During weekends and holidays, plain-clothes police instinctively sort the sheep from the goats of Asian flaneurs and shoo them away. To the uninitiated, the fine distinctions between social classes within a single national group disappear in the casual attire of public leisure places. Yet, the local police can smell class even across the six-lanes that some workers in their Sunday best are trying to cross in order to join the families enjoying the Corniche or public parks. In mufti and trying to act like everyone else, the plain-clothed police stride toward the spot their prey is approaching. Just as he recognizes them, so they recognize him. Most give up. For the hardy few, those who dare to assert civic rights of access to public places, there’s a brief encounter. The courageous are humiliated and compelled to slink back. They had misread open space for a public place. They were guilty of violating public interest, interest that depends on keeping social classes separate (Chakrabarty 2002, 77).
The management of foreigners has produced two separate domains, the pure and the contaminated. Saudi Raja’ `Alim explores these separate worlds in her Mecca novels that mix magic, perfume, and fantasy. Although strangers are the norm in a Mecca where pilgrims often stay and become part of the city’s life, the Meccans keep them at a distance. Sri Lankans, Indonesians, and Ethiopians stave off hunger, she writes, by “eating vermin and drinking the water of Zamzam” (`Alim 2007, 158). These outsiders with their disgusting diets and broken Arabic bear the contamination of what they eat: vermin. The holy waters of the Zamzam well may counteract the dire consequences of their condition, yet they remain a source of dread (158, 162, 230, 236–37).
Post-oil mass migrations to the Arab Gulf have caused anxiety that verges on panic. Native citizens fear that the foreigners, who outnumber them everywhere except in Bahrain, will become what Asef Bayat calls a social non-movement. The power of such actors emerges out of their large numbers and their “common practices of everyday life” (Bayat 2010, 20, original emphasis). Poised to unite in what Hannah Arendt has called a tribal nationalism with no “definite home but (feeling) at home wherever other members of their ‘tribe’ happened to live” (Arendt 1979, 232), these rootless inside-outsiders threaten to demand a share in the national wealth. To deflect a potential rights discourse and maintain their monopoly over resources, Gulf Arabs emphasize their deep history in a region “free” of foreigners.12 The narrative of a pure past is a fiction, but it is a fiction with strong roots in the psychological stress of the present moment when black gold is producing new contradictions.
FORGET THE MULTICULTURAL PAST
The region’s rich multicultural history is being erased. This erasure appears most clearly in the surprising rewriting of merchant histories. The families of traders who have long connected crucial nodes in the Indian Ocean networks “downplay or deny their transnational heritage in response to the Arabization policies of the Gulf Arab governments [. . .] In the Gulf today, public discussion about the Persian, Indian, and African mothers of past shaikhs and shaikhas is strongly discouraged” (Onley 2005, 60, 62). Any discussion of such intermarriage in the past challenges the purity of twenty-first-century Gulf Arabs and so it is erased. Although “multiculturalism has defined the Gulf since time immemorial” (Fox, Mourtada-Sabbah, and al-Mutawa 2006, 267), it dissolves in myths of millennial isolation.
Yet, tribal elites’ rejection of a past filled with cross-cultural encounters is not anomalous. Rather, it mirrors a reflex of modernity that promotes “the systematic erasure of continuous and deep-felt encounters [that] have marked human history throughout the globe” (Trouillot 2002, 846). “Spectacular domination’s first priority,” Guy Debord confirms, “was to eradicate historical knowledge in general; beginning with just about all rational information and commentary on the most recent past . . . The more important something is, the more it is hidden . . . Spectacular power can deny whatever it likes, once, or three times over, and change the subject, knowing full well there is no danger of any riposte, in its own space or any other” (Debord 1998, 13–14, 19). On the palimpsest of the now empty page, tribal leaders and their historians can pen new stories of spotless lineages.
What has changed in contemporary Gulf countries is not the fact of multiculturalism, but rather its agents and its scale: “Iranians and Indians still live in the Gulf Arab ports, but few Gulf Arabs have connections with Iran or India today. The predominant foreign influence is now British and American” (Onley 2005, 78). The new cosmopolitan story accents a past of uncontaminated lineages and isolated lifestyles. The less said about that heterogeneous past the better; the fantasy of first exposure to outsiders must be maintained.
Wealth and anxiety about who should have it and who should not even dream of wanting it have combined to create a climate of cruel discrimination against the foreign majority, especially the Asian laborers. But there are some, like Qatari poet Maryam Ahmad Al Subaiey, who acknowledge the humanity and suffering of people whose labor has turned the desert into a paradise for the few:
Behind the dust all you can see
is their broken souls and the shine
of new cars mirrored in their eyes.
They are not as human as we are.
They are nothing
but workers. We don’t want
them in our malls, we choose
not to see them, to forget them.
This army that builds our country
remains invisible beneath the burning sun.
Paine, Lodge, and Touati 2011, 171–72
Al Subaiey rails at her fellow citizens’ collective indifference that has reduced these foreigners to the broken life of the barely human. Beneath the burning sun, the invisible army builds a brave new world for the native citizens, the privileged minority. It is their rights as tribal citizens that the police monitor and safeguard.
Chapter two will consider the ways in which Gulf Arabs project tribal modern identities that accord them rights and privileges unavailable to those without their pure tribal blood. New DNA testing bolsters oral histories of millennial tribal endogamy and the family trees they generate. This kind of tribal lineage determines citizenship and concomitant entitlements to a share in the oil wealth.
CHAPTER TWO
Pure Blood and the New Nation
Tribalism that considers every outsider, even a neighbor, a permanent foreigner
Bagader, Heinrichsdorff, and Akers 1998
It could be argued that the tribal ‘tradition,’ especially in relation to the marriage practices of women, traditional dress and expected social roles is often increased, not decreased by wealth and the pursuit of acceptable social status within an extremely wealthy but still extremely lineage-based society
Fromherz 2012
In the fourteenth century, the Arab historian-philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) proposed a new way to think about the rise and fall of civilizations. Humanity, he wrote, was divided between two distinct forms of social organization or civilization, badawa and hadara. Badawa is the space of the pastoral nomad Bedouin forced by their circumstances to remain close to each other and loyal to the tribe to survive. Hadara, by contrast, is the settled place of urban ease where the blood bonds of tribal solidarity weaken and gradually come undone. Both are necessary to the ebb and flow of civilizations, and environment provides the key to understanding civilizational cycles as they oscillate in constant motion between these two extremes.
To my surprise, I learned that Ibn Khaldun’s paradigm—at once dialectical and