\paperw4260 \margr0\margl0 \plain \fs20 \f1 \fs24 Nomads travel in space and time, following the seasons, shifting their tents from the desert to the plains, raising stock, and t
illing fields no more than is strictly necessary. They will harvest the crop on their next passage, for, on the basis of an unwritten law, no one in the desert will ever touch what someone else has sown. The nomadic\b \b0 or semi-nomadic Bedouins live i
n a tribal society. Their houses are tents and their needs modest, so that it is hard to distinguish the rich from the poor. \b \cf2 \ATXht11801 Raiding\b0 \cf0 \ATXht0 has been considered a valid way of making a living since pre-Islamic times and the
\b \cf1 \ATXht48 Koran\b0 \cf0 \ATXht0 itself devotes a whole chapter to ôspoils.ö As time went by, the Bedouins, masters of the desert, could not avoid contact with the cities of the merchants, who were Bedouin themselves but led a sedentary life. The u
nifying effect of \b \cf2 \ATXht10904 Islam\b0 \ATXht0 \cf0 has accelerated the process of rapprochement between nomad and urban society, without altering a number of traditional balances. The fourteenth-century Arab historian \b \cf2 \ATXht10901 Ibn
\b0 \cf0 \ATXht0 Khaldun treats the subject of the disappearance of nomadism with a great deal of circumspection. ôThe Bedouins, even though they have also turned toward the things of the world,ö he wrote in the \i Muqaddimah\i0 , ôonly do so to the extent
that is indispensable and not with a view to luxury,ö while the sedentary life marks the culminating point of civilization and of its shift toward evil.ö\par
