In the swirl of radical social transformation, Gulf Arabs are projecting a distinctive national and cultural identity that is rooted and tribal but also modern and global. Arab Gulf states are buying up iconic real estate around the world that compels attention to their wealth, prestige, and power. Since the outbreak of the Arab uprisings in January 2011, the tribal modern brand has expanded its significance, with Qatar claiming the right to become peace broker in the region.
Contesting contemptuous accounts of Gulf citizens’ superficiality, lack of substance, and backwardness, I suggest that the return of the tribal is shaping a new way to think of the modern in cultural terms. It also opens a new way to conceptualize past and present, while imagining a previously unimaginable future. The tribal modern brand holds apparently contradictory states in balance. In the productive tension between a millennial source of social stability and a globalizing process of instant transformations, the tribal becomes a modernizing force.
In coining the term the “tribal modern,” I am not imagining an alternative, culturally specific modernity, and certainly not an incomplete modernity. An apparent oxymoron, the tribal modern makes sense of the epistemological, socio-economic, and political upheavals that have rocked the Arab Gulf for half a century and continue to shape it today. Situated at the nexus of the local, the national, and the transnational, the tribal modern is a contact zone that recalls the miracle Saudi writer Raja’ `Alim invokes “where the old world and the new are tight as two lovers” (`Alim 2007, 217). Although this phenomenon is not limited to the Arab Gulf, it is there that this chronotope is most clearly in evidence.
CHAPTER ONE
Uneasy Cosmopolitanism
“Where are you from?” I asked the attendant at one of the women’s dorms at Education City in Doha. Having noted the Qatari accent and the `abaya, I had assumed that this woman was one of the few Qataris working a lowly job.
“Iran.”
“Were you born in Iran?”
“No. Here.”
“And your parents?”
“Here.”
“And your grandparents?”
Nodding, she smiled. It was like sharing an insider joke. She knew the name of the town she was supposedly from but she was not sure where exactly it was located except that it was somewhere across the Gulf in the South. Near Shiraz? Yes, yes, near Shiraz.
I felt myself in a time warp. This “Iranian” woman reminded me of my South Asian travel companions in the human cargo boat almost forty years earlier. Children of those who stayed would probably have had her experience and felt the same way, but with a major difference. Indians cannot pass like those Iranians who look Arab.
A MILLENNIAL CROSSROAD
Since the 1960s, Asian workers have poured into the Gulf countries. Some have settled and had children, but virtually none have become citizens. Regular remittances to families across the Indian Ocean connect them to a home where they dream to return. So important are these laborers to the home economy that they have changed the face of some Asian villages and towns. Novelist Amitav Ghosh describes a road in Mangalore lined with “large houses, some new, with sharp geometric lines and bright pastel colours that speak eloquently of their owners’ affiliations with the Persian Gulf” (Ghosh 1994, 284). These Asian immigrants are the latest in a long line of travelers who have moved back and forth across the vast oceanic spaces separating the Gulf from the western coasts of the Indian subcontinent and the eastern coasts of the African continent. Today the paths between the nodes of the ancient Indian Ocean network are more traveled than ever.
Rivaling the Pharaohs in their antiquity, these networks go back to the Bronze Age and the Bahrain-based civilization of Dilmun (2450–1700 BCE). Dilmun linked the ancient cities of Hufuf and Qatif in the eastern region of the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain. Source of a cosmopolitan ethos that characterized the Gulf long before the rise of Islam, Dilmun was called Ard al-khulud, or the Land of Eternity. Mesopotamians, like Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Sumerian Uruk, went there hoping to escape death.1 Recent archaeological excavations have made clear how broad and deep were the Gulf trading networks that connected Babylonia, Oman, East Africa, and the Indian subcontinent four millennia ago.2 “Indus Valley seals have turned up at Ur and other Mesopotamian sites. ‘Persian Gulf’ types of circular stamped rather than rolled seals, known from Dilmun, that appear at Lothal in Gujarat, India, and Faylahkah, as well as in Mesopotamia, are convincing corroboration of the long-distance sea trade.”3
By the ninth century CE, Gulf trade networks had spread to Southeast and even East Asia: “The recent discovery of an Arab dhow off the coast of Belitung in Indonesia laden with some 60,000 pieces of gold, silver, precious cobalt and white ninth-century Tang ceramics confirms the existence of a busy maritime trade route between Baghdad and Xian, capital of Tang China. Ships filled with aromatic woods from Africa and fine textiles and goods from Abbasid Baghdad would leave Basra and pass through the Gulf” (Fromherz 2012, 43–44). Sailors leaving the Gulf in November, their dhows full of pearls and dates, would return months later laden with spices, rice, sugar, and wood, especially Indian teak for doors and windows and Zanzibar mangrove poles for ceilings. With the wood and spices they also brought back new ideas and technologies from distant ports in the Indian Ocean.
These trading voyages generated prolonged contact between people separated by sea but linked by commerce. Writing about Kuwait, Anh Nga Longva describes long-distance ties that were common in the region: “Even ordinary merchants and sailors sometimes maintained house holds in both Kuwait and the towns along the trade route. Basra, Karachi, Calicut, Sur, Aden, Lamu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar were the nodal points through which pre-oil Kuwaiti society connected with the other participants in the sea-trade network centered around the Indian Ocean” (Longva 1997, 21). These men, whether from Kuwait or other Gulf ports, led multiple lives often with multiple wives.
From the earliest times, war, natural disasters, pilgrimage, and trade have attracted travelers to the Gulf region. Statues in the trading hub of Thaj just west of Dammam provide evidence of a lesser-known stop along the route of Alexander the Great’s fourth-century BCE military conquests. In Yemen, the repeated ruptures of the Ma`rib Dam until the sixth century CE drove Yemenis out of the area, and many chose to move to the Gulf. From the seventh century, Muslim proselytizing and pilgrimage networks utilized the ancient frankincense and spice caravan routes. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Indian Ocean and Mesopotamian subjects were trading and sparring with the Portuguese in the Gulf. More recently, imperial struggles between the Ottomans and the British brought new foreign elements into the mix. They fought for control of the valuable waterways that linked the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean and the British with their Indian Raj.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, traffic in the Gulf had become intensely multicultural. Travelers, including pearl dealers from Paris, described a scene where Persians, Iraqis, Indians, Beluchis, Afghans, British, French, descendants of sixteenth-century Portuguese, Zanzibaris, Yemenis, Hadhramis, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese all lived in the region (Al-Rasheed 2005, 3). In 1865, the British traveler William Palgrave described the colorful mix of foreigners in Manamah: “Thus the gay-coloured dress of the southern Persian, the saffron-stained vest of Oman, the white robe of Nejed, and the striped gown of Baghdad, are often to be seen mingling with the light garments of Bahreyn [. . .] Indians, merchants by profession, and mainly from Guzerat, Cutch, and their vicinity, keep up here all their peculiarities of costume and manner, and live among the motley crowd” (quoted in Onley 2005, 59).
When oil was discovered in the early twentieth century, a new group of migrants—Americans—entered the Gulf. Thus began the latest phase in Gulf cosmopolitanism.
CITIES OF SALT
For some, however, this period was less cosmopolitan than it was neocolonial. In the 1980s and early 1990s, several writers narrated the conversion of the desert into concrete jungles in a process as violent as the colonizing missions that the British and the French had brought to the Arab world in the nineteenth century. In his five-volume