NATIONALIZING TRIBES
There is nothing natural or unchanging about blood lineages. As in all cases of modern state and nation formation, blood ties only seem to “naturally bind its members together while ‘naturally’ separating races and nations [and naturalizing] obligations and responsibilities towards race and nation, and not towards outsiders” (Thobani 2007, 113). In other words, what is not natural is made to appear as natural. This racialization process homogenizes heterogeneous populations. Race, David Goldberg writes, “is integral to the emergence, development and transformations (conceptually, philosophically, materially) of the modern nation-state” (quoted in Thobani 2007, 24). Tribe becomes race becomes nation, but each step depends on practices of ranking, imposition, and control to sustain the links and secure power for those privileged by such links.
In the Arab Gulf, racialized nation building confronted a local problem. National borders often cut through tribal territories, and tribal affiliations split when individual members had to choose different nationalities with their rights and entitlements to vote, to buy property, and to marry. The same tribe then provided the same qualification for national citizenship but in two states. The tribal system, Amira Sonbol argues, has suffered.5 This is true, but it is also true that tribes could and did find new ways of dealing with tribal ambiguity so that demands for national homogeneity should not undermine tribal identity.
Not all tribes saw the advantage in choosing a single citizenship, preferring the freedom of pastoral nomadism. Some of those who did not register for citizenship remain even today without the rights and entitlements of those who did choose to belong to one of the new nation-states. This “withoutness” earned them the name Bedoon, meaning “without.” It is important to recognize that this statistically small group represents the residue of a larger, often inchoate process of choice that all Gulf Arabs faced with nationalization. Recently, the Bedoon have become assertive. While the Bedoon did not choose any nationality, other tribes, like the Al Murrah,6 did choose several nationalities precisely because they continued to privilege tribal boundaries over national borders. Used to wandering freely across lands where they had established control “through military conquest and displacement of other tribes” (Cole 1975, 94), members of the Al Murrah in 2005 refused to recognize the Qatar–Saudi Arabia border that had once again been recognized by a treaty protocol in 2001.7 Consequently, those Al Murrah who did not choose exclusive Qatari citizenship were forced to leave when the government cut off their water and electricity. In May 2005, “members of the Al Ghafran clan, a division of the Murrah tribal confederation, wrote to US congressmen to complain that they’d been stripped of their Qatari citizenship” (O’Sullivan 2008, 21, 220; see Al-Qassemi 2012). Why U.S. congressmen? Probably because of the close relationship established between the Qatari and the American governments after 9/11. The presence of the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, just outside Doha city limits, means that Americans have influence and power. In effect, the U.S. was assuming the oversight role that the British had previously exercised. The Qatari government did soon restore the Al Murrah their citizenship, but not before the lingering potential for ongoing tension between tribal and national had been registered yet again.
Like all Gulf Arab tribes, the Al Murrah had to choose between nationalities while continuing to assert the purity of their tribal lineage. Purity and authenticity, or asala, was the sine qua non for national citizenship. The overlapping and confusion of tribal and national identities are part of everyday life. Noof al-Khalifa illustrates the dilemma through a story about her Bahraini great-great-grandfather, Shaikh Nasser bin Mubarak bin Abdullah, who married the daughter of the Qatari Shaikh Jassim bin Mohammad Al Thani, and now she wonders, “Where do I belong? I know I’m a Muslim, an Arab, and a Qatari. I come from a big family, the Al Khalifas, with complicated roots [that stretch back to Bahrain]” (Al Khalifa 2010, 42). By downgrading the tribal affiliation, Noof could acquire the modern religious, ethnic and, above all, national identity that made her a Qatari citizen.
TRIBAL MODERN MARRIAGES
“From the time of Adam,” says Dabbasi, a Bedouin in Munif’s Cities of Salt, “men have bound themselves together by way of women. When a man gets married he binds himself to the land and the tribe” (Munif 1989, 261). Tribal marriages depend, above all, on women who uphold the purity of the lineage by not marrying down. These marriages remain crucial in societies where tribal affiliation constitutes qualification for citizenship.
Yet tribal marriages are complicated because they take place within the limits of nation and often “tribal equivalence.” These protocols have serious consequences for women. Should they wish to marry a foreigner, native citizens may have to seek official permission, and, if denied, women may have to give up their citizenship, because children automatically inherit their father’s citizenship and its rights. In 1989, the state of Qatar passed a law, Qatari Law No. 21, which “banned certain categories of state employees from marrying foreigners at all: ministers and deputy ministers, members of the diplomatic service, officers of the armed forces, the police or intelligence service, and students on overseas study-missions” (Dresch 2005, 149). Far from being exceptional, the Qatari Law has its equivalents elsewhere in the Gulf (155).8
But none of the laws answer fully the larger question: who counts as foreign when the tribal and the national are confused? A foreigner might be a first cousin. For example, should the citizen of one state wish to marry his daughter to the son of a brother who had chosen another nationality, he will face a dilemma, since this nephew now counts as a foreigner. In an April 1999 colloquium in Ras al-Khaima on marriage to foreign women, some women participants demanded clarification for the definition of foreigner (Dresch 2005, 152). No clear answer emerged beyond a reversion to DNA as biological (i.e., tribal) proof of nationality. Conference organizers declared that the Emiratis’ distinguishing feature is “relationships of kinship and descent (al-qurba wa-l-nasab) among families within the state. This again harks back to the criterion of purity or authenticity. It connects tribal membership and citizenship rights to authentic (asli, original, noble) Arab customs and manners which originate from the (the society’s) Islamic belief and from ethical values inherited from (our) ancestors” (155). In fact, it is kinship and descent among families within the state that provide the biological definition, and the nod to Islam reinforces the ethical dimension. Since the notion of citizenship in the Arab Gulf is a recent invention, this insistence on nationals marrying each other can, and often does, undermine endogamous tribal bonds spanning the Arabian Peninsula.
The question of who can marry whom assumes added significance for rulers and their families. In her study of the political culture of leadership in the UAE, Andrea Rugh emphasizes the importance of tribal marriages in strengthening the status of the leader and his tribe: marriages consolidate blood ties, reward loyalty, and sometimes co-opt enemies (Rugh 2007, 82–95, 137, 191, 227).
Since the early 1990s, some governments have established a sunduq al-zawaj (marriage fund) that offers monetary inducements to marry within the nation-state. The UAE, for example, provides a 20,000-Dirham dowry, substantial funds for national weddings, and subsidies for children (Fox, Mourtada-Sabbah, and al-Mutawa 2006, 47; see also Bristol-Rhys 2011, 88; Longva 1997, 53). The marriage fund also underwrites the costs of mass weddings. In March 2000, 376 Dubai couples “were married off at once in an enormous televised ceremony, where questions of status among families were displaced by eulogies to Dubai’s crown prince and to the Federation’s leader, Shaikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi [. . .] The Fund represents a massive attempt at social engineering” (Dresch 2005, 148; see Hasso 2011, 72). In this case, nation trumped tribe and tribal equivalence. What mattered was the fact that citizens of the same nation-state were strengthening the national composition of the state and that, in the