the ruler drew wealth from taxes on pearling, trade, as well as some agricultural activities” (Hanieh 2011, 5). It was a huge shift in both perception and power. The British insisted on a pure tribal lineage to qualify someone to negotiate, and their insistence on designating and prioritizing some tribes over others became crucial ultimately, not only to defining citizenship but also to assigning economic and political rights.
In 1899, John Gordon Lorimer, official of the Indian Civil Service, put together The Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia. According to the title, the Gulf coast was considered one region, the desert hinterland another, with Oman the only named country. Lorimer, working under Vice-Regent Lord Curzon, employed a team of researchers from the Political Department of the British Government in India. During eight long years, The Gazetteer researchers collected information on local tribes. Above all, they noted when the various states were first mentioned by their current name. For example, the little fishing village where the Bani `Utub of the Central Arabian tribe of `Unaiza settled in 1716 was called Kut, or Kuwait. In 1766, immigrants from Kuwait moved to “Zubarah, upon the western shore of the promontory of Qatar” (Lorimer 1984, 787). At the time, Qatar was a dependency of Bahrain (798).
The Gazetteer became an instrument of rule, an invaluable manual and a symbolic register of prestige for Gulf Arabs and also for the British. It gave the British an idea of tribes’ material wealth and relative usefulness to the British. Unlike other British colonies rich in natural resources or history, the Gulf shaikhdoms were considered a nuisance factor to be minimized in order for business-as-usual to proceed throughout the British Empire. Although they did wield political influence in the region, the British had little presence on land. They preferred to use local agents to conduct their business (Bristol-Rhys 2011, 50).
Far from resisting what might have been considered to be a colonizing project, Bahrain in 1861 asked the British to admit them to what came to be called the Truce. Other shaikhdoms followed suit. So positive was the British presence considered to be that when the British government “declared it could no longer afford the 12,000,000 pounds per annum to keep its forces in the Gulf and would be withdrawing its military in 1971, the Ruler of Abu Dhabi offered to pay for the military presence himself. The Ruler of Dubai made a similar offer . . . The British Government declined these unprecedented offers, however, and withdrew its forces in December 1971” (Onley and Khalaf 2006, 192, 202, 203, 204). When one considers the nature of colonial rule and its end in other parts of Asia and in Africa, this scenario is nothing short of extraordinary. Although 1971 is now said to be the date of independence for all Gulf countries except for Kuwait, which had declared independence in the early 1960s, it was not marked by revolt or warfare but rather by reluctance. Only when offers to sponsor Britain’s continued military presence failed did the shaikhdoms organize themselves into separate nation-states. The UAE formed a new confederation from the Council of the Trucial States that had been established in 1952.
New national boundaries in effect “froze tribal relationships at the point the maps were finalized and further removed the rationale for many past tests of leadership” (Rugh 2007, 13).4 Borders hardened as lines drawn through tribal territories during the early oil period came to account for nationally distinct characteristics.
Nationalism did not erase tribalism so much as shift its focus. Nationalizing tribal identities while still insisting on their importance, modern regimes held tribal lineage in affective tension with the national identity. Just as Ibn Khaldun could not conceive of civilization apart from the dynamic of Bedouin and urban theaters, so the modern Gulf states are unimaginable apart from the tribal and national spheres of identity. Beyond language, culture and, crucially, tribal blood, what were the unique characteristics of national belonging in these territorially small but economically potent countries that had been formed at the same time and shared the same history? That is the question that I explore in the following pages.
NATIONALIZING TRIBES
There is nothing natural or unchanging about blood lineages. As in all cases of modern state and nation formation, blood ties only seem to “naturally bind its members together while ‘naturally’ separating races and nations [and naturalizing] obligations and responsibilities towards race and nation, and not towards outsiders” (Thobani 2007, 113). In other words, what is not natural is made to appear as natural. This racialization process homogenizes heterogeneous populations. Race, David Goldberg writes, “is integral to the emergence, development and transformations (conceptually, philosophically, materially) of the modern nation-state” (quoted in Thobani 2007, 24). Tribe becomes race becomes nation, but each step depends on practices of ranking, imposition, and control to sustain the links and secure power for those privileged by such links.
In the Arab Gulf, racialized nation building confronted a local problem. National borders often cut through tribal territories, and tribal affiliations split when individual members had to choose different nationalities with their rights and entitlements to vote, to buy property, and to marry. The same tribe then provided the same qualification for national citizenship but in two states. The tribal system, Amira Sonbol argues, has suffered.5 This is true, but it is also true that tribes could and did find new ways of dealing with tribal ambiguity so that demands for national homogeneity should not undermine tribal identity.
Not all tribes saw the advantage in choosing a single citizenship, preferring the freedom of pastoral nomadism. Some of those who did not register for citizenship remain even today without the rights and entitlements of those who did choose to belong to one of the new nation-states. This “withoutness” earned them the name Bedoon, meaning “without.” It is important to recognize that this statistically small group represents the residue of a larger, often inchoate process of choice that all Gulf Arabs faced with nationalization. Recently, the Bedoon have become assertive. While the Bedoon did not choose any nationality, other tribes, like the Al Murrah,6 did choose several nationalities precisely because they continued to privilege tribal boundaries over national borders. Used to wandering freely across lands where they had established control “through military conquest and displacement of other tribes” (Cole 1975, 94), members of the Al Murrah in 2005 refused to recognize the Qatar–Saudi Arabia border that had once again been recognized by a treaty protocol in 2001.7 Consequently, those Al Murrah who did not choose exclusive Qatari citizenship were forced to leave when the government cut off their water and electricity. In May 2005, “members of the Al Ghafran clan, a division of the Murrah tribal confederation, wrote to US congressmen to complain that they’d been stripped of their Qatari citizenship” (O’Sullivan 2008, 21, 220; see Al-Qassemi 2012). Why U.S. congressmen? Probably because of the close relationship established between the Qatari and the American governments after 9/11. The presence of the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, just outside Doha city limits, means that Americans have influence and power. In effect, the U.S. was assuming the oversight role that the British had previously exercised. The Qatari government did soon restore the Al Murrah their citizenship, but not before the lingering potential for ongoing tension between tribal and national had been registered yet again.
Like all Gulf Arab tribes, the Al Murrah had to choose between nationalities while continuing to assert the purity of their tribal lineage. Purity and authenticity, or asala, was the sine qua non for national citizenship. The overlapping and confusion of tribal and national identities are part of everyday life. Noof al-Khalifa illustrates the dilemma through a story about her Bahraini great-great-grandfather, Shaikh Nasser bin Mubarak bin Abdullah, who married the daughter of the Qatari Shaikh Jassim bin Mohammad Al Thani, and now she wonders, “Where do I belong? I know I’m a Muslim, an Arab, and a Qatari. I come from a big family, the Al Khalifas, with complicated roots [that stretch back to Bahrain]” (Al Khalifa 2010, 42). By downgrading the tribal affiliation, Noof could acquire the modern religious, ethnic and, above all, national identity that made her a Qatari citizen.
TRIBAL MODERN MARRIAGES
“From the time of Adam,” says Dabbasi, a Bedouin in Munif’s Cities of Salt, “men have bound themselves together by way of women. When a man gets married
