When I asked some Qatari students about tribal equivalence and how to tell who is where in the tribal pecking order, they said that everyone knows.
“But how do you know?” I asked.
They shrugged, smiling at the strangeness of the question: “You can tell from the face to which tribe this person belongs. You can tell their status by the way they speak or act or dress.”
“Why does tribal status matter so much?”
“If you marry someone from an inappropriate tribe, you harm the tribe.”
What did harming the tribe mean? To look more deeply into the affective connection between tribal class and marriage, I asked several students in a class I was teaching at the Virginia Commonwealth University–Qatar (VCUQ) in the fall of 2010 to conduct surveys on the role of tribal class and on the importance of asala (or, authenticity and purity of lineage) in marriage.
Thirty men and women between the ages of 18 and 30 responded in full to an online survey about tribal status and the acceptability of marriage outside the tribe.10 One of the questions that the students had left optional was tribal name. To the students’ surprise, most of the respondents were happy to give the name of their tribe. Moreover, some even specified whether they were hadar or Bedouin.
A majority of respondents affirmed that elite tribe members should marry each other. One simply wrote: “Of course!” Another: “Yes, because our society is extremely tribal.” For another, the tribes are the “good pure part of society” (emphasis in the original).
In answer to a question about what makes a tribe elite, several insisted on the importance of deep roots in time and across space. A member of the Al Muraikhi tribe, for instance, wrote that her Bedouin tribe stretched in space to “KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), Kuwait, Qatar and UAE . . . some are in Bahrain too. We go back before Islam, i.e. more than 1400 years ago!” In other words, she perceived her status to derive from the geographic and temporal spread of her tribe. A man from the Al Suba`i tribe wrote that he could trace ancestors for over 1000 years; members of his tribe can be found “almost in all Arab countries.” An Al Murrah man also affirmed pride in his tribe. Careful not to seem arrogant, he added, “If my tribal habits is [sic] making others embarrassed I don’t show them or present it. Being around people who don’t belong to tribes, trying not to make them feel they lack something.” His self-evident tribal superiority, he presumed, would embarrass and even intimidate anyone without elite tribal affiliation. “I am asil Arab from the Arabian Gulf,” wrote one woman, using the Arabic term asil in her otherwise English statement.
Although the expectation to marry within tribal equivalence is widespread, the student survey probed personal feelings on the subject: would they accept a spouse from another tribal class? 70.6 percent said yes. One wrote, “I would choose to marry a person based on compatibility, respect, love, mutual understanding, etc. [sic] and not only based on their tribal origin or their last name!” Note that none of these affective criteria trump tribal origin. Instead, they become additive, desirable traits.
While they were not the majority, a third of the responses indicated that the partner’s tribal status, class, did indeed matter to them. The following is a sampling of these reactions:
“Lower social class affects my kids.”
“I do not accept other tribes and their customs.”
“When it comes to marriage it is very hard and rare to break the rules; basically we just can’t.”
“It is impossible for me to marry someone from another tribal class.”
How absolute this person was! Even political status cannot overcome lack of tribal equivalence.11
“The tribe must have hasab (noble descent) and nasab (tribal lineage)” (Khaldunian terms were here used seamlessly, almost reflexively, to denote status and kinship categories).
“Maybe I won’t be able to interact with other tribes and my family might not accept that.”
The most amusing reply came from a woman who listed the eight appropriate tribes for herself and for her children, ending with a flourish: “Can you mix diamonds with stainless steel? Doesn’t work.”
Some wrote that they would impose the same tribal restrictions on their children, indicating their satisfaction with a system that should be perpetuated. Although two-thirds of the participants in the survey had responded that tribal class in a life partner did not matter to them individually, the overwhelming majority agreed that their families did care. One wrote that to marry someone with Persian blood is completely unacceptable. In the summary of the survey results, the students wrote that they were surprised to learn that these marriage restrictions were not imposed: “They actually believe in them to a degree that they want to apply these tribal restrictions on their children.”
The principle of tribal compatibility in marriage, or kafa’a, has long governed tribal alliances.12 Whereas men may marry down, women should not. Women’s hypogamy degrades her tribe’s gene pool because children carry the father’s tribal affiliation. Although kafa’a is an Islamic legal principle ruling on the suitability of marriage partners, `adam takafu’ al-nasab is a deviation from that principle. In Sunni schools of jurisprudence, kafa’a rules on compatibility between a man and a woman amount to “equivalence of social status, fortune and profession (those followed by the husband and by the father-in-law), as well as parity of birth, which should exist between husband and wife, in default of which the marriage is considered ill-matched and, in consequence, liable to break-up.”13 In the Gulf, lack of tribal lineage compatibility (`adam takafu’ al-nasab) can sometimes entail what some call “forced divorce.” In this latest usage, `adam takafu’ al-nasab accentuates the importance of nasab or tribal lineage. Authorities can force a couple to divorce or not to marry if their tribes are unequal. Despite concern about skyrocketing divorce rates in the region,14 police even have permission to pursue a tribally incompatible couple and force them to divorce. Saudi poet Nimah Nawwab decries this practice and the continued dominance of tribal values. She wonders why “this abhorrent tribalistic attitude and practice has again resurged after its eradication by Islam.”15
DNA AND MONEY
Yet, money and the class mobility it enables complicate tribal equivalence. How can hypergamy for women be sustained in the oil age when members of lower tribes become superrich and thus change their class, and with it, their tribal status? Blood and bank accounts compete.
A young Emirati woman complained that her grandmother would prefer her to marry a foreigner rather than a man from a lower status tribe: “‘No way in the world would she let that happen, because they used to work for us; in her eyes that would be like marrying the driver, for God’s sake.’ When I point out that the family in question is fabulously wealthy and well-respected now, I get a look that tells me that I am incredibly dense” (Bristol-Rhys 2011, 99). The tone of outrage at the mere thought of marrying down, even if to super-rich men, mirrors some of the responses to the VCUQ tribal marriage surveys: “Tribal class is more important than money in my family. Money goes but family name will stay.” Another wrote: “Being rich is not what I ask from the man. We all have money.” Time will tell how long such indifference to money can last.
Incalculable wealth, how it is to be distributed, and who has the right to what size of the pie, is changing attitudes. It has given tribal compatibility a new twist. One principle pervades: money should not seep out of the hands of the pure tribes. For anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff, “the more that ethnically defined populations move toward the model of the profit-sharing corporation, the more their terms of membership tend to become an object of concern, regulation, and contestation. And the more they do, the greater is their proclivity to privilege biology and birthright, genetics and consanguinity, over social and cultural criteria of belonging” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 47, 65). Blood and money can, and sometimes do, replace the flexible forms of social community that used to prevail: “nowhere was there full