Tribal Modern. Miriam Cooke

      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.”<sup>13</sup> 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 agreement as to family or collective history. Though ambiguity has not disappeared, the arbiter is now a state apparatus, which rules upon genetic facts” (Dresch 2006, 203). No longer part of a flexible oral tradition, lineage is now being fixed, and the state is ruling upon genetic facts.¹⁶

      Tribal concerns with pure blood in the Gulf parallel developments in South Africa, with new demands to draw “unequivocal lines of inclusion and exclusion, of inside and out. No wonder the commerce in recreational genomics, which turns out to be more than merely recreational when the stakes are large, is growing so quickly; the likes of DNA PRINT GENOMICS, DNA Tribes, and Ethnoancestors claim to have technologies that provide ‘hard’ scientific evidence of identity, evidence that puts the matter of membership beyond construction, debate, or question” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 67).¹⁷