The Bedouin Heritage Project - helping the Bedu maintain their sense of identity despite changing modern realities.

Bedouin Heritage Project

Photos from the Wadi Rum Desert Marathon

Breeding camels: a lesson on traditions, economics and love

BHP presentation at the National Geographic Store, London

Cultural Diversity and Global Sustainability

“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; Teach a man to fish and he will feed his whole village!”

Bedouin Fire: music from the desert

Music from the desert campfire.

Sponsor profile: Canon at work in the field.

BHP Featured Photographer: Paola Biondi

Featured Photographer: Paola Biondi

The Sedentarization of the Bedouin People

About BHP

The principal goal of the project is to safeguard the main features of the lifestyle and oral expressions of the Bedu that have developed over the course of millennia and that are being lost due to inevitable societal changes. The knowledge, wisdom and history that is at risk forms the historical foundation of all Arab people’s.

BHP’s first project’s scope is to safeguard the main features of the lifestyle and oral history of the Bedu that have developed in Wadi Rum region in Jordan. The people of Wadi Rum have been recognised for their uniqueness by UNESCO and are the only Arab culture admitted to the permanent list of Intangible World Heritages.

more on BHP...

ICH in the News
- National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage
  Anamazing resource for anyone working on Intangible Cultural heritage! […]
- Viagens da Iris - Iris's travels: Excerpts from the book "Cultural Tourism", by Bob McKercher and Hilary du Cros
  Above all else, cultural tourism is a form of tourism. It is not a form of cultural heritage management. As a form of tourism, the decision to embark on cultural tourism must be based on sound, commercial tourism reasons first and cultural heritage management reasons second. […]
- UNESCO Culture Sector - Intangible Heritage - 2003 Convention : Fifth Session of the Intergovernmental Committee (5.COM) - Kenya, November 2010
  UNESCO's next meeting 5.com on ICH will be held in Kenya, November 2010. […]
- Tibetan Epic Poem Belongs to All Mankind
  Researchers brief the media on their efforts to include "The Epic of King Gesar" on UNESCO's World Intangible Cultural Heritage List […]
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Music under the desert sky.

Listen to the first track of the upcoming EP, "Bedouin Fire", with Salim Ali Lafi Zelabieh playing the Aoud while his brothers sing and dance.

Dancing around the fire
New Additions

The Islamist: Why I joined radical Islam in Britain, what I saw inside and why I left
Ed Husain
For those who believe that Islam is one unified religion of fundamentalists, this book will be an eye opener.

The Rock: A Tale of Seventeenth-century Jerusalem
Kanan Makiya
To understand Jerusalem, one must first understand the Dome of the Rock and the role it has played in all three mono-theistic religions.

Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories
L AbuLughod
Bedouin women are the narrators of their own lives; they are not the subjects or objects of ideas projected by the ethnographer's imagination.

The Cry of the Dove
Fadia Faqir
A haunting tale of a Bedouin woman who escapes her family's shame, emigrating to England, leaving her newborn child behind.

Arabian Sands (Travel Library)
Wilfred Thesiger
A classic from the times when crossing the desert was a dangerous and long process from a man who lived there. Wonderful insight into bedu life and knowledge of their environment.

Bedouin Heritage Project