the earliest times, war, natural disasters, pilgrimage, and trade have attracted travelers to the Gulf region. Statues in the trading hub of Thaj just west of Dammam provide evidence of a lesser-known stop along the route of Alexander the Great’s fourth-century BCE military conquests. In Yemen, the repeated ruptures of the Ma`rib Dam until the sixth century CE drove Yemenis out of the area, and many chose to move to the Gulf. From the seventh century, Muslim proselytizing and pilgrimage networks utilized the ancient frankincense and spice caravan routes. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Indian Ocean and Mesopotamian subjects were trading and sparring with the Portuguese in the Gulf. More recently, imperial struggles between the Ottomans and the British brought new foreign elements into the mix. They fought for control of the valuable waterways that linked the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean and the British with their Indian Raj.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, traffic in the Gulf had become intensely multicultural. Travelers, including pearl dealers from Paris, described a scene where Persians, Iraqis, Indians, Beluchis, Afghans, British, French, descendants of sixteenth-century Portuguese, Zanzibaris, Yemenis, Hadhramis, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese all lived in the region (Al-Rasheed 2005, 3). In 1865, the British traveler William Palgrave described the colorful mix of foreigners in Manamah: “Thus the gay-coloured dress of the southern Persian, the saffron-stained vest of Oman, the white robe of Nejed, and the striped gown of Baghdad, are often to be seen mingling with the light garments of Bahreyn [. . .] Indians, merchants by profession, and mainly from Guzerat, Cutch, and their vicinity, keep up here all their peculiarities of costume and manner, and live among the motley crowd” (quoted in Onley 2005, 59).
When oil was discovered in the early twentieth century, a new group of migrants—Americans—entered the Gulf. Thus began the latest phase in Gulf cosmopolitanism.
CITIES OF SALT
For some, however, this period was less cosmopolitan than it was neocolonial. In the 1980s and early 1990s, several writers narrated the conversion of the desert into concrete jungles in a process as violent as the colonizing missions that the British and the French had brought to the Arab world in the nineteenth century. In his five-volume Cities of Salt (1989), Saudi oil economist and novelist in exile `Abd al-Rahman Munif narrates the destructiveness of American oil imperialism that begins in the early 1930s in the fictional Wadi al-`Uyun, the Valley of Springs so named because of its many water springs.
The narrative unfolds a scene of betrayal. Generous as they might be to strangers who made it across the inhospitable territory that surrounded them, the tribes of the oasis kept to themselves. But one day it was rumored that three Franks, a.k.a. Christians, had arrived. Anxiety spread with the news that the foreigners spoke Arabic and they cited the Qur’an. Why had these strangers come? Why were they asking so many questions “about dialects, about tribes, and their disputes, about religion and sects, about the routes, the winds and the rainy seasons”? Why were they so concerned to know whether other foreigners had preceded them (Munif 1989, 31)?
The Arabic-speaking foreigners were American oil prospectors who claimed to be looking for water. But the locals became suspicious when the strangers’ inquiries concerned remote places not known to have wells or springs. The Americans stayed a few days only to return several months later with many others, and they set up camp. Alarmed, a local delegation confronted the Emir, and he explained that he had invited the Americans because they “have come to extract the oil and the gold” under the tribes’ feet; this oil and gold would make them all rich (86). Soon, huge yellow machines filled the desert with their roar. By the time they were done uprooting the palm trees and orchards of the tribes, the invading Americans had reduced the idyllic oasis to desert.
An agent of the local ruler plotting with the Americans warned the people of Wadi al-`Uyun to leave if they wanted to be compensated: “The emir has said good riddance to anyone who wants their desert and tribe, but for those who want a place to live, the government is arranging everything” (111, my emphasis). Wadi al-`Uyun was thus not a real place, according to the American understanding of place.
Everyone left, everyone, that is, except for a crazy old woman who died the eve of the departure. The only way to stay in the old Wadi al-`Uyun was to be buried in its sand. Now this newly desertified space “that no longer had a name since the houses had been destroyed and all the landmarks obliterated” (187) was ready to be turned into the kind of place where camels, the sine qua non of pre-oil tribal life, no longer were of use. Without camels the tribes had no means of livelihood. To survive they had to work with the Americans.
Meanwhile, the Americans established themselves in Harran, a hellhole of a place on the Gulf. It was to be “a port and headquarters of the company, as well as a city of finality and damnation . . . Within less than a month two cities began to rise: Arab Harran and American Harran”4 (198, 206). After American Harran had been built, the Arabs wanted their city to be just like it. But that was not to be.5 Housed in barracks, the Bedouin were reduced to laborers who watched the Americans cavort and “do just as they please in their own colony” (216, my emphasis). In true colonial fashion, the Americans had asserted power over potential rebels.6 The novel trumpets a warning: outsiders are dangerous; their desire for the Arabs’ land and wealth must be checked.7
The Bedouin had treated the American oil prospectors with the suspicion they reserved for outsiders. Outsiders were not from Mars; they were part, albeit an unwanted part, of their lives, and the Bedouin had always kept them on the edge of their society. These latest outsiders, however, could not be prevented from venturing deep into Bedouin territory. Their desire for black gold would keep them there indefinitely.
CONTAMINATION
Munif’s novel fictionalizes a process that became increasingly painful with the discovery and exploitation of oil throughout the Gulf region. As Harrans mushroomed all around the Gulf coasts, foreigners began to outnumber the native population. The stream of workers has grown exponentially and, with their exploding numbers, the fear factor. Even though most of the migrants are the poorest of the poor from Asia and Africa, utterly dependent on their local sponsors, without any rights and with the most meager of hopes to sustain families back home, their visibility everywhere has led to fear of their contaminating influence and a determination to deny them the rights and entitlements of citizenship.8 Gulf regimes have instituted exclusionary policies that range from “formal categorization and legislation to informal customs and practices in everyday life and the manipulation of cultural values and symbols” (Longva 1997, 44). Some of these exclusions are institutionalized; others are symbolic. No matter how long they have lived there, the vast majority of foreigners remain physically and socially apart from the citizen community. Prevented from integrating, they must stay ever alert to internal borders they cannot cross.9
In their segregation, they become the “Other,” a single block of alterity in whose mirror Gulf Arabs see their own identity reflected. But within this block, the international workers are socially stratified and enclosed in ethnic compounds. What sociologist Asef Bayat observes about Dubai might be said about any of the Gulf states: “Dubai turns out to be no more than a ‘city-state of relatively gated communities’ marked by sharp communal and spatial boundaries, with labor camps (of South Asian migrants) and the segregated milieu of parochial jet-setters, or the ‘cosmopolitan’ ghettos of the western elite expatriates who remain bounded within the physical safety and cultural purity of their own reclusive collectives” (Bayat 2010, 186–87; see also Khalaf 2006, 251–56). A chasm yawns between the native citizens and both sets of others: the educated cosmopolitans and the laboring underclass.
With no hope of acquiring citizenship10 or of returning home because of the crushing debts they owe their sponsors, the migrant laborers survive in slums on the city margins or in desert camps. For second-and third-generation workers, to be Pakistani in Dubai does not designate a country of origin. It means belonging to a group of rootless people who live, work, and die together with compatriots
