Texts in Sinai Bedouin Law.

• Author: Palva, Heikki
• Position: 2 parts

These volumes contain a selection of texts relating to the customary law of the Ahaywat tribe of central Sinai. Only five of the 69 texts were originally composed in writing; the remainder were spoken in genuine Bedouin dialect and recorded in authentic situations. Even though they represent less than two percent of the total amount of material recorded by Stewart during his fieldwork in 1976-82, they constitute one of the few extensive collections of ethnographic texts published in original dialectal Arabic. Other large collections of high quality are O. Jastrow, Die mesopotamisch-arabischen qaltu-Dialekte II (1981), and P. Behnstedt and M. Woidich, Die agyptisch-arabischen Dialekte, 3: Texte I-Ill (1987-88). Among smaller collections, D. Cohen, Le Parler arabe des juifs de Tunis (1964) is outstanding. Earlier on (1987), Stewart surveyed the literature on Bedouin law (al-Arif 1933, Graf 1952, Chelhod 1971, al-Qusus 1972, Abu Hassan 1974, Mohsen 1975, and others) in the article "Tribal Law in the Arab World: A Review of the Literature" (IJMES 19:473-90), and because he will treat the actual disputes and the law of the Ahaywat in two future volumes (Cases in Sinai Bedouin Law; A Bedouin Tribe and its Law), it seems appropriate here to discuss the present volumes exclusively from the linguistic point of view.

The dialect of the Ahaywat as well as other Sinai tribes documented thus far is closely akin to the dialects of the Negev Bedouin, concisely and competently described by Haim Blanc ("The Arabic Dialect of the Negev Bedouins" [1970], 39 pp.), who also collaborated with the author on linguistic questions. Therefore it was a natural solution to follow Blanc's system of transcription, with a few minor modifications. Blanc's article has been reprinted as an appendix to part 2, and a list of corrections to it is given in the preface (p. xv). The transcription is theoretically well founded; perhaps the only practical drawback is its isolation from the most commonly used systems in the description of long vowels in the final position.

The majority of Bedouin texts published to date are poems and oral narratives following traditional stylistic conventions. Stewart's texts, which among others include many dialogues, thus substantially contribute to the knowledge of the colloquial Bedouin idiom. Carefully interpreted with the assistance of original speakers and other firsthand informants by a researcher unmistakably at home in his subject, the...