simultaneous processes of mixing and separation. Contradictions stand in the borderlands, bringing together and separating the symbolic tribal and the material modern. Resisting resolution, these contradictions spiral into new forms of productive branding. Gulf Arab regimes have recently devoted themselves to the task of tailoring the regionally similar brand to reflect separate, distinctly national characteristics.
The brand privileges individuals and nations but also differentiates them. Internally, it distinguishes native citizens from the many foreigners populating their cities. Externally, it helps each new nation to stamp its distinctive mark on world politics. Chapters five, six, and seven consider how these various regimes market the brand through novel, little-understood uses of public space. They are evident in spectacular national museums and vernacular architecture, in public ceremonies, in neo-Bedouin language, and in dress. The brand is adapted into new versions of tribal sports. It is also used to revise undesirable elements from the past, such as the hardships of pearling. Citizens are balancing contradictory expectations, norms, and values: cosmopolitan openness versus tribal isolationism; postnational globalization versus national specificities. These are not dichotomous but convergent styles, practices, and expectations.
Chapter eight looks at women’s reactions to the new societies growing up around them. Some experience loss, others empowerment. Better educated than the men, women have unprecedented opportunities. Contesting tribal expectations that they remain at home and out of sight, they are entering public space and the workforce in growing numbers. Although some Gulf women seem poised to become important players in their societies, they still face the daunting challenge of negotiating the tensions between new opportunities and old constraints. Some women writers symbolize their fears in images that evoke cold and freezing. In conclusion, I consider a new social development with men and women rebelling against their societies’ expectations and performing queer identities.
In the swirl of radical social transformation, Gulf Arabs are projecting a distinctive national and cultural identity that is rooted and tribal but also modern and global. Arab Gulf states are buying up iconic real estate around the world that compels attention to their wealth, prestige, and power. Since the outbreak of the Arab uprisings in January 2011, the tribal modern brand has expanded its significance, with Qatar claiming the right to become peace broker in the region.
Contesting contemptuous accounts of Gulf citizens’ superficiality, lack of substance, and backwardness, I suggest that the return of the tribal is shaping a new way to think of the modern in cultural terms. It also opens a new way to conceptualize past and present, while imagining a previously unimaginable future. The tribal modern brand holds apparently contradictory states in balance. In the productive tension between a millennial source of social stability and a globalizing process of instant transformations, the tribal becomes a modernizing force.
In coining the term the “tribal modern,” I am not imagining an alternative, culturally specific modernity, and certainly not an incomplete modernity. An apparent oxymoron, the tribal modern makes sense of the epistemological, socio-economic, and political upheavals that have rocked the Arab Gulf for half a century and continue to shape it today. Situated at the nexus of the local, the national, and the transnational, the tribal modern is a contact zone that recalls the miracle Saudi writer Raja’ `Alim invokes “where the old world and the new are tight as two lovers” (`Alim 2007, 217). Although this phenomenon is not limited to the Arab Gulf, it is there that this chronotope is most clearly in evidence.
CHAPTER ONE
Uneasy Cosmopolitanism
“Where are you from?” I asked the attendant at one of the women’s dorms at Education City in Doha. Having noted the Qatari accent and the `abaya, I had assumed that this woman was one of the few Qataris working a lowly job.
“Iran.”
“Were you born in Iran?”
“No. Here.”
“And your parents?”
“Here.”
“And your grandparents?”
Nodding, she smiled. It was like sharing an insider joke. She knew the name of the town she was supposedly from but she was not sure where exactly it was located except that it was somewhere across the Gulf in the South. Near Shiraz? Yes, yes, near Shiraz.
I felt myself in a time warp. This “Iranian” woman reminded me of my South Asian travel companions in the human cargo boat almost forty years earlier. Children of those who stayed would probably have had her experience and felt the same way, but with a major difference. Indians cannot pass like those Iranians who look Arab.
A MILLENNIAL CROSSROAD
Since the 1960s, Asian workers have poured into the Gulf countries. Some have settled and had children, but virtually none have become citizens. Regular remittances to families across the Indian Ocean connect them to a home where they dream to return. So important are these laborers to the home economy that they have changed the face of some Asian villages and towns. Novelist Amitav Ghosh describes a road in Mangalore lined with “large houses, some new, with sharp geometric lines and bright pastel colours that speak eloquently of their owners’ affiliations with the Persian Gulf” (Ghosh 1994, 284). These Asian immigrants are the latest in a long line of travelers who have moved back and forth across the vast oceanic spaces separating the Gulf from the western coasts of the Indian subcontinent and the eastern coasts of the African continent. Today the paths between the nodes of the ancient Indian Ocean network are more traveled than ever.
Rivaling the Pharaohs in their antiquity, these networks go back to the Bronze Age and the Bahrain-based civilization of Dilmun (2450–1700 BCE). Dilmun linked the ancient cities of Hufuf and Qatif in the eastern region of the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain. Source of a cosmopolitan ethos that characterized the Gulf long before the rise of Islam, Dilmun was called Ard al-khulud, or the Land of Eternity. Mesopotamians, like Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Sumerian Uruk, went there hoping to escape death.1 Recent archaeological excavations have made clear how broad and deep were the Gulf trading networks that connected Babylonia, Oman, East Africa, and the Indian subcontinent four millennia ago.2 “Indus Valley seals have turned up at Ur and other Mesopotamian sites. ‘Persian Gulf’ types of circular stamped rather than rolled seals, known from Dilmun, that appear at Lothal in Gujarat, India, and Faylahkah, as well as in Mesopotamia, are convincing corroboration of the long-distance sea trade.”3
By the ninth century CE, Gulf trade networks had spread to Southeast and even East Asia: “The recent discovery of an Arab dhow off the coast of Belitung in Indonesia laden with some 60,000 pieces of gold, silver, precious cobalt and white ninth-century Tang ceramics confirms the existence of a busy maritime trade route between Baghdad and Xian, capital of Tang China. Ships filled with aromatic woods from Africa and fine textiles and goods from Abbasid Baghdad would leave Basra and pass through the Gulf” (Fromherz 2012, 43–44). Sailors leaving the Gulf in November, their dhows full of pearls and dates, would return months later laden with spices, rice, sugar, and wood, especially Indian teak for doors and windows and Zanzibar mangrove poles for ceilings. With the wood and spices they also brought back new ideas and technologies from distant ports in the Indian Ocean.
These trading voyages generated prolonged contact between people separated by sea but linked by commerce. Writing about Kuwait, Anh Nga Longva describes long-distance ties that were common in the region: “Even ordinary merchants and sailors sometimes maintained house holds in both Kuwait and the towns along the trade route. Basra, Karachi, Calicut, Sur, Aden, Lamu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar were the nodal points through which pre-oil Kuwaiti society connected with the other participants in the sea-trade network centered around the Indian Ocean” (Longva 1997, 21). These men, whether from Kuwait or other Gulf ports, led multiple lives
