souls and the shine
of new cars mirrored in their eyes.
They are not as human as we are.
They are nothing
but workers. We don’t want
them in our malls, we choose
not to see them, to forget them.
This army that builds our country
remains invisible beneath the burning sun.
Paine, Lodge, and Touati 2011, 171–72
Al Subaiey rails at her fellow citizens’ collective indifference that has reduced these foreigners to the broken life of the barely human. Beneath the burning sun, the invisible army builds a brave new world for the native citizens, the privileged minority. It is their rights as tribal citizens that the police monitor and safeguard.
Chapter two will consider the ways in which Gulf Arabs project tribal modern identities that accord them rights and privileges unavailable to those without their pure tribal blood. New DNA testing bolsters oral histories of millennial tribal endogamy and the family trees they generate. This kind of tribal lineage determines citizenship and concomitant entitlements to a share in the oil wealth.
CHAPTER TWO
Pure Blood and the New Nation
Tribalism that considers every outsider, even a neighbor, a permanent foreigner
Bagader, Heinrichsdorff, and Akers 1998
It could be argued that the tribal ‘tradition,’ especially in relation to the marriage practices of women, traditional dress and expected social roles is often increased, not decreased by wealth and the pursuit of acceptable social status within an extremely wealthy but still extremely lineage-based society
Fromherz 2012
In the fourteenth century, the Arab historian-philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) proposed a new way to think about the rise and fall of civilizations. Humanity, he wrote, was divided between two distinct forms of social organization or civilization, badawa and hadara. Badawa is the space of the pastoral nomad Bedouin forced by their circumstances to remain close to each other and loyal to the tribe to survive. Hadara, by contrast, is the settled place of urban ease where the blood bonds of tribal solidarity weaken and gradually come undone. Both are necessary to the ebb and flow of civilizations, and environment provides the key to understanding civilizational cycles as they oscillate in constant motion between these two extremes.
To my surprise, I learned that Ibn Khaldun’s paradigm—at once dialectical and cyclical—still figures importantly in the way Gulf Arabs define themselves and their lineages. They know themselves to be hadar if their tribes had at some point in time settled in an oasis or on the coast, or badawi (Bedouin) if their tribes remained pastoral nomads. There is a psychological barrier between the two forms of tribal existence. One might even say that there is mutual contempt between these two tribal entities. The Bedouin consider the settled tribes “less honorable because they engaged in commerce rather than the noble pastime of camel raising. The hadar in turn saw themselves as more sophisticated than the nomads” (Rugh 2007, 17). In fact, hadar tends to trump Bedouin in a modern society that values the urban over the nomadic. But what is too easily lost in weighing whether hadar or Bedouin prevail is the persistence of their interaction. These native citizens of rapidly transforming city-states lining the eastern shore of the Arabian Peninsula are both modern and tribal.
During spring 2008, I visited a class in Georgetown-Qatar University, one of the new American branch campuses housed in Doha’s Education City. I asked the students whether the concept of the tribal modern meant anything to them. The unanimous response: “Of course! Tribal roots is everyone’s new thing!” They explained that when meeting each other for the first time, they would try to discover each other’s tribes by asking “Aish ismitch” (or, “What is your name?”—that is, what’s the name of your tribe?). Some students were even more direct: “To which tribe do you belong?” Was there a contradiction in their minds, I asked, between being modern while also asserting the importance of tribal affiliations? No, they replied, the tribal is cool. But, they quickly added, it’s not enough to be from a tribe, any tribe; what mattered was which tribe. The tribe had to be elite, with an impressive lineage, for it to be really cool.
Elsewhere, in a filmed exchange among Qatari students, one boy claimed that all Qataris were originally Bedouin. His friends remonstrated, calling Bedouin backward. The coup de grace came when one of them sneered: “Just look at their cars!” To which the we-are-all-Bedouin boy responded, “No, you can’t tell the Bedouin by their cars. Now they have nice cars. You can only tell who are the real Bedouin from their language.”1 In chapter seven, I discuss why the revival of the Bedouin language has become so popular among young people in the region.
Before oil, Arab Gulf tribes with their clans lived in their own defined and bounded territory. Their territories stretched across what later became national borders. The tribe’s right to be there, like the shaikh’s right to assert hegemony, was based on a historical claim. It was a claim undergirded by power and genealogies. Rivalries, alliances, political marriages, and colonial interventions all choreographed the intricate dance of power that allowed individual tribal leaders to hold on to their territory during the early oil period while also becoming rulers of new nation-states.2
THE BRITISH
The British arrived in the Gulf in the late eighteenth century. It was a turbulent period, with tribal leaders feuding and pirates roaming the coasts. Abdulaziz Al Mahmud has captured the spirit of the age in The Corsair. The novel narrates the bitter conflict between clueless British emissaries and the notorious Rahmah ibn Jabir Al Jalahimah. Considered a folk hero for his resistance to the British in the early nineteenth century, Kuwait’s Barbarossa made and broke alliances with the various rulers in the region, thus often outwitting the British.
Already well established in India, however, the British were able to exert increasing control, and, in 1820, they signed the General Treaty of Peace with the shaikhs of the Oman coast and Bahrain. The treaty banned pirate attacks on their ships and at the same time outlawed maritime toll collection in the Gulf. The 1853 Maritime Truce renewed various earlier treaties aimed at controlling piracy, barring foreign powers from playing a role in the region, and keeping shipping lanes open (Davidson 2008, 19; Bristol-Rhys 2011, 45). The British policy of mediating tribal rivalries and ending piracy was less altruistic than it was strategic, because before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Gulf was the main thoroughfare from England to India. British colonials and their East India Company ships needed safe passage from the English Channel to the Indian Ocean.
The treaties signed with the British empowered and legitimized the ruling shaikhs. They also brought the small shaikhdoms into the “international state system as autonomous political entities” (Crystal 1990, 17).3 The shaikhdoms became part of the British Commonwealth, where all subjects were vouchsafed imperial protection. In the Gulf, not only Arabs but also Indian traders, who enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the pearling industry until the late nineteenth century, were British Commonwealth subjects. The British made sure that the Indians were not harassed (Lorimer 1984, 808–11).
By the end of the nineteenth century, British power in the Gulf region expanded, thanks to their systematic data collection, the sine qua non for organization and control of their colonies. They were the first to record the existence of the shaikhdoms and to recognize them as distinct political entities. In so doing, they conferred external recognition and power on ruling families who “could trace their origins back to one of the Arabian Peninsula
