such as the water buffalo cannot really be considered domesticated if their owners fail to supervise their mating, and the Mi’dan did not consider this their business. Houses of the Mi’dan are built either in the marsh itself atop man-made islands of reed mats layered with mud or on the very edge of the marsh where they and their animals have easy access to the marsh vegetation. Both women and men are practiced at harvesting reeds and turning them into reed mats and baskets, which they sell or trade to itinerant trades people. Additional sustenance is derived from sowing rice during the spring in the seasonal marshland formed by the annual inundation. The most important source of outside income, however, comes from the making of reed mats and from the dairy products of their water buffalo. The Mi’dan fished for their own consumption but despised nets and thought that the only manly way to catch fish was to spear them.
Both the Bedouin and the Beni-Hasan looked down on the Mi’dan for keeping water buffalo, which both regarded as disgusting. Over the years serious scandals arose when the Bedouin or Beni-Hasan thought local butchers had substituted the meat of a water buffalo for the meat of domestic cattle. The Beni Hasan also thought that the Mi’dan were incomprehensibly silly to spend so much time trying to spear a few fish when they could catch many more with nets.
Aside from these distinctions and their different dwelling areas and subsistence modes, essential patterns of Mi’dan culture such as family organization, life-crisis ceremonies, division of labor, and notions of good and evil are very similar to those of the Beni-Hasan. One instantly noticeable difference is the custom of the Mi’dan women to go about their work without the abaya.
The architecture of the Beni Hasan and the Mi’dan, which was markedly different when the al-Hiba expedition began its work, grew more similar as time passed (see p. 100–101). Most members of the Mi’dan did not consider some so-called Mi’dan who lived in isolation or semi-isolation in the marshes as Mi’dan. These people often had been in some trouble with the law and had come south to lose themselves in the marshlands. On the surface, at least, their way of life was identical to that of the Mid’an, and they were held by their hosts to the same religious and moral standards of conduct. In the many years of our work in the area, I never heard of the smallest violation of conduct on the part of these outsiders. They were very dependent on the Mi’dan’s early warning system which effectively alerted everyone that an outsider was coming and usually identified the newcomer. At least an hour before the police could arrive at their homes, those in trouble with the law would melt into the marshes. It took me a long time to figure out how this was done, but it seems that signals were sent by a complicated system of gunshots, drums, and sometimes children’s whistles in a code based on the number of shots or notes and the time intervals between them.
The typical family has very few household possessions. They can, in a few short hours, roll up the reed mats which provide them shelter, put their few possessions into their boat or boats, and, driving their water buffalo before them disappear into the marshes, sometimes to isolated islands sometimes to hide in the water itself among the giant reeds.
Bedouin
From August through January the edges of the mound and its surrounding area were also inhabited by a clan of the nomadic Hadij, a Bedouin tribe, whose tents usually dotted the landscape in groups of three or more. Their nomadic wanderings brought them to al-Hiba when the recession of the marshes furnished pasturage for their herds. When the winter rains and the increasing floods from the irrigation canals began to empty into the marshes and expand them, the Hadij moved west into Syria, then south to Kuwait, and finally into the deserts of Saudi Arabia before returning to the area near al-Hiba during the hottest part of the summer.
Some Bedouin encampments were within walking distance of al-Hiba, others could be visited by a combination of boat and camel. All Hadij were members of the same clan, but they split into smaller groups to take advantage of the emerging grasslands fodder at the edge of the marsh. All were also Sunni Moslems, and although they were of a different sect, the Bedouin were welcomed here by both Beni Hasan and the Mi’dan. They inhabited and used for their pasturage only that part of the land not used by the others—the part that was beneath the water level of the marshes during the rest of the year.
Most Beni Hasan and Mi’dan believed that they themselves were descended from nomads who had settled here in earlier days; thus they thought they were close relatives of the Bedouin. The Hadij were especially respected because the Prophet Mohammed had descended from these desert nomads and because they were people whose unsurpassed honor was obvious in their women’s purity, their men’s honesty, and their meticulous observation of rules of hospitality. If a villager wished to choose a bride from among the Bedouin—and many so aspired—he must be prepared to pay a bride price at least three times that for a village girl.
Three categories of Bedouin women, however, never married into local families: women from the families of the mukhtar or sheikh (clan leader), from the sayyid (clan religious leader) who was a descendant of the Prophet, and from the weavers. Although they perform the same functions as families of other clan members, the family of the mukhtar (often called sheikh by followers and neighbors) usually has a long history of clan leadership and is held in great respect. Girls from such families are usually married into other leadership families of equal or greater respect to maintain the political advantage of their fathers. Boys from these families must learn to do the same things expected of other boys their age and, in addition, are usually also given some special training in leadership, but they may more freely marry tribeswomen of other classes.
Both daughters and sons of the sayyid are expected to marry into families who are, like them, descended from the Prophet. Those children of a sayyid traveling with the Hadij had to find mates outside the clan: only one sayyid family accompanied a clan. Indeed, the sayyid and his family were not considered clan members, and could travel freely with it or not as they wished. Boys from such a family were given religious training in addition to the daily tasks of herding animals.
The male weavers, using shuttle looms, traded their more finely woven material to be used for clothes and blankets for cruder wool and woven carpets made by village women. In contrast to the other two status groups and in spite of their economic importance to the clan, male weavers and their families were given little or no respect by either the Bedouin clan to which they belonged or by local villagers. The only Bedouin wife considered undesirable was a woman from a weaving family; even the poorest villager would have considered such a marriage unsuitable. Members of weavers’ families married within their own families or into other weavers’ families. The origin of this bias seemed to lie within the historical Bedouin concept of the ideal man, who should be a first-rate hunter or raider, wily, strong, and proud, not a sedentary individual who spent his days sitting on the ground before his loom. Among the Bedouin weavers who visited the area, I always noticed a sort of frantic cheerfulness and frenetic high spirits as if to cover an imperfection of which they were all too well aware.
No such stigma applied to Bedouin women weavers. The women of each household wove their own goat-hair tent panels from which they constructed their tent and the special panels that were used to divide the tents into women’s and men’s quarters, which consisted of alternating horizontal strips of woven goat hair, sheep wool, and camel hair. The wool from animals with multicolored coats was segregated by color, and panels of different colors alternated within the basic design. Sheep wool, for example, could be woven into strips of brown, black, and white, and these strips would then be alternated with khaki-colored strips of camel hair and strips woven from various-colored goat hair.
Women also raised the tents (usually under the direction of their men folk) and dismantled them with no direction whatsoever. They cooked, made clothing, drew water for animals that could not be taken to the water source, made fuel from dung and straw or reed, cleaned, washed, and did all other household chores. Men herded the camels, sheep, goats, made coffee, and sometimes tea. In the past their other major duty was to guard the encampment against outside
