Читать книгу Tribal Modern - Miriam Cooke - Страница 10

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 tribes. With their rule sanctioned and supported by the British, 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 he binds himself to the land and the tribe” (Munif 1989, 261). Tribal marriages depend, above all, on women who uphold the purity of the lineage by not marrying down. These marriages remain crucial in societies where tribal affiliation constitutes qualification for citizenship.

Yet tribal marriages are complicated because they take place within the limits of nation and often “tribal equivalence.” These protocols have serious consequences for women. Should they wish to marry a foreigner, native citizens may have to seek official permission, and, if denied, women may have to give up their citizenship, because children automatically inherit their father’s citizenship and its rights. In 1989, the state of Qatar passed a law, Qatari Law No. 21, which “banned certain categories of state employees from marrying foreigners at all: ministers and deputy ministers, members of the diplomatic service, officers of the armed forces, the police or intelligence service, and students on overseas study-missions” (Dresch 2005, 149). Far from being exceptional, the Qatari Law has its equivalents elsewhere in the Gulf (155).⁸

But none of the laws answer fully the larger question: who counts as foreign when the tribal and the national are confused? A foreigner might be a first cousin. For example, should the citizen of one state wish to marry his daughter to the son of a brother who had chosen another nationality, he will face a dilemma, since this nephew now counts as a foreigner. In an April 1999 colloquium in Ras al-Khaima on marriage to foreign women, some women participants demanded clarification for the definition of foreigner (Dresch 2005, 152). No clear answer emerged beyond a reversion to DNA as biological (i.e., tribal) proof of nationality. Conference organizers declared that the Emiratis’ distinguishing feature is “relationships of kinship and descent (al-qurba wa-l-nasab) among families within the state. This again harks back to the criterion of purity or authenticity. It connects tribal membership and citizenship rights to authentic (asli, original, noble) Arab customs and manners which originate from the (the society’s) Islamic belief and from ethical values inherited from (our) ancestors” (155). In fact, it is kinship and descent among families within the state that provide the biological definition, and the nod to Islam reinforces the ethical dimension. Since the notion of citizenship in the Arab Gulf is a recent invention, this insistence on nationals marrying each other can, and often does, undermine endogamous tribal bonds spanning the Arabian Peninsula.

The question of who can marry whom assumes added significance for rulers and their families. In her study of the political culture of leadership in the UAE, Andrea Rugh emphasizes the importance of tribal marriages in strengthening the status of the leader and his tribe: marriages consolidate blood ties, reward loyalty, and sometimes co-opt enemies (Rugh 2007, 82–95, 137, 191, 227).

Since the early 1990s, some governments have established a sunduq al-zawaj (marriage fund) that offers monetary inducements to marry within the nation-state. The UAE, for example, provides a 20,000-Dirham dowry, substantial funds for national weddings, and subsidies for children (Fox, Mourtada-Sabbah, and al-Mutawa 2006, 47; see also Bristol-Rhys 2011, 88; Longva 1997, 53). The marriage fund also underwrites the costs of mass weddings. In March 2000, 376 Dubai couples “were married off at once in an enormous televised ceremony, where questions of status among families were displaced by eulogies to Dubai’s crown prince and to the Federation’s leader, Shaikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi [. . .] The Fund represents a massive attempt at social engineering” (Dresch 2005, 148; see Hasso 2011, 72). In this case, nation trumped tribe and tribal equivalence. What mattered was the fact that citizens of the same nation-state were strengthening the national composition of the state and that, in the future, their children would swell the citizen roles.⁹ Tribal equivalence and compatibility, however, remain factors in deciding marriage partners.

When I asked some Qatari students about tribal equivalence and how to tell who is where in the tribal pecking order, they said that everyone knows.

“But how do you know?” I asked.

They shrugged, smiling at the strangeness of the question: “You can tell from the face to which tribe this person belongs. You can tell their status by the way they speak or act or dress.”

“Why does tribal status matter so much?”

“If you marry someone from an inappropriate tribe, you harm the tribe.”

What did harming the tribe mean? To look more deeply into the affective connection between tribal class and marriage, I asked several students in a class I was teaching at the Virginia Commonwealth University–Qatar (VCUQ) in the fall of 2010 to conduct surveys on the role of tribal class and on the importance of asala (or, authenticity and purity of lineage) in marriage.

Thirty men and women between the ages of 18 and 30 responded in full to an online survey about tribal status and the acceptability of marriage outside the tribe.¹⁰ One of the questions that the students had left optional was tribal name. To the students’ surprise, most of the respondents were happy to give the name of their tribe. Moreover, some even specified whether they were hadar or Bedouin.

A majority of respondents affirmed that elite tribe members should marry each other. One simply wrote: “Of course!” Another: “Yes, because our society is extremely tribal.” For another, the tribes are the “good pure part of society” (emphasis in the original).

In answer to a question about what makes a tribe elite, several insisted on the importance of deep roots in time and across space. A member of the Al Muraikhi tribe, for instance, wrote that her Bedouin tribe stretched in space to “KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), Kuwait, Qatar and UAE . . . some are in Bahrain too. We go back before Islam, i.e. more than 1400 years ago!” In other words, she perceived her status to derive from the geographic and temporal spread of her tribe. A man from the Al Suba`i tribe wrote that he could trace ancestors for over 1000 years; members of his tribe can be found “almost in all Arab countries.” An Al Murrah man also affirmed pride in his tribe. Careful not to seem arrogant, he added, “If my tribal habits is [sic] making others embarrassed I don’t show them or present it. Being around people who don’t belong to tribes, trying not to make them feel they lack something.” His self-evident tribal superiority, he presumed, would embarrass and even intimidate anyone without elite tribal affiliation. “I am asil Arab from the Arabian Gulf,” wrote one woman, using the Arabic term asil in her otherwise English statement.

Although the expectation to marry within tribal equivalence is widespread, the student survey probed personal feelings on the subject: would they accept a spouse from another tribal class? 70.6 percent said yes. One wrote, “I would choose to marry a person based on compatibility, respect, love, mutual understanding, etc. [sic] and not only based on their tribal origin or their last name!” Note that none of these affective criteria trump tribal origin. Instead, they become additive, desirable traits.

While they were not the majority, a third of the responses indicated that the partner’s tribal status, class, did indeed matter to them. The following is a sampling of these reactions:

“Lower social class affects my kids.”

“I do not accept other tribes and their customs.”

“When it comes to marriage it is very hard and rare to break the rules; basically we just can’t.”

“It is impossible for me to marry someone from another tribal class.”

How absolute this person was! Even political status cannot overcome lack of tribal equivalence.¹¹

“The tribe must have hasab (noble descent) and nasab (tribal lineage)” (Khaldunian terms were here used seamlessly, almost reflexively, to denote status and kinship categories).

“Maybe I won’t be able to interact with other tribes and my family might not accept that.”

The most amusing reply came from a woman who listed the eight appropriate tribes for herself and for her children, ending with a flourish: “Can you mix diamonds with stainless steel? Doesn’t work.”

Some wrote that they would impose the same tribal restrictions on their children, indicating their satisfaction with a system that should be perpetuated. Although two-thirds of the participants in the survey had responded that tribal class in a life partner did not matter to them individually, the overwhelming majority agreed that their families did care. One wrote that to marry someone with Persian blood is completely unacceptable. In the summary of the survey results, the students wrote that they were surprised to learn that these marriage restrictions were not imposed: “They actually believe in them to a degree that they want to apply these tribal restrictions on their children.”

The principle of tribal compatibility in marriage, or kafa’a, has long governed tribal alliances.¹² Whereas men may marry down, women should not. Women’s hypogamy degrades her tribe’s gene pool because children carry the father’s tribal affiliation. Although kafa’a is an Islamic legal principle ruling on the suitability of marriage partners, `adam takafu’ al-nasab is a deviation from that principle. In Sunni schools of jurisprudence, kafa’a rules on compatibility between a man and a woman amount to “equivalence of social status, fortune and profession (those followed by the husband and by the father-in-law), as well as parity of birth, which should exist between husband and wife, in default of which the marriage is considered ill-matched and, in consequence, liable to break-up.”<sup>13</sup> In the Gulf, lack of tribal lineage compatibility (`adam takafu’ al-nasab) can sometimes entail what some call “forced divorce.” In this latest usage, `adam takafu’ al-nasab accentuates the importance of nasab or tribal lineage. Authorities can force a couple to divorce or not to marry if their tribes are unequal. Despite concern about skyrocketing divorce rates in the region,¹⁴ police even have permission to pursue a tribally incompatible couple and force them to divorce. Saudi poet Nimah Nawwab decries this practice and the continued dominance of tribal values. She wonders why “this abhorrent tribalistic attitude and practice has again resurged after its eradication by Islam.”¹⁵

DNA AND MONEY

Yet, money and the class mobility it enables complicate tribal equivalence. How can hypergamy for women be sustained in the oil age when members of lower tribes become superrich and thus change their class, and with it, their tribal status? Blood and bank accounts compete.

A young Emirati woman complained that her grandmother would prefer her to marry a foreigner rather than a man from a lower status tribe: “‘No way in the world would she let that happen, because they used to work for us; in her eyes that would be like marrying the driver, for God’s sake.’ When I point out that the family in question is fabulously wealthy and well-respected now, I get a look that tells me that I am incredibly dense” (Bristol-Rhys 2011, 99). The tone of outrage at the mere thought of marrying down, even if to super-rich men, mirrors some of the responses to the VCUQ tribal marriage surveys: “Tribal class is more important than money in my family. Money goes but family name will stay.” Another wrote: “Being rich is not what I ask from the man. We all have money.” Time will tell how long such indifference to money can last.

Incalculable wealth, how it is to be distributed, and who has the right to what size of the pie, is changing attitudes. It has given tribal compatibility a new twist. One principle pervades: money should not seep out of the hands of the pure tribes. For anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff, “the more that ethnically defined populations move toward the model of the profit-sharing corporation, the more their terms of membership tend to become an object of concern, regulation, and contestation. And the more they do, the greater is their proclivity to privilege biology and birthright, genetics and consanguinity, over social and cultural criteria of belonging” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 47, 65). Blood and money can, and sometimes do, replace the flexible forms of social community that used to prevail: “nowhere was there full agreement as to family or collective history. Though ambiguity has not disappeared, the arbiter is now a state apparatus, which rules upon genetic facts” (Dresch 2006, 203). No longer part of a flexible oral tradition, lineage is now being fixed, and the state is ruling upon genetic facts.¹⁶

Tribal concerns with pure blood in the Gulf parallel developments in South Africa, with new demands to draw “unequivocal lines of inclusion and exclusion, of inside and out. No wonder the commerce in recreational genomics, which turns out to be more than merely recreational when the stakes are large, is growing so quickly; the likes of DNA PRINT GENOMICS, DNA Tribes, and Ethnoancestors claim to have technologies that provide ‘hard’ scientific evidence of identity, evidence that puts the matter of membership beyond construction, debate, or question” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 67).¹⁷