Lebanon's Arab Bedouins: The last nomads of Jurd al-Mneitra

In the desert of Jurd al-Mneitra, on the ridges of Ouyoun al-Simane descending step by step towards the Bekaa, a tent, a sky turning pale, fragments of the solitary lives of nomads among brambles and rocks captured by Mohamad Abdouni’s lens. There are still about 100,000 counted between Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, those known as Arab Bedouins and classified in population registries as "Doms." Some have been naturalized in one country or another; the rest are undocumented, not due to ostracism but because they long resisted the idea of belonging to a state, rejecting even the notion of a border.

How can we not see their point in this fragmented world, whose ancestors once traveled paths defined only by the whims of nature, the tiredness of their legs and their herds' fatigue, before the drawing of the famous "line in the sand" by Sykes and Picot? In these photos, a whole way of life comes alive in silence, suspended between stillness and movement, antiquity and modernity. On both sides lies the threat of being lost.