world’s highest tennis court that, at 211 meters, serves also as a helipad. From the coast, we drove inland and passed Knowledge Village, Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City Annex, and Mall of the Emirates, where the pinnacle of the world’s largest indoor ski slope towers above the commercial complex. Heavy traffic slowed to a crawl through the six-lane highway separating the two sides of the Sheikh Zayed Road known as Dubai’s Fifth Avenue. Most stunning of all was the 828-meter high Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building in the shape of a rocket.1
Finally, we entered an older part of town where I alighted and walked through a maze of alleys to the Xva Art boutique hotel where I had booked a room for two nights. A traditional house converted into an art gallery-cum-hotel, it is located in Bastakia, a restored heritage area inaccessible to cars. The hotel was a two-minute walk from the Khor, or Creek, a bustling hive of activity where I had landed all those years ago. Bastakia’s romantic wind towers and hushed, narrow lanes flanked by high, white, windowless walls allowed the imagination to roam to a time in the past when Arabs, Persians, and Indians traded and traveled from there to all parts of the Indian Ocean.
Nothing in this vertical city with its fantasy architecture recalled the place I had briefly visited in 1973. In December 2008, I found myself less in a place than in a condition. Architect and professor at the American University in Sharjah, George Katodrytis captures the surreal mood of Dubai when he writes “the ‘thrill’ of the urban voyage is quickly giving way to banality and exhaustion . . . The city tends to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, because it has no urban center or core . . . Dubai may be considered the emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities” (Katodrytis 2005, 42, 43).
Dubai, like the six other emirates of the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, Ras al-Khaima, Fujeira, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi—and Qatar, resembles Shanghai and Las Vegas more than the dusty town that had surprised me thirty-five years earlier. Dubai has become the icon of a world in transition. With a population that has increased twentyfold and skyscrapers blanketing miles upon miles of what used to be desert, Dubai may be more over-the-top than other Gulf cities, but just below the surface, the mix of timeless desert and helter-skelter modern is everywhere the same: camel races and Lamborghinis; falcon markets and indoor ski slopes; camping in the desert and Jeeps “bashing” dunes. Beyond the endless pursuit of fun and profit, the same question must be asked of Dubai and its Gulf neighbors: how do real people live in such unreal places?
•••
In the 1970s one of the hottest, most forbidding regions of the world burst onto the international stage. Unimaginable wealth had suddenly accrued to desperately poor tribes in the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. Successors to the fishing and pearling shaikhdoms made destitute in the early twentieth century by competition with the Japanese cultured pearl industry, ultramodern petro-cities sprouted up out of the Arabian deserts and along the Arab Gulf coast. The discovery and exploitation of oil in the mid-twentieth century allowed Gulf Arab rulers to dream big, very big. The national project was to turn tribal shaikhdoms into world hubs for transnational flows of people, goods, and capital. Tribal leaders became modern monarchs of tiny political entities, each carved out of shared tribal territory and identical histories.
Now, in the twenty-first century, they are fashioning in dependent, modern nation-states with historically and politically differentiated societies. Yet sameness prevails. In the attempt to highlight national uniqueness, icons dot the cityscape and especially the ubiquitous Corniche, a prestigious strip of reclaimed land lining each nation-state’s stretch of the Gulf coast. These national symbols, however, derive from the pre-oil days: an oryx, a pearl, a coffee pot, a dhow or an incense burner, and importantly, a falcon. Representing the Prophet Muhammad’s tribe of the Quraysh, the falcon telegraphs tribal aristocracy. Sharing history and geography, these countries perforce share the same symbols from their common past.
Gulf Arab citizens are a rare sighting except in malls, where they stroll majestically through air-conditioned spaces. Indians, Sri Lankans, Filipinos, Indonesians, Malays, Burmese, and Europeans scurry past tall, thin women elegant in their black cloaks, or `abayas, and their hair piled high under the black scarves, or shaylas. Foreigners step aside careful not to get in the way of tall young men walking hand in hand, their sparkling white gowns, or thawbs2 crisp. Constantly adjusting their starched white headdress, the gutra, and nonchalantly throwing the tips of the scarf over their head, they glance at their reflection in shop windows to check the effect.
These women in black and men in white are the scions of tribes who knew no roof but the sky and the goat-hair tent. From pre-Islamic times, poets sang a life of travel from oasis to oasis, where they named each dune according to its shape and resilience, each stage in a camel’s life, and each shade of its hair. Each plant, each wind, each cloud had a name to define its moment in time. In the space between the hard-packed sand and the soft sand that the zephyr breezes blew back and forth, the sixth-century tribal prince poet Imrul Qais detected the trace of the encampment where he remembered his forbidden love. The tribe learned of their tryst and they took her away, far away. And yet, no matter how much the wind stirs up the sands the trace remains and the poet will go mad with longing. Such pre-Islamic odes to lost loves fill the canon of Arabic literature.
These poets of ancient Arabia, whose intimacy with nature allowed them to wander freely where outsiders could not survive a day, have inspired a new generation of oral poets. They are reviving desert tropes to address and even welcome new realities. In the following fragment of a poem by Bakhut al-Mariyah, the desert and the sky, representing the traditional, tribal past and the modern present, are intertwined:
The passenger of that which is in heavenly space walks by the movement of
Its sound, because of its speed, throwing it behind
It leaves the airport in the forenoon
Passing the camels’ herdsman, who has not left his home.
It crosses the passengers of the Dodge before Dumwat, cutting across the
Red Sulba and the encampment below.
al-Ghadeer 2009, 156
The plane, recalling the roc of Arabian Nights fame, crosses time and space in the blink of an eye. Saudi Bakhut al-Mariyah juxtaposes the tribal and the modern in what is by now a familiar trope. A Bedouin woman looking up from the encampment to the plane, like this image of Bedouin men riding their camels into a hypermodern city to celebrate a special event, emblematize the tradition-modernity clash (see Figure 1).
How, some wonder, can such tribal people negotiate the clashing complexities of our modern world?
In addressing this question, Tribal Modern challenges its binary assumptions. The tribal and the modern must be thought of together. I argue that one must look below the surface of these newly rich desert societies to find the different meanings that attach to the appearance of the nonmodern, in this case the tribal. My argument throughout this book will be that the tribal is not the traditional and certainly not the primitive.3
Figure 1.Tribes, camels, and skyscrapers.
This statement calls for elaboration. Let’s turn briefly to the December 1984 New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition entitled “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.”4 A spectacular display of non-Western artefacts alongside works of Western modernist art, the exhibition sparked a craze for all things primitive/tribal—the terms were used interchangeably during the 1980s and 1990s. Widely reviewed at the time, the exhibition attracted negative
