During spring 2008, I visited a class in Georgetown-Qatar University, one of the new American branch campuses housed in Doha’s Education City. I asked the students whether the concept of the tribal modern meant anything to them. The unanimous response: “Of course! Tribal roots is everyone’s new thing!” They explained that when meeting each other for the first time, they would try to discover each other’s tribes by asking “Aish ismitch” (or, “What is your name?”—that is, what’s the name of your tribe?). Some students were even more direct: “To which tribe do you belong?” Was there a contradiction in their minds, I asked, between being modern while also asserting the importance of tribal affiliations? No, they replied, the tribal is cool. But, they quickly added, it’s not enough to be from a tribe, any tribe; what mattered was which tribe. The tribe had to be elite, with an impressive lineage, for it to be really cool.
Elsewhere, in a filmed exchange among Qatari students, one boy claimed that all Qataris were originally Bedouin. His friends remonstrated, calling Bedouin backward. The coup de grace came when one of them sneered: “Just look at their cars!” To which the we-are-all-Bedouin boy responded, “No, you can’t tell the Bedouin by their cars. Now they have nice cars. You can only tell who are the real Bedouin from their language.”1 In chapter seven, I discuss why the revival of the Bedouin language has become so popular among young people in the region.
Before oil, Arab Gulf tribes with their clans lived in their own defined and bounded territory. Their territories stretched across what later became national borders. The tribe’s right to be there, like the shaikh’s right to assert hegemony, was based on a historical claim. It was a claim undergirded by power and genealogies. Rivalries, alliances, political marriages, and colonial interventions all choreographed the intricate dance of power that allowed individual tribal leaders to hold on to their territory during the early oil period while also becoming rulers of new nation-states.2
THE BRITISH
The British arrived in the Gulf in the late eighteenth century. It was a turbulent period, with tribal leaders feuding and pirates roaming the coasts. Abdulaziz Al Mahmud has captured the spirit of the age in The Corsair. The novel narrates the bitter conflict between clueless British emissaries and the notorious Rahmah ibn Jabir Al Jalahimah. Considered a folk hero for his resistance to the British in the early nineteenth century, Kuwait’s Barbarossa made and broke alliances with the various rulers in the region, thus often outwitting the British.
Already well established in India, however, the British were able to exert increasing control, and, in 1820, they signed the General Treaty of Peace with the shaikhs of the Oman coast and Bahrain. The treaty banned pirate attacks on their ships and at the same time outlawed maritime toll collection in the Gulf. The 1853 Maritime Truce renewed various earlier treaties aimed at controlling piracy, barring foreign powers from playing a role in the region, and keeping shipping lanes open (Davidson 2008, 19; Bristol-Rhys 2011, 45). The British policy of mediating tribal rivalries and ending piracy was less altruistic than it was strategic, because before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Gulf was the main thoroughfare from England to India. British colonials and their East India Company ships needed safe passage from the English Channel to the Indian Ocean.
The treaties signed with the British empowered and legitimized the ruling shaikhs. They also brought the small shaikhdoms into the “international state system as autonomous political entities” (Crystal 1990, 17).3 The shaikhdoms became part of the British Commonwealth, where all subjects were vouchsafed imperial protection. In the Gulf, not only Arabs but also Indian traders, who enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the pearling industry until the late nineteenth century, were British Commonwealth subjects. The British made sure that the Indians were not harassed (Lorimer 1984, 808–11).
By the end of the nineteenth century, British power in the Gulf region expanded, thanks to their systematic data collection, the sine qua non for organization and control of their colonies. They were the first to record the existence of the shaikhdoms and to recognize them as distinct political entities. In so doing, they conferred external recognition and power on ruling families who “could trace their origins back to one of the Arabian Peninsula tribes. With their rule sanctioned and supported by the British, the ruler drew wealth from taxes on pearling, trade, as well as some agricultural activities” (Hanieh 2011, 5). It was a huge shift in both perception and power. The British insisted on a pure tribal lineage to qualify someone to negotiate, and their insistence on designating and prioritizing some tribes over others became crucial ultimately, not only to defining citizenship but also to assigning economic and political rights.
In 1899, John Gordon Lorimer, official of the Indian Civil Service, put together The Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia. According to the title, the Gulf coast was considered one region, the desert hinterland another, with Oman the only named country. Lorimer, working under Vice-Regent Lord Curzon, employed a team of researchers from the Political Department of the British Government in India. During eight long years, The Gazetteer researchers collected information on local tribes. Above all, they noted when the various states were first mentioned by their current name. For example, the little fishing village where the Bani `Utub of the Central Arabian tribe of `Unaiza settled in 1716 was called Kut, or Kuwait. In 1766, immigrants from Kuwait moved to “Zubarah, upon the western shore of the promontory of Qatar” (Lorimer 1984, 787). At the time, Qatar was a dependency of Bahrain (798).
The Gazetteer became an instrument of rule, an invaluable manual and a symbolic register of prestige for Gulf Arabs and also for the British. It gave the British an idea of tribes’ material wealth and relative usefulness to the British. Unlike other British colonies rich in natural resources or history, the Gulf shaikhdoms were considered a nuisance factor to be minimized in order for business-as-usual to proceed throughout the British Empire. Although they did wield political influence in the region, the British had little presence on land. They preferred to use local agents to conduct their business (Bristol-Rhys 2011, 50).
Far from resisting what might have been considered to be a colonizing project, Bahrain in 1861 asked the British to admit them to what came to be called the Truce. Other shaikhdoms followed suit. So positive was the British presence considered to be that when the British government “declared it could no longer afford the 12,000,000 pounds per annum to keep its forces in the Gulf and would be withdrawing its military in 1971, the Ruler of Abu Dhabi offered to pay for the military presence himself. The Ruler of Dubai made a similar offer . . . The British Government declined these unprecedented offers, however, and withdrew its forces in December 1971” (Onley and Khalaf 2006, 192, 202, 203, 204). When one considers the nature of colonial rule and its end in other parts of Asia and in Africa, this scenario is nothing short of extraordinary. Although 1971 is now said to be the date of independence for all Gulf countries except for Kuwait, which had declared independence in the early 1960s, it was not marked by revolt or warfare but rather by reluctance. Only when offers to sponsor Britain’s continued military presence failed did the shaikhdoms organize themselves into separate nation-states. The UAE formed a new confederation from the Council of the Trucial States that had been established in 1952.
New national boundaries in effect “froze tribal relationships at the point the maps were finalized and further removed the rationale for many past tests of leadership” (Rugh 2007, 13).4 Borders hardened as lines drawn through tribal territories during the early oil period came to account for nationally distinct characteristics.
Nationalism did not