteration, and is accompanied by an introduction and notes on the cultural, linguistic, and historical background. This thorough and original study makes a vital contribution to our knowledge of the Bedouin, and will be of great interest to Arabists, anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and all those who visit this part of the Arab world.Dr Bailey has has lectured on Bedouin culture and history at various universities, and is a founder of the Museum of Bedouin Culture in the Negev.

Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev is the first comprehensive study of Bedouin law published in English, including oral, pre-modern law. The material for the book, collected over the course of forty years of field work by Clinton Bailey, one of the world’s leading scholars on Bedouin culture, is of permanent scholarly value.  Bailey shows how a nomadic desert-dwelling society provides for its own law and order in the traditional absence of any centralized authority or law enforcement agency to protect it. This comprehensive picture of Bedouin law, offers readers a unique opportunity to understand Bedouin law by highlighting the close connection between the law and the culture from which it emerged.

Two-thirds of all Palestinians are Jordanian citizens living on the East and West Banks; a sizable number also reside and work in various parts of the Arabian Peninsula. With the questions of ultimate sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip attracting much international attention since Israel's occupation of these areas in 1967, the solution to the Palestinian question is often seen as entirely dependent on Palestinian relations with Israel, despite the fact that only one-third of the Palestinians live in the occupied territories. In contrast, Palestinian relations with the Arab states, including Jordan, are generally portrayed as a sideshow to the main theater of conflict. This book examines the thirty-five-year struggle between the Hashimite monarchy and the forces of Palestinian nationalism over the future identity, and perhaps location, of those two-thirds of the Palestinian people who have been Jordanian subjects since 1948. Dr. Bailey bases his study on "open" sources: reports appearing in the Arab, Israeli, and world press, in addition to academic studies and published memoirs of persons involved in the events described, providing an accurate portrayal of the significant developments in Jordan's Palestinian challenge over the past thirty-five years.

This book attempts to portray the thirty-five-year struggle between the Hashimite monarchy and the forces of Palestinian nationalism over the future identity, and perhaps location, of those two-thirds of the Palestinian people who have been Jordanian subjects since 1948.

The recent revival of interest in the Muslim world has generated numerous studies of modern Islam, most of them focusing on the Sunni majority. Shi'ism, an often stigmatized minority branch of Islam, has been discussed mainly in connection with Iran. Yet Shi'i movements have been extraordinarily effective in creating political strategies that have