Tracing the origins of a new sign language

The sun was beating down on the tin roof of a small house made of cement and coarse sand. Husseina rose at dawn to make tea, wash, and put on a clean dress.
The early hours of this particular Friday morning were nothing unusual. 
Outside, goats wandered by looking for old cardboard boxes to chew on, and children played marbles in the yard.
In the distance, among the rocky dunes of the desert, the voice of a muezzin crackled through a low-quality loudspeaker. Salah ran to seek refuge in his mother’s skirts, his eyes wide, his little arms whirling in the air, smacking his tiny palms against his ears.
“He can hear! He can hear the call to prayer! It’s a miracle!” his mother exclaimed. The older ladies of the village, cousins and aunts all clustered around him.
“He said it was buzzing!” The women shouted, clapped their hands, banged spoons against metal plates, made a din that could wake the devil. But nothing. So they called back the men of the village who had gone to pray, put the little boy in a pick-up truck and drove as fast as they could to find a doctor in Dahab, the nearest town. In a small emergency pharmacy, a doctor, his assistant, the boy’s parents and a few curious neighbours all studied the child’s ear canal. 
“Bring me forceps and a tray!” The doctor poked around in the frightened boy’s ear, making him whimper. With the tip of the metal tweezers, the man in scrubs extricated a large insect encased in wax, which he deposited on the table with its legs curled up on its abdomen and sticky antennae. The creature looked like it had been mummified. No miracle today. “That’ll be 200 geneih”. An aunt grumbled into her niqab, the mother breathed a sigh of disappointment, the father waved his hand sharply near his ear to say, “It’s over!”. They all bundled back into the white Isuzu and went home, somewhat down in the mouth, sheepish but not dejected. It was not the idea that Salah had got his hearing back that delighted them, but that God had thought of them.
“That’s how it is, it is the will of Allah”, Husseina said. Mohamed, the father, shrugged his stocky shoulders and said nothing. He is also deaf.

Since then, there have been no more divine whispers. Not in the Abu Garab household, anyway. Of the eight family members, one parent and four of the six children are deaf: Mohamed, the father; Faraj-Allah, Ahmed and Salah, three of the sons; and Aïcha, the youngest daughter. The mother, Husseina; Khadidja, the eldest daughter; and Youssef, the youngest son, have no difficulties with hearing or speaking.
“‘adi!” says the teenager, amused that this might impress anyone. Of the fifty people who live in Safah, a gloomy little village in the middle of the desert, around one third of the adults and over half of the children are deaf. But they all tell me “adi!”, “it’s fine”.
Despite being unusual, this concentration of hearing loss cases has a perfectly rational explanation. No miracle is on the cards here, but there is no curse either. The cause is autozygosity – a complex term which denotes people whose genes have not been sufficiently diversified over generations, related individuals affected by hereditary illnesses and disabilities. In Egypt, the rate of consanguinity is estimated at 31%. Already a high level – one of the highest in the world – it soars as you travel towards the Sinai Peninsula, reaching up to 100% in certain territories. In Safah, as in many Bedouin villages in the area, the ‘deafness gene’ has been transmitted and strengthened over decades by endogamy, particularly among the Muzeina, one of the most powerful tribes. In other words: deafness is passed down from generation to generation.

Pureblood

Mohamed is sitting in a suit and scratching his nail along the folds of a soft flowery blanket. He is deep in thought. Dust swirls in a ray of light shining into the Abu Garab family home: bare walls decorated with sheet metal and rugs thrown directly onto the gravel, arranged around a tray of hot ashes where tea is boiling.
A few years have passed since that Friday morning’s close call with the doctor. The head of the family is now approaching forty. He is an imposing figure, with strong hands and kind eyes. 
“I was born and raised here. I’ve never been far. When I was 20, I chose to marry Husseina. She’s my uncle’s daughter”, he explains, “I was very fond of her…” An easy match. Arranged, but not forced, as is the tradition. For the Bedouin in Sinai Province, marriage follows strict ancestral customs. To protect the core of the tribe, and to preserve property as well as purity of blood, young men are generally free to choose any wife they like, but on one condition: she must come not only from the tribe, but also from the clan – the same family circle as him. Naturally, this means that unions are made between cousins and genes are intertwined. “For the Bedouin, blood is the most important thing, it must not be mixed. The closer you are to your chosen wife, the better”, Mohamed signs to me. 

His family was already accustomed to silence. Before he and his brother were born, his grandfather and his uncle were deaf. He knew, as did Husseina, that like all the families here, they would have children like him.

He tells his story using only his hands: they jostle and twist around his face, grab at the air, catch hold of clothing. Sometimes, his story is punctuated by a click of the tongue or a guttural sound from deep inside his chest. At his side, his wife has to interpret. This scene is not unusual. Hearing loss is so widespread in the region that everyone learns sign language, and hearing people often become impromptu interpreters to allow deaf members of the community to speak to a doctor, a trader, a police officer… and very occasionally, a journalist. This is a strange language – mysterious and intuitive in equal measure – telling the story of a historically isolated people who are resourceful and full of solidarity.

New languages

“Lokha torsh”. Husseina clicks her tongue, eyes half closed, looking satisfied. “This is where it was invented”, she says. “How did I learn it? I don’t know, that’s like asking me how I learned to talk! It’s my mother tongue, like the Bedouin dialect”.
For a long time, the village elders – known as the ‘goded’ – had the role of teaching lokha torsh, in the true Bedouin tradition of oral transmission. They gathered the children around a fire or took them into the mountains with the livestock to tell them stories and pass on their heritage through sign. When the elders died, language learning became more informal, to fit in with day-to-day life in the home. 
Where did this language come from? Is it still evolving? Could it take the place of oral communication? No one knows, because no anthropologist or linguist has studied it yet. Residents of Sinai Province say that the earliest mention of lokha torsh can be found in travel journals from almost three hundred years ago; but no one has ever got their hands on these accounts, not even the nuns at the Sainte-Catherine convent, home to one of the most confidential collections of manuscripts, palimpsests and grimoires in the world. In fact, it seems that the existence of this language was unknown to the scientific community until I called Wendy Sandler, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics Emerita and Founding Director of the Sign Language Research Lab at the University of Haifa, Israel. As a specialist, Sandler has dedicated thirty years of her life to studying the semantics of gestural communication. Although it is a very rare phenomenon, she has observed the emergence of another sign language, not far from Sinai Province, in the Negev desert, which her colleagues christened ‘ABSL’, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language.

In the tiny video square that appears on my computer screen, her image freezes, but I can just make out the face of the ecstatic researcher. 
“This is an in-cre-dible disc-overy!”
The connection drops out but comes back better. 
“We should absolutely start doing on-site research, try to understand how this language was born! But, of course, that will involve years of field work…”

Sandler is enthusiastic but prudent. Not having worked in the same territory or in the same society, she declines to analyse a language she knows nothing about. She reminds me that it is difficult to model one linguistic pattern on another, even if they are geographically close. “Languages, of any kind, are a cultural phenomenon, so from one group to the next, they vary. There’s nothing to suggest that ABSL might resemble this language you’re talking about, it’s actually very unlikely, given that the two communities have no close or regular contact with one another”. 
We put this assumption to a rudimentary test – nothing scientific, just out of curiosity – by comparing a few simple signs commonly used by the two neighbouring tribes. Naturally some of them are similar because they are iconic, but there are significant variations in their execution. Others are nothing alike. “The human brain is just as well programmed for sign language as for spoken language”, says Sandler, “but there has to be a social system that allows it to develop that competence. Now, contrary to what you might think, the Bedouin are less isolated than other communities because they live in small groups. That’s actually a fantastic space for new languages to emerge”.

Golden wolves 

During my visits to the village, I gradually unlock the secrets of their silence. Fingertips twisting together to imply a lemon, a swift movement pushing both wrists forward to evoke bread (reminiscent of the way you throw it into the ash-coloured sand to cook), one hand covering the cheek to denote a man (assuming a beard), and a fist closing on the forehead to signify woman (a veil covering her face).

We stare at one another with genuine curiosity. “Why are you so interested in this?” The mother of the family asks, her eyes inquisitive. Her purple hijab covers her mouth, leaving only two black marbles and a long nose visible. 
A mobile phone starts to ring. The shrill tune doesn’t disturb her husband, sitting close by blowing up balloons for the children. Excited little hands grab the father’s arm. “Your phone!” Mohamed answers the call and, without even putting it to his ear, passes the phone to his wife. “Ahh, ahhh”, she says waving her hands at her husband. “Tamam!” (‘OK’, ed.) “See you tomorrow!” She hangs up. “It was Brahim. You’re going hiking with some American tourists”. Mohamed forms a question by curling his fingers then stretching them out towards the sun, which is sinking over the valley. “Yes, you’re going to the Coloured Canyon”, Husseina confirms with a movement of her wrist and chin. A mixture of excitement and frustration passes over their faces like a cloud. The following night is the night of doubt, preceding the start of the month of Ramadan. Mohamed won’t be at home; his wife will be alone with the children. “It’s fine”, she says. “Work is always good news, but it will be a bit sad, my two eldest boys are away too”.

This is how things work: to ensure that deaf patriarchs can provide for their families, the community organises work buddies. This means that hearing and hard of hearing people work in a team wherever possible: as guides or porters on mountain hikes with tourists from Cairo, Tel Aviv or Moscow, but also for sea fishing, agricultural work and other businesses.

In the early hours of the morning, they gather their things: a pair of sandals with a good sole, fleece blankets, a woven rug, a woollen hat, a water bottle. And then the pick-up races up to the front of the house. Mohamed waves a hand in the air to greet the group of strangers. “Hiiiiii!” He gives them a smile, loads his kit onto the roof and climbs into the front with his partner. Social cohesion is a very important part of life for the Bedouin tribes. This sense of belonging to a group - aṣabiyyah in Arabic – was studied by one of the pioneers of modern sociology, the philosopher Ibn Khaldun, as far back as the fourteenth century. In its current usage, the word encompasses solidarity, family survival and tribalism. ‘Together we rise, together we fall’ the writer summarised in his Book of Examples. Facing the adversities of the desert, only united groups can make it through. “All of Bedouin culture is based on resilience and adaptability to external constraints”, recalls anthropologist Matthew Sparks, who works on exchanges between tribes in the Arabian Peninsula. The Bedouin people of the Sinai Peninsula are also known as ‘golden wolves’ (salawa): wild animals who raise their young in packs, half dog, half jackal, eating small fruits and any game they happen upon, capable of surviving the great droughts on the plains and the angry downpours on the high peaks. The Bedouin are very proud of this name. “We are like that”, Husseina approves. “We share blood, we share everything”. In the small gravel courtyard, exhausted, she cradles a large container of milk to make cheese.

The night of doubt

Several hours’ walk away from the village, in a small fruit garden, her husband deposits sleeping bags, a large container of mineral water, some tomatoes and a metal teapot. The group will stay there tonight. Sheltered from the wind, sleeping on ground that is earthy and cool, but flat enough for camping. Since this morning, the tourists have flitted noisily around Mohamed, who hears none of their chatter. Brahim, his buddy, tells the group how to navigate by following the stars as they begin to shine in the night sky. He speaks English, but it could just as well be Hebrew or Russian. “We’re all fluent in different languages, three, four, five, it depends!” the guide says with a smile. “Lokha torsh is on top of that, I don’t even count it!” It is these talented polyglots who have allowed the Muzeina tribe, considered the most open to the world, to carve out a place for itself on the tourist scene.
Meanwhile, Mohamed is busy collecting dry twigs for the fire. “How do I say thank you?” I ask. He makes a visor gesture on the side of his forehead and swings his hand forward. “I’m more limited than a regular Bedouin”, he acknowledges. “I can’t be a guide. I work either as a driver or as a cook. And I’m always accompanied, because I can’t talk”.

100 kilometres from Mohamed’s makeshift camp, at the edge of the village, his eldest son is getting ready to surprise his mother. Faraj-Allah is 21. He dreams of freedom, stolen kisses and camel racing. But tonight, he has come to spend the night of doubt with his mother so that she is not alone. He appeared at blue hour, with his brother and three friends. A few months ago, he was a barely pubescent teenager; now you can make out the shape of his biceps under his sandy-coloured galabeya. Beneath his long eyelashes is the indescribable glow of youth and immortality. He is back from the flower fields. Flowers that people pick, sell and eat for their health. They are known to bring in dirty money and trouble. A white crescent has appeared in the sky.

“Ramadan Kareem!” shout a few children, excited to announce the start of the holy month. Husseina sets out transparent cups and biscuits. She watches the youngsters talking in the twilight. Like shadow puppets, they are deep in a passionate conversation about girls, the ongoing harvest, a police patrol that had been spotted earlier in the day… Yet there is almost perfect silence. Some stifled laughter, words whispered, and the rest of the story unfolds in animated sequences cast on the walls of the dimly lit room. 

Smartphone school

As the night draws on, faces become absorbed in telephone screens. Like everywhere, the young people have smartphones – not top of the range, but good enough to connect to the internet via individual 4G devices. They have Instagram and TikTok accounts, make calls on FaceTime, post videos of their motorbike escapes, or the torrential rains that flood the crops, or their evenings around the fire. Except they don’t interact with any sound content, and most of them are navigating these platforms without knowing how to read or write. Their exchanges with family and friends are conducted through stories and emojis. 
New technology, perceived as a danger to the linguistic development of future generations around the world takes on a different status here. While it’s impossible to predict what effect it will have on the Bedouin’s sign language, it has enabled them to communicate via a camera with people living outside of the village. “Now, the more interactions there are, the more a language becomes structured and therefore conventional”, Wendy Sandler points out. 

These kids haven’t been to school, or not for long.
“I sent the older ones to school at first, but the teachers can’t do anything for them”, Husseina says. “What do I want for my children? The most important thing is that they adapt, that they know how to use their hands, that they get by. If they can do that, they’ll succeed in life. I couldn’t hope for anything more”.

In Egypt, school is based on learning everything by heart: the same lessons, the same songs, read and recited again and again. An approach that makes it particularly difficult to educate deaf and non-verbal children. There is, however, the government school in Assalah, 60 kilometres away, where a special class has been reserved for them since 2017. 
An iron gate, painted in the colours of the Egyptian flag, opens onto a concrete playground where two sacred trees stand in front of a dilapidated pink building. Dismantled benches and tables pile up in the corridors. In one stylishly decorated room, Rehab, an elegant woman in her thirties, is drinking tea with her colleagues. She is not Bedouin, she’s not even from this part of the country. She settled here seven years ago, but is originally from Suez. She holds a master’s degree in education, specialising in children with special needs, and used to visit her father nearby on the Red Sea coast.
One summer, someone told her: “We need someone like you here”. And she never left.
“When I arrived, the classes were unfeasible. There was almost no furniture, old dusty books… I threw everything out”, she recalls.

The classrooms are still simple, but the walls have been painted white and blue with stars, and the desks have been neatly aligned. 

“The first thing I did was set up a dedicated class for deaf children”. But soon she was baffled. “I used a sign language that meant nothing to them, and I didn’t understand anything they were telling me. I had to relearn everything”. 
There is not just one universal sign language, each region of the world has its own. Brazilians, Russians, South Africans and Indians all use a different language. Rehab had learned the Egyptian variant of Arabic sign language, far removed from the Bedouin dialect used in the Sinai Peninsula.
“This class became a place of learning for me as much as for them. I taught them writing and maths, and they taught me their language. It was hard, but it was a wonderful gift they gave me”. 
Still, Rehab sometimes loses hope. Today, as is often the way, she is short of work.
“School is empty. That’s how it is, you have to accept that you don’t know who’s going to show up from one day to the next. I only have five who come regularly. Of the hundreds of children in need in the region, that’s nothing”.

Like Husseina, most of the Bedouin do not consider an academic education a priority. In the first few years, Rehab donned her trainers, packed her textbooks and went door to door in the surrounding villages, multiple times a week, to convince the parents to let her teach their children. In the end, she gave up. Rehab would like to contribute to the wellbeing of the community, but how can she provide help without interfering or stepping on anyone’s toes? 
“It was the same with the ‘electric ears!’” she adds.

Electric ears

It was 2016, shortly before Rehab arrived – she was still living in Suez – but Emira remembers it well. It was a Wednesday in April. The small seaside town was buzzing with the excitement of a big day. Hundreds of Bedouin, mainly men, gathered in the community centre. Pick-up trucks had come from all over the peninsula. The women of the association had set out large tables with dates, biscuits, fruit juice and other snacks. The dusty old furniture had been cleared from the meeting room, the floor had been mopped, and they’d got hold of as many chairs as they possibly could. Crowds of people wearing turbans had slipped inside.
“We’re here for the electric ears!”

Coming from Cairo, the social worker was in an Association Nidaa convoy, which had been joined by a string of officials from Egypt’s Ministries of Health and Social Solidarity, doctors, technicians and several regional governors. The go-between in this meeting was Gilly, a ballet dancer from England who had retired to the Egyptian coast. Struck by the number of deaf people in her neighbourhood, she took her husband’s old Jeep and made the journey across the dry plains to the largest hospital in Cairo to ask for some hearing aids. “To try”. Touched by her request, a team of healthcare workers decided to come along in person. Emira was one of them. They soon set off, full of good intentions but caught up in all the red tape generated by the Ministry’s desire to impress. For three days, they examined the ears of every Bedouin who visited.
“Oh, you should have seen it, it was wonderful!” Gilly recalls. “I really got the impression we were doing something useful and extraordinary!”

The octogenarian hands me brochures, test templates and the book containing all her notes. In total, 52 people – those with the least profound hearing loss – were deemed eligible to receive a hearing aid. Since the devices were made in the capital, the association returned a few weeks later to distribute them. The Assalah community club has carefully preserved a list of the recipients on an obsolete computer.
“But I’ve never seen anyone wearing one”, I boldly tell the director.
Silence.
The tiny British woman beside me discreetly tugs on my sleeve and says: “Nobody’s ever worn them…”

“It was a failure”, Emira explains later. “We weren’t very well prepared. The Bedouin showed a real interest, and we were all very enthusiastic, but we quickly realised that the limitations of this kind of equipment did not suit their way of life. We were naïve. As if it would be enough to hand out hearing aids to the deaf and they would suddenly become hearing. It doesn’t work like that. We should have stayed with them, taught them how to adapt to these new sensations, offer talking and listening therapies. That didn’t happen”, she says bitterly. 

With a clammy finger, I browse through the list of people who received those hearing aids… “Mohamed Abu Garab and family. In Safah”.

“To speak which language?”

A few days later, I’m back within the now-familiar bare walls of their tiny living room, and Husseina is taken aback by my query. 
“Yes, the electric ears, they’re in here!”, she says, ushering me into the bedroom. No one in the family has ever mentioned them. In the dark room, cluttered with blankets thrown on the floor to give the children somewhere to sleep, she crouches down and rifles through her things for a moment. From the box containing her jewellery and a few items of sentimental value, she pulls out four scratched and slightly sticky cases.
“Please. We’ve got loads of them, I know they’re worth a lot”, she says, wiping the boxes with her sleeve. 
“But no one wears them. Why?”
“It doesn’t really work, and it’s not practical. For the children, it’s difficult: they hang around in the dust and they’re always doing their acrobatics, they might lose them or break them”.

Mohamed doesn’t wear his either.

“He’s too old, he’s gone his whole life without. For him, it’s unbearable, it makes a noise in his head, it goes ‘ooh ooh!’”

Her husband squeezes through the gap in the door and makes the sign for pain: a fist opening out like an explosion near his head.
“And anyway, what’s it for?” Husseina goes on. “To speak which language? Bedouin dialect? He doesn’t even know it! So why make life more complicated when you have no problem communicating?”

Gilly is also in the doorway. At once crestfallen and amazed.
“You see, that’s a life lesson they’ve taught us. Sometimes you think you’re doing a good thing, you think you’re helping, but you still need to understand what people really want. Their solidarity prevailed over everything. They don’t need anyone else, they’re happy as they are”.