From 1967 to 1978, Sinai was controlled by Israel. During this period, Israeli researchers actively studied the ethnography of the peninsula and, in addition to other information about the Bedouin culture, collected a large collection of their poetry. This article uses poems written in the 1970s by Israeli Professor Yitzhak (Clinton) Bailey to demonstrate how the Sinai Bedouin felt about modernization and the extent to which it influenced them to engage in smuggling. They were published by him in articles and monographs translated into Hebrew and in the original (a line-by-line translation of the verses given below, my. - M. V.).

The Bedouins, who lead a dangerous life in the desert, always cling to the immutability of traditions and old customs, seeing them as a guarantee of stability. As long as they remain true to the traditional way of life, modernization concerns them to the smallest extent. The processes that take place in the big world cannot make them act differently from their ancestors, because the desert dictates its own unchanging conditions from century to century. Where Bedouins continue to engage in nomadic farming, not only their centuries-old way of life is preserved, but also the oral tradition of poetic creativity, which dates back about 1.5 thousand years. This is due to the fact that the poetry of Arab nomads is characterized by high functionality. As long as the Bedouins lead an original way of life, they find themselves in situations where they need poems in the form and quality in which they have been composed for centuries. Bedouin poetry is also characterized by a realistic, detailed depiction of life. Thanks to these two features, the oral work of nomadic Arabs is an indispensable ethnographic and historical source - until recently, the Bedouins practically did not leave any written information about themselves.

By studying Bedouin poetry, it is possible to determine the extent to which modernization affects nomadic society. If the ancient poetic tradition is generally preserved, it means that modernization (even if it has greatly changed the real situation in which Bedouins live today) has not radically affected their way of life. As long as nomads maintain their way of life, everyday changes have little effect on the oral tradition as a whole. Modernization, of course, could not but leave its mark on Bedouin poetry, but its influence is evident only in the details. For example, while the Bedouins roam with their flocks, as their ancestors did, the traditional motif of describing a journey through the desert-rachel - does not disappear from their qasid poems. However, modernization has led to the fact that in some cases, instead of traveling by camel, you can find a description of traveling by car [Kurpershoek, 1994, p. 99].

The desire of the Bedouin to adapt to the innovations introduced to the desert by various civilizations is also reflected in oral art. This is due to both the functionality and information content of Bedouin poetry. The Arab tribes-

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In the modern world, poetry is a traditional tool for solving social problems. Modernization poses new challenges for Bedouins, and this is reflected in the content of the verses.

If nomads move to a sedentary lifestyle and modernization changes their reality dramatically, as, for example, happened to many Bedouins of the Negev Desert (Israel), the ancient poetic tradition is interrupted. Young Bedouins do not understand traditional poetry because they do not share the values that it embodies. The nomadic reality that formed the ancient poetic canon becomes alien to them, and they do not find themselves in situations in which poems would be necessary for them as a functional part of their culture.

Bedouin poetry faithfully recreates the image of the people who created it: the Bedouins are reflected in it as nomadic pastoralists, warriors and caravan traders. As for the inhabitants of the Sinai Peninsula in the second half of the XX century, they also appear in their poems as smugglers. Thus, modernization affected their way of life and was reflected in poetry. The poems of the smugglers of the Sinai Peninsula are a valuable historical and ethnographic source that characterizes the attitude of their creators to modernization and allows us to determine the extent to which they were subjected to it during the XX century.

The development of smuggling in this region began after the traditional economic system was destroyed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1884 led to the flow of pilgrims and cargo that had previously traveled to Arabia via Sinai by sea. For some tribes, in particular for the Huweitat tribe, this was a real disaster, and they left the peninsula [Bailey, 1973, p. 4]. The development of road and rail cargo transportation in the 20th century also negatively affected the material well-being of nomads who had been engaged in caravan trade for centuries.

The gradual disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the first quarter of the 20th century also contributed to the destruction of the traditional economic system of the peninsula. By the beginning of the last century, the Bedouin world, which united the nomads of Sinai, Negev, Transjordan, Hejaz and Najd, lay entirely within the borders of the Turkish state. The Bedouin tribes of these areas were culturally united and maintained close economic ties. Ottoman rule provided them with external security and stability of tribal borders. As the empire collapsed, the Bedouin world was fragmented by State borders (Ben-David, 1985). In 1906, when Egypt was already under British control, the Ottoman and British Empires drew a border between the Sinai Peninsula and the Negev Desert. Five tribes - Tarabin, Tiyakha, Azazme, 'Aheivat, and Savarka-lived simultaneously in both the Negev and Sinai (Bailey, 1993, p. 16]. The border separated relatives from each other, cut off traditional nomadic routes, and cut off the Bedouins from their usual pastures and reservoirs. The barrier briefly disappeared in 1917, when the Negev came under the British protectorate, but in 1923 Egypt withdrew from it. The economic, family, and political ties of the Bedouins of Sinai, Negev, and Jordan were almost completely severed with the proclamation of Israel in 1948. The Jewish state was not recognized by its Arab neighbors, and therefore the borders between them were sealed and carefully guarded [Ben-David, 1985].

In an effort to preserve their usual way of life, nomads were forced to cross the border illegally. For the Bedouin, who knew the terrain thoroughly and had built many secret and intricate routes through the deserts and Wadis over the centuries, this was not an unsolvable problem. They understood that they were violating the boundaries of the states that had established control over the desert, but since they considered themselves the true masters of the desert, they respected only tribal boundaries. With setting boundaries by-

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there was a demand for the secret transportation of prohibited goods through cordons. Demand gave birth to supply. The Bedouins, unable to trade and farm as their ancestors did, began to improve their financial situation by smuggling.

Bedouin poetry, as already mentioned, is closely connected with reality and, therefore, reacts very quickly to changes taking place in it. The theme of smuggling appeared in the work of the inhabitants of Sinai, as soon as they began to engage in illegal transportation across the border. During the First World War, when famine raged on the peninsula and the Bedouins were forced to resort to smuggling, the British administration severely punished them for it. This is reflected in the lines of the I'ida poet:

The world has been fighting for three years now,
And even those who work do not find a livelihood.
Everyone has already sold their expensive items
Just to buy some cloth and coffee beans.
You will find empty houses without bread,
And everyone's face is covered in dust.
There are those who sit in their tents,
There are those who steal, but most of them do not find anything.
What if you get caught smuggling?,
You will accept the death penalty from a sergeant and an officer [Bailey, 1973, p. 12].

Until the end of the 19th century, the Turks paid little attention to what the Bedouins did, giving them complete economic freedom. There was even a saying among nomads at that time: "The desert is above the law" (Ben-David, 1985). During the years of British rule, freedom disappeared, and when Egypt gained independence, the Egyptian authorities tried to put the law above the desert. The following is an excerpt from a poem written in the mid-1960s. A poet from the Aleigat tribe expressed dissatisfaction with passporting, military conscription, and methods of combating smuggling (interrogating sheikhs). In his words, the reluctance of the Bedouins of Sinai to identify with the Egyptians is felt:

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They (the authorities) are attacking us and recruiting our sons,
And in the pictures we appear in notebooks,
And they make tickets for every family,
In which a man, child, and grandfather are recorded 1.
They're forcing the sheikh to testify against us,
and they've set up patrols along the smuggling routes.
But to someone who has a pedigree and ancestors,
Not on the road with the Egyptians 2.
Throw away the saddle and don't ride the horse 3,
So far, the Fellah rules the pure race (Bailey, 1973, p. 14).

After the 1967 war, control over the Egyptian-Israeli border was tightened on both sides for security reasons. The level of smuggling was significantly reduced, and the Bedouins did not like it. Many lost an important source of income, and goods became very expensive, and many men left their native places in search of earnings. In the poem below, a Bedouin working in the oil fields of Abu Rhodes on the Gulf of Suez complains about the difficult life that has followed the end of the era of smuggling.

I want a pack of cigarettes from Hasuna's store,
But standing in line [ in it] is like being in another [place].
In the hands of the owner, the handle crawls like a razor over the head of someone who is being shaved,
And the bill has already reached hundreds [riyals] just for a carton (pack of cigarettes) and flour.
The wife complains and he asks: "Why not?"
And she replies," Is this all you brought after a week's absence?"
He says, " If you could only see us working,
You'd say it's all a mistake."
Every day, everyone is drowning their eyes in oil,
Life is running away, and no one knows why.
She asks: "What about the sheikhs? They've got a lot of gold in their teeth!".
He says: "That gold is not from the present times.
It is from the time when they were also involved in smuggling"
[Bailey, 1973, p. 17].

1 The poet accurately conveys the Bedouin perception of what is happening to them and around them. In their understanding, passports with photos are just some notebooks with pictures, and the cards of scribes, in which they enter a man and his relatives, are presented to them as tickets.

2 "One who has a family tree and ancestors" is a Bedouin. It is enough for the poet to say so, and the nomads immediately understand that we are talking about them. The Bedouin, unlike the sedentary peasant, remembers his ancestry for many generations and is very proud of it. The poet claims that the nomads will never be on the way with the Egyptians, who do not know their pedigrees.

3 By this metaphor, the poet most likely means that Bedouins should be careful not to get caught by Egyptian inspectors.

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Smuggling is not only reflected in poetry as the theme of individual poems. To a large extent, it is to her that the Bedouin poetry of Sinai in the second half of the twentieth century owes its existence. The vast corpus of poems that could be heard on the peninsula in the 1970s and 1980s was created by the Bedouins of Jordan, the Syrian Desert, the Hijaz, and even Najd (Bailey, 1975, p. 127)and brought to Sinai by smugglers. When there were no state borders separating the Bedouin world, there was a constant cycle of oral poetry among the Arab nomads. The distribution routes of poems mostly followed trade and economic routes. The Bedouins of Sinai, carrying contraband, could remember especially successful works, heard, for example, at the campfires of Najd, and then recite them in their native desert.

In the second half of the XX century. for most Arab nomads, a single Bedouin world no longer existed, but for smugglers it continued to exist, as they ignored state borders. Smuggling routes became the distribution routes of poetry, and the best poets of the Sinai Peninsula were smugglers [Bailey, 1971, p. 135]. Visiting all parts of the Bedouin world, they not only acquired a lot of necessary impressions, but also added to their poetic baggage due to the well-established formulas, images and comparisons of the Bedouin community. This is extremely important, since the Bedouin poets of the end of the last century remained carriers of an ancient type of artistic creation. As Isaac Filshtinsky wrote about the Bedouin poets of the early Middle Ages, they did not try to attract listeners with original ideas or broad generalization, but, on the contrary, used a set of formulas and "stable conditional images-signs" in their poems [Filshtinsky, 1985, p.62].

The Bedouins of Sinai in the 1970s had a lot to learn from the nomadic poets of Najd and Jordan, whose poems they considered more skillful than their own. "The poetry of the East is a wreath of flowers, the poetry of Najd is a stone carving, and the poetry of the West is camel droppings," said the Western Bedouins (Beiley, 1975, p. 127).

The secret to the superiority of Eastern poetry lies in the fact that, unlike most of the inhabitants of Sinai and the Negev, the Bedouins of Najd and Jordan, despite modernization, continue to lead a truly nomadic lifestyle, moving hundreds of kilometers in whole tribes. Most of the time they watch the desert from a saddle height. It is in the process of such observations that Bedouin poetry is born. Only for those who lead a truly nomadic lifestyle, the comparisons and metaphors used in traditional poems are meaningful. The nomads of Jordan and Najd are more dependent on their mounts and are able to describe them in detail in the raheel - a special part of the poem (qasida), usually devoted to the description of the journey and the camel (steed). Sinai smugglers, who spend most of their lives in the saddle and have the opportunity to see the desert in all its diversity and beauty, have all these qualities that give rise to authentic poetry of the Eastern Bedouin.

The following story was told by I. Bailey in one of his books and dates back to the early 1970s. It clearly illustrates the fact that the great poets of the desert are often smugglers, and the Bedouin are forced to engage in smuggling by necessity. One day, Bailey was sitting in the tent of a prominent poet belonging to one of the tribes of northern Sinai. It was nearing midnight-

4

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Chee and the host, along with their son, had been talking about poetry for about three hours, explaining the meaning of various poems to the guest. Suddenly the Bedouin, for whom poetry seemed to be a matter of life, broke down and shouted: "Doctor, just leave these poems and let's move on to a more serious topic!" "What subject can be more serious than poetry?" asked Bailey. In response, the famous poet offered the scientist a deal. Bailey, as an Israeli army officer, was able to move around the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip without arousing suspicion, while the Bedouin military and police were subjected to all sorts of checks. The poet suggested that the guest arrive at the specified location in the Gaza Strip, receive a cargo of hashish and opium, bring it back and immediately receive a thousand dollars for it. Bailey preferred a career as a scientist to that of a smuggler and drug dealer, so he politely declined. The Bedouins understood him in their own way and increased the amount of the promised reward to sixty thousand. The scientist apologized and said that such a case was still not for him. The poet looked at him with undisguised disdain and asked bluntly: "Tell me, do you have a lack of self-respect?Bailey asked him to explain what self-respect had to do with it, and the Bedouin replied, as if the link between drug smuggling and self-respect was clear in itself: "If you don't make money, then how will you invite guests? Where will you get a goat or sheep to slaughter in their honor?" Finally, in order not to be unfounded, he gave a clear example, pointing to one of the tribesmen: "Look what happened to your friend Sleiman! He's stopped smuggling, and he's penniless. No one comes to visit him! " [Bailey, 1993, p. 9].

Sinai Bedouins are often jailed for smuggling. This also happened to poets, and being in prison stimulated the flourishing of their work. First of all, there was an increasing need for prisoners to exchange messages with their relatives and friends. The smuggler prisoners had to send their letters in such a way that no one would guess their contents. In addition, most nomads are illiterate. In this situation, the poetic system of the Bedouins was the salvation. Poets expressed their thoughts in a veiled, traditional figurative-poetic form that few people understood, and transmitted messages orally - through a messenger. It is worth remembering that by writing poetry, Bedouins give vent to emotions. In prison, the poets had a lot of free time, and the soul languished with emotions because of the lost freedom. Thus, prison became another factor that influenced the fact that in the second half of the XX century it was the smugglers who became famous in the Bedouin environment as great poets.

One of the most famous poets of Sinai, Anez Abu Selem el-Urdy (Tarabin tribe living in the south-east of the peninsula), in 1962 was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Egypt as the head of a smuggling network. He became interested in poetry as a young man, traveling with cargo between Syria and Egypt. Poems that have become popular among the inhabitants of the peninsula, he composed in the last ten years of his imprisonment. The success of the works was due not only to their beauty and perfection, but also to the author's reputation. The poet was known as a generous man and a reliable carrier - exactly what, according to local ideas, a real Bedouin should be. In the poem quoted below, Anez describes the miserable situation in which he found himself:

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Last night we (the poet means himself) spent in suffering [from insomnia],
And there are few to whom we can complain about the torment of [the heart].
How pleasant is a cup of coffee between palm trees
And the click of German [guns] in the curves of mountain passes,
And the coals of the lamb roaster,
And friends lying down in the shade of the hut
Around the ones with slits for eyes and perfect teeth,
the ones with tattoos as green as spring grass 5.
Today we are entangled in the bonds of fate
And we swallow pure poison.
[While other] people are clothed, we are naked,
and our homes have become jerboa play grounds.
We became pitiful after the withers of the camel turned white (from hashish) ,
We have become unnecessary around the black shawls [of women],
We're like a pack of hyenas bent over
Lapping up muddy water in the calm.
Life is coming to an end, the woman is incomplete,
And the poor man will rejoice on the Day of the Shock 6.
After I was like a wolf [prowling] in the villages,
And saddled the best camel, as not saddled Jadeya 7,
I go on foot with broken bones,
I get up and sit down [in pain] on the rocky ground [Bailey, 1993, p. 87-88].

5 The poet speaks allegorically about women.

6 One of the euphemisms used by Arabic poets to refer to the Day of the Last Judgment (another, for example ,is "Day of Rising").

7 The name of a Bedouin hero.

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Anez recalls his great smuggling past, when he saddled a camel as skillfully as even the Bedouin hero Jadeja could not, and carried so much hashish that the animal's withers turned white with powder. By "we," the poet means his own kind. Now he is naked, while others are clothed, and weak, like a herd of hyenas forced to drink from muddy reservoirs where strong animals do not come. The poet considers his relatives helpless, because they have changed their family values. Anez, once in prison, gave a divorce to his wives, not wanting to be disgraced in case of their infidelity. He had expected his wives to wait for him to return, but he was destined to be disappointed. The most terrible thing was that his wives were married by men from his own family.

The Sinai smuggling community is only a part of Bedouin society as a whole, and therefore the role of poetry in it is exactly the same as in the entire Bedouin environment. Poets exchange messages in verse form, emphasize the merits of relatives and friends, threaten abusers, explain the way to messengers, and give vent to emotions. They observe canons that originated in the pre-Islamic era, but the peculiarities of everyday life and the activities of smugglers leave their mark on traditional poems. Thus, the path that the poet explains to the messenger often turns out to be a smuggling route, and among the virtues of the praised hero there are qualities that a real smuggler should possess. Examples of this can be found by analyzing the construction of the traditional Bedouin qasida (poem).

A more or less stable form of qasida was determined by the middle of the 9th century, when it was recorded by the philologist Ibn Qutayba. Ideally, the qasida was three-part. In the first part, the nasib (lyrical beginning), the poet described his arrival at the footsteps of an abandoned camp in the desert, where his beloved once was. Then there should have been a description of the beloved, the strength of feelings, the pain of separation. After that, the poet should describe his journey (rakhil), complaining of fatigue, insomnia, night journey, midday heat and exhaustion of the camel (Kudelin, 1983, p. 20). Rachel could also contain a description of the quality of a riding animal - a horse or camel. In the third part - the panegyric-the main place was occupied by the motives of praising the person to whom the poet arrived. In practice, deviations from the ideal model were very different. Both the lyrics and descriptions of the journey in Bedouin poetry can exist in the form of independent poems. As for the nasib, it may not contain love lyrics, and love lyrics, in particular the description of the beloved, may exist on their own, without being tied to the nasib.

It would seem that the description of the beloved and smuggling are things that are extremely far from each other, but in this case this is not entirely true. Contraband plays such an important role in the life of the inhabitants of Sinai that it also transforms the love lyrics. For example, one young man, wanting to sing the girl he liked, said:

It's worth a caravan of hashish
And the military who are [chasing] him.
[Bailey, 1975, p. 129]

Much more serious are the realities of smuggler's life affecting Rachel. This part of Qasida is very much tied to Bedouin life. I note that in the poems of medieval court panegyrists, unfamiliar, like their listeners, with the desert, Rachel was reduced to formality. If it did not disappear completely in their poems, it was only because the formality was not empty. Introducing the realities of Bedouin life before moving on to the panegyric part, the court poet connected in the listener's mind

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a glorified person (emir or caliph) with a pan-Arab heroic past [Filshtinsky, 1987, p. 21]. In the works of those who remained loyal to the desert, Raheel has preserved to this day the role that was assigned to him in ancient Arabian poetry. Those who lead a nomadic life do not detract from the descriptions of the journey through the desert, because they themselves constantly make it. The Bedouins of Sinai are no exception in this respect, and often the journeys described in their poems are secret night journeys of smugglers. The true meaning of events occurring in the poem is not always obvious to the listener (or reader), unless the Bedouins themselves explain the event background of the poem. The verses do not necessarily indicate what exactly a person is carrying on a camel. If you understand where it comes from and where it goes, you can guess that it crossed the border, but the geographical names mentioned by Bedouins are often familiar only to them. Below is an excerpt from a poem in which a Sinai Bedouin describes his nocturnal journey with a cargo of contraband through the southern Negev.

Give me a camel with black sweaty breasts,
Heading for the ring of mountains in the Ubda Valley.
Hear the sound of the bridle against the wood of the saddle,
The camel is trained and obeys you.
But then the guide made a mistake, [being] in the wadi without an exit,
And the night is dark, and the water skin dried up.
But at sunrise we reached Jabal Yahamim
They continued to ride through the rocky valley (Bailey 1975, p. 130).

In order to add weight to the poem in the eyes of listeners, the ancient Arab poets described the hardships of their journey and at the same time - their camel. Later, the description of his own journey was largely replaced by the description of the travels of the messenger carrying Kasid to the addressee. In fact, in twentieth-century Bedouin poetry, the messenger himself, his camel, and the journey they made might have been imaginary. At the same time, the description of the camel was still very important, because the stronger and more thoroughbred the animal carrying Kasida, the more significant the poem becomes, and the more respect the addressee feels for himself. Usually, the Bedouins are not stingy in their words, extolling the speed and pedigree of the camel. They explain in detail that up to the age of three, the animal was allowed to feed from its mother and was not forced to work (this is how especially fast riding camels are raised). If the recipient needs to be offended and angered by expressing their disgust, the camel should be as bad as possible.

A Bedouin smuggler once smuggled a cargo of hashish from Egypt to Sinai to customers from the Ma'aza tribe, which lives on the shores of the Gulf of Suez. They did not pay him, and he sent them a threat on the back of a tired camel.

He can barely carry a blanket and two bags, and his black skin is torn and frayed. He is exhausted from carrying heavy loads, And if you send him on a journey, he will go Like a mountain wolf, afraid of hunters, Trembling in his cave from the whistle of bullets [Bailey, 1975, p. 119].

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The significance of a qasida also depends on what path it has traveled, and this is true for different epochs and not only for nomadic society. The listeners of the ancient Bedouin poet felt all the more respect for him and his poems, the longer and more difficult his journey was. In the tribal Yemeni society of the twentieth century (i.e., in the society of farmers), Qasida listeners were imbued with respect for the poem, having learned what significant places the poems visited on their way. Well, for example, if the messenger visited the tomb of a local saint and prayed on it. Such a stop creates an area of religious piety around Kasyda. It is good if the poet, describing the journey of the messenger, admires the beauty of the places where the addressee lives [Miller, 2001, p. 149].

As for the Bedouins of the Sinai Peninsula, the smuggling route is often the most expensive for them, and they can send an imaginary messenger along it, regardless of which way the verses actually travel. For example, a Bedouin who was imprisoned in Zagazig prison in Egypt composed a poem addressed to his family, who lived in the middle of the Sinai Desert on the Ijme hill. He sent the messenger to his home in a way that was familiar to smugglers. In this poem, the image of a camel carrying a message to the poet's relatives is strikingly different from the camel that in the above-mentioned kasida was carrying a threat to defaulters. Here, the camel is a hardy riding animal: it was allowed to feed for up to three years and was not forced to carry cargo.

O one who rides a camel as fast as a frightened ostrich,
A camel that has been nurtured without burns on its legs.
His mother's breasts hadn't been tied up in three years,
And his shepherd did not strap his load.
Guide him through the desert to the peaks of Samar,
When you leave Goz al-
Radawi on your right and Zygm al-Abyad on your left,
Drive carefully through the mountain bends at high altitudes
[Bailey, 1975, p. 120].

In medieval Arabic rakhil, the fakhar motif of self-praise was often developed (Kudelin, 2003, p. 112). Often in this way, the poet praised his tribe. In the twentieth century, Bedouin poets who glorified their relatives followed an ancient tradition and described their nobility, bravery, resilience before the blows of fate, loyalty to the word, the ability to provide protection, defend the territory and avenge the dead. The poets did not forget to mention that their tribe is numerous or has numerous male offspring. This is a set of values typical of a tribal society of warlike nomads. The poet composed fakhar not only in order to raise the spirit of his fellow tribesmen and indicate moral guidelines for young people. Most importantly, he made it clear to his enemies that his tribe should not be offended, because it is strong and capable of taking revenge for any insult, if not in the coming years, then in the person of the next generations. The Bedouin we have already mentioned, who did not receive the promised reward from the Ma'aza tribe for crossing hashish, spoke about his ancestors and descendants, addressing the offenders:

As our tribe rose up against you, so will our grandchildren rise up against you.
The Ma'aza tribe has caused us great losses.

Confident that when his children grow up, they will be able to take revenge on the defaulters, the smuggler declares with a threat:

Let's wait patiently until the grass grows high on the hills,
And then the camel will graze to her full when the rainy season comes
(Bailey, 1971, p. 141).

Bedouin poets traditionally celebrate the merits of the addressee of Qasida in the madha - panegyric part. Even if the poem is not written for the sake of praise, but, for example, to convey a message, the poets still make it clear that the addressee is not the author of the poem.-

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a guide to the most important Bedouin values. This is usually done as an instruction to the messenger. The poet explains to him exactly which noble (hospitable, generous and brave) people he will meet upon arrival at his destination and whom he should remember to greet. In the society of caravan traders, among other advantages, it is important to be able to take responsibility for the cargo and deliver it regardless of difficulties and dangers. Smuggling has spread so easily among the Bedouins because it is essentially the same as the caravan trade. The main thing is to take responsibility for the goods (weapons or drugs) and deliver them to the right place despite obstacles (police and soldiers). Below is an example of how the poet mentions the qualities necessary for smugglers, explaining to the messenger the character of the addressee of Kasida.

Abu Salim, like a strong camel,
A camel that will deliver cargo to Baghdad.
Pay attention to the ones that go anywhere,
Pay attention to someone who will not be afraid of the tasks you have taken
[Bailey, 1971, p. 135].

Thus, we see that the smugglers of the Sinai Peninsula in the second half of the twentieth century, unlike many other Bedouin tribes, continued to lead the lifestyle of the "former" Sinai Bedouins. This does not mean that they have combined smuggling with the traditional Bedouin way of life. Smuggling allowed them to adapt to the modernization of the region and remain true to the original way of life. This is evidenced by their poetry, which, having absorbed the realities of a new life, nevertheless composes itself completely in line with the centuries-old Bedouin tradition.

If we ignore the legal side of the issue, it turns out that smugglers 20 - 30 years ago lived almost the same way as their caravan ancestors 200-300 years ago. Despite the modernization processes in the Middle East, they traveled all over the Bedouin world, overcoming dangers and transporting goods. They spent day after day in the saddle, observing the desert and keeping in touch with the poetic world of the nomads of Jordan and the Hejaz. The way of life of Sinai smugglers contributed to the fact that on their peninsula they became the successors of the ancient Bedouin poetic tradition.

list of literature

Kudelin A. B. Srednevekovaya arabyskaya poetika [Medieval Arabic Poetics], Moscow, 1983.

Kudelin A. B. Arab literature: poetics, stylistics, typology of interrelation. Moscow, 2003.

Filshtinsky I. M. Istoriya arabyskoi literatury: V - nachalo X veka [History of Arabic Literature: V-early X century]. Moscow, 1985.

Filyntinskiy I. M. Istoriya arabyskoi literatury: X-XVIII veka [History of Arabic Literature: X-XVIII centuries]. Moscow, 1991.

Kurpershoek P. Marcel. Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia. I. The Poetry of Ad-Dindan (A Bedouin Bard in Southern Najd). Leiden-New York-Koln, 1994.

Miller Flagg. Inscribing the Muse: Political poetry and the discourse of circulation in the Yemeni cassette industry. PhD dissertation. The University of Michigan, 2001.

Bailey Yitzkhaq (Clinton). 'Arakhim khevratiim ba-shira ha-bedwit // Reshimot be-nose' habedwim. Midreshet Sde-Boqer. (3) 1971.

Bailey Yitzkhaq (Clinton). Ha-shir ha-bedwi ke-maqor histori // Reshimot be-nose' habedwim. Midreshet Sde-Boqer. (4) 1973.

Bailey Yitzkhaq (Clinton). Ha-shira ha-bedwit ba-Sinay u-va-Negev // Reshimot be-nose' habedwim. Midreshet Sde-Boqer. (5) 1975.

Bailey Yitzkhaq (Clinton). Qesem ha-naqot. Racanana, 1993.

Ben-David Yosef. Ha-bedwim ba-Negev, 1900 - 1960. 1985 // http://lib.cet.ac.il/Pages/item.asp7item=13005

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