gamal /n pl gimaal/ camel ma shuftish il gamal wala l-gammaal [proverb] (I have seen neither the camel nor the cameleer) I have no idea who was responsible. ma gaash fi-l-gamal (He did not come by camel) He hasn’t asked for too much. il-gamal bima hamal (The camel with what it carried) The whole caboodle. is-sikka tfawwit ig-gamal (The way permits the passage of the camel) No one is forcing you to stay. ya gamal-i (O my camel!) expression of mourning by a woman lamenting her dead husband.
gamali /adj invar/ 1. of or pertaining to camels 2. requiring long cooking. shay gamali [jocular] tea very late in coming.
-A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic
I regret never asking the drovers for idioms and proverbs in their Kabbashi dialect that mentioned camels. These Egyptian proverbs originate from the language of settled peasants who rarely see camels in their daily life. Donkeys and sheep maybe yes. Camels probably never. But I still wonder how many camel proverbs there might be in the drovers’ language.
They have no aphorism like “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven” because there are no rich men in Dar al-Kababish, and the original verse probably contains a misprint of the Greek word kamelos (camel) for kamilos (anchor chain), of which there are none in North Kordofan because there is no water on which to sail a boat.
But KhairAllah definitely might say something like, is-sikka tfawwit ig-gamal, The way permits the passage of the camel, because we were riding camels on the Darb al-Arba’een, The Way of the Forty, otherwise known as a sikka sahraawi, A Saharan Way, and no, we were not Arab Seamen aboard Ships of the Desert, just woeful cameleers, or as Egyptians would say, gammaaleen.