Ababda Erotic

The Ababda are the Beja who speak Arabic, and that one fact organizes almost everything else about them. Their country is the Eastern Desert of Egypt, the stony ground between the Nile and the Red Sea from around Qena south past Aswan to the Sudanese border, and it continues into the Sudanese Nile valley around Berber and Atbara. Their neighbors to the south, the Bishariyyin, still speak Beja, a Cushitic language, and some Ababda families near the border keep it too, but the tribe as a whole shifted to Arabic generations ago. With the language came a genealogy: the Ababda trace themselves to an ancestor named Abbad and through him to Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, a companion of the Prophet. Outsiders have argued for two centuries over whether that makes them Arabs or Arabized Beja. The Ababda tend not to see a contradiction. They are Sunni Muslims with a strong Sufi streak, and the desert tomb of Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili at Humaithara, founder of the Shadhili order, sits in their territory under their care and draws a large annual mawlid.

What set them apart was the desert itself. For most of recorded history the Ababda were the people who knew the wells. They guided and guarded caravans between the Nile and the Red Sea ports, Qena to Quseir, Daraw to the coast, and they controlled the punishing Korosko road that cut across the great bend of the Nile toward Abu Hamed, a route the Egyptian and British armies depended on during the Mahdist wars, when the Ababda chief Hussein Pasha Khalifa governed Berber for Cairo. Steamers and the railway killed that trade, and Lake Nasser later drowned some of their riverside ground. Camels, goats and sheep remain the core of the pastoral economy, alongside charcoal burning, senna and medicinal plants gathered for sale in Nile towns, fishing on the coast, and increasingly work in tourism around Marsa Alam and Wadi el Gemal, where the national park sits squarely in Ababda land. The four main sections are the Ashabab, Fuqara, Milaykab and Abudein, each with its own sheikhs, and the paramount chiefs long kept their seat at Daraw near Kom Ombo, whose camel market still fills with Ababda and Bishariyyin dealers. The custom guests meet first is the jabana: green coffee beans roasted over coals, pounded with ginger, brewed in a round clay pot and poured into tiny cups in rounds that it is rude to refuse. The mat tent, the straight double-edged sword, and a tracker's habit of reading the ground remain part of how they describe themselves, even in families now living in concrete houses in Shalateen or Aswan.