The tribal in Tribal Modern is far from that anthropological primitive—whether historicized or not—located beyond the reach of Western modernity. The tribal as it appears in the Arab Gulf today is integral to the modern; it constitutes a crucial element in the Gulf’s modernity. The tribal was repressed in the middle of the twentieth century because oil imperialists and their local agents considered it a hindrance to modernization, but the tribal is making a comeback in the twenty-first century. In its return, the tribal signals racial privilege, social status, and exclusive entitlement to a share in national profits. Indeed, the rubbing up of the tribal against the modern in today’s Gulf states does not represent a clash of conflicting values, but, rather, the desired effect of common aspirations. This effect will be analyzed through the lens of the barzakh, a term denoting undiluted convergence. It derives from the Qur’an where it depicts simultaneous mixing and separation in two dimensions: metaphysical and physical. The undiluted convergences between this life and the hereafter and between salt and sweet water I will amplify in chapter four.
Examining the culture of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, Tribal Modern traces the emergence of a national brand that combines the spectacle of tribal and modern identities and cultures. The brand is widely visible yet poorly understood, and the goal of this book is to present the brand in such a way that it compels attention to the absolute simultaneity and compatibility of the tribal and the modern without privileging one over the other.
The outcome of my research goes against the grain of popular thinking and media hype. Highly stigmatized, the region tends to be considered as either tribal or modern; in other words, it is either backward tribal with a thin, modern veneer or failed modern because of tribal residue. Refer back to Figure 1 of the Dukhan Camel Club procession about to greet Qatar’s Emir on December 3, 2010, upon his return from Zurich, where Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup. People to whom I have shown this image have shrugged, saying that there is nothing new here. Some see only the camels and the dhows, others only the starchitect skyline; for most, this juxtaposition provides proof of the cognitive dissonance between the tribal and the modern. But to begin to understand the culture of the Gulf and to appreciate what is new and different in it, we must see how the modern and the tribal, the high-rises and the tribal regalia, converge, each reinforcing the other.
The category of tribe/tribal projects something new and crucial in the twenty-first century. A racialized idea that catalyzes a distinctively modern identity for Gulf Arab citizens, tribal designation distinguishes native citizens from others close to them, the majority international community of workers. It provides a cultural, social, and political resource for young Gulf Arab elites, seeking to reconnect with grandparents who experienced cyclical austerity and constant movement across vast borderless zones. Only the tribal bond allows Gulf youth to comprehend the dignified poverty and the restlessness of their ancestors. They are redefining the tribal for their times and in their own lives. Like the Medicis in sixteenth-century Italy and the Vanderbilts in nineteenth-century America, the Arab Gulf tribes in the twenty-first century are asserting both tribal superiority and family privilege.
These aspirations occlude elements from their immediate and distant history. Tribes are said to have always existed beyond foreign influence, and many claim that foreigners are new in the region. Yet, history records millennia of interaction across the Indian Ocean. The latest foreigners to come to the Gulf were the Americans, whose arrival in the 1930s Saudi novelist `Abd al-Rahman Munif vividly describes in his 1984 Cities of Salt. Indispensable for the economy, foreigners are considered a threat to be marginalized today and erased from yesterday. In chapter one, I consider the suppression of transnational connections in the past. Further, today’s foreigners—Asian workers along with American and European “educated cosmopolitans”—are represented as new and, in the case of the laborers, contaminating. In the newly cosmopolitan cities, the less said about the region’s heterogeneous past the better.
How does the elite tribal minority hold on to its privileged status? The first step is to assert unique right to citizenship and exclusive entitlement to national wealth. Only those who have inhabited these lands since time immemorial, namely the tribes, can claim that right. Nation building on tribal territories has turned tribe into race into nation. The next step involves fabricating immediately recognizable identities to differentiate Gulf Arabs from the mass of foreign workers. Chapter two discusses the recent emphasis on pure tribal identities and lineages that draw an unbreachable line between native citizen and visiting foreigner. With the establishment of Gulf nation-states, new national borders were drawn. In many cases, they cut through tribal territory so that today the tribal and the national compete in shaping “authentic” identities. Tribal purity, the sine qua non of citizenship, is maintained through marriages arranged within the racialized norms of tribal equivalence and compatibility, and impeccable genealogies preserve the veneer of tribal purity.
Students in a class I was teaching in fall 2010 at the Virginia Commonwealth University–Qatar conducted surveys on marriage and tribal status. Its results demonstrate how pervasive yet complex is the prestige conferred by tribal lineage and consequent status. The chapter ends with an exposé of the connection between DNA and money. Birthright, genetics, and consanguinity—all provide the crucial building blocks in a citizens’ rights discourse that celebrates tribal origins.
Analysis of nation building reveals the constructedness of pure tribal blood and traces how it has changed into the idea of the tribe. Chapter three discusses this process. But is this a novel development? I argue that it is not. I explore the production of tribal lineages in a rapidly changing political and economic climate. The tribal, the national, and the modern are inextricably bound to one another. The transformations of tribal ties and genealogies into race and then into class—especially urban cosmopolitan class—become critical for citizenship. The emergence of the privileged national citizen reveals the interdependence and the reciprocity of the tribal and the modern.
The inflated yet flexible idea of the tribe shapes a distinctive national brand that broadcasts class, race, and power. Every brand needs a slogan. Authenticity, often a synonym for the tribal, is the oft-repeated slogan that shapes the new Gulf Arab brand. Chapter four looks at the creation of the tribal modern brand as a new space where the potential for dynamic interaction is released. This brand brings together contradictory states in a broader border that I call the barzakh, an untranslatable term signifying undiluted convergence, the simultaneous processes of mixing and separation. Contradictions stand in the borderlands, bringing together and separating the symbolic tribal and the material modern. Resisting resolution, these contradictions spiral into new forms of productive branding. Gulf Arab regimes have recently devoted themselves to the task of tailoring the regionally similar brand to reflect separate, distinctly national characteristics.
The brand privileges individuals and nations but also differentiates them. Internally, it distinguishes native citizens from the many foreigners populating their cities. Externally, it helps each new nation to stamp its distinctive mark on world politics. Chapters five, six, and seven consider how these various regimes market the brand through novel, little-understood uses of public space. They are evident in spectacular national museums and vernacular architecture, in public ceremonies, in neo-Bedouin language, and in dress. The brand is adapted into new versions of tribal sports. It is also used to revise undesirable elements from the past, such as the hardships of pearling. Citizens are balancing contradictory expectations, norms, and values: cosmopolitan openness versus tribal isolationism; postnational globalization versus national specificities. These are not dichotomous but convergent styles, practices, and expectations.
Chapter eight looks at women’s reactions to the new societies growing up around them. Some experience loss, others empowerment. Better educated than the men, women have unprecedented opportunities. Contesting tribal expectations that they remain at home and out of sight, they are entering public space and the workforce in growing numbers. Although some Gulf women seem poised to become important players in their societies, they still face the daunting challenge of negotiating the tensions between new opportunities and old constraints. Some women writers symbolize their fears in images that evoke cold and freezing. In