Many Bedouins regard women as the source of all evil and say that hell is full of them. The verses of a few desert poets breathe hatred for women rather than love. Here is a verse from one of Sir Richard Burton’s translations:
They said, marry.
I said I am free;
Why take unto my bosom
A sackful of snakes?
May Allah never bless womankind!
It is a simple matter for a Bedouin woman to clean house or move. The tribe leaves one bit of the desert as soon as the pasturage in the vicinity is exhausted. The more aristocratic Bedouins have neither sheep nor goats—only camels and horses. They limit themselves to the least possible amount of possessions and refuse to be tied down to any one spot. They have the fewest wants and are the freest of all the peoples of the earth.
Sheik Nuri Shalaan once asked to be told something about European customs. “Well, if you come to my house in England,” said Lawrence, “my women will serve you with tea.” Whereupon Nuri clapped his hands for one of his wives, ordered her to make tea, and invited Lawrence into the women’s quarters to drink it, an act entirely contrary to the unwritten law of the desert.
The Bedouins are exceedingly courteous, and no matter how apalling your Arabic they will never presume to correct you. When you call at a Bedouin tent you make all of your polite speeches right away, and then when you leave you may get up and brush off without saying a word of farewell. I have seen Bedouins call on Lawrence in his tent when he was reading. He would greet them, and then they would crouch down on their heels and he would resume his book. After a while they would get up and silently walk out. But Lawrence himself would never leave so long as a guest was there.
Al Ghazzali, the great theologian of Islam of the eleventh century, said, “Marriage is a kind of slavery, for the wife becomes the slave of her husband, and it is her duty, absolutely, to obey him in everything he requires of her except in what is contrary to the laws of Islam.” Wife-beating is allowed by the Koran. All female slaves taken in war may become the private property of the man who wins them. There is an old tradition that a lie is excusable in three circumstances: in war, to reconcile friends, and to women.