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Introduction

Bombay. February 1973.

I was running out of money. After months on the road, I was tired of traveling. Busing and hitching across Europe through Turkey to Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass and Rawalpindi to Katmandu and down to Goa for Christmas and Trivandrum for New Year’s Eve had finally slaked my wanderlust. Instead of Bali, I decided to return to Bombay and then home. Home in oh-so-far-away England.

With little money left, my only option was the “human cargo ship.” These vessels of misery left Bombay when they had filled with Indian laborers bound for the Arab Gulf. The accelerating production of oil drove the demand for migrant workers. South Asia supplied them. More and more ships were filling and leaving. At the port of Bombay, I met with the ship’s captain and handed over my twenty pounds sterling to cover the cost of my trip to the Iranian port of Khorramshahr. Before setting sail, I signed a document accepting the conditions of travel: no doctor on board.

For ten nights, I slept in the black bowels of the ship. My hammock was squeezed between other hammocks, packed with women and screaming, puking babies. It was hard to sleep. Morning brought relief. Bleary-eyed, we climbed the stairs out of the stinking hold and onto the deck where we lined up for breakfast. Stewards slopped curry into our outstretched bowls. Lunch and dinner were the same. The only break from the monotony of potato curry was afternoon tea, sweet and milky, with Marie biscuits.

After passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the ship stopped at the various towns dotting the Arab Gulf coast. We anchored for a few hours to disembark passengers in their assigned port of call. Under guard, they were herded down the gangplank and quickly separated into small groups before vanishing into the maze of narrow streets beyond the port. Since I was the only non-Indian passenger and not likely to escape, the captain made an exception to the rule that no one could leave the docked ship. With the sailors I wandered around the various ports for a few hours.

The only place I really remember is Dubai. The British, after presiding over the Gulf region for over one hundred and fifty years, had withdrawn two years earlier. They had left little trace of their presence. This dusty town of one-and two-story mud buildings was at the time “the largest conurbation in the region” and the “business capital of the Trucial coast” with a population of over 100,000, half being foreigners (Davidson 2008, 68–69). The only “tourist attraction” I recall was a Russian hospital. It was highly recommended, and so I joined a couple of the sailors who were on their first rip to the Gulf. The car wound its way through the streets and then quickly out into the desert. There it was, a large, glass, empty edifice. Rumor had it that those who entered did not leave alive. We kept our distance.

Bleak and colorless though it was, Dubai had seemed uncannily familiar.

•••

Dubai. December 2008.

About to land in Dubai International Airport, I wondered if I would again experience those intimations of a previous incarnation. Flying over the city, I knew I wouldn’t.

I entered the huge, glass airport that serves as one of the busiest hubs in the world. Teeming with people, it felt like Heathrow or JFK. After a long wait for the luggage, I caught a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the Palm Jumeirah and then through the downtown. Happy to comply, he drove me around the man-made island shaped like a palm tree with the monstrous Atlantis Hotel looming at the end. Next, we passed the seven-star, sail-shaped Burj al-`Arab Hotel. It boasts the world’s highest tennis court that, at 211 meters, serves also as a helipad. From the coast, we drove inland and passed Knowledge Village, Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City Annex, and Mall of the Emirates, where the pinnacle of the world’s largest indoor ski slope towers above the commercial complex. Heavy traffic slowed to a crawl through the six-lane highway separating the two sides of the Sheikh Zayed Road known as Dubai’s Fifth Avenue. Most stunning of all was the 828-meter high Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building in the shape of a rocket.¹

Finally, we entered an older part of town where I alighted and walked through a maze of alleys to the Xva Art boutique hotel where I had booked a room for two nights. A traditional house converted into an art gallery-cum-hotel, it is located in Bastakia, a restored heritage area inaccessible to cars. The hotel was a two-minute walk from the Khor, or Creek, a bustling hive of activity where I had landed all those years ago. Bastakia’s romantic wind towers and hushed, narrow lanes flanked by high, white, windowless walls allowed the imagination to roam to a time in the past when Arabs, Persians, and Indians traded and traveled from there to all parts of the Indian Ocean.

Nothing in this vertical city with its fantasy architecture recalled the place I had briefly visited in 1973. In December 2008, I found myself less in a place than in a condition. Architect and professor at the American University in Sharjah, George Katodrytis captures the surreal mood of Dubai when he writes “the ‘thrill’ of the urban voyage is quickly giving way to banality and exhaustion . . . The city tends to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, because it has no urban center or core . . . Dubai may be considered the emerging prototype for the 21^st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities” (Katodrytis 2005, 42, 43).

Dubai, like the six other emirates of the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, Ras al-Khaima, Fujeira, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi—and Qatar, resembles Shanghai and Las Vegas more than the dusty town that had surprised me thirty-five years earlier. Dubai has become the icon of a world in transition. With a population that has increased twentyfold and skyscrapers blanketing miles upon miles of what used to be desert, Dubai may be more over-the-top than other Gulf cities, but just below the surface, the mix of timeless desert and helter-skelter modern is everywhere the same: camel races and Lamborghinis; falcon markets and indoor ski slopes; camping in the desert and Jeeps “bashing” dunes. Beyond the endless pursuit of fun and profit, the same question must be asked of Dubai and its Gulf neighbors: how do real people live in such unreal places?

•••

In the 1970s one of the hottest, most forbidding regions of the world burst onto the international stage. Unimaginable wealth had suddenly accrued to desperately poor tribes in the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. Successors to the fishing and pearling shaikhdoms made destitute in the early twentieth century by competition with the Japanese cultured pearl industry, ultramodern petro-cities sprouted up out of the Arabian deserts and along the Arab Gulf coast. The discovery and exploitation of oil in the mid-twentieth century allowed Gulf Arab rulers to dream big, very big. The national project was to turn tribal shaikhdoms into world hubs for transnational flows of people, goods, and capital. Tribal leaders became modern monarchs of tiny political entities, each carved out of shared tribal territory and identical histories.

Now, in the twenty-first century, they are fashioning in dependent, modern nation-states with historically and politically differentiated societies. Yet sameness prevails. In the attempt to highlight national uniqueness, icons dot the cityscape and especially the ubiquitous Corniche, a prestigious strip of reclaimed land lining each nation-state’s stretch of the Gulf coast. These national symbols, however, derive from the pre-oil days: an oryx, a pearl, a coffee pot, a dhow or an incense burner, and importantly, a falcon. Representing the Prophet Muhammad’s tribe of the Quraysh, the falcon telegraphs tribal aristocracy. Sharing history and geography, these countries perforce share the same symbols from their common past.

Gulf Arab citizens are a rare sighting except in malls, where they stroll majestically through air-conditioned spaces. Indians, Sri Lankans, Filipinos, Indonesians, Malays, Burmese, and Europeans scurry past tall, thin women elegant in their black cloaks, or `abayas, and their hair piled high under the black scarves, or shaylas. Foreigners step aside careful not to get in the way of tall young men walking hand in hand, their sparkling white gowns, or thawbs² crisp. Constantly adjusting their starched white headdress, the gutra, and nonchalantly throwing the tips of the scarf over their head, they glance at their reflection in shop windows to check the effect.

These women in black and men in white are the scions of tribes who knew no roof but the sky and the goat-hair tent. From pre-Islamic times, poets sang a life of travel from oasis to oasis, where they named each dune according to its shape and resilience, each stage in a camel’s life, and each shade of its hair. Each plant, each wind, each cloud had a name to define its moment in time. In the space between the hard-packed sand and the soft sand that the zephyr breezes blew back and forth, the sixth-century tribal prince poet Imrul Qais detected the trace of the encampment where he remembered his forbidden love. The tribe learned of their tryst and they took her away, far away. And yet, no matter how much the wind stirs up the sands the trace remains and the poet will go mad with longing. Such pre-Islamic odes to lost loves fill the canon of Arabic literature.

These poets of ancient Arabia, whose intimacy with nature allowed them to wander freely where outsiders could not survive a day, have inspired a new generation of oral poets. They are reviving desert tropes to address and even welcome new realities. In the following fragment of a poem by Bakhut al-Mariyah, the desert and the sky, representing the traditional, tribal past and the modern present, are intertwined:

The passenger of that which is in heavenly space walks by the movement of

Its sound, because of its speed, throwing it behind

It leaves the airport in the forenoon

Passing the camels’ herdsman, who has not left his home.

It crosses the passengers of the Dodge before Dumwat, cutting across the

Red Sulba and the encampment below.

al-Ghadeer 2009, 156

The plane, recalling the roc of Arabian Nights fame, crosses time and space in the blink of an eye. Saudi Bakhut al-Mariyah juxtaposes the tribal and the modern in what is by now a familiar trope. A Bedouin woman looking up from the encampment to the plane, like this image of Bedouin men riding their camels into a hypermodern city to celebrate a special event, emblematize the tradition-modernity clash (see Figure 1).

How, some wonder, can such tribal people negotiate the clashing complexities of our modern world?

In addressing this question, Tribal Modern challenges its binary assumptions. The tribal and the modern must be thought of together. I argue that one must look below the surface of these newly rich desert societies to find the different meanings that attach to the appearance of the nonmodern, in this case the tribal. My argument throughout this book will be that the tribal is not the traditional and certainly not the primitive.³

Figure 1.Tribes, camels, and skyscrapers.

This statement calls for elaboration. Let’s turn briefly to the December 1984 New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition entitled “‘Primitivism’ in 20^th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.”⁴ A spectacular display of non-Western artefacts alongside works of Western modernist art, the exhibition sparked a craze for all things primitive/tribal—the terms were used interchangeably during the 1980s and 1990s. Widely reviewed at the time, the exhibition attracted negative reviews from some scholars. In “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: ‘Primitivism’ in Modern Art at the Museum of Modern Art” (Artforum, November 1984), Thomas McEvilly derided the show’s Eurocentric, colonialist, even racist “privileging of European art over the indigenously tribal arts . . . as sources of the visual forms and motifs that informed key European Modernist painters.” Particularly offensive to McEvilly was “the mainstream practice of exhibiting and discussing non-Western production without naming the artists or dating their arts.” Tribal art became mere “footnotes to Modernist production.”⁵

In The Predicament of Culture (1988), anthropologist James Clifford provided his critique in the chapter on “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern.” The title would lead the reader to expect a consistent analysis of the tribal modern. Instead, the tribal stands in for people and places outside the West. Contra the MoMA curators’ claim that the tribal is the past, Clifford asserts that tribes are part of the present, but it is the non-Western present. He refuses any “essential Affinity between tribal and modern or even a coherent modernist attitude toward the primitive but rather the restless desire and power of the modern West to collect the world” (196). Note the way he elides the difference between the tribal and the primitive in a single sentence. The point he makes is that the tribal/primitive cultural context within which these objects have been produced disappears in the ahistorical formal mix-and-match agenda of the MoMA exhibition. Tribes/primitive people, he insists, are alive and well and not part of a vanishing world. However, they are also not part of the modern Western world. With their complex cultures they are of a different order from the modern that Clifford assumes to be Western. The tribe in the MoMA version is a chronotope whose time is the past and whose place is the non-West; in Clifford’s version the time of the tribe chronotope is the present, although, like the place of MoMA’s tribes, its topos is the non-West.⁶

The tribal in Tribal Modern is far from that anthropological primitive—whether historicized or not—located beyond the reach of Western modernity. The tribal as it appears in the Arab Gulf today is integral to the modern; it constitutes a crucial element in the Gulf’s modernity. The tribal was repressed in the middle of the twentieth century because oil imperialists and their local agents considered it a hindrance to modernization, but the tribal is making a comeback in the twenty-first century. In its return, the tribal signals racial privilege, social status, and exclusive entitlement to a share in national profits. Indeed, the rubbing up of the tribal against the modern in today’s Gulf states does not represent a clash of conflicting values, but, rather, the desired effect of common aspirations. This effect will be analyzed through the lens of the barzakh, a term denoting undiluted convergence. It derives from the Qur’an where it depicts simultaneous mixing and separation in two dimensions: metaphysical and physical. The undiluted convergences between this life and the hereafter and between salt and sweet water I will amplify in chapter four.

Examining the culture of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, Tribal Modern traces the emergence of a national brand that combines the spectacle of tribal and modern identities and cultures. The brand is widely visible yet poorly understood, and the goal of this book is to present the brand in such a way that it compels attention to the absolute simultaneity and compatibility of the tribal and the modern without privileging one over the other.

The outcome of my research goes against the grain of popular thinking and media hype. Highly stigmatized, the region tends to be considered as either tribal or modern; in other words, it is either backward tribal with a thin, modern veneer or failed modern because of tribal residue. Refer back to Figure 1 of the Dukhan Camel Club procession about to greet Qatar’s Emir on December 3, 2010, upon his return from Zurich, where Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup. People to whom I have shown this image have shrugged, saying that there is nothing new here. Some see only the camels and the dhows, others only the starchitect skyline; for most, this juxtaposition provides proof of the cognitive dissonance between the tribal and the modern. But to begin to understand the culture of the Gulf and to appreciate what is new and different in it, we must see how the modern and the tribal, the high-rises and the tribal regalia, converge, each reinforcing the other.

The category of tribe/tribal projects something new and crucial in the twenty-first century. A racialized idea that catalyzes a distinctively modern identity for Gulf Arab citizens, tribal designation distinguishes native citizens from others close to them, the majority international community of workers. It provides a cultural, social, and political resource for young Gulf Arab elites, seeking to reconnect with grandparents who experienced cyclical austerity and constant movement across vast borderless zones. Only the tribal bond allows Gulf youth to comprehend the dignified poverty and the restlessness of their ancestors. They are redefining the tribal for their times and in their own lives. Like the Medicis in sixteenth-century Italy and the Vanderbilts in nineteenth-century America, the Arab Gulf tribes in the twenty-first century are asserting both tribal superiority and family privilege.

These aspirations occlude elements from their immediate and distant history. Tribes are said to have always existed beyond foreign influence, and many claim that foreigners are new in the region. Yet, history records millennia of interaction across the Indian Ocean. The latest foreigners to come to the Gulf were the Americans, whose arrival in the 1930s Saudi novelist `Abd al-Rahman Munif vividly describes in his 1984 Cities of Salt. Indispensable for the economy, foreigners are considered a threat to be marginalized today and erased from yesterday. In chapter one, I consider the suppression of transnational connections in the past. Further, today’s foreigners—Asian workers along with American and European “educated cosmopolitans”—are represented as new and, in the case of the laborers, contaminating. In the newly cosmopolitan cities, the less said about the region’s heterogeneous past the better.

How does the elite tribal minority hold on to its privileged status? The first step is to assert unique right to citizenship and exclusive entitlement to national wealth. Only those who have inhabited these lands since time immemorial, namely the tribes, can claim that right. Nation building on tribal territories has turned tribe into race into nation. The next step involves fabricating immediately recognizable identities to differentiate Gulf Arabs from the mass of foreign workers. Chapter two discusses the recent emphasis on pure tribal identities and lineages that draw an unbreachable line between native citizen and visiting foreigner. With the establishment of Gulf nation-states, new national borders were drawn. In many cases, they cut through tribal territory so that today the tribal and the national compete in shaping “authentic” identities. Tribal purity, the sine qua non of citizenship, is maintained through marriages arranged within the racialized norms of tribal equivalence and compatibility, and impeccable genealogies preserve the veneer of tribal purity.

Students in a class I was teaching in fall 2010 at the Virginia Commonwealth University–Qatar conducted surveys on marriage and tribal status. Its results demonstrate how pervasive yet complex is the prestige conferred by tribal lineage and consequent status. The chapter ends with an exposé of the connection between DNA and money. Birthright, genetics, and consanguinity—all provide the crucial building blocks in a citizens’ rights discourse that celebrates tribal origins.

Analysis of nation building reveals the constructedness of pure tribal blood and traces how it has changed into the idea of the tribe. Chapter three discusses this process. But is this a novel development? I argue that it is not. I explore the production of tribal lineages in a rapidly changing political and economic climate. The tribal, the national, and the modern are inextricably bound to one another. The transformations of tribal ties and genealogies into race and then into class—especially urban cosmopolitan class—become critical for citizenship. The emergence of the privileged national citizen reveals the interdependence and the reciprocity of the tribal and the modern.

The inflated yet flexible idea of the tribe shapes a distinctive national brand that broadcasts class, race, and power. Every brand needs a slogan. Authenticity, often a synonym for the tribal, is the oft-repeated slogan that shapes the new Gulf Arab brand. Chapter four looks at the creation of the tribal modern brand as a new space where the potential for dynamic interaction is released. This brand brings together contradictory states in a broader border that I call the barzakh, an untranslatable term signifying undiluted convergence, the simultaneous processes of mixing and separation. Contradictions stand in the borderlands, bringing together and separating the symbolic tribal and the material modern. Resisting resolution, these contradictions spiral into new forms of productive branding. Gulf Arab regimes have recently devoted themselves to the task of tailoring the regionally similar brand to reflect separate, distinctly national characteristics.

The brand privileges individuals and nations but also differentiates them. Internally, it distinguishes native citizens from the many foreigners populating their cities. Externally, it helps each new nation to stamp its distinctive mark on world politics. Chapters five, six, and seven consider how these various regimes market the brand through novel, little-understood uses of public space. They are evident in spectacular national museums and vernacular architecture, in public ceremonies, in neo-Bedouin language, and in dress. The brand is adapted into new versions of tribal sports. It is also used to revise undesirable elements from the past, such as the hardships of pearling. Citizens are balancing contradictory expectations, norms, and values: cosmopolitan openness versus tribal isolationism; postnational globalization versus national specificities. These are not dichotomous but convergent styles, practices, and expectations.

Chapter eight looks at women’s reactions to the new societies growing up around them. Some experience loss, others empowerment. Better educated than the men, women have unprecedented opportunities. Contesting tribal expectations that they remain at home and out of sight, they are entering public space and the workforce in growing numbers. Although some Gulf women seem poised to become important players in their societies, they still face the daunting challenge of negotiating the tensions between new opportunities and old constraints. Some women writers symbolize their fears in images that evoke cold and freezing. In conclusion, I consider a new social development with men and women rebelling against their societies’ expectations and performing queer identities.

In the swirl of radical social transformation, Gulf Arabs are projecting a distinctive national and cultural identity that is rooted and tribal but also modern and global. Arab Gulf states are buying up iconic real estate around the world that compels attention to their wealth, prestige, and power. Since the outbreak of the Arab uprisings in January 2011, the tribal modern brand has expanded its significance, with Qatar claiming the right to become peace broker in the region.

Contesting contemptuous accounts of Gulf citizens’ superficiality, lack of substance, and backwardness, I suggest that the return of the tribal is shaping a new way to think of the modern in cultural terms. It also opens a new way to conceptualize past and present, while imagining a previously unimaginable future. The tribal modern brand holds apparently contradictory states in balance. In the productive tension between a millennial source of social stability and a globalizing process of instant transformations, the tribal becomes a modernizing force.

In coining the term the “tribal modern,” I am not imagining an alternative, culturally specific modernity, and certainly not an incomplete modernity. An apparent oxymoron, the tribal modern makes sense of the epistemological, socio-economic, and political upheavals that have rocked the Arab Gulf for half a century and continue to shape it today. Situated at the nexus of the local, the national, and the transnational, the tribal modern is a contact zone that recalls the miracle Saudi writer Raja’ `Alim invokes “where the old world and the new are tight as two lovers” (`Alim 2007, 217). Although this phenomenon is not limited to the Arab Gulf, it is there that this chronotope is most clearly in evidence.