Kuwait. They have no rights. They are thrown together in what looks like the “everyday cosmopolitanism” of multicultural urban centers, but with a difference. For if cosmopolitanism is “both a social condition and an ethical project . . . with humanistic objectives,” as Asef Bayat maintains, then what we see in the Gulf is not cosmopolitanism but communalism of the “inward-looking and close-knit ethnic or religious collectives [who] espouse narrow, exclusive, and selfish interests” (Bayat 2010, 186). There is good reason to place foreigners in enclaves. When a financial crisis occurs, projects are put on hold, and foreign laborers risk being dispatched so that life for the native citizens may continue generally undisturbed. Adam Hanieh uses the term “spatialization” to explain how such geo-political mechanisms of social control allow for the “spatial displacement of crisis” (Hanieh 2011, 60, 63, 65, 179).
Although Americans and Europeans are accorded privileges generally unavailable to South and Southeast Asians and to Africans, internal distinctions place the wealthy maharaja above the middle-class European. Wealth trumps ethnicity among the professional expatriates whom Longva calls “educated cosmopolitans.” Making up the middle classes between the Gulf Arabs and the manual laborers, this “ethnically composite population shared one common feature, a ‘creolized’ expatriate culture with elements from multiple origins expressed in a major Western idiom—mostly English, occasionally French—and coalesced around values that were perceived as Western” (Longva 1997, 136). These educated cosmopolitans “close ranks across nationalities, united in their eager embracement of ‘Western’ identity” (138). In other words, a Westernized identity has become legible as middle-class status. Class notwithstanding, native citizens view most outsiders with a suspicion that may escalate to panic.
“Expatriates are a danger worse than the atomic bomb,” some officials recently warned.11 Under intense surveillance, they experience a discrimination common “in modern societies characterized by an advanced system of social welfare since, to be genuinely meaningful, these social goods are necessarily limited, and their enjoyment is therefore contingent on proof of national membership” (Longva 1997, 7; see Longva 2005, 126). This proof nowadays is visible and audible. It is performed in dress and language that distinguish the native citizens from the immigrant workers. The streets, where the non-citizens come into contact with the citizens and where “collective dissent may be both expressed and produced” (Bayat 2010, 167), attract the greatest scrutiny. Even if the non-citizens do not intend to rebel, their mere public presence drives the authorities to “normalizing violence, erecting walls and checkpoints, as a strategic element of everyday life . . . [for the disenfranchised] the streets are the main, perhaps the only place where they perform their daily functions—to assemble, make friends, earn a living, spend their leisure time, and express discontent. In addition, streets are also the public places where the state has the most evident presence, which is expressed in police patrol, traffic regulations, and spatial divisions” (12, 62, 212). Streets are systematically surveilled to make sure undesirables, especially working-class bachelors, stay out of sight and back in their desert camps.
During weekends and holidays, plain-clothes police instinctively sort the sheep from the goats of Asian flaneurs and shoo them away. To the uninitiated, the fine distinctions between social classes within a single national group disappear in the casual attire of public leisure places. Yet, the local police can smell class even across the six-lanes that some workers in their Sunday best are trying to cross in order to join the families enjoying the Corniche or public parks. In mufti and trying to act like everyone else, the plain-clothed police stride toward the spot their prey is approaching. Just as he recognizes them, so they recognize him. Most give up. For the hardy few, those who dare to assert civic rights of access to public places, there’s a brief encounter. The courageous are humiliated and compelled to slink back. They had misread open space for a public place. They were guilty of violating public interest, interest that depends on keeping social classes separate (Chakrabarty 2002, 77).
The management of foreigners has produced two separate domains, the pure and the contaminated. Saudi Raja’ `Alim explores these separate worlds in her Mecca novels that mix magic, perfume, and fantasy. Although strangers are the norm in a Mecca where pilgrims often stay and become part of the city’s life, the Meccans keep them at a distance. Sri Lankans, Indonesians, and Ethiopians stave off hunger, she writes, by “eating vermin and drinking the water of Zamzam” (`Alim 2007, 158). These outsiders with their disgusting diets and broken Arabic bear the contamination of what they eat: vermin. The holy waters of the Zamzam well may counteract the dire consequences of their condition, yet they remain a source of dread (158, 162, 230, 236–37).
Post-oil mass migrations to the Arab Gulf have caused anxiety that verges on panic. Native citizens fear that the foreigners, who outnumber them everywhere except in Bahrain, will become what Asef Bayat calls a social non-movement. The power of such actors emerges out of their large numbers and their “common practices of everyday life” (Bayat 2010, 20, original emphasis). Poised to unite in what Hannah Arendt has called a tribal nationalism with no “definite home but (feeling) at home wherever other members of their ‘tribe’ happened to live” (Arendt 1979, 232), these rootless inside-outsiders threaten to demand a share in the national wealth. To deflect a potential rights discourse and maintain their monopoly over resources, Gulf Arabs emphasize their deep history in a region “free” of foreigners.12 The narrative of a pure past is a fiction, but it is a fiction with strong roots in the psychological stress of the present moment when black gold is producing new contradictions.
FORGET THE MULTICULTURAL PAST
The region’s rich multicultural history is being erased. This erasure appears most clearly in the surprising rewriting of merchant histories. The families of traders who have long connected crucial nodes in the Indian Ocean networks “downplay or deny their transnational heritage in response to the Arabization policies of the Gulf Arab governments [. . .] In the Gulf today, public discussion about the Persian, Indian, and African mothers of past shaikhs and shaikhas is strongly discouraged” (Onley 2005, 60, 62). Any discussion of such intermarriage in the past challenges the purity of twenty-first-century Gulf Arabs and so it is erased. Although “multiculturalism has defined the Gulf since time immemorial” (Fox, Mourtada-Sabbah, and al-Mutawa 2006, 267), it dissolves in myths of millennial isolation.
Yet, tribal elites’ rejection of a past filled with cross-cultural encounters is not anomalous. Rather, it mirrors a reflex of modernity that promotes “the systematic erasure of continuous and deep-felt encounters [that] have marked human history throughout the globe” (Trouillot 2002, 846). “Spectacular domination’s first priority,” Guy Debord confirms, “was to eradicate historical knowledge in general; beginning with just about all rational information and commentary on the most recent past . . . The more important something is, the more it is hidden . . . Spectacular power can deny whatever it likes, once, or three times over, and change the subject, knowing full well there is no danger of any riposte, in its own space or any other” (Debord 1998, 13–14, 19). On the palimpsest of the now empty page, tribal leaders and their historians can pen new stories of spotless lineages.
What has changed in contemporary Gulf countries is not the fact of multiculturalism, but rather its agents and its scale: “Iranians and Indians still live in the Gulf Arab ports, but few Gulf Arabs have connections with Iran or India today. The predominant foreign influence is now British and American” (Onley 2005, 78). The new cosmopolitan story accents a past of uncontaminated lineages and isolated lifestyles. The less said about that heterogeneous past the better; the fantasy of first exposure to outsiders must be maintained.
Wealth and anxiety about who should have it and who should not even dream of wanting it have combined to create a climate of cruel discrimination against the foreign majority, especially the Asian laborers. But there are some, like Qatari poet Maryam Ahmad Al Subaiey, who acknowledge the humanity and suffering of people whose labor has turned the desert into a paradise for the few:
Behind the dust all you can see
