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Peoples who make and remake their settlements in a variety of places, often depending upon climactic conditions. Nomads ¶ (aʿrāb) are the non-urban population of the Arabian peninsula, attested ten times in the Qurʾān. Oasis-town and countryside By the time of the Prophet, the Near Eastern social trichotomy of peasants, townspeople and nomads had developed into the dichotomy of nomads and urbanites in northern and central Arabia (see city; pre-islamic arabia and the qurʾān). This was the result of the “bedouinization of Arabia,” a social process which had set in with…