The narrative unfolds a scene of betrayal. Generous as they might be to strangers who made it across the inhospitable territory that surrounded them, the tribes of the oasis kept to themselves. But one day it was rumored that three Franks, a.k.a. Christians, had arrived. Anxiety spread with the news that the foreigners spoke Arabic and they cited the Qur’an. Why had these strangers come? Why were they asking so many questions “about dialects, about tribes, and their disputes, about religion and sects, about the routes, the winds and the rainy seasons”? Why were they so concerned to know whether other foreigners had preceded them (Munif 1989, 31)?
The Arabic-speaking foreigners were American oil prospectors who claimed to be looking for water. But the locals became suspicious when the strangers’ inquiries concerned remote places not known to have wells or springs. The Americans stayed a few days only to return several months later with many others, and they set up camp. Alarmed, a local delegation confronted the Emir, and he explained that he had invited the Americans because they “have come to extract the oil and the gold” under the tribes’ feet; this oil and gold would make them all rich (86). Soon, huge yellow machines filled the desert with their roar. By the time they were done uprooting the palm trees and orchards of the tribes, the invading Americans had reduced the idyllic oasis to desert.
An agent of the local ruler plotting with the Americans warned the people of Wadi al-`Uyun to leave if they wanted to be compensated: “The emir has said good riddance to anyone who wants their desert and tribe, but for those who want a place to live, the government is arranging everything” (111, my emphasis). Wadi al-`Uyun was thus not a real place, according to the American understanding of place.
Everyone left, everyone, that is, except for a crazy old woman who died the eve of the departure. The only way to stay in the old Wadi al-`Uyun was to be buried in its sand. Now this newly desertified space “that no longer had a name since the houses had been destroyed and all the landmarks obliterated” (187) was ready to be turned into the kind of place where camels, the sine qua non of pre-oil tribal life, no longer were of use. Without camels the tribes had no means of livelihood. To survive they had to work with the Americans.
Meanwhile, the Americans established themselves in Harran, a hellhole of a place on the Gulf. It was to be “a port and headquarters of the company, as well as a city of finality and damnation . . . Within less than a month two cities began to rise: Arab Harran and American Harran”4 (198, 206). After American Harran had been built, the Arabs wanted their city to be just like it. But that was not to be.5 Housed in barracks, the Bedouin were reduced to laborers who watched the Americans cavort and “do just as they please in their own colony” (216, my emphasis). In true colonial fashion, the Americans had asserted power over potential rebels.6 The novel trumpets a warning: outsiders are dangerous; their desire for the Arabs’ land and wealth must be checked.7
The Bedouin had treated the American oil prospectors with the suspicion they reserved for outsiders. Outsiders were not from Mars; they were part, albeit an unwanted part, of their lives, and the Bedouin had always kept them on the edge of their society. These latest outsiders, however, could not be prevented from venturing deep into Bedouin territory. Their desire for black gold would keep them there indefinitely.
CONTAMINATION
Munif’s novel fictionalizes a process that became increasingly painful with the discovery and exploitation of oil throughout the Gulf region. As Harrans mushroomed all around the Gulf coasts, foreigners began to outnumber the native population. The stream of workers has grown exponentially and, with their exploding numbers, the fear factor. Even though most of the migrants are the poorest of the poor from Asia and Africa, utterly dependent on their local sponsors, without any rights and with the most meager of hopes to sustain families back home, their visibility everywhere has led to fear of their contaminating influence and a determination to deny them the rights and entitlements of citizenship.8 Gulf regimes have instituted exclusionary policies that range from “formal categorization and legislation to informal customs and practices in everyday life and the manipulation of cultural values and symbols” (Longva 1997, 44). Some of these exclusions are institutionalized; others are symbolic. No matter how long they have lived there, the vast majority of foreigners remain physically and socially apart from the citizen community. Prevented from integrating, they must stay ever alert to internal borders they cannot cross.9
In their segregation, they become the “Other,” a single block of alterity in whose mirror Gulf Arabs see their own identity reflected. But within this block, the international workers are socially stratified and enclosed in ethnic compounds. What sociologist Asef Bayat observes about Dubai might be said about any of the Gulf states: “Dubai turns out to be no more than a ‘city-state of relatively gated communities’ marked by sharp communal and spatial boundaries, with labor camps (of South Asian migrants) and the segregated milieu of parochial jet-setters, or the ‘cosmopolitan’ ghettos of the western elite expatriates who remain bounded within the physical safety and cultural purity of their own reclusive collectives” (Bayat 2010, 186–87; see also Khalaf 2006, 251–56). A chasm yawns between the native citizens and both sets of others: the educated cosmopolitans and the laboring underclass.
With no hope of acquiring citizenship10 or of returning home because of the crushing debts they owe their sponsors, the migrant laborers survive in slums on the city margins or in desert camps. For second-and third-generation workers, to be Pakistani in Dubai does not designate a country of origin. It means belonging to a group of rootless people who live, work, and die together with compatriots in the only place they know to call home: Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Umm al-Quwain, Ajman, Fujairah, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. They have no rights. They are thrown together in what looks like the “everyday cosmopolitanism” of multicultural urban centers, but with a difference. For if cosmopolitanism is “both a social condition and an ethical project . . . with humanistic objectives,” as Asef Bayat maintains, then what we see in the Gulf is not cosmopolitanism but communalism of the “inward-looking and close-knit ethnic or religious collectives [who] espouse narrow, exclusive, and selfish interests” (Bayat 2010, 186). There is good reason to place foreigners in enclaves. When a financial crisis occurs, projects are put on hold, and foreign laborers risk being dispatched so that life for the native citizens may continue generally undisturbed. Adam Hanieh uses the term “spatialization” to explain how such geo-political mechanisms of social control allow for the “spatial displacement of crisis” (Hanieh 2011, 60, 63, 65, 179).
Although Americans and Europeans are accorded privileges generally unavailable to South and Southeast Asians and to Africans, internal distinctions place the wealthy maharaja above the middle-class European. Wealth trumps ethnicity among the professional expatriates whom Longva calls “educated cosmopolitans.” Making up the middle classes between the Gulf Arabs and the manual laborers, this “ethnically composite population shared one common feature, a ‘creolized’ expatriate culture with elements from multiple origins expressed in a major Western idiom—mostly English, occasionally French—and coalesced around values that were perceived as Western” (Longva 1997, 136). These educated cosmopolitans “close ranks across nationalities, united in their eager embracement of ‘Western’ identity” (138). In other words, a Westernized identity has become legible as middle-class status. Class notwithstanding, native citizens view most outsiders with a suspicion that may escalate to panic.
“Expatriates are a danger worse than the atomic bomb,” some officials recently warned.11 Under intense surveillance, they experience a discrimination common “in modern societies characterized by an advanced system of social welfare since, to be genuinely meaningful, these social goods are necessarily limited, and their enjoyment is therefore contingent on proof of national membership” (Longva 1997, 7; see Longva 2005, 126). This proof nowadays is visible and audible. It is performed in dress and language that distinguish the native citizens from the immigrant workers. The streets, where the non-citizens come into contact with the citizens and where “collective dissent may be both expressed and produced” (Bayat 2010, 167), attract the greatest scrutiny. Even if the non-citizens do not intend to rebel, their mere public presence